Product Creation and how to Create an Information Product

Over the past few days I've posted two "create information product" articles, links to them are below:

- Why Sell Information Products Online

- Pick Your Information Product

In this article I discuss Product Creation and Branding.  Enjoy!

Product Creation and Branding

Once you have a general idea of what subject you want to write about in your information products, you should start thinking about branding yourself and your product line.

Creating a brand identity is a way to build customer loyalty and to ensure that when customers are looking for a solution, they think of you first.  Think of someone like Cesar Milano, and you automatically think “The Dog Whisperer”.

When you think of home decorating, what name pops into your head?  Chances are pretty good that it’s Martha Stewart.  Think of cooking, and you’ve got a lot of different options…Emeril La-gasse…Rachael Ray…and yet even there, people have found ways to distinguish themselves.  Extreme eating, adventures in dining – An-thony Bourdain! Southern cooking – Paula Deen!

If you’re from the UK you might think of Jamie Oliver when you think about School Dinners or Barbara Woodhouse when you think of dog training. If you think about money saving in the UK you think about Martin Lewis. When you arrive at his website the first thing you see is a picture of him. That tells you immediately you’ve come to the right place. Branding!

This branding allows them to build on their success.

Once you are known for producing an excellent product, people will come back to see what else you’ve got available, and when you cre-ate a list of satisfied customers and notify them that you’ve got some-thing new, if you have established a brand for yourself, they are much more likely to want to purchase it. You can, of course, choose to design a single product or a series of unrelated products, but you’re missing a great opportunity to build up buzz and repeatedly sell to the same customers when you do that.

To create a brand identity it helps to have a consistent visual theme for your web endeavors – a similar design and color scheme for your website, your ebooks, your short reports, etc.

If you don’t have any design skills, no problem. You can go some-where like elance.com, guru.com, rentacoder.com, or any other free-lance website, and find a graphics designer to create a logo and website header for you that will represent your business.

You don’t have to get any fancier than that. People aren’t looking for fancy website design when they land at your website. They want to know that they’ve arrived at the right place – and will be instantly re-assured when they see your familiar looking banner.

Then, they want the information that they came here to find – how to save money with coupons while shopping at grocery stores, how to litter train their cat, how to flatten their abs, etc.

And they want the site to be easy to navigate – they don’t want to have to hunt around to find what they are looking for.  So all you need to help establish your brand identity is a custom designed banner and logo that visually tells the customer at a glance what you and your products are all about. You can adapt that logo and banner and use some version of it for all of your products.

Let’s take the coupon example, for instance.

You decide that you want to be the coupon queen. An obvious thing to do would be to get a crown logo designed; perhaps a crown sitting on top of a pile of coupons. From then one when anyone sees that logo and the phrase “The Coupon Queen” they know it’s one of your products.  You would want to include your brand name in your product title if possible. “The Coupon Queen’s tips for getting groceries FOR FREE!” or “The Coupon Queen’s 50 delicious low cost recipes!”

Or, to use a more masculine example, say you are an expert fisher-man and hunter and you want to create a series of information products that will teach people to fish and hunt.

You could create a brand identity like “The Good Ole Boy’s guide to Bass Fishing.” This could spin off a whole series of ebooks, instructional videos, product endorsements and so on.

The possibilities are only limited by your imagination.

Some of it sounds cliché, and perhaps even tacky. But it works beyond your wildest dreams!

Next post will be…"Creating Your Info-product!"

Please leave a comment and let me know what you thought.