Recently I listened raptly to a 9-CD course on the principles of personal success recorded by Napoleon Hill in the 1950s. The content was as relevant to me as any more recently created self-help material and totally riveting because of Hill’s captivating presentation style.

Perhaps you have your eye on generating current income, so that the idea of creating something that can still be sold in 10, 20 or even 50 years from now with minimal updating seems like a luxury. If so, I would encourage you to rethink your attitude. Consciously creating information products that can last means you can keep on earning from your past labors without having to remove your products from circulation or redo them every couple of years.

Create it once, sell it for years and years.

Ingredients That Make Your Information Product Timeless

1. An evergreen goal. Focus your product on something that your customers wanted to achieve 10 or 20 years ago and will undoubtedly want to achieve 10 or 20 years from now. The logic is that any topic that couldn’t have been discussed in the past will probably change so much in the future that whatever you say now may no longer apply then. Here are some examples. Improve your search engine traffic: no. Increase repeat business: yes. Keep your kids safe from Facebook predators: no. Keep your kids safe: yes. Master the art of online dating: no. Understand your compatibility as a couple: yes. Delicious recipes using your Weber grill: no. Recipes for low-salt diets: yes.

2. Big-picture thinking. Spend the bulk of your energy within the product on broad-brush strategies rather than little details. For instance, I created a course on how to create a system of information products. The first lesson of seven talks about the thinking and procedures required for long-term success. These will never change. A submodule discusses the psychology of preventing refunds. This too will not go out of date. Where I talk about writing marketing copy, the principles concern the overall ingredients needed for persuasion, which are unchanging. I do discuss how-to’s for specific steps, such as setting up a merchant account and a shopping cart, but in a side document that’s more easily updated than the course as a whole.

3. Ruthless editing. Most blogs will not stand the test of time because they’re interlaced with references to current events and personal histories that will be as hard to wade through as stale newspapers. Before recording your program or turning your manuscript into the final “to-print” version, get rid of references like “next week” or “last month” and cut mentions of sports events, political happenings, TV or music fads and even large-scale natural disasters. Although you may be right to assume most people know what you’re talking about now, this will not be true down the road. Napoleon Hill did so well keeping his course timeless that I had a hard time figuring out during which decade he recorded this series. Only his biography provided enough clues to place it during the 1950s.

4. Historical depth. Instead of referring to a current president or prime minister, use examples from earlier eras. A phenomenally successful lecturer on storytelling illustrates his points with examples from Homer’s Odyssey as well as classic films and novels like Citizen Kane and Jane Eyre more than this year’s blockbusters. He’s been teaching his seminar for more than 25 years now, and this approach means he doesn’t need to reinvent it.

I once asked a colleague who have amassed a significant product line whether or not he deliberately tried to make his content timeless. He sighed. “I wish I had,” he said. “I’ve had to pull a couple of items because I didn’t have time to update them.”

Author Bio: The author of 15 books and eight multimedia home-study courses, Marcia Yudkin has been selling information since 1981. Download a free recording of her answers to commonly asked questions about creating and selling information products at http://www.yudkin.com/infomarketing.htm .

Category: Marketing
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