Plan To Succeed With Information Product Creation: Why You Need To Split Your Process Up

One of the keys to succeeding in information product creation is to break the process up into discrete steps. This frequently isn’t an instinctive reaction for the typical information marketer. Especially on the internet where small sized learning products are the norm.

However, it is extremely important to your ultimate success. In fact, I would go so far as to say that if you don’t do this you probably won’t succeed… even when you are starting out let alone as you move forward.

Your product creation system should do this for you if only to help you to understand the overall task.

But why?

In this article, I’m going to ignore chunking and focus on the practical aspects. That’s not to say that chunking isn’t important. It is. It’s important to understanding and to learning the process. But while you can use the same chunks as you move forward, long term your focus needs to be on the operation of the system not the understanding of it. Unless of course you are constantly training new people!

So why is chunking important to long term use of the product creation process? (Yes, I know systems design uses a different term for this process but I’m not teaching you systems design. So I’m going to use the word learning content designers use.)

The first reason that having individual discrete tasks is important is one of schedule estimation. Frequently it is very difficult to estimate how long the total task of creating a product will take. After all, the size and type of the products matters as does the number of products in your product funnel. And those are just the most obvious elements. However, estimating a discrete task is often much easier. The total can then be estimated as the total of the discrete tasks.

Secondly, scheduling a large task can be problematic. However, by segmenting the task into a number of discrete tasks, you gain a much greater flexibility in scheduling. Not only that but as your business begins to add people you are able to schedule multiple people to the product creation.

Finally, segmenting a large task into smaller discrete tasks allows you to have much better control over the product creation. This affects two different areas — status and quality.

By segmenting your process into discrete tasks you are able to schedule and record the progress at much more detailed level. As a result you are more in control of the status of the product creation. You know what everyone is doing. When they should complete it. And how much it should cost. You also know exactly what has been done.

You also improve your overall quality. Instead of waiting until everything is done you can check quality as you go. This allows you to immediate react to low quality products without absorbing their costs. This means that you have less rework and your rework costs less. And if the product is not going to meet its quality requirement you will know about it in time to stop the development, change the requirement or fix the product.

Learn From Your Investment Mistakes

Every one makes investment mistakes. From the time we were born, we learned from the mistakes we made. As investors, we need to learn from our investment mistakes by recognizing when we make them and make the appropriate adjustments to our investing discipline. When we make a losing investment, do we recognize our investing mistake and learn from it, or do we attribute it to some outside factor, like bad luck or the market? To make money from your investments and beat the market, we must recognize our investing mistakes and then learn from them. Unfortunately, learning from these investing mistakes is much harder than it seems.

Some of you may have heard of this experiment. It is an example of a failure to learn from investing mistakes during a simple game devised by Antoine Bechara. Each player received $20. They had to make a decision on each round of the game: invest $1 or not invest. If the decision was not to invest, the task advanced to the next round. If the decision was to invest, players would hand over one dollar to the experimenter. The experimenter would then toss a coin in view of the players. If the outcome was heads, the player lost the dollar. If the outcome landed tails up then $2.50 was added to the player’s account. The task would then move to the next round. Overall, 20 rounds were played.

In this study there was no evidence of learning as the game went on. As the game progressed, the number of players who elected to play another round fell to just over 50%. If players learned over time, they would have realized that it was optimal to invest in all rounds. However, as the game went on, fewer and fewer players made decisions to invest. They were actually becoming worse with each round. When they lost, they assumed they made an investing mistake and decided to not play the next time.

So how do we learn from our investing mistakes? What techniques can we use to overcome our “bad” behavior and become better investors? The major reason we don’t learn from our mistakes (or the mistakes of others) is that we simply don’t recognize them as such. We have a gamut of mental devices set up to protect us from the terrible truth that we regularly make mistakes. We also become afraid to invest, when we have a losing experience, as in the experiment above. Let’s look at several of the investing mistake behaviors we need to overcome.

I Knew That

Hindsight is a wonderful thing. As a Monday morning quarterback, we can always say we would have made the right decision. Looking again at the experiment mentioned above, it is easy to say, “I knew that, so I would have invested on each flip of the dice”. So why didn’t everyone do just that? In my opinion, they let their emotions rule over logical decision-making. Maybe their last several trades were losers, so they decided it was an investing mistake and they become afraid to experience another losing trade.

The advantage of hindsight is we can employ logic as we evaluate the decision we should have made. This allows us to avoid the emotion that gets in our way. Emotion is one of the most common investing mistake and it is the worst enemy of any good investor. To help overcome this emotion, I recommend that every investor write down the reason you are making the decision to invest. Documenting the logic used to make an investment decision goes a long way to remove the emotion that leads to investment mistakes. To me the idea is to get into the position where you can say “I know that” rather than I knew that. By removing the emotion from your decision, you are using the logic you typically use in hindsight to your advantage.

Self Congratulations

Whenever we make a winning investment, we congratulate ourselves for making such a good decision based on our investing prowess. However, if the investment goes bad, then we often blame it on bad luck. According to psychologists, this is a natural mechanism that we, as humans possess. As investors, it is a bad trait to have as it leads to additional investing mistakes.

To combat this unfortunate human trait, I have found that I must document each of my trades, especially the reason I am making the decision. I can then assess my decisions based on the outcome. Was I right for the right reason? If so, then I can claim some skill, it could still be luck, but at least I can claim skill. Was I right for some spurious reason? In which case I will keep the result because it makes me a profit, but I shouldn’t fool myself into thinking that I really knew what I was doing. I need to analyze what I missed.

Was I wrong for the wrong reason? I made an investing mistake, I need to learn from it, or was I wrong for the right reason? After all, bad luck does occur. Only by analyzing my investment decisions and the reasons for those decisions, can I hope to learn from my investing mistakes. This is an important step toward building genuine investment skill.

Luck Becomes Insight

The market is comprised of a series of cause and effect actions, which are not always transparent. This cause and effect has created some interesting behaviors by some very successful people. For example, some baseball pitchers are known to not step on the white chalk line when they are playing. I am sure you have heard of many “superstitions” that people hold to be true to help them perform well.

In an experiment by Koichi Ono’s in 1987, subjects were asked to earn points in response to a signal light. They could pull three levers, though they were not told to do anything in particular. They could see their score on a counter, but did not know that points were awarded completely independent of what they did. Nothing they did influenced the outcome in terms of points awarded. During the experiment, they observed some odd behavior as the participants tried to make the most points possible. Most subjects developed superstitious behavior, mainly in patterns of lever pulling, but in some cases, they performed elaborate or even strenuous actions. Each of these superstitions began with a coincidence. In some cases, the participants would pull levers in a particular sequence. In other cases, even more odd behavior was observed, including a person who jumped off a table and then later jumped up to touch the ceiling to “score” points. Keep in mind the points were awarded either on a fixed time schedule or on a variable time schedule, not based on the action of the participant.

The point of this is that as humans we tend to think that luck is insight. We fail to analyze effectively the situation and the real reason for our success or failure. In investing this behavior will lead to ruin. To help overcome our natural tendency, we must document our investing decisions and then assess the results. This assessment process helps us learn from our success and from our failures and is critical for each of us if we hope to become successful investors.

Learn from Investment Mistakes

To help avoid investing mistakes, what should you document before you make an trade? I like to look at three categories regarding a stock I am considering. First, I look at a series of fundamental information such as earnings yield, return on capital, revenue growth, insider holdings, sector, and free cash flow. The fundamental information helps me identify if this is a good company with growing earnings, good management and has potential. After reviewing the appropriate financial information including SEC documents, I identify the risks inherent in the company. These risks might include competition, market share, insider transactions, and any litigation that the company is experiencing. Here one needs to try to identify every possible risk and assess them critically. Finally, I look at the chart of the stock, seeking to identify support and resistance zones. This gives me potential entry points, exit targets, and the trailing stop loss. I complete these sections with a written trading strategy describing how I expect to make my trades. All these investment factors should be documented before making a trade. Once the trade is complete, I review them to see what I can learn so I can avoid any investing mistakes in the future.

To learn from our investing mistakes, we need to document our actions before we make the decision. We also need to be honest with ourselves when assessing our results. As we have seen, it is quite easy for each of us to put on rose-colored glasses and think we are better investors than we really are. We need to assess critically our investing abilities without distorting the feedback we receive from our decisions. Those of us who are able to learn this valuable skill will benefit greatly. Those of us who are unable to apply this learning will be destined to mediocrity at best and likely lose much of their capital before they quite investing.

Hans E. Wagner
I began investing in high school and have remained active in the markets. A graduate of the US Air Force Academy with an MBA majoring in Finance from the University of Colorado, I continued to invest throughout my career in the US Air Force, Bank of America, Coopers & Lybrand, and working for Ross Perot before retiring at 55. During that time I have gained a very good understanding of what works and what doesn’t. I hope to impart that knowledge to others so they can achieve financial independence as well.

How To Succeed At Online Product Creation The Easy Way

Product creation could be a frightening subject for a lot of Internet marketers to face. Some folks who get in the game with the intention of making a full time income are completely ignorant as to how an online business operates. One of the most profitable ways to create online cash is by creating a product that others are happy to pay for.

Product creation is legitimate method of generating money through internet marketing but many entrepreneurs get it wrong. They start by imitating their Internet marketing gurus by creating information products on Internet marketing in hopes of getting rich the way their heroes did. The problem is that they usually don’t know what they are doing and enter a highly competitive niche with very little marketing experience or connections.

Here are a few tips for effective product creation that may help you get on the right track:
Start by finding a profitable niche with low to moderate competition. If you conduct some rudimentary market research and keyword research, you’ll find many opportunities in areas that will surprise you. Amazon and eBay are two great places to brainstorm for product ideas.

Developing Your Product does not have to be a difficult project. You can find experts in the right field for your niche and pay them to write the material while an artist designs the packaging and website or blog. You can outsource the entire product creation part of the project after you conduct the research and testing to ensure profitability.

Sales and marketing strategies should be created while developing the product and learning about the market. Some experienced marketers use pay per click to drive traffic to their offer page; some folks outsource the entire marketing campaign to affiliates through ClickBank or other affiliate programs.

Product creation does not need to be hard, particularly when the merchandise is electronic. E-books, videos, audio and multi-media products sell very well. They are distributed immediately to customers electronically. Once you have a good feel for a niche market, try to service your customers with associated products and upgrades. If you want to earn money online through product creation, you must understand supply and demand. The majority of new online marketers fail miserably because they go after highly competitive markets or forget to research their chosen niche properly. You have to create your products according to the needs, wants and desires of the prospective customers.