Many consultants and freelancers are sticklers for perfection. We want to get results for our clients, which drives us to aim for perfection with our project outcomes. Great consultants under-promise, over-deliver, and work hard to ensure customer satisfaction.
Unfortunately, this drive for perfection can be a huge roadblock for consultants who want to create passive income products. After all, how can you ever create the perfect e-book on your topic? Won’t it take months or years to create the best course ever written for customers in your industry?
This type of thinking keeps thousands of consultants and freelancers from achieving financial freedom through passive income product creation. In this article, I’m going to give you 4 quick ways to make creating information products faster and easier for your business:
#1: Aim for Good, not Perfect
Your goal should never be to create perfect information products. Your e-books, courses, and webinars don’t need to be perfect, they just need to be good.
Remember, you have two objectives for creating passive income products: first, you want to help your customers achieve their goals; and second, you want to make money. Neither of those objectives require perfection.
Your customers need the information you have… don’t withhold it from them! Create good products, and get them out into the world. They don’t need to contain every single bit of information on the topic or answer every single question… they just need to help your customers get real results.
#2: Measure by Impact, not Length
When you first set out to create info products, you may have some ideas about the ideal length of your creations. For example, you may say that you want to write a 50,000-word e-book, or create a 90-minute webinar.
Those goals are fine, but you shouldn’t primarily be measuring the worth of your product by its length. If you can teach someone how to create a great website header in 60-minutes, then don’t force yourself to stretch it into a 90-minute webinar. If you can teach someone how to write a great fundraising letter in a 30,000-word e-book, then don’t worry about not hitting your 50,000-word goal.
Of course, you’ll want your info product to be long enough to seem substantial to your customers, but don’t worry about not meeting artificial length requirements. If you could teach someone how to do something really valuable, but it only takes you 3 pages to do it, chances are they will still pay for the information as long as you are smart about how you market it.
#3: Outline / Outline / Outline / Write
There are lots of different methods for writing content. Over the past twenty years I have written millions of words, created dozens of e-books, built over 50 online courses, and taught over 250 webinars. I have found that for me, the best strategy for writing content quickly and easily is a method I call “Outline / Outline / Outline / Write.”
Here’s how it works. First, I create a big picture outline of what I want to write or talk about, whether it’s for an e-book, webinar, or online course. Then I go back and add a level of detail to the outline, inserting the major subheadings for each of those topics. Then I go back and add another level of detail, with topics I want to discuss under each of the subheadings. Then I go back and write the content.
Basically, I’m writing an outline in its entirety, then going back two times and adding levels of detail to the entire outline. Then, if it’s an e-book, I’ll go back in and write the content. If it’s a class or webinar, often the outline will be detailed enough at this point that I’ll be ready to deliver the content, speaking directly from the outline. I talk about this process a bit in our guide How to Create a Bestselling Online Course.
I’ve found that using this method makes creating content much easier than sitting down and staring at a blank page and trying to write 25,000 words.
#4: Ship, then Improve
While I was creating my first few info-products, I finished the product, then went through a tons of rounds of revisions before launching my marketing efforts. This was a huge mistake. Eventually, I realized that I could create the product, edit it, and then “ship” it (put it up for sale)… and then improve it over time.
When I figured out this trick, it was a gamechanger for my business.
Remember, your goal with passive income products is to build evergreen products that you can sell for many years to come… so why not create the first version and start selling it… then work to improve the product over the coming months or years by updating it, editing it, and adding new information? Having a mindset like this will help you take the pressure off of yourself to create a perfect product right out of the gates.
Photo Credit: Remains Healthy on Pixabay
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