Types of Info Products

Now, we’re going to talk about what form your information product is going to take.

There is a lot of talk these days about how video information products are hot and everyone prefers video.

Don’t believe it.

Video is perfect for some types of information products and not so hot for others. And not everyone loves video.

There can be drawbacks to presenting information in video form. People have limited time and short attention spans these days, and it’s a lot easier to scan an ebook and get what information you need than it is to scan a video. Then again some people claim the exact opposite.

It’s very hard however to fast forward an online video that is still loading to see if it contains the relevant information than it is to look at the contents page of an ebook.

So your video must be well made and get to the point immediately, with no fluff or lengthy introductions, or you will anger people and get a lot of refund requests, and people will not be likely to order from you again.

In a written product, people are a little more forgiving, because they can page forward quickly to get to the information that they need.

If you are talking about how to design a web site, for instance, they may already know some of what you are discussing. In an ebook they can skip what they already know; in a video they can’t, because they don’t know where on the video to find the part of the video that they are looking for.

However, some information products do naturally lend themselves to ebook form or audio form.

If you can interview an expert, like an internet marketing guru, an audio form works quite well. If you have an information product that does not rely on visuals (like teaching someone how to paint a portrait), the audio form works quite well.

An audio recording is also a good option for people who are visually impaired.

Video can definitely jazz up an information product. Say you have a cookbook; anyone can write a cookbook, but if you show each step of the cookbook process, along with a picture of the cookbook at the end, you present a much more tantalizing picture.

If you want to show how to train a dog, it’s easy to say a technique, but to show a video of an unruly dog, and then you using the training techniques, and then that same dog behaving perfectly and obeying commands...is very powerful.