Information products are gold buried in your blog and you may not even know it.
If you’ve been using your blog to market your business and generate leads and sales, that’s awesome. But it’s not the only thing you can be doing.
In addition to the products or services you provide, people are also hungry for the right information that will educate them and help them make crucial decisions. Your blog already helps with that, but what can help people even more are information products.
Information products are items such as ebooks, audio, video, workbooks, checklists, or better yet, a combination of any of these. The best way to approach information products is to think of them as providing much-needed education and training for your market. People gladly pay for this kind of helpful information, because it’s all in one place and follows through to deliver beneficial results—something that’s difficult to do with single posts.
What is so easy about this is that you’re already sitting on a wealth of material for creating information products.
It’s your blog.
Recycle Your Blog Posts into Information Products
All those helpful posts you’ve been writing can be “recycled” into information products, opening up an entirely new line of revenue for your business besides the products and services you’ve been selling in the past. This is easier than you think. Here’s a general outline of how to do it to create an ebook in 10 steps:
- Look at past posts that all belong to the same category and copy the best ones into a single word processor document.
- Expand on them and provide more examples, details, and tips so they’re better than the original blog posts.
- Edit them for continuity and group them into logical chapters.
- Write an introduction that explains who you are, who the product is for and what they’re going to get out of it.
- Write a conclusion that sums up the benefits of putting into action the information in the ebook.
- Use your word processor’s tools for adding a table of contents and a cover (don’t worry about it looking fancy).
- Use a service like E-junkie to provide for secure sales and digital downloads (you will also need a PayPal account).
- Create a page on your blog from which to sell information products. Call it “Resources,” “Training,” or “Getting Started.”
- Write up the benefits your product provides and include a picture of the cover and the “add to cart” button code from E-junkie.
- Write a blog post and send an email out to your list announcing the product. Watch sales roll in.
Even Better: Intentionally Write a Series of Blog Posts
While the above steps work great with what you’ve already written, you can really kill it by writing a series of posts that you plan to make into an information product from the beginning. Many bloggers have done this successfully. In fact, this is exactly what Grant Did with 31 Days to Kick Your Blog in the Butt, which has been very successful. There’s no reason why you can’t follow this approach, too.
What is so easy and economical about this is that you have to write posts, anyway, so why not get extra mileage and money out of the process?
