Rogers Online Business Management for the Agriculture Community

Posts Tagged ‘Information Products’

In order for you to differentiate yourself from your competition you need to outsell them. One way to do this is to make a better product.

Study your competitor’s product and make a better one. Find out which important questions still are unanswered in your competitors products so you can make more complete information. Find a way to help your customers make more money, save more time or whatever your product does.

If your competitor just sells an ebook–create audios, videos, or a workbook. Anything that can make your product have a higher perceived value and appeal to all kinds of learners. After all, not everyone wants to read an ebook so you are losing a lot of customers who want to listen to an audio in the car or be able to download a recording to their iPod. So if you can make a better and more useful product, you’re way ahead of the game.

The hardest part of writing a book is the first sentence. When you look at the whole project, it seems like an impossible task. That’s why you have to break it down into manageable tasks.

First, figure out your ebook’s title. Jot down a few different titles, and eventually, you’ll find one that will grow on you. Titles help you to focus your writing on your topic; they guide you in anticipating and answering your reader’s queries. Aim for clarity in your titles, but cleverness always helps to sell books as long as it’s not too cute. For example, Remedies for High Energy Bills: twenty different ways to cut costs and save the environment. Or: Get off that couch: fifteen exercise plans to whip you into shape.

Next, write out a thesis statement. Your thesis is a sentence or two stating exactly what problem you are addressing and how your book will solve that problem. All chapters spring forth from your thesis statement. Once you’ve got your thesis statement fine-tuned, you’ve built your foundation. From that foundation, your book will grow, chapter by chapter.

Your thesis will keep you focused while you write your ebook. Remember: all chapters must support your thesis statement. If they don’t, they don’t belong in your book. For example, your thesis statement could read: We’ve all experienced high energy bills, but there are twenty environmentally friendly things you can change right now to lower your energy consumption.

Once you have your thesis, before you start to write, make sure there is a good reason to write your book. Ask yourself some questions:

• Does your book present useful information and is that information currently relevant?
• Will your book positively affect the lives of your readers?
• Is your book dynamic and will it keep the reader’s attention?
• Does your book answer questions that are meaningful and significant?

If you can answer yes to these questions, you can feel confident about the potential of your ebook.

Another important step is to figure out who your target audience is. It is this group of people you will be writing to, and this group will dictate many elements of your book, such as style, tone, diction, and even length. Figure out the age range of your readers, their general gender, what they are most interested in, and even the socio-economic group they primarily come from. Are they people who read agriculture magazines or book reviews? Do they write letters in longhand or spend hours every day online. The more you can pin down your target audience, the easier it will be to write your book for them.

Next, make a list of the reasons you are writing your ebook. Do you want to promote your business? Do you want to bring quality traffic to your website or maybe to your farm? Do you want to enhance your reputation?

Then write down your goals in terms of publishing and promoting your business. Do you want to sell it as a product on your website, or do you want to offer it as a free gift for when they visit your farm or for ordering a product? Do you want to use the chapters to create an e-course, or use your ebook to attract affiliates around the world? The more you know upfront, the easier the actual writing will be.

Decide on the format of your chapters. In non-fiction, keep the format from chapter to chapter fairly consistent. Perhaps you plan to use an introduction to your chapter topic, and then divide it into four subhead topics. Or you may plan to divide it into five parts, each one beginning with a relevant anecdote.

Here is how I usually start: I take an hour of my day and come up with 3 different topics I want to write about. I then think of a bunch of different ebook titles to go along with those topics. My next step is to say the titles out loud and in diffenent tones of my voice. This lets me experiment in how people might read the title so I want to make sure its one that seems to be catchy. When one sounds good to me I choose that one and start my writing.

Next time I’ll tell you how to make your ebook “user friendly”.

It’s not true that everything that has been said has already been written. Since that unfortunate axiom came into use, the whole universe has changed. Technology has changed, ideas have changed, and the mindsets of entire nations have changed.

The fact is that this is the perfect time to write an ebook. What the publishing industry needs are people who can tap into the world as it is today–innovative thinkers who can figure out how to solve old problems in a new way. Ebooks are the new and powerful tool for original thinkers with fresh ideas to disseminate information to the millions of people who are struggling to figure out how to do a plethora of different things.

Let’s say you already have a brilliant idea, and the knowledge to back it up that will enable you to write an exceptional ebook. You may be sitting at your computer staring at a blank screen wondering, “why? Why should I go through all the trouble of writing my ebook when it’s so impossible to get anything published these days?”

Well, let me assure you that publishing an ebook is entirely different than publishing a book in print. Let’s look at the specifics of how the print and cyber publishing industry differ, and the many reasons why you should take the plunge and get your fingers tapping across those keyboards!

Ebook available at the Ease Your Workload Shopping Center

Submitting a print book to conventional publishing houses or to agents is similar to wearing a hair shirt 24/7. No matter how good your book actually is, or how many critique services and mentor writers have told you that “you’ve got what it takes,” your submitted manuscript keeps coming back to you as if it is a boomerang instead of a valuable mine of information.

Perhaps, in desperation, you’ve checked out self-publishing and found out just how expensive a venture it can be. Most “vanity presses” require minimal print runs of at least 500 copies, and even that amount will cost you thousands of dollars. Some presses’ minimal run starts at 1,000 to 2,000 copies. And that’s just for the printing and binding. Add in distribution, shipping, and promotional costs and–well, you do the math. Even if you wanted to go this route, you may not have that kind of money to risk.

Let’s say you already have a farm business with a quality website and a quality product. An ebook is one of the most powerful ways to promote your business while educating people with the knowledge you already possess as a business owner of a specific product or service.

For example, let’s say that you’ve spent the last twenty-five years growing and training bonsai trees on your farm, and now you’re ready to share your knowledge and experience. An ebook is the perfect way to reach the largest audience of bonsai enthusiasts.

Ebooks will not only promote your business–they will help you make a name for yourself and your business, and establish you as an expert in your field. You may even find that you have enough to say to warrant a series of ebooks. Specific businesses are complicated and often require the different aspects to be divided in order for the reader to get the full story.

Perhaps your goals are more finely turned in terms of the ebook scene. You may want to build a whole business around writing and publishing ebooks. Essentially, you want to start an e-business. You are thinking of setting up a website to promote and market your ebooks. Maybe you’re even thinking of producing an ezine.

One of the most prevalent reasons people read ebooks is to find information about how to turn their businesses into a profit-making machine. And these people are looking to the writers of ebooks to provide them with new ideas and strategies because writers of ebooks are usually people who understand the new cyberspace world we now live in. Ebook writers are experts in marketing campaigns and the strategies of promoting and distributing ebooks. The cyberspace community needs its ebooks to be successful so that more and more ebooks will be written.

You may want to create affiliate programs that will also market your ebook. Affiliates can be people or businesses worldwide that will all be working to sell your ebooks. Think about this? Do you see a formula for success here?

Figure out what your subject matter is, and then narrow it down. Your goal is to aim for specificity. Research what’s out there already, and try to find a void that your ebook might fill.

Today lets look at one way you can have your first informational product–Create an Ebook!!!

I know a lot of people have trouble convincing themselves to simply get started with creating an information product and this really holds true for the agriculture industry. This is one industry that just needs to catch up with the rest of the world who are marketing information products online. So I’m going to be sharing with you in several future posts just how easy it is to create your product that will earn you extra income. Now is the perfect time to create your products as this is the time that people are looking for new ways to save money.

So if you decided that you are going to write an ebook and perhaps do an audio file to go with it, your costs will be minimal to produce this product. Sure, there is time involved, but with proper research you’ll know how to spend your time. An information product shouldn’t be your life’s work…at least not your first one. Get your feet wet with a few easy to put together products and learn from your experience. After all, the worst thing you can do is make a mistake…but that really isn’t a bad thing at all. Mistakes are learning experiences and you will improve your techniques all the time. And the faster you can make your mistakes, the faster you’ll become successful.

Don’t worry if you don’t know how to make an MP3 file or even how to write an ebook. Don’t let the fact that you don’t know how to do something stop you from doing what you want to do. These are all pieces that you can learn along the way. Again, if you make some mistakes, it’s okay. I’ve made several mistakes when I first started too. If you make mistakes and learn from them you’ll become successful more quickly than if you sit and wonder “how can I get started”.

One of the easiest ways to start is by doing research with your own customers. If you already have customers, you have your very own research center. Get to know what your customers want and then sell it to them. Ask them questions and really get to know them and how they respond to different bits of information you give them.

If you already have a website and do business online, then you probably already have a mailing list of subscribers. The same applies here by getting to know your subscribers and what they want. Find out how they respond to different mailings and other information that you send them.

It’s much easier to sell to someone who is already a customer or subscriber than to go out and look for other customers. That’s why I limit my products to my main market. I already have a decent list of customers, so why would I go create an information product on something completely different when it would be just that much harder to sell to them?

But that doesn’t mean you shouldn’t start creating information products if you don’t have a list or a website with much traffic. We all had to start somewhere so if you’re just getting started there are plenty of research tools available. I’ll be sharing with you in the future the most useful internet research methods out there. So until the next post–start thinking about what you want to create for your first information product!

My favorite part of my business is creating information products and earning money on work that didn’t take me very long to put together.

So what is an information product?

Information products are basically any information that you sell or you could even give away for free. They are often how-to-guides that teach anything from feed and production practices or farm safety techniques. They can be written guides, audio recordings, workbooks, videos, membership sites, newsletters or all of the above. They can be digital downloads, MP3 or PDF files where your customers simply download the files off the Internet or you can ship out printed guides, published books, CDs and DVDs, if you’d like. That’s what an information product is and I’m going to talk more and more about how it can work for your business in future posts.

 How can it be so easy?

As I mentioned earlier this is my favorite part of my business because even though you have to work on marketing your information product, the creation of the product itself is probably one of the easiest to put together because it’s information you use every day. It’s taking things that you know or even things you don’t know and creating an information product out of it. You may think that no one would be interested in what you know but you’d be surprised what people want to know and they are willing to pay to have that information.

When I first started creating information products I learned to keep an eye out for those questions that people ask over and over again. I now keep a small notebook with me to jot down a notation that will help me remember what to research for future products. If I don’t have my notebook with me, I just use the memo recorder on my cell phone. And then when I find time I just transfer what I recorded into my notebook. I like keeping all my ideas in one place so that when I’m reviewing my notes if I noticed that I’ve made several related entries, then that’s the product I want to start creating.

So get yourself a small notebook and start jotting down all your ideas for your information product. Remember that no idea is silly. If you thought of it I’ll bet there’s several other people out there that thought of it as well and wished someone could provide them with that information. So make yourself the expert and start creating today!

Don’t let the fact that you don’t know how to do something stop you from doing what you want to do. The pieces you will need to create and market your own information products will be laid out for you in future posts. But if you would like to get started now then you can contact us at agriculture@easmyworkload.com and our team of experts will help you develop your products.