When coaches, consultants, freelance writers, designers and experts contemplate the prospect of developing a product line, they imagine something equivalent in effort to trudging up a steep, rocky hillside.

However, creating a first (or second or third) product doesn’t have to be torturous or even difficult. With any of the five ideas below, you can have a product ready to sell in little more than one week – often much more quickly.

Five Easy, Fast Q&A Products

1. Compilation of expert answers. Bob Serling is a master of this method of generating content. All he does is think up a provocative question, something people fiercely desire to know from the mouths of those with reputations or achievements. Then either by audio or by email, he collects short answers to that one question from experts. He collects those answers – unedited, I believe – and he then has a saleable product.

While Serling might know most or all of the other marketers whose answers he collects, I have also seen this work from someone who was a complete unknown, without cronies to tap. Two secrets to that are that once you get one “yes” you leverage that to convince others to cooperate; and you should carefully keep your time or length expectations in check. Just about anyone can find a slot in their schedule for a ten-minute interview that gets recorded or time to type out and submit three to four paragraphs.

Several years ago, I used this method to create a quick bonus for a teleclass. Fifteen experts sent me a single tip on “going virtual” in a paragraph or two, adding up to a six-page PDF in which everyone had a different, useful angle on the issue.

2. Collection of your own answers. You can solicit frequently asked questions to answer from your target market, find them on discussion boards or dig them out of your head. Then organize them in a logical order and tackle them one by one in writing. Create a catchy title for your collection, turn the document into a PDF and voila, you have a report people will be willing to pay for.

A friend of mine who had recently set out her shingle as a business coach for a certain niche sat down to type out answers to more than a dozen commonly asked questions in her field and within a couple of days had completed her first product, which she sold as a PDF report.

3. Live teleclass. Instead of writing out your answers, you might find it easier and faster to talk them out. This works well in the format of an interactive teleclass. You promise to answer questions during a live call, solicit some questions in advance, lead off the call with those, and then take additional questions from listeners on the line until time is up. You can run such a call free, then sell the recording in MP3 format or on CD.

4. Expert interview. If you don’t regard yourself as knowing enough to address questions credibly, enlist an expert to provide the answers. Either solicit questions in advance, make them up or ask your expert to provide them. Introduce the expert with his or her bio before launching into the questions. You can present this sort of interview either in written or spoken form – or both, if you record the interview, then transcribe it. In my experience, most experts are willing to be interviewed without pay as long as you give them a master copy of the resulting product for them to sell as well as you selling it from your web site and via email to your list.

5. Cooperative questions and answers. Here you get together with three or four colleagues, or perhaps more, to take turns answering questions that you’ve all agreed upon in advance and thus had time to create notes for. This amounts to a simple joint venture, as all those involved get equal rights to sell the product created in this way, via recording and perhaps also a transcript of the discussion.

Dan Kennedy’s mastermind groups have cooperated to create this kind of a product several times. As with all the other methods of product creation, if the questions are intriguing and the participants articulate and knowledgeable, the result possesses the kind of value customers are highly willing to pay for.

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

Category: Marketing
Keywords: product,development,questions,answers,expert,interview,creation,creating,first,fast,quick,rapid