Product Creation or Marketing: Which to Do First?

Product creation or marketing. Which one should you do first? Which one is the most important? If truth be told, you can't have one without the other. If you have something to sell, but no one knows about it, then it's like keeping a painting in a vault. No one ever sees it. But, if you market until the cows come home, but have nothing to sell, then you'll never have any customers. So what's that balance?

Obviously, you need to have both, and in this article I want to share with you how I learned do it.

It's never easy when you first start out to do everything you think you need to do. In fact, the feeling that you're being overwhelmed with tasks is quite often a daily occurrence, and it takes more than a few deep breaths to avoid the onset of considerably anxiety.

I struggled with this problem for quite a while. I couldn't never seem to get on top for long enough to accomplish what I knew I needed to do. Even after I whittled down my priorities to just a couple of activities, I still found myself running out of day, before I accomplished all that I wanted to.

It took a bit of experimenting, but here's what I came up with.

I do both, but I reversed the order. I knew that I needed to market as well as create products, and I used to market first, and then work on products later. But, quite often, I ended up marketing until I was too tired to do anything else. And that meant that my products weren't getting finished.

So one day, I decided to work on my products first. It solved my problem the first day I tried it. I found that creating new products required more mental energy than marketing. And that meant that when I worked on the marketing first, I simply flamed-out when I got to the products.

But reversing the order, I was able to spend as much as half of my work day creating new material. Then, when I started working on the marketing, my brain was sufficiently stimulated so that I could work faster than when I had started first thing in the morning.

If you're product creation always seems to get pushed to the end of your day or week, then try doing it first thing each day.

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How to Write and Develop Passive Income

The goal of every writer should be to create passive income. You can do it, as long as you plan for it. Let's look at how you can do that.

You may be wondering just what "passive income" is. Often it's income that's derived from the licensing of your writing in one way or another. You license the rights to your writing to someone else, and they publish your writing. When the book is bought, or people go and see the movie, you receive a royalty.

Royalty payments are the original form of this.

These days however, writers have many more opportunities than depending on book royalties from traditional publishers, or from movie sales.

You can self-publish your own books, and keep all the profits for yourself. Beyond books, you can create websites, which make money for you in various ways.

Here's a simple process for getting started.

1. Decide What You'd Like to Write

Do you want to write ebooks or books? This is simple. You can do this quickly, you don't have to spend a year writing a book; your ebooks can be very short, when compared to traditional books.

You can write fiction, or nonfiction. Currently on the Amazon Kindle bookstore, fiction outsells fiction six to one. Therefore, if you like writing fiction, just get started.

You don't need to write hundred of pages, many ebooks are short, at fewer than 50 pages. Some are just 20 pages.

2. Create a Publication Schedule

The most successful creators of info products are those people who have a schedule. They treat creating passive income streams like a job. They make plans, and carry them out.

Therefore, once you've decide what you want to write, create a schedule for your projects. Add the starting dates, and the deadlines, to your calendar.

3. Expect That Some of Your Attempts Will Be Duds

You may create a best-selling ebook, or a high-income generating website the first time you try to create passive income.

However, chances are that you'll stumble the first few times, and your early attempts will be duds. Don't let this faze you.

Everyone fails their way to success. Look on everything you do as an experiment. Some of your experiments will be highly successful, others less so.

You will learn, even from your duds. Sooner or later, because of everything you've learned, you'll create something which will go on producing passive income for you for years.

Why not get started creating your first passive income project today?

Want to develop real passive income streams? You can. Angela Booth offers you (almost) unlimited guidance on her Fab Freelance Writing Blog. Angela's been writing for money for 30 years, and shows you that you can make a six-figure income. Join Angela on her blog, and subscribe to her weekly free ezine for freelance writers and online money makers.

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How Gamification Can Turn Businesses Into Winners

Research and analytics

Gamification has the ability to spice up customer engagement in areas that have traditionally failed to attract the target market, such as in market research and other fields of data collection. While the internet has given market researchers a wide pool of potential candidates from which to quickly and easily obtain data, poorly-designed online surveys can make customer engagement lower and therefore, less reliable.

As a result, this has 'major implications for data quality with a knock-on effect on the quality of the insights received', according to Engage Research, which recently wrote about its foray into gamification.

Trialling a number of well-documented gamification practices, the organisation found it received 'two or even three times as much feedback to the more engaging questions and consistently more time taken in providing the answers'.

When Engage simply asked customers to describe themselves, for example, an average of 85 per cent of people answered using an average of 2.4 descriptors. When asked to describe themselves in seven words however, response rates rose to 98 per cent and descriptors increased to 4.5.

In a business context, getting the maximum amount of information out of a 20,000-strong workforce could make the difference between adopting a new company-wide policy or not. Only by ensuring the correct level of engagement and detail can businesses truly make the right decisions for all their staff.

Illustrating the importance of rewards to individuals, Engage also discovered that a question like "What emotions do you think people associate with this?" generated response times of eight seconds, with a 50 per cent 'enjoyment rate'. When respondents were told they'd receive points for correct answers, this rose to a 12-second completion time with a 90 per cent enjoyment rate.

The results illustrate perfectly how gamification techniques can provoke people not only to be more engaged with the topic at hand - increasing their chances giving well thought-out, qualitative answers - but providing more information generally about a specific topic.

Increased performance

Considering the dramatic impact of gamification on staff engagement levels, it's easy to imagine how gamification could be applied within the workplace - in areas such as employee performance management, training and innovation.

Just like using gamification in a survey, it could be used as part of a task-based project to increase friendly competition among workers. While the rules of gaming will always dictate that one person is 'better' than another (perhaps having more points on a sales leader board, for example) the feeling that staff are contributing and adding value towards something might be a powerful enough emotion for them to continue doing so.

"[Users] create value. This is what you want to drive," explains Michael Wu, a principal scientist in analytics at brand advocacy firm, Lithium, as cited by computing.co.uk.

Wu argues that when employees realise how much value they've created, in terms of connecting with one another and raising important business issues, "gamification becomes secondary, and value becomes primary".

Ultimately, gamification opportunities could help employees become more productive and help them to enhance existing business processes.

LiveOps, a call-centre vendor with 20,000 independent call-centre contractors throughout the United States, says its gamification platform has led to a 15 per cent reduction in call times. Furthermore, its sales have improved between eight and 12 per cent among some sales agents.

Over half of the company's agents (60 per cent) voluntarily check-in to the community site, with 90 per cent logging on weekly to compete in new challenges and review their personal performance.

Overall, the company claims it has increased revenue by two per cent, due to implementing a gamified platform.

Dangers

In a recent report, 'The Engagement Economy: How gamification is reshaping businesses', Deloitte warned that businesses need to be careful about how they source and utilise data collected from their gamification-based endeavours.

While the fun factor surrounding gamification most certainly exists, it's important that businesses 'agree to terms on standards for sharing data, while maintaining strict data privacy and security standards,' just as they would with any other sort of user data collection; perhaps keeping it stored in a data centre.

Furthermore, for gamification to be sustainable, it must constantly evolve, as (just like a real game) users will inevitably hit a wall of progression: the maximum level of user points, for example.

"Gamification by itself is not sustainable in the long term," said Wu of the matter. "Once you master a game, you finish all the levels, you quit. You move onto the next game. Nobody plays a game for their whole life."

One answer to keeping people 'in the game' could be to constantly push the maximum attainable levels available to users, driving them to 'play' indefinitely.

By continuing to engage customers and staff, businesses will continue to reap all of the benefits that gamification has to offer. For those yet to have applied gamification to their businesses, the hard figures put forward in this article might provide enough encouragement to warrant a 'play' themselves.

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Conceptual Thinking 101

I get into a lot of questions about the importance of or the need for conceptual thinking; and my answer is always that it is the key to successful products, especially in relation to marketing in today's world, whether on the web or not. It is certainly more than just graphics and code, image and tone, content and prose, it is process development. It is understanding the goals of the product and what the target audience wants and needs to see. It's about the right information in the right way, at the right time. The web has changed... and web sites are no longer just 'sites' with paragraphs of useless information and cheesy graphics. They're information portals, virtual sales tools, social playgrounds, and by far the most readily available, coherent mass media tool available today. The right design with the right ideas wins!

Once you have a plan of what you want to do and have inventoried and accumulated the resources to do it, you then need to figure out exactly how to realize your goals. This is the conceptual design phase, where you try to find accord between needs and resources and produce a detailed plan that can be directly translated into putting content in web pages that look good. Conceptual design is the processing of finalizing the concepts that will drive the design and developing concrete ways of representing those concepts in the form of the final product.

Not a very clear explanation, but conceptual design is very much a process, and sometimes a process can be hard to describe except in terms of its constituent parts. Conceptual design is what those people at automobile companies get paid large quantities of money to do when they develop all sorts of "cars of the future", most of which never see production. It is also what those who do when one of the car of the future ideas pans out and looks like it should be translated into a real, marketable product. One comes up with automotive concepts. The other takes those concepts and tries to develop working designs that embody those concepts.

So how do we engage in conceptual design in the web setting?

Brainstorming

A useful tool for conceptual design is brainstorming. Brainstorming is a getting a group of people together to play with ideas, no matter how outrageous. In the web setting, brain-storming is usually key players (uh, aka the funders), technical gurus (makers & do'ers), and some user representatives (the most important people) getting together and playing with ideas. If you worked for a toy manufacturer, brainstorming would more likely be engineers in a fully equipped work-shop making new toys and playing with them, passing the good ideas on to management for analysis and review.

Brainstorming is playing with ideas, and letting ideas come out, no matter how crazy. Well, okay, if they are a little too crazy then people may look at you funny, but sometimes it is the crazy ideas that win the day. The point of brainstorming is to get as many ideas out on the table as possible, and hopefully to get people thinking out of the box. Thinking out of the box just means taking a step back and trying to look at something from a different perspective. People who can't think outside of the box try to hire others to do it for them.

Brainstorming normally starts with everyone throwing ideas out, which are recorded and then sifted through. Transient media are best for this sort of thing, such as chalk boards and white boards. Things that can be erased and scribbled over. If you are really high tech, then you can get a white board that can take a picture of itself when you find an idea you want to change.

Game playing and role playing are also useful tools. See... all those management conferences do serve a purpose.

Once the ideas are out, you then have to sift through them to look not only for the best ideas, but for relationships between ideas. You are looking for patterns you can work with to organize the information of your proposed design into something useful and powerful.

The ultimate goal of brainstorming is to reach consensus on where to go with the product. People need to be brought together to agree upon and to be willing to collaborate on the mission, vision, and goals of the product. This is the time to identify issues and resolve differences, before internal conflicts become enshrined in the final design. It is also where you start developing the structure of the site, mapping out potential architectures to fit the needs of the audience and the content.

Metaphor Exploration

Metaphor exploration, a part of the brainstorming process, is the exploration of overarching metaphors for the design, including both those that might drive design behind the scenes and those that might become part of the physical site.

Metaphors exist to associate the unfamiliar with the familiar, making the new easier to understand by giving us relationships to work with that connect it with what we already know. As well as explaining by association, they can also be used to generate enthusiasm or to persuade. Holiday sales are good examples of these latter two. It's President's day, so you can celebrate and do your patriotic duty at the same time by going shopping.

Metaphors come in a variety of flavors. For our purposes, we can break them into three groupings.

Organizational metaphors are metaphors that associate something with a given organizational system to make it easier to use. For instance, an intranet may directly reflect the company org chart because that is what employees are used to. Or an online archive may use the metaphor of a library to organize the information.
Functional Metaphors relate new tasks to known tasks. Thus online forms that used to be in paper format may be reproduced online with the same structure as the original paper ones. This might not be the most efficient way to organize the forms online, but it is what people are familiar with.
Visual Metaphors make use of familiar graphics to create associations between old and new. Much of the metaphor that shows up in the physical site is visual in nature, since to accomplish relevant graphic design you must work almost exclusively with visual metaphors to create a certain look and feel to the site. The conceptual design phase is where you begin to feel these options out.

When working with metaphors, you should always be careful not to overdo it. It is possible to drown a site in metaphors, especially in today's metaphorically over-saturated world of online interaction. People also tend to fall in love with their own metaphors, which may make perfect sense to them and be totally incomprehensible to those actually trying to use the product.

That's why the rest of this is the hardest part of all for some...
Test. Endlessly. Forever.

Joel Serino from Redwood Agile.

Redwood Agile provides expert advice for small companies and entrepreneurs. Visit us today at http://www.redwoodagile.com/.

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Turn Your Products and Services Into Experiences

It's easy to think you offer unique products and services, but in today's world, you're probably wrong. It doesn't take much for a competitor to start offering the same products or services - and often that competitor can be somebody in China building the same product, or somebody in India offering the same service. Sometimes your competitor is even the customer themselves!

Travel agents are a perfect example. In the past, consumers used travel agents because they had access to special information - flights and fares, accommodation discounts, package deals, and the like. Now on-line travel agencies have equal or better access to those facilities; and consumers themselves often book their own travel.

To compete, the travel agent has to offer better experiences - for example, by organising customised tours, special packages and personal service.

Joseph Pine, author of The Experience Economy, describes different kinds of economies, and how they have developed over time. We started with an agrarian economy, which became an industrial economy, which became a service economy, and we're now moving into an "experience economy".

As the economy has changed, so has the value we place on products and services. Pine uses coffee as an example:

As a commodity, the coffee beans required for a cup of coffee are worth about 2-3 cents.Grind them, roast them, package them and sell them as goods on a supermarket shelf; and those same beans are now worth about 10-15 cents.Brew them in a diner and offer this as a service: That's worth about $1.Turn this into an experience at a café or restaurant, and now you can charge $4 (for what started out as 2-3 cents worth of coffee beans).

What changed? Clearly there are more raw ingredients in a cup of coffee than just the beans, but not $4 more (A friend of mine who owned a small café estimated a coffee cost her about 50 cents in total - including the ingredients, labour, and other overheads). The answer is that we're paying for the experience surrounding the coffee, not just the coffee itself.

Clearly this applies to some other products and services as well:

Apple users pay more for a supposedly better user experience.Dining at a five-star restaurant is as much about the experience as it is about the food.A day at Disneyland is all about the experience.The premium for flying first class far exceeds the airline's cost of providing the additional services.

In these cases, it's obvious the customer is paying extra for the experience, because the experience is part of the product.

What can you do to build - and sell - better experiences to your customers and clients? If you aren't constantly looking for ways to improve your customer experience, you'll be at the mercy of competitors, and you'll be missing out on profitable opportunities.

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Boost Your Program Value - Without Piling on the Content (or Doing More Work)

Here is a mistake that some coaches make - they think if they are to increase the price of their programs, they need to pile on the content (and create more work for themselves).

To get over this misconception, first, you need to realize that people are paying for the results/outcomes/solutions to the pain points that you are delivering, not the process of resolving the problem (they are paying for the destination, not the plane ride... nor the painful line at airport security!)

Then, realize that if you can get them to push a button and have their problems resolved in 5 seconds, they would - rather than going through a 6-week program and spending 3 hours each week on implementing the changes. Here is a story to illustrate the point:

Back in the days, a farmer went to a tooth doctor to get his rotting tooth taken out.

Farmer: How much do you charge?Tooth doc: 2 pieces of silverFarmer: OK, that's steep. How long will the process take?Tooth doc: A minute.Farmer: What? I am paying you 2 pieces of silver for a minute of work??!Tooth doc: I can stretch it out to 30 minutes, but you will be in pain for 30 minutes, instead of 1 minute.

Most people who are looking for solutions want to get their problems taken care of quickly and painlessly. Don't make them jump through extra hoops, i.e. read or listen to more content that does not get them from point A to point B in a straight line.

So now you ask, how do I ask for more moolah if I am not giving them more content?

Here are the 3 "C"s and 1 "B" that you can play around with, to increase (or decrease) the value of your program...

Before you go into structuring the Cs and the B, ask yourself - what do I want this program to do for my business model? E.g. if you have two programs at the $500 price point, and nothing at the $0-$500 range, you may want to create a "scaled-back" program at entry-level to capture potential clients who are interested in your services but don't want to drop the big bucks yet.

The three "Cs" are: Content, Community and Coaching

Content: content should be relevant and succinct, focusing on delivering effective solution to a problem.

Community: support from like-minded peers is essential for some people to "stick with it" and achieve results. There are many online tools these days to help you build a community through groups, message boards and forums. There are a few WordPress plugins for creating membership sites. Ning is also a good tool. Or, you can just create a closed Facebook group (I actually like Facebook groups best because most people are already on Facebook, so they don't have to make a point of logging into another site. From my experience, it's the best in terms of encouraging interaction and support among participants.)

You can also offer a support group as an individual product, and add a membership to the group as a bonus to your program for the duration of the training (no extra work, no extra cost!)

Coaching: either one-on-one or group coaching, this is a great way to boost the value of your program without much additional time involvement other than the few hours that you need to hop onto the phone (position the calls as implementation support and Q&A, so that you don't have to prepare for additional materials.) This helps increase the effectiveness of your program (leads to more and better testimonials) and boost the "like, know and trust" factor your clients have with you, making upselling to other programs that much easier.

The "B" is Bonus

Bonus: people like extra stuff for free. However, don't throw everything plus the kitchen sink into your program - doing so may make your potential clients think that there must be something fishy or inadequate about the "main course" - i.e. the program - that you are selling.

You don't have to do a lot of extra work to add bonuses to your package - here are a few ideas:

Ask other coaches or practitioners who have the same target market as you do, but not a direct competitor, to contribute a product - they will get the exposure, and your clients will get something relevant.Look at the materials in your program - is there one or two really juicy pieces that can standalone as a product (e.g., you can pull out all the recipes and create a xx-day menu plan ebook)? Pull these materials out, re-package them, and make them as "bonuses" - no extra work required! You can even sell it later on as a separate product.Look at the information product that you already have (or plan to create anyway), or recordings from classes that you did previously. If the topic is relevant to your program, add them as a bonus. You can also create a special report that you can later repurpose for use as a free gift for newsletter sign up.

One more way to use bonus is to have a couple that are only available for limited time or quantity. This adds urgency to your offer and entice people to take immediate action.

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Why Experts Need to Create Information Products and E-Learning Programs

There was a time when most experts - such as speakers, trainers, consultants and thought leaders - delivered one-off face-to-face programs, and nothing else. A few - the smart few - complemented their programs with electronic products, but they were in the minority.

Now it's the other way around. Clients and audiences expect more than just a keynote, just a training workshop or just a coaching session. It's fast becoming the norm that you'll send your audience a pre-event survey before your keynote, or offer a follow-up webinar to your training course, or provide password-protected resources for your coaching clients. If you don't offer this form of "e-learning", you'll fall behind other competitors who do offer this and more.

Why e-learning is not just an option, but a necessity.

There are five key reasons why you should be adding e-learning options to your business now - not just because they're attractive, but because they're now essential:

Clients expect more. In the past, you could be a "hit and run" presenter, who waltzes in, delivers a keynote, acknowledges the standing ovation, and leaves. That's no longer an option. Clients expect you to deliver more - much more - than just your standard face-to-face time with them. If you don't deliver it, they'll find somebody else who will.The world is flat. In Thomas Friedman's book of this name, he talks about the rising middle class throughout the world. These are the people who can create and deliver the same value you deliver, but do it faster, cheaper and more effectively with e-learning.The tools are accessible. Even amateurs can create blogs, YouTube videos, on-line forums, even entire e-learning sites. Yes, they are amateurs, and some of their products are amateurish. But your clients don't necessarily see it that way. Rather, they see other people offering e-learning technology, and wonder why you don't.Your speaking fee is insignificant. You know how you're always struggling to get clients to accept your fee? In fact, your fee is insignificant when compared with the cost of the lost productivity of their people who attend your events. E-learning allows them to learn from their office desks - and sometimes even their homes. This productivity gain is worth many times more than what they pay you.You won't be seen as serious. When I first started showing clients how to use e-learning technology, 12 years ago, it was a significant point of difference and a strong selling point. Now it's significant if you don't offer it - and a strong point against you.

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