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The Fallacy of the Great Idea
Be careful of the new shiny thing, it might not make sense in the long run
A lot of internet marketers would love to get going with Product Creation but never start because of this reason : I’d love to create my own product, but I don’t have a great idea.
That is to say, they believe that to create a successful product that sells well and that they enjoy creating and marketing, they have to have a fantastic one-of-a-kind idea that blows everybody away.
Leaving aside that this is a convenient excuse for procrastination, there are several things wrong with this belief, this fallacy.
The first is that most new ideas fail the first time they are marketed. It’s exceedingly difficult to get any 100% brand new product to work right the first time. It usually takes several iterations or generations of refinement to get it right. In the meantime you get poor sales and frustrated customers.
How many brand new products succeeded the first time that you know of? If you say the iPod, iPhone or iPad you’d be wrong. The iPod wasn’t the first MP3 player, the iPhone wasn’t the first smartphone, the iPad wasn’t the first tablet computer.
All 3 devices used off the shelf parts but were just put together with exceptional focus on detail, use and performance.
This is a great model for information products. Take existing knowledge and present it in a better way. Make it look better, make it more enjoyable, polish it.
Take the frustrations you have had with information products before and take them out of your product. Take the things you like and include them.
You’ll end up with something you’ll really like. Which brings me to the next problem with the great idea fallacy, that you’ll only enjoy and be proud of a product with a great new idea. Not true, at all. What tends to happen with a new idea is that you start with a giant spike of enthusiasm which quickly diminishes. When you improve something that already exists, you are left with something that grows, that is a long term asset, that can be re-purposed over and over again.
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Video accounts for something like a third of internet traffic. Every day it becomes more and more the norm for all websites.
Yet many product creators are ignoring this, still producing ebooks without video. Here are some of my thoughts on this
- A lot of ebooks still make a ton of money without any video. Reading will stay as a preferred content consumption method for many people for a very long time to come. So I think it will always be possible to make money through ebooks alone.
- However, for a lot of people video is their preferred content consumption method. To ignore these people while your competitiors don’t could be folly.
- Video is a lot easy to produce than you may think. A popular and successful method is just to talk over a Powerpoint presentation. You can also get an automated animated version of yourself to talk. Or you can even get somebody else to do the talking for you.
- Video adds a lot of value. You can charge a lot more for video.
- PLR. Rather than rewrite a PLR ebook, why not take that content and make powerpoint videos of the content instead? This a very fast and cheap way to create a high-value in-demand product.
If you’re a bit wary of creating video, the best thing to do is create one and see how you go. Like ebook-writing or any kind of product creation, the first one is the hardest. After that it becomes much much easier. So jump in and have a go.
The mainstream and niche ebook writing worlds are starting to dovetail. 
I just read a great article about the likelihood of advertising starting to appear in Kindle ebooks.
Internet marketers have long (well long in internet terms at least) used ebooks as promotional tools. Often giving the books away for free, they include prominent links to their website or larger advertisments.
It’s a great system as it’s win-win for customer and author. The customer saves money, and the author gets the chance to build a relationship with the customer as well as promote themselves.
Now it seems the mainstream ebook world may be moving towards this model. Every day it seems there is a new ebook reader coming onto the market, and every month a new major ebook store. Think Amazon, iBooks and Google editions.
All this competition will likely drive down the price of ebooks. Given that profit margins are already being squeezed by the low price of ebooks, publishers will be looking to make more money.
So advertising in ebooks is likely coming our way. What forms will this advertising take? There are lots to choose from. Full page ads appearing periodically. Smaller popup ads. Text only ads appearing in a subsection of the page.
It’s likely Amazon will attempt to customize ads based on what you have previously purchased at their store.
Will this advertising lead to product placement? I’m thinking not so much characters drinking a certain brand of cola, but characters using a certain type of object (sweater, knife, computer) and the reader being offered the chance to buy that object at a certain discount price.
Want to buy the same T-shirt as Lisbeth wears from the Dragon Tattoo books? Maybe soon it will be very easy to do.
Whatever may happen the development I think is good for product creators. The more creating profitable content becomes mainstream, the greater the market for us ebook writers becomes.
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