Product Creation

Are You A Professional Newbie?

Don't forget, it's okay to make mistakes. When you break into any niche you have to deal with a learning curve and the only way to learn the most important things in life is to make mistakes doing them.

A "professional newbie" is someone who never wises up, never figures out what they are good at, and doesn't belong in the niche they are in.

Are You a Professional Newbie?

There are people in the internet marketing niche, in the stock trading niche, and in the programming niche who lurk on message boards who have no idea what they are talking about, who post on blogs and have no idea what they are talking about.

In internet marketing, a professional newbie is someone who gets hyped up about AdSense, makes some sites for a few weeks and then gets bored. He gets hyped up by another guru about article marketing, writes some articles, but that doesn't make him any money so he moves onto the next thing.

The professional newbie tries Squidoo, blogging, Craigslist, eBay, Forex, AdWords, Clickbank, PLR, ELance, all only for a few months all with no results.

Oh look... a rock over there... oh wait... another rock over there.

Idiot professional newbies spend all their time "thrashing" from idea to idea without any focus. They don't accomplish anything besides losing money.

I read someone's blog in the stock trading niche who is a professional newbie and probably always will be. He follows the advice of random strangers who post comments on his blog and invests tens of thousands of dollars into some stock he has hardly even heard of, but was given "a tip" that it will make him a bunch of money.

Usually it blows up in his face.

Do you make this same mistake in your niche?

(That newbie whose blog I follow was ahead $200,000 at one point and is now almost $500,000 in debt.)

I see the same mistake in the software niche...

• Professional newbies switch from project to project.
• Professional newbies begin learning how to program, but they get bored and switch around to some other languages.
• Professional newbies want to make their products so perfect that they never get launched.
• Professional newbies want to make the most unique product there is... the only problem is... it's a stupid hair-brained idea and no one wants it.

I could go on forever. In every niche there you are going to deal with a LOT of noise. Moreso if the niche is in any way profitable, because that means others can prey on you -- they profit from your inexperience.

Don't be a professional newbie. Stick to one single project for a month, get off your butt and do some work.

If you have a niche you've always wanted to break into, spend 1-2 days writing a short report and create a sloppy sales page. Send some traffic to it and see if that path is worth pursuing.

Find out what niche you are good at and like.

The only way you are going to get anywhere is by working hard and working smart. You need both. If you work smart but not hard, you're a philosopher. If you work hard but not smart, you're a McDonald's employee.

DO SOMETHING! Stay focused. Don't even think about what your next product will be until the one you're working on now is launched and is selling.

One last thing. You need to know where you want to end up. Do you want to host seminars on your topic, do you want to produce an autoshipped monthly CD series? Do you want to do freelancing and then move up to high-end paid consulting? Or do you just want to sell off the rights to your products and bail out at some point?

It's like a map, you need to know your start point and your end point, and always be on a road that is getting you one step closer to that end point. Just one little step in the right direction.

You can't possibly be thinking about every single road you're going to take to that destination... but on the other hand you can't turn at every single street hoping it will lead you somewhere.

My friend Steven Schwartzman has this problem of taking action... so recently when he had a great idea for a niche to break into, I told him to make the small report, get it out there as sloppily and as quickly as possible, and see if it takes off.

I have been building my business just a little bit every day. I don't think I'm ever going to go full time in internet marketing but I want to build a bigass product funnel, get into physical products then maybe hit some seminars. I don't want to host seminars or speak at any.

The way for me to get there is with more video products, which is why I have been upgrading my e-books to video packages. So far this month I have released Simple JavaScript, Sales Page Tactics Volume 1 and Sales Page Tactics Volume 2 as video products.

I'm not going to try to break into any other niches at this time or pursue any weird projects right now like a membership site. I'm not going to go back to freelancing or put effort into any big joint ventures because that's not the direction I want to be headed towards... but that's just me personally.

What you want with your sites, your products and your niche is going to be way different than what I want.

Practice

Previously when I was talking about product creation I said the three ways to get infoproducts produced quickly are: don't make it look good, get excited about the topic, and practice.

This last Sunday (January 13th, 2008) I took my girlfriend to the Arco Arena stadium in Sacramento and attended an open-to-the-public Sacramento Kings basketball practice session.

(Don't I look oh-so-entertained?)

Everyone benefits from practice -- not just professional sports players. You benefit from practice every day of your life, from driving a car to brushing your teeth, to writing that e-book and recording video.

Practice means you get used to a routine and can focus your creativity on things that really matter.

You automate the hard part -- getting the ideas down on a page -- and can think about cool homework assignments to add to your books, better headlines, or fun ways to market the product to your list.

My older sister graduated from college a few years ago with a Bachelor of Arts in Communications and a minor in Journalism. She had to write a lot of papers. When she still lived with our parents, I would visit sometimes and see her working on a paper at the computer.

I noticed a few things about her at the computer:

1. Sometimes she would "warm up" for a paper by quickwriting. She would open up a blank Word document and start typing anything that came to mind just to get her into the rhythm for a few minutes, then start on the actual paper.
2. She kept a blog for fun. This was a private blog and obviously I never read it, but she would write pages and pages on that thing. Keeping a blog gets you used to writing.
3. She would wait until the last minute to write the paper. Usually the night before. She was a great student but was unable to work on a paper ahead of time... her brain wasn't trained for it. Her brain was trained to write under pressure with a time constraint. If you ask me that's the best way to write because it means you get the most work done in the least amount of time.

The books I write -- you can check any of them out on the sidebar of this blog -- are filled with dumb little jokes and puns. Most of the time I don't realize I've written them until they're already typed out. Because I'm not really thinking about what I'm typing, the final result is funnier, more story-like, and more interesting.

Even ignoring all the creative benefits of practice, when you make a routine, the process is easier and repeatable. This doesn't just apply to the creation of your product -- it applies to the promotion of it too.

Once my product is finished, I'm so used to writing the sales letter, writing the ad, posting the WSO, sending an e-mail out to my list... that I get a weird unsettling feeling if I don't do all that stuff right away.

I use my own PHP scripts to setup these sites quickly, for example, the scripts I offer at www.SalesPageTactics.com to do things like add a contact form, make my site more interactive, or setup a countdown timer to increase urgency.

When you get used to releasing smaller imperfect products over and over, you will cut down on your launch time with each release and have time for more "fun."

You'll get more excited and as a result have a more creative finished product with lots of flow.

Most importantly, you'll actually have something out there selling and making a little bit of money so you can move on to creating the next product and setting up a new income stream.

Get Excited About Your Topic

You can write down a lot of information at a time by getting excited about your topic. It's easy to feel sorry for yourself and think back to high school when you had to write some stupid 5 page essay and it was a struggle just to finish a paragraph. It's easy to give up and say you're "not a writer."

Ask yourself:

• Have you ever stayed up all night talking with a best friend or significant other?
• Have you kept a diary?
• Have you had a phone conversation that lasted longer than an hour?
• Have you described every little detail of some amazing movie you really liked?

I bet your answer is YES to all of these questions.

Why is it hard to write a term paper but easy to write a blog or post a zillion MySpace comments? Because a term paper is "work" and blogging is "fun." If you are in a niche that also happens to be your favorite hobby, writing gets a lot easier.

When I write a book, it takes me around two hours for a 5-10 page article. If it's a book on PHP then this includes the time to write the PHP script. If the book includes video, it takes me about 15 minutes to record the demonstration video for each chapter. I almost always get the videos recorded in one take... that's just because of practice. I'm a horrible public speaker and always will be, but I show that I'm excited about the topic and know what I'm talking about.

The same thing goes with writing. Have you seen my writing? I'm sloppy, I don't use fancy language and I try to put as few sentences possible into paragraphs.

I wouldn't have it any other way. If you learn to write the same way you speak, your writing will have a strong voice and you will be able to write everything quickly.

I try to write with 5% or less passive sentences.
I try to write at a 4th or 5th grade reading level.
I feel guilty writing sentences longer than 7 words.

The downside is that everything you write kind of smells like a first draft, but then again if you go back and edit your writing, you won't find anything particularly horrible, plus your writing will be packed with more ideas than the average writer.

Getting Excited = Less Work + Stronger Voice + Higher Idea-to-Paragraph Ratio.

• Instead of writing a big long paragraph explaining a series of ideas, make a bullet-point list of 3-4 items.
• Bold the important words but don't get carried away.
• Never say more than you have to.

Every now and then I like to read a little bit about copywriting. Copywriting doesn't interest me all that much, but I want to write in a way that keeps attention to the very end, and has a clear call-to-action at the end.

Headlines, stories, mysteries, cliffhangers, lists... these are much more interesting than topic sentence... concrete detail... concluding sentence... and then onto the next boring paragraph.

You need to be passionate about your topic. If you are excited about it then it will show and get your readers / customers / prospects excited about what you have to say.

It Doesn’t Have to Look Good, Just Be Good

I only have three tips for fast infoproduct creation:

1. Don't make it look good.
2. Get excited about your topic.
3. Practice.

John Williams made an excellent point to last Wednesday's blog post... which was about writing a small report and adding onto it later, releasing free upgrades to existing customers while increasing the price to new buyers as the size of the infoproduct went up. John said that I left out the part about doing the actual work, writing the e-book itself.

It has never taken me longer than 7 working days to create an infoproduct. By "infoproduct" I mean a 100 to 150 page e-book. A few years ago I created a package where I sold 3 e-books in one, that was a one month project.

One week to write each of the three e-books and I spent the final week writing a bunch of articles to promote the book so I could post one article to article sites every day or so.Your product doesn't have to look super great and fancy. It doesn't even have to look okay.

I heard a story once about a guy who ordered a DVD from a web site about how to play the guitar. The DVD was homemade, burned on a store-bought DVD-R with the title of the DVD handwritten with a sharpie marker on the disc.

The buyer popped the DVD into his DVD player. There was no menu, the video just started up and was a low quality camcorder video of a guy warming up on his guitar. The camerawoman (his wife) was fiddling with the focus and zoom and asking if it was recording.

Edit: Paydex pointed out that the story was from Russell Brunson about some weightlifting DVDs he ordered - thanks - it's been bugging me for years where that story came from.

The creator of the product didn't bother to edit any of this out. Heck, maybe he didn't even know how!

It didn't matter. The buyer was more than happy with the lessons the DVD had to offer. The presentation doesn't matter as much as you think. Ken Evoy heavily tested graphics versus no graphics on his sales letters... guess what... graphics hardly made any difference.

In fact, fancy graphics and Flash can hurt your sales letter conversion rates if they are too large and distract readers from your headline and sales copy. Just present your information in a simple and readable way.

Would you rather create a product that has a nice looking box with crappy content, or a crappy box with great content?

Please, do everyone a favor and get your product out there even if it isn't 100% polished.