Robert Plank

Reading time: 2 - 4 minutes

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.

What are you going to do with this information right now?

Reading time: 2 - 3 minutes

The entry about product creation that I was going to post today will have to wait until Monday. That's because I just launched a new PHP video package and it's called PHP Uncensored.

But there's a little bit of a twist to it. I'm following the mini-product launch formula we talked about earlier this week. Usually my PHP video packages contain: 7 scripts, 7 chapters of an e-book, and 7 videos. Retail price after all the specials are over: around $20-$30.

Video 1: How To Bully Your Web Visitors To Buy When You Show How Many Copies Of A Product Are Remaining! (5 minutes 44 seconds)

Shocking but clever Internet marketing technique exposed: Who ever thought to combine a countdown timer with a popup?

Video 2: Automatically Keep Your Headlines Current And Up To Date In A Way That Evokes Familiarity From Your Readers! (10 minutes 4 seconds)

Tune-up the existing headlines on your site by making sure they always refer to current (or upcoming) events -- your sales copy will never require maintenance!

Videos 3 through 7 are currently CENSORED!! You don't know what's coming, but I know what's coming, and I'm telling you these are some damn cool unique and really useful scripts in the pipeline.

With PHP Uncensored, you get the first 2 scripts, chapters, and videos for $10 because that's all I've made so far. Actually that's half true, if you are on my mailing list and read my e-mails I have had two full books written (complete with scripts) but I didn't make the videos.

In a couple of days I'm going to release the third chapter and bump up the price to $12.50. Then a few days later, I'll put out the fourth chapter and bump up the price to $15.00 ... and so on, $2.50 each time, until all 7 chapters are available.

I'm offering free upgrades with this. That means when I release chapter 3, chapter 4, chapter 5, and so on, you get all those updated versions as they come out. It's your choice... you can pay $10 now and get the same thing or wait a few days and pay as much as $22.50.

Here's that link one more time: http://www.phpuncensored.com ...

Do you agree or disagree?

Reading time: 3 - 4 minutes

If you have big huge grandiose plans for your product launch, it's never going to get launched.

Here is what I would do instead...

Write a simple report. It doesn't have to be big, just 10 to 20 pages. Write a quick one-page sales letter for it because... it's only a report, right? Then launch it, price it at $7 or $10.

Limit the special offer to just 10 buyers. After 10 sales, snap it shut and close the offer. Now you have $100 in your pocket for writing this report... great, right? But it's not the big huge product launch you hoped for.

That same afternoon, write the next chapter in the e-book. E-mail it out to all your buyers for free (if you were really evil you could charge $1 for the upgrade... but I'd rather not have to try and juggle multiple versions of the same book). Then post another special offer with the upgrade book for $11... again, limiting it to 10 buyers.

These will be 10 new buyers you can add to your list. (Make sure you are funneling all these sales into a product update list... otherwise this strategy is totally useless.) Repeat the process. That afternoon, write another chapter, add a couple bullet points to the sales letter, mail out the free upgrade and then post the offer for $12.

If you do this until you have a 50-page report (let's say 10 chapters in addition to the original report)... that's:

$100 + $110 + $120 + $130 + $140 + $150 + $160 + $170 + $180 + $190 + $200...

Which equals: $1,650. But more importantly, it equals 110 proven buyers, and you can expect a good number of those to buy from you again if you come out with similar reports for that same niche in the future.

If you could write just one "article" (I like to call my chapters "articles" ... it makes them easier to write) per day for a month, that means you launched three reports and accumulated 330 buyers (some duplicates... let's say 200) for a profit of $5000.

You don't even have to write every single day. If you were ambitious and could pump out 5 articles in one day, you could take the rest of the week off... aside from 10 minutes a day posting the special offer and dealing with customer support.

Continue this for six months, and you don't have to do these incremental launches anymore... your list will be big enough that you can write a report, launch it, send an e-mail, and take orders.

June 2007 was my best month and I didn't do any sort of AdWords, joint ventures, article marketing, social networking, nothing. I made a product, posted on a forum, then e-mailed my list of 8000 people (mostly previous buyers... because they are the most responsive!)

If you are the kind of person interested in totals, I only launched 3 e-books that month... 7 chapters, each chapter had a video, they were about 50 page reports with 60-90 minutes of video. The book part took a week of writing one article-chapter per day and a grand total of two hours making the videos.

On June 19th, 2007, I made 362 sales totalling $3,058.72 ($2,850.02 after fees). The total PayPal sales for that whole month and the three products I launched was 978 sales totalling $11,420.30... $10,541.05 after fees and a couple refunds. That plus my Clickbank accounts and day job income totalled right about $15,000 income for one month... not bad for a 22 year old! (I was 22 in June... now I am 23.)

What about you? What are your thoughts on this subject?