My Favorite Foolproof (!) Info Product Recipe
(Thanks to RecipeCurio.com for the cool card image and recipe!)
When I was a kid growing up in the 70’s, girls in junior high school (middle school for you Gen Y’s out there) were required to take Home Economics for two years!!
In 7th grade we learned how to cook; in 8th grade we learned to sew. Our Home Economics teacher, Mrs. Schue (Shoe) was a very nice woman who had to teach 25 13-year old girls the basics of cooking. Some girls were already fairly skilled and some would burn water if left unsupervised.
I was somewhere in the middle of the cooking skills spectrum.
The Basic, Adaptable Recipe
How did you teach 25 assorted 13-year old how to cook? Mrs. Schue was smart. She started us off with very, very basic recipes. Not perfectly foolproof but pretty darn close.
My favorite of these recipes was for muffins. We started with a no-frills recipe and then once we mastered plain muffins we learned how to adapt the recipe to make fancier muffin varieties: blueberry muffins, “Hidden Treasure” muffins (regular muffins with a blob of jelly in the middle), apple cinnamon muffins, etc. etc.
You could even make quick breads by pouring muffin batter in a loaf pan instead of using a muffin tin!
So many good things from a very simple recipe!
If you want to be able to cook decently enough to fix a few nice meals for yourself and your family, I highly recommend beginning with the “basics then adapt” approach.
A Basic Adaptable Recipe to Create an Information Product?
Now let’s say you’re a small business owner reading this article. You’ve been knocking around the idea of creating some information products that you can sell to earn extra revenue, offer as a way for prospects to sample your work, etc.
You really like the idea of creating and selling information products. But when it comes to taking the first step you feel overwhelmed by:
- where to even begin! what is the first step?
- technology – do you need learn complicated software? buy expensive equipment or applications?
- requirements to be an expert – do you need a PhD for people to take you seriously?
- time and energy – how long does it take anyway and is it really worth all that effort?
Take a deep breath and relax. We’re going to create the basic muffin version of an information product.
Muffins OK? Not chocolate souffle.
In the case of information products, one of the easiest information products to create is a How-to Guide.
How-to Guides: Perfect Starter Information Products
A how-to guide is a wonderful information product to begin with when you’re just getting started.
As the name implies, a how-to guide is simple a list of ordered steps to create something or solve a problem.
The reasons I love how-to guides as beginner info products are:
- Every business owner knows how to get things done and solve problems. That what we get paid for, right? So the how-to material is already in our heads.
- You can start with your simple steps and then add things that will help your customers get better results: you can include stories, photos, tips, etc.
- Customers love how-tos because they will get something useful from following the steps.
- How tos are easy to sell because the value is fairly obvious to customers
The Basic (Foolproof) How-to Guide Recipe
So here’s the basic, foolproof, recipe for creating a how-to guide.
Ingredients:
2-3 stories about how you helped your customer get something done or to solve a problem
Clean sheets of of paper
Pen or pencil
(a computer and a word processing program can be substituted for paper and pen)
Steps:
#1. Write a story explaining exactly what you did to help a customer solve a problem (or get something done).
Example: Using a nail clipper to trim your cat’s claws.
Dr. Andrew, a veterinarian, sees a lot of people who don’t like being scratched by their cats but don’t want to declaw their cats (most veterinarians now advise against surgically declawing cats).
He often shows cat owners how they can trim their cats claws using a common nail clipper without stressing themselves, their cats, and without hurting the cat.
#2 Identify the specific steps in your problem-solving or how-to story
Dr. Andrew reads through his story and picks out the steps his clients need to follow:
“Let’s see, well, first, it’s important to make sure your cat is relaxed and calm. It helps to pet them and talk in a gentle voice as you get ready.”
“Then you want to make sure everything is ready. You need a large-sized nail clipper which you can buy at any drugstore and have a towel available too.”
“I advise people to put the towel in their lap and then hold their cat gently but firmly in their lap.”
“Keep talking quietly to our cat and holding a front paw, gently take the first digit and press enough so that the cat’s claw is extended. You don’t need to press very hard.”
and so on.
As you read the above example, can you see how the narrative falls naturally into specific steps?
Step #3 Write or type each step
Dr. Andrew’s steps for trimming a cat’s claws look good. Now all he needs to do is to number the steps in order.
I’d also recommend he add a “summary sentence” for each step.
For example:
From the steps Dr. Andrews wrote down:
“Let’s see, well, first, it’s important to make sure your cat is relaxed and calm. It helps to pet them and talk in a gentle voice as you get ready.”
He adds a step number and summary sentence:
Step 1. Prepare your cat. Pet your cat and talk to her in a gentle voice as you get ready.
Step #4 Test your How to Guide
Before your how-to guide is ready for pubic consumption, it’s important to test your how to at least twice:
First, do a walk through following the steps as you wrote them. If something is missing or you need to do some re-organizing, make the changes.
Second, ask a customer or someone very similar to an ideal customer to test your how-to. Tell them to be honest and to let you know if there are any spots in which they’re confused or get stuck.
Honest feedback here is very important. Your how-to needs to work. If people get confused or stuck (imagine someone getting stuck trying to trim their cat’s claws!), it can hurt your credibility; worse, you lose customer!
Best Advice: Keep it Simple!
I hope that sentence didn’t scare you. Please keep your first how-to guide as clear and simple as possible.
If you find yourself getting overwhelmed it’s possible you’re trying to explain how to do more than one how-to.
Bottom Line
If you’re a small business owner and want to create information products but are feeling too intimidated to get started, I recommend you try out my foolproof recipe for writing a how-to guide.
It is my hope that as you begin creating your how-to guide, you’ll discover it’s a straightforward, even fun, thing to do.
And of course you can eventually begin earning revenue from your efforts.
Even better than making good muffins!
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