The Six-Figure Second Income: How to Start and Grow a Successful Online Business Without Quitting Your Day Job (8 page)

fingers crossed that she’l buy that argument. Back to the tomato nut: He just wants

anything that has to do with tomatoes. If you sel him a report that makes the rational

argument that he can now make money with his hobby, passion, obsession, or whatever

you cal it—wel , that’s music to his ears.

You may ask “
But
how can I tel him how to make money with tomatoes? I don’t know

anything about them besides how to eat
one
.” That’s where you made a smart move to

buy this book! You’re learning how to turn just about anything into a moneymaking info

product. The very concepts you are discovering in this chapter can be repurposed for the

tomato grower. You could easily do a 10- or 20-page report al about how that person

could find a topic to write about, or how she could prepare a DVD for sale on Amazon or

as a video download.

That tomato grower has not read this book but you soon wil have. That means you are

in a position to offer a guide to that person. Then when you’ve cornered the market for

guides on making money with tomatoes you can move to orchids, parakeets, and any of

thousands of other hobbies.

I can hear you saying, “
But
I have no credentials yet to be able to talk about making

money by growing tomatoes or with any other such report. I better wait.” Wel , you could

do that, but remember the Brown University student who could have made excuses

about his photographic inexperience. Instead, he took action and is now raking in the

dough. Let’s also consider the kidney stone guy and his report—I real y could not have

cared less that he was not a doctor, and I didn’t even care whether he had ever suffered

from kidney stones before. I only wanted access to possible remedies that were

traditional, easy, and safe. I wanted to know I could get my money back if they didn’t

work, and that was it. I was ready to buy and I bought.

You can be in the same position with scores of simple reports as soon as you put your

mind to it even briefly.

Is This Great, or What?

Now let’s think about al those concerns that Uncle Moe had earlier about making money

with a new product.

1. I’l need a fortress to protect my idea: No, you won’t. It’s a 10-page report on a

Brother sewing machine, for Pete’s sake! I don’t think the Chinese government wil be

conspiring to knock off that report.

2. I must reach mil ions of people: Forget that. If you write a report on a Saturday

and get it al set up for sale by the end of Sunday, you don’t need to sel mil ions or

even thousands of them to make a very handsome profit.

3. I want to be famous: Okay, these smal reports wil not make you famous.

Moe’s right on that one. You’l just have to find some other activity that wil accomplish

that goal.

4. I want to be as rich as King Midas from this first invention: Highly unlikely that it

wil happen. You didn’t build the Great Pyramid of Giza but spent a few hours or

perhaps a few days on the project, so it’s unlikely to bring you everlasting wealth and

glory. It wil , however, create one of those smal streams that—when added to the

other streams you can easily build—col ectively can be as large as you’d like.

5. I need to invent something revolutionary: Nope. You need to invent something

even just slightly different. It could be more detailed or in a different medium like video

or audio, or it could appeal to a narrower but more passionate audience. That’s al

that is necessary.

6. Inventions are things that are
manufactured in
factories: Absolutely true in the

beginning of the twentieth century, but not at the beginning of the twenty-first. We al

use physical objects that are forged, mixed, or stamped, and we probably always wil

use them. You get to choose to make money in a new and much easier marketplace

—a global and almost instant one.

ANOTHER SCHOOL OF THOUGHT

You’re going to hear some marketers say there’s a much better way to find a product.

They’l insist that the correct way to make a bunch of money is to find a hot trend and get

in front of it.

Here’s how that would work. You can use two Google tools that most people have no

clue about—Google Trends at www.google.com/trends and Google Insights for Search

at www.google.com/insights/search. These are wonderful tools that are also free. Google

Trends wil tel you the hot current trends, and Google Insights for Search wil tel you how

long they’ve been hot and in what regions of the country or the world.

Again, the concept is to find something real y hot and then create a product for that

market. There’s nothing wrong with that thinking, and, if you find something promising

with those tools, by al means create a product for it.

I bring up this method after al the other ones simply because you may find it a bit more

difficult to accomplish at first. I’m trying to undo decades of Uncle Moe’s influence, after

al . I want you to get a little stream of income just as quickly and easily as possible so

you stand back, wide-eyed, and go: “Wow! This stuff real y does work! I can’t wait to do it

over and over again!”

In my opinion, that easy, early win wil best come from building an info product around

something you already know wel . It wil involve less research and you’l already know al

the jargon, myths, pitfal s, and so on.

If you’re gung-ho to try the hot-trend angle, then please guard against early

discouragement, which can be fatal to your profit plans. It may take you longer to get the

product out and have it become highly visible, and you may lack the motivation to see it

through.

AVOID THIS PITFALL

I know this next pitfal from personal experience so I want you to avoid it: Do not get al

excited about creating a product without checking what’s out there already. Don’t get me

wrong—I’m not saying that you need to find an untouched market. On the contrary, I just

finished saying how you can make good money by doing yet another guide about

growing tomatoes despite the 289 other guides out there.

What I am saying is you need to know the lay of the land before marketing your info

product and preferably before even creating it. When you get a great idea it’s a

temptation to not search on the web for it, because you don’t want to be disappointed to

discover that someone else has already created a great video to the Brother CS-6000i

sewing machine—though that’s pretty unlikely.

Resist the temptation to stick your head in the sand. Do some solid research up front

for two reasons: First, if in fact there is something exactly like what you were going to

create, you’ve now saved yourself a lot of time. Second, your potential customers are

searching al around for what new materials exist on a particular topic. It’s to your

advantage to be able to speak intel igently about your info product, as in: “This is the first

guide that breaks down to easy steps the complicated process of recalibrating the Mark

VI Widget. . . .”

You may remember some years ago how there was a national obsession with

prescription drug prices. Congress was considering laws that would have made it legal

to import Canadian prescription drugs, which at the time were far less expensive for the

same medicine than were the American drugs.

I did some initial research on the topic and realized there seemed to be a huge

opportunity to fil a gaping hole with a great info product. There were a ton of online

searches for the term Canadian prescription drugs but, as far as I could tel , no info

products to satisfy those searches! I had no personal knowledge of this area, so I spent

a good amount of time doing careful research into al the issues and factors that went

into Canadian drugs versus U.S. ones, including when it was possible to substitute

generic drugs for brand-name ones and how to find the best Canadian pharmacy.

As I finished the report I licked my chops at the dough I’d soon make. When the time

came to put the report online and start to make that money, I discovered one tiny little

problem—there were no info products about that topic because the search engine had

banned al such info products! Apparently, so much garbage had been published about

the topic that the lack of products was not a great opportunity, but instead a great big red

flag.

I learned the hard way to do more careful research about what appears to be a super

opportunity before pouring substantial time into it.

GET MY CHART

In the pages you’ve just read you have enough product ideas to last you several lifetimes.

I could make this section twice as long with more variations but I’d run the risk of

overwhelming you to the point of your eyes glazing over. I’d much rather that you pick one

of the concepts above and run with it immediately. Stil , I want to give you unbelievable

value for your purchase of this book. If you’d like a special Product Idea Generator I’ve

created, then just go to www.sixfiguresecondincome.com and type into the search box

the words “idea generator.”

How to Create Content Cheaply and Easily

It’s not uncommon for people to get al excited about the product possibilities I just

covered, only then to become pale at the thought of sitting down and writing. If you’re one

of them, by the time you’re done reading this section you’l no longer be worried about

that.

First, let’s dispel the notion that al of these info products involve sitting down in front of

a keyboard and writing. Multiple ways exist for capturing content, but before we get too

deeply into that topic it’s important to explain that your info product wil go through three

stages.

Stage 1: Capture the Raw Content

Stage 2: Edit the Content

Stage 3: Deliver the Content

By breaking the process down into these steps the whole thing becomes less

daunting and much more clear.

STAGE 1: CAPTURE THE RAW CONTENT

You have many options for capturing content that wil become your info product. Let’s

look at each one.

Method One: Sit Down and Write

This is a common way and may work wel for you, especial y if you’re writing about

something with which you’re highly familiar. You can just let ‘er rip in front of a keyboard.

If you take this option, I highly recommend six principles:

1. Do Not Edit While You Write!

This is probably the biggest cause of writer’s block there is. People expect that the

words they put on paper from the start need to be clear, grammatical y correct, and

finished. If you suffer under that expectation you’re needlessly suffering.

You are much better off thinking of the writing process more like the clay-sculpture

process—you throw a big hunk of clay on a table and start to work it from rough shape to

successively finer details. Al the raw material goes onto that table from the outset and

then it’s a matter of cutting away, moving around, stepping back, and smoothing.

Do not al ow the censor part of your brain to interfere with the expressive part. Let your

expressive part get al that clay onto the table in any which way. Then you can bring the

censor out from his locked room to do his thing. You’l need to herd him back into the

room when it’s time to get more raw material down on paper.

2. Do Not Let Other People Hear or See Your Work While It’s in

Rough Form

You are probably highly aware of nonverbal and verbal behavior, and the slightest

criticism or joke about your work-in-progress could easily mean that you abandon it. I

suggest that you get it completely down on paper and edited at least once before

showing it to bystanders.

3. I’ll Make This Point Again—Do Not Sweat How Long or Short the

Document Becomes

If it’s much longer than you expected, then you can make decisions during the editing

process to cut portions or even turn it into two info products. If it’s much shorter then ask

yourself if it completely covers the topic. If so, then leave it alone.

I don’t know about you, but I get annoyed when I read something that contains obvious

fil er content. That’s the total y boring and common-sense stuff like, “Be sure not to store

your gasoline can with an open top next to your furnace.” Oh real y! Gee
thanks for
tel ing

me
that—I would
never have known. You’re better off keeping your document as short as

necessary to cover the content. Your readers might even appreciate the compact, pithy

prose.

4. Do Not Become a Slave to Accuracy During the Writing Process

If you don’t know a model number, statistic, or other fact, then don’t get sidetracked by

stopping your writing to look it up. If you’re on any kind of a writing rol at al , just keep

writing and stick in a spot like this: “And when the time comes to replace the gasket, just