The financial news is pretty clear these days: The United States economy is in a deep recession and the world economy is coming along for the ride. To many, it seems like a bad time to try and sell products online - but they couldn’t be more wrong.

An interesting thing happened on ‘Black Monday.’ As the bottom fell out of the stock market and trillions of dollars in investor wealth vanished into thin air, I actually had a pretty good day in my information publishing business. I made sales as an affiliate, I sold some products from my own product line, and I earned income from ads on my various blogs and websites. (Of course, I lost plenty of money on my investment portfolio!)

People may change their focus and priorities during a recession, but they don’t stop buying things.

When people are feeling ‘rich’ and there is plenty of cash and credit floating around, you don’t have to try hard to sell products. Even lazy marketers can make a few bucks riding trends and copying other people’s marketing methods.

But, when fear grips the markets (and people’s wallets) you have to have spend a little more time and energy to find or create the products that will sell.

What Will People Buy Right Now?

Think for a minute about what your friends and family are discussing right now when it comes to the economy and their jobs. Many are probably trimming back spending on ‘luxury’ items. Others are trying to stretch the useful life of products they have been just throwing out and replacing in the past.

Instead of a new car, it’s new brakes on the old car. Maybe you know someone who is learning to cook and bake from scratch to avoid the cost of expensive pre-packaged foods in order to stretch the grocery money a little further each week. You may even know people who are scrambling to trim their lifestyle and sell off non-essential items in their homes to keep up the payments on a house after their spouse lost a job.

In every one of these cases and more there are opportunities for smart marketers. Information about car repair, selling on eBay, and meal planning are easy sells in a difficult economic climate. You can also teach people how to make things for themselves to save money (think knitting, sewing, crochet, woodworking, etc.)

There is also a huge market for ‘frugal living’ resources. These folks may not like to spend money on store-bought cleaning products, clothes, and packaged foods, but they will buy inexpensive info products that teach them how to make their own versions of popular products for pennies.

Plenty of people are in desperate need of credit and budget counseling too. It is amazing how few people actually know how to create a household budget and use it. I don’t know many. You can get away without this kind of knowledge when times are good, but when the money pool dries up, these are the skills that keep you from going bankrupt. If you know anything on the subject, now is the time to get that information into a product.

The ‘Recession Buster’ Package is On The Way

I’m working on a special “Recession Buster” package that is going to put together an amazing collection of products for walking anyone through the process of starting up their own information publishing business. It will be available to subscribers of the IM Insights newsletter in a few days. (Only newsletter subscribers will receive this offer, so subscribe to the free course using the form on the right side of this web page to get the sale announcement. You’ll get an awesome e-course too!)

Keep watching your emails, the ‘Recession Buster’ package will only be available for 4 days. So, you’ll need to move fast to take advantage of this amazing deal (over 75% off of my normal sales prices.)

Real value is created in our economy when people like you and me create new and valuable products and sell them to others who need them. As our businesses grow, we pay for things like payment processing, web hosting, and software. We also hire bookkeepers and other folks to manage our business. We purchase computers, video cameras, audio recorders, and more to create new products to sell. And, the list goes on.

In short, it’s people like you and me getting to work that will ultimately start rebuilding this shattered economy. I hope, through the “Recession Buster” package, to help you get a jump start on doing your part without breaking the piggy bank in the process.

Don’t let a recession get you down. Let it inspire you to create instead.

If you are listening to the podcast version of this article, visit us on the web at www dot go-to guy enterprises dot com to sign-up for the newsletter and receive our powerful e-course titled “The Six Secret Weapons of Power Persuasion.”

Selling software is an extremely profitable business. The recent “Grand Theft Auto 4″ release sold over $500 Million in the first week and many more mundane software titles like word processors, spreadsheets, and screen capture tools sell hundreds and thousands of dollars worth of product year after year.

For information producers who are more familiar with creating courses and seminars, there is another alternative that will help you cash in on the software business using the content you are creating right now.

A Different Kind of Software

Back in college I studied fiction writing and came across a piece of writing software called “WritePro.” The software was (and still is) pitched as a virtual writing tutor designed to help users craft better characters and richer story lines for their writing. This software is not particularly sophisticated and has not been updated much, but continues to sell for $99 per copy over 10 years later.

The foundation of the software is a writing course created by author and writing coach Sol Stein. It consists of a series of exercises and questions designed to help you develop a fictional story with well-rounded characters. The software simply presents the questions and exercises to you in a specific sequence and records your responses.

As you work through the material, you revisit and add to the material you previously wrote and, finally, convert it into a wordprocessor file to further develop into a manuscript for a novel.

The technology to run this software is very simple - it’s the sequence of questions and exercises (the content) that creates the value. Speaking of value, let’s take a look at the value of Stein’s teaching in various formats.

The Value Of Content In Various Forms

Sol Stein has 3 significant books on writing that can be purchased today: “Stein on Writing”, “How to Grow a Novel”, and “Solutions for Writers.” All three books can be purchased at Amazon right now for $47.74 plus shipping - if you buy them used, $32.23.

There is an MP3 audio on CD version of “Stein on Writing” that sells for $24.95 new and $15.72 used (that’s about $5-$14 dollars more than the print version.)

The “WritePro” software is constructed from essentially the same teaching content, but it is presented in an interactive interface that prevents people from jumping ahead until they have done the writing work for each module. That software sells for $99 today and has been on the market for over 10 years.

Transforming Your Content Into Software

Think for a minute about all of the ebooks, audio recordings, videos, and websites you have created. Can that content be presented as a sequence of learning modules with assignments at the end of each one? Can the end result of the activities be combined to create a resource that will help your customer succeed at whatever subject you are teaching them about? If so, you could have the makings of an excellent software product on your hands.

If you have an ebook about how to write short ebooks, it probably breaks down the writing process into steps that build on each other. Imagine a software package that instructs users to pick a topic and write it down. Then, it asks them to write down four sub-topics. Then it presents each sub-topic and asks the user to write several paragraphs for each one. The software would walk the user step-by-step through the writing process, capturing the results of each exercise along the way. When the writing is done, the software could present the user with several templates to chose from and out the other side comes a well written professionally formatted ebook ready to sell. That’s just the bare bones of an idea. There are many other useful functions that could be added to increase the value to the user.

The first step in adapting your content is to create a teaching plan and define the final output and how it will benefit your customer. Next, plan the content for each module and make notes on how you would like to present it to the customer. How will the user be able to navigate through the exercises? Will there be supplemental teaching material available? Will the user need to review previous results during later assignments? Make your notes and show them to a trusted adviser to get an outside opinion of how well the material flows.

There are a number of different technologies which can be used to program your final software. You can use a program like Flash or Multimedia Maker to create your program and deliver it to your customer. Or, you can hire a programmer to start from the ground up and create everything in C++ or Java. Whatever your solution, before you search for a programmer on eLance or start working on it yourself, create a detailed outline from your notes of how you want the software to work and make samples of how you want it to look. This will help shorten the development process and minimize mistakes and miscommunication.

The greatest value will come if the software you create helps people create and store resources they can use again or pushes them to complete a process they wouldn’t otherwise finish if they just had a blank pad of paper and your content in ebook form. Some of the simplest software I’ve seen does little more than ask people to fill in a few blanks about a product and then inserts the results into a pre-formatted HTML template to create a sales page. The user uploads the resulting file to their server and they are ready to start driving traffic to it - a simple tool that helps people who have trouble putting together a decent sales page.

The bottom line is this, create something useful and you can profit with it for months and years to come. There is big money in software.

If you are listening to the podcast version of this article, we invite you to visit us on the web at www dot go-to guy enterprises dot com.

What exactly are people paying you for when they purchase an information product? Many people drawn to the business of selling information are the sorts of folks who like to search out information and find their own answers. By nature they are researchers. This is an accurate description of me, and I’m sure many others.
More on Information Products: What Are People REALLY Paying For…