Planning my first info product [notes]

Picking a format

I know format matters in terms of perceived value so I think I will have a combination of video (with audio/transcripts) and pdf worksheets.

I’m worried about losing steam (a lot going on atm) – since I’m starting with text, I might reduce the scope to being an ebook for v1.

Picking a topic

The topic has to match up with my background, what I like writing about, what would be helpful to my target audience.

Picking a topic, I’m going to go with something like getting more sales from search engines for seasoned bloggers.

I picked this direction for a few reasons:

1. For most content-centric sites, the majority of traffic comes from search.
2. We want to work with subject matter experts: author-entrepreneur-consultant types with a deep library of content.
3. Most veteran bloggers struggle with SEO, conflicting advice, a lot of noise out there – meanwhile they have glaring issues hurting their SEO – so the problem and pain is real.
4. Major opportunities exist once you have a lot of content. Big corporations connect the dots between traffic, content, and conversions, but personal brands who are actually trying to help people don’t (at least not well).

Search is king.

As long as people want to learn, buy things, get answers, etc., search will reign supreme. Sure it will evolve into voice search and voice answers and contextual algorithms will eventually predict what you want to know before you even start searching but it’s still all “search.”

The most qualified traffic source

It’s also the most qualified traffic source. Anyone searching for a solution in a given moment that lands on a relevant page on your site is in-market, attentive, and ready to consider what you have to say.

The challenge

It’s been harder than I thought to transform what I’ve learned over time into something useful, easy to implement, and widely applicable.

I can look at a site and see room for improvement but how do you help other people do that for themselves? Or create systems where they can hire a VA, and say, “go do this program.”

Also, SEO is complex. A lot of guides are things like “101 things” or context-dependent advice. What I’m working on is inventorying the most common low hanging fruit and issues I come across.

Right now I’m basing what would be included based on what’s worked well for past clients with a lot of content as well as case studies deconstructing sites’ success – so it’s taking a bit.

What the product needs to be able to do

The approach needs to meet some criteria:

1. whatever you learn, it can be added into your existing content marketing regimen
2. you can make a majority of the changes yourself with some ease
3. the time to complete the changes must be reasonably short
4. anything “technical” or requiring third party tools needs a “good enough” alternative

Here is the running list I have of existing opportunities / low hanging fruit / levers you can pull:

• Identifying opportunities in keyword research patterns
• Focusing on improving first page but not first position rankings
• Focusing on pages that used to get a lot of search traffic
• How to get more traffic to “money pages”
• Once you know the pages you want to raise up in search, how to do so with internal linking
• Identify and fix common site health issues (80/20 here, eg. cutting taxonomies, speed, duplicate content)
• Getting topics, pages, call-to-actions, and products congruent

And then there are some important 101 skills to be able to do the above:

• Knowing what type of keyword research for your goal
• Prioritizing (assessing cost to rank, potential value of rankings)
• How to take a site crawl or use data tools
• Adding a share/link amplification regimen (outreach)

“types of keyword research”

I’m not sure how complex this is starting to sound but even just in considering “types of keyword research” from the first bullet just above, I came up with these to start:

• Understanding the competitive landscape
• Organizing your blog
• Outlining an editorial calendar
• Getting ideas for topics
• Understanding search intent
• Guide creation
• Coming up with FAQs

I can already tell this could get out of hand if I don’t scale it down to something like just one of bullets above.

It has to be easy to implement

And then, of course, no one is going to actually do this if it’s not “easy” to get started and keep up with. So it should also be:

• portable – not context dependent
• you can make progress you feel good about daily
• you see results immediately – like – within a few days immediately

I can already tell this could get out of hand if I don’t scale it down to something like just one of bullets above.