Category: Info Product Creation

Creating Video Products

Creating Audio Products

Ebooks and Written Info Products

How To Create Your Own Info Product

Introduction to Info Products

If you’re a product creator, you’ve probably thought about putting affiliate links in your ebooks. This article is going to discuss this practice and offer some advice on the subject. I think you will find this information useful.

Let me start off by saying that there are definite pros and cons to putting affiliate links in your ebooks. I know you’re probably scratching your head wondering what could be bad about putting a link in an eBook that helps make us money. Well, consider this.

Your eBook is passing yourself off as an authority on a certain subject. That is, after all, why you wrote it. You know the subject better than anybody. So doesn’t it seem a little odd that inside this book, one that’s supposed to answer all the customer’s questions, has got a link to somebody else’s product? If you’re the expert, why isn’t the link going to one of YOUR products? Don’t you have something similar that is just as good, if not better than whatever that affiliate link is pointing to? Think about it.

Okay, let’s move on to what’s good about affiliate links in ebooks. They provide us an income off of a product that WE don’t have to support. The product creator supports that sale. So this is pretty much found money for us without much effort. However, if you’re going to splash affiliate links throughout your ebook, there are some things you’re going to want to do.

At the top of the list is what I call subtlety. You don’t want to hit prospects over the head with these links. You don’t want large neon signs pointing to each one. You want to mention these links in passing mixed in with the actual content you’ve written. If that method doesn’t work for you, you can simply list some resources in the appendix with your affiliate links sprinkled throughout. Whatever you do, you want to be subtle. Remember, you’ve already sold these people YOUR ebook. You don’t want to come off as selling again.

Beyond subtlety, you don’t want to have so many affiliate links in your eBook that it looks like a classified ad section. A few links throughout is fine. Again, you’ve already sold these people. You don’t want to make it look like you’re trying to soak every last dime out of them.

There is no question that affiliate links in ebooks can bring you a significant income. Just make sure that you use them wisely.

A question that many product creators ask is this. “Should I create one product or many products?” That’s actually a very good question, and there are pros and cons to both models. But more importantly than the pros and cons there is the need. Do you really NEED to create more than one product? After all, if you could make a million dollars a year off of just one product, why bother creating others? Well, let’s take a look at this issue and see what we come up with.

Let me start off by saying that I create many products. The reason, however, is not the same reason that most people create many products. See, many product creators create more than one product because the life span of each product they create is limited, meaning that it will sell for a certain length of time and then, after a while, will either stop selling or sell so little that they have to come up with something else. I, on the other hand, create many products because I provide info for a number of different niches and/or sub niches. It’s called going wide rather than going deep, which I do as well. I guess you can say I am quite diversified.

So the question is, what do YOU want to do? More importantly, what do you NEED to do to continue to earn a consistent income? Well, if you’re somebody like the guy who created the product “Magic Of Making Up”, which happens to be in the relationships niche, you probably don’t have to create anything else to keep making a steady income. That product is near the top of the Clickbank marketplace, has tons of affiliates promoting it, and I am sure is making the author a very nice living. More importantly, relationship products are evergreen. People are ALWAYS going to need help with relationships. So the product should always sell. If you have something like THAT…then you really don’t need to create anything else, not that you can’t.

But if you have the latest “make money online” eBook based on some new tactic using some obscure social networking site, then odds are that one day that method will become saturated or just not bright and shiny new anymore and sales for the product will slow to a trickle. In the case of products like that, you will probably have to come up with something new if you’re going to stay in that niche. Products like that are NOT evergreen. They’re good for a short run, will usually make you good money during that time, but eventually, they die out.

Look at a company like Aweber. They’re an autoresponder service. Do you really think that the owner has to create anything else other than that service? I can only imagine how many customers he has. That’s a perfect example of an evergreen product. People will ALWAYS need an autoresponder service if they’re going to build a mailing list.

So you need to look at what it is you’re doing and realistically determine if the product you’re going to create or have created is one that can sell for a life time or at least close to it. If not, then you might want to consider creating other products now or down the road.

A lot of people are under the impression that if you create a product, it has to be completely finished before you can release it to the public. While this is the norm, it doesn’t have to always apply. In this article, I’m going to give you an example of a product that can actually be finished long after the initial sale, using one of my own products as an example. I think you will get a lot out of this article.

Just recently, I released my first big product in about three years. The main part of the product, which customers got upon delivery, was a six volume PDF set. However, there was more to the product than just the PDFs. There are a series of videos that are going to be released over the course of the next six months. This was actually the main selling point of the product as many of the videos will be custom made to the customers’ requests.

Okay, there are pros and cons to this kind of product creation model and I will go over them both here. You need to be aware of these before you jump into this kind of product creation model. Yes, there is a downside that many people don’t think about. They only concentrate on the positives. This can be a recipe for disaster.

The pros are obvious as the day is long. By releasing a product where you have weeks or even months to complete it before final delivery, or in the case of my product, staggered delivery, you can take your time with the product. You don’t have to kill yourself to get it done. This actually makes it so that you can concentrate on making the best product possible because of the fact that you don’t have to rush through it.

However, there is a major downside to this…something most people don’t want to think about. What if something, God forbid, happens to you and you can’t complete the product? Your customers have already paid for it and are going to be more than just a little upset that they’re not going to get complete delivery, if they got any delivery at all depending upon how much of the product you initially got done. In the back of my mind, I know I have to keep myself alive and well for at least the next six months. Now, while I’m no old man at 53, let’s face it…stuff happens. I could get hit by a truck tomorrow.

So before you consider creating a delayed product release, please keep this in mind that the people who paid for it are going to expect full delivery at some point in time.