Five Proven Formulas of Successful Information Products

In Suc­cess Secrets of the Online Mar­ket­ing Super­stars by Mitch Mey­er­son, Mitch has some good ideas — I would say for­mu­las — that you can use to cre­ate infor­ma­tion products:

For­mula 1 - Problem/Solution — State a prob­lem and then present solu­tions to the prob­lem.  For exam­ple, you may want to develop a prod­uct to improve SAT scores.  The prob­lem is not hav­ing enough money for col­lege.  The solu­tion is improv­ing a student’s chances at suc­ceed­ing on the SAT stan­dard­ized test so that their chil­dren have a higher like­li­hood of get­ting a schol­ar­ship to defray the high costs of college.

For­mula 2 — Numer­i­cal — Cre­ate a prod­uct with a whole series of steps toward a solu­tion.  Mitch Mey­er­son points out the wildly pop­u­lar book by Steven Covey called The 7 Habits of Highly Effec­tive Peo­ple.  Suc­cess breeds more suc­cess as evi­dence by all the fol­low on books Covey has been able to pro­duce.  Here are only a few of them:

• The 7 Habits of Highly Effec­tive Peo­ple Per­sonal Workbook
• The 7 Habits of Highly Effec­tive Families
• The 8th Habit: From Effec­tive­ness to Greatness
• The 7 Habits of Highly Effec­tive Net­work Mar­ket­ing Professionals

For­mula 3 — Chrono­log­i­cal — Prod­ucts that have to be pre­sented in a chrono­log­i­cal order to make sense.  The good exam­ple of this kind of prod­uct is Your Preg­nancy: A Week by Week Guide: What to expect at every stage, from con­cep­tion to birth and post-natal care; Expert advice and guid­ance for a healthy, happy preg­nancy and baby.

For­mula 4 — Com­pare and Con­trast — Show­case your prod­uct by pre­sent­ing options and then com­par­ing or con­trast­ing them.  In Good to Great: Why Some Com­pa­nies Make the Leap… and Oth­ers Don’t, author Jim Col­llins uses this tech­nique to high­light truly supe­rior com­pa­nies exis­tent today and why they are bet­ter than others.

For­mula 5 — Ref­er­ence — A prod­uct that is used as ref­er­ence to oth­ers — com­piled all in an easy to use resource to save read­ers time and effort in the niche you have cho­sen.  Yanik Silver’s Instant Sales Let­ters is a good exam­ple of a ref­er­ence work that cus­tomers can use in a vari­ety of sit­u­a­tions and can be imi­tated when you cre­ate your infor­ma­tion product.

If you pat­tern your prod­uct after one of these suc­cess­ful for­mu­las you should find suc­cess in your infor­ma­tion prod­uct endeavors!