Though it might look a bit sparse right now, Metal Shredder TV will soon be rolling out a ton of video micro-lessons and e-books on different techniques, starting with TapAttack. While his past few muse ideas have seen sales and created an income stream, what matters now is that he’s living what he sells and has the passion to blow it up. He’s got the calloused fingers to prove it. He’s going to have a killer, passionate community because he’s passionate, and his products/content will be world-class because he’s got the expertise. Here’s a promo video to show you what I mean.

Taking something to a large scale doesn’t mean more work, it simply means changing your focus and architecting it properly from the start. LanguageCheat represents one of our muse concepts that we’re taking to that level. What’s yours?

A quick rundown of the conversation…

• Respecting your ideas, respecting your muse
• The Product: Language Cheat
• Where the idea came from
• A few samples
• Evolving a small idea into a big one, without abandoning the muse model
• Business plans & getting investors; defining the details up front
• Going big without getting heavy
• Tell us what you’re working on. What’s your muse?

Starting with only the spark of an idea – to create an audio learning course for aspiring bartenders – I decided to see what would happen if I set out to create a world-class audio learning system to sell as an information product. This is how I made it happen, presented as a model you can easily replicate…

Testing an unproven niche market

The first unbreakable rule of muse creation is ensuring you have an audience willing to exchange money for the value of your offer. A beautiful website, compelling copy, a perfect product – none of it matters if no one wants what you’re offering. The critical misstep you should avoid at all costs is committing extensive time and energy to creating products for a market that doesn’t have an appetite to buy.

1. Offer your product to your niche to gauge interest.
2. Measure market interest to justify the cost/time required.
3. Create the product only if the interest is irrefutable

“How the hell do you offer a product that hasn’t been created yet?” you’re asking. You’ll understand how that works as we move forward…

Writing the copy

Start by writing the sales letter. Forget aesthetic, forget the product – just focus on benefits. Sell solutions, sell ease of pain, sell peace of mind. Evoke emotion however you can – just make it impossible for someone in your niche to ignore you.

One fact that’s come as a surprise to many is that the story used on the landing page is actually true. For future products, I intend to include similar stories, even if they’re works of fiction. Giving your product an origin, a eureka moment, is strongly compelling and I’m a firm believer in making your story the focus of your sales copy. Writing sales copy based on fictitious events raises some controversial questions. The principles behind writing effective copy is something I’ll dive into in another post shortly.

Building the website

Coming from a background in design/development, I personally managed the creation of a simple sales letter website to present my offer’s sales copy. As with every step of the process, I handled much of it myself the first time through. I strongly believe, though I intend to outsource 98% of my tasks in the future, the first time presents an opportunity to move through a process first-hand, gaining an understanding of how to effectively manage each moving part. The intention was to create a workflow and a prototype to be replicated.

The original “test-only” website (since replaced by the up-to-date version) included nothing more than the following:

• Header graphic touting my USP (unique selling proposition) with Buy Now button
• Sales letter (story, benefits, offered solution, product breakdown, money-back guarantee, order form)
• Audio sample

Given I had no product, you might ask how I could offer an audio sample. Good question. This was an opportunity to get creative. I’d selected my voice talent (via Elance), prepared a script and planned out all the materials. The product itself was perfectly planned but not yet created. Research told me start-to-finish creation will take exactly 3 days and cost $600 USD (for voice talent). Clearly, it made sense to test my market first. If hypothetical sales justify creation of the product, I’d move forward.

This approach allows you to test multiple ideas in parallel without investing the time/effort to create a possibly worthless product. No matter how much you dig your own ideas, let the market decide if it’s worth pursuing.

Accepting orders… without accepting orders.

The next obvious question focuses on ordering. Clearly you should never accept payment for a product not immediately available to the customer. The key is to allow someone to approach the ultimate point of purchase, which gives you clear indication of purchase intent. To capture orders, simple create a mailing list with AWeber and present it as Step 1 of your order process. When someone submits an order, capture only their name and email address and bounce them to a page that says something like:

“We apologize but we are currently updating our product and not accepting orders at this time. We will notify you when the product is available for purchase.”

As a sort of pay-back for my early-interest customers who end up seeing this message, I make a point in the future to send them all a code for a hefty discount on the product once it’s ready for purchase.

Google time.

The specifics of launching and managing a Google Adwords campaign is the subject for future post. Simply stated, I ran a simple Adwords campaign – spending no more than $10/day – to push traffic to my sales letter. I ran this for 2 weeks to gauge day-by-day metrics.

After day 15 running Adwords, these were my metrics…

19 orders placed @ $59 price point. Theoretically, the product would have generated ~$1,100 in 15 days. Projecting on that alone equated to ~$2,240/mo or over $26,000/year in revenue.

Total Google Cost-To-Date:
$72.72 (@ avg. CPC of $0.61) with a daily budget capped at $5.

Needless to say, this was all the market demand validation I needed to see to press forward with creating the final product and laying the groundwork for generating actual sales.

Continue to Part 2

Some quick background

Let me detail what this product is, to give context to everything that will follow. Audio Mixologist enables rapid memorization of complex drink recipes through the use of mnemonic devices. As the site says…

A mnemonic (pronounced “nuh-monic”) is simply a word-association technique used to improve memory of complex information. Think back to grade-school where you likely learned quite a few mnemonics. Do you remember learning all the colors of the visible light spectrum? Does the name Roy G. Biv ring a bell? Red Orange Yellow Green Blue Indigo Violet. How about Every Good Boy Deserves Fudge to remember the musical note scale of E-G-B-D-F? For centuries, people have used mnemonics and other memory techniques to recall complex information with ease.

Years back, deluded by one-too-many Cocktail viewings, I found myself going through bartending school. I was the single person in class that did not write-out – by hand – hundreds of recipes on a 3×5 notecard. It just seemed like too much work. I did it all at once one night, in Microsoft Word, printed directly to Avery label stickers, and then stuck them to 3×5 cards. I walked into class with these one night, while everyone else was nursing carpal tunnel from the previous nights study session. I proceeded to sell the Word document to nearly the entire class for $10/ea. In retrospect, this was my first successful information product. Years later, that Word document popped back into my head and brings us to where we are today…

Collecting the drinks

This phase was an outsourcing wet-dream.

Somewhere deep in my hard drive, I had a cluttered, unstructured Word document with all the valuable content I needed for this product. I sent this off to one of my $5/hr outsourcing firms and the next morning I had a beautifully-structured spreadsheet with all my content flawlessly migrated.

Total cost: $24 USD. A steal at twice the price.

All drinks and data is managed using Filemaker Bento on Mac OS X . Excel quickly became too cumbersome so I imported directly to Bento, which allowed me to quickly create a nice input-form for additional data. Bento exports to simple CSV for migration to Excel or other applications.

Getting the voice talent

The talent was found via Elance. Project bids for a 60-90 minute program ranged from $200 to $900. This was a case where I wasn’t just bargain-shopping. From the very first email, one particular firm (Wooly Bugger Productions) stood out and provided me free audio auditions with 6 of their female voices, free of charge. About a week after the first email exchange, the guy acting as project manager emailed to tell me he was literally hit by a truck and laid-up in bed recovering. The intention was to let me know everything would go on as-planned and he was simply set-back a day or two. Seriously, that is customer service. Contact details for this firm are available on the Muselife Resources page.

Turnaround from script being sent to final product: 3 days. Impressive, to say the least. The firm delivered over 200 audio files, each uniquely named according to my spreadsheet’s unique ID and drink name. This certainly took them extra time, but made my life far easier when it came to organizing the audio course.

Audio Samples

[audio:http://www.audiomixologist.net/Sample1.mp3]

[audio:http://www.audiomixologist.net/Sample2.mp3]

[audio:http://www.audiomixologist.net/Sample3.mp3]

[audio:http://www.audiomixologist.net/Sample4.mp3]

Lesson Learned

Don’t always go with the cheapest provider. Particularly with creative endeavors, you need to balance your budget with the competence of the freelancer/outsourcer and the expected quality of your final product.

Creating course materials

Interactive/Mobile Versions

The Interactive Version of the system was created using Apple Keynote (Apple’s elegant answer PowerPoint). I was able to create one version with clickable links and export as both an Interactive version using Flash as well as an iPod-friendly video version using Quicktime. The elegance of all this was that I could create one master file and use it to generate the majority of my assets. Unfortunately the firms I’d been working with were not equipped with Apple’s suite of applications so I chose to do this myself. It took about 5 hours of grunt work one evening and is something I would not choose to do myself again.

Interactive Sampler

I’ve uploaded a sample of the Interactive version, which is limited to the Introduction and After Dinner Drinks section. Other links will not work, but it will give you an idea how one aspect of the final product came together:

Audio Mixologist Interactive Sampler

Lesson Learned

Make sure any offshore firm you hire can fit into your workflow and has the necessary tools and software.

Drink Guide

I had my virtual assistant migrate all my Excel spreadsheet data to a well-structured Word document in Outline format, making creation of the Drink Guide an absolute breeze. I simply added some introductory information, basic styling and a reference guide to common words. Otherwise, this was generated from the same base set of data that’s powered everything else.

Bonus Guides

Written in 1-2 hours simply using my existing knowledge of the industry as well as some research I did online.

Launch & Delivery

Final Package

Although I anticipated a large final package, the overall size of nearly 400mb was a whole other story. Hesitant to waste time optimizing/compressing and such, I’ve taken the simpler approach of logically splitting the entire system into separate files, all of which are available to the buyer instantly after payment.

Payment Processing

Quite simply handled through 1ShoppingCart.com paired with Paypal Business Services Merchant Account.

Digital Content Delivery

A common question when it comes to selling digital goods is how one delivers and protects the assets so only customers may access. I’ve found a solution with Payloadz . You create a product, assign assets to it (in my case, the relevant PDF/ZIP files), and it handles all the payment and delivery logistics. Each customer is assigned an access link which is good for 48 hours from purchase.

Conclusion

That’s that. Muse creation, from concept to launch. There’s much, much more to come in the form of posts that dive more deeply into the various topics discussed in this case study. For now, use this as a rough outline of a rather effective product creation process. Adapt it, alter it, optimize the workflow and do it better. This just the beginning.