The complete guide to creating your own information product

For so long bloggers have relied on brand partnerships and affiliate income streams. While both of these income streams are great and can definitely bring in decent levels of income to your business, they are not the only ways to monetise a blog.

I truly believe there is such great power in creating your own products. Creating and selling your own information products is a great way to make money online. Once created they provide you with a passive income stream, which you can totally automate.

Creating your own information products can have additional benefits too:

• They can help you reach a wider audience.
• Having a passive income stream which runs alongside active income streams means you can create more revenue in the same amount of time.
• They can position you as an expert.

My favourite thing about having my own information products is that the money I earn is based on me serving my audience. It isn’t based on traffic to a certain link or a brands decision to work with me or not. It is based on how well I can serve my audience and meet their needs.

So why aren’t all bloggers cranking out their own information products?

There are a number of reasons. I think some people don’t even really realise it’s a possibility. They are indoctrinated into blogging knowing about sponsored posts and affiliate income, but information product creation passed them by. The other main reason is they think people won’t but their product when it contains information they could find for free. Lastly, they get derailed not knowing where to start.

So let’s deal with the ‘they can get it for free’ issue. There is not much that anyone can say that people couldn’t find for free on the internet. No information contained in a course that couldn’t be hunted down and read for free. There is very little content that is totally unique and groundbreaking. People don’t expect that from you. They want convenience, they want a shortcut and they will pay you to be the shortcut.

Your job is not to share everything you know about a topic. Rather it is to get your audience from A to B in the most effective and time efficient manner. People pay for that.

So how do you know what product you could create?

I coached a client live on Facebook brainstorming this exact problem which might give you lots of ideas. I’ll wait here……

You back? O.k let’s chat about how to find the right product for you.

Step 1: Identify the pain point

As content creators we should have our finger on the pulse of the pain points of our audience. We should know what they are struggling with and what keeps them awake at night. We need to know this in order to be able to serve them with our content.

How do you know what the pain points are? You chat with your audience on Facebook, answer their emails, respond to comments and you see the questions they post in other Facebook groups. What questions and struggles are constantly reoccurring? Your product should be designed in order to relieve this specific pain point.

Step 2: Do your research and organise it

If you’ve been blogging for more than a few months or more, you will probably have some content you can reuse. Some places to look for content you can repurpose include:

• Your blog
• Your emails (and autoresponder sequences/one offs)
• Your social media accounts
• Your YouTube channel
• Your personal checklists and worksheets

If you delve into these places you might find you have a fair bit of content that addresses your audiences current need. The next step would be to organise this information into a format which will be the best fit for your audience.

Step 3: Create the best-fit solution

Now how do you create a product that will be a perfect fit for your audience?

• Do you audience need help over a longer period of time? Maybe creating a membership site would be the best fit.
• Write an ebook? This is a great option for solving a very focused, single problem. Even better, Kindle books offer a fabulous opportunity to reach a wider audience.
• Perhaps you need to give them comprehensive information on a specific topic, in which case an ecourse would work.

Your choice will depend largely on the scope of the solution. Is it a simple answer that can be explained in a few pages or is it a complex issue that requires several weeks of work?

All you need is a simple sales page, your product and a way to sell it. Payhip is a really easy and great option for selling your products. You can be set up in as little as 15 minutes and they handle all the payment processing for you.

Creating a product doesn’t have to be difficult or time-consuming. Sure, you can design a massive, all-encompassing course, but when you’re just getting started, that’s a daunting prospect. Instead, work with what you already have and you’ll have your first product up and selling in no time.

Don’t stop, keep going. Once you’re finished creating and setting up your product to sell it’s not time to stop. This is just the start of your information product venture. Now you need to start marketing your product and spreading the word. You want to get targeted traffic to your product website and lots of it. Start by writing and submitting articles to directories. Set up a mailing list and communicate with your audience regularly. The more you can do to promote your product the better. In step two we told you to just go for it, now is the time to expand and really put the effort in to creating a long-term valuable business.

Which type of information product would you like to create?