All About Information Product Creation

Well, first of all it’s a misnomer.

Of course, some internet marketers are big enough to involve themselves in databases and software and training and advice and somehow end up in the information products business. But most are far more targeted than that.

Typically, most internet marketers are really talking about a particular type of information product. Specifically they are talking about teaching. This teaching can be in any number of different formats from live seminars, to speeches to eBooks to recording on DVD or CD. Or even internet training events.

A much better term for what they are selling is learning content. Or learning products. Or even self-help. I’ve even heard the industry called the advice business. Which is probably the best description (if least technical) that I’ve heard.

But information products is just too broad a term to be useful for the typical internet marketer.

So what is information product creation?

Obviously it’s the creation of information products. But in practical terms the meaning to most internet marketers goes off into the wild blue yonder.

One of the things you will soon learn about internet marketers is that they are in love with systems. There’s a good reason for that. Survival for an internet marketer focuses on the ability to reproduce results. To constantly re-invent and grow. To constantly add and adapt. To have processes function without intervention.

Systems allow you to do that with less risk and greater certainty of success.

It can be argued that every company develops systems. It’s inevitable. It’s how we accomplish large tasks. But usually we use the word system to differentiate between informal, ad-hoc processes and formal, integrated processes. Systems being the latter and organic processes the former. In short systems are something that is intentional, and planned and organic processes just happen.

So information products creation (or learning products creation to be more technically correct) is a (formal, reproducible) system which helps one create learning products efficiently, effectively, consistently and successfully.

To do that it needs to be a unified system. That is it needs to deal with all media and with a single learning content spread over multiple products.

Traditionally, learning products creation has been independent. Each product was created by itself. However, as we learned more — and frankly as internet marketing evolved — we realized that independent development was wasteful and subject to error. Instead systems were developed that focused on creating the learning content and then translating and reformatting that content into different media and purposes.

Why purposes? Because it isn’t just for products for sale anymore. It also includes marketing. Marketing on the internet is moving away from the simple sales page and towards an integrated process that includes video samples, audio samples, written samples and sales pages. And the samples are simply scaled back versions of the final product.