Information Marketing - Converting Public Domain Books Into Courses

When it comes to creating an info-product, one way to find content is to use a public domain source. These sources, such as books, allow you to borrow their content and add to it for your own use in products.

As the President of the Information Marketing Association, I host a monthly coaching call for info-marketers who have questions and are trying to launch their infopreneur business. Here is a question from Ted in LaHoya about converting public domain books into courses. Since this is a common question, I decided to prepare an article about this challenge to help you.

When you approach creating an info-product out of a public domain resource, such as a book, I would start with an outline. If you are looking to translate that content into a more detailed home study course, you need to make sure you have the expertise or can bring in the expertise to provide additional details to the content you will be creating. Really the simplest method is to take the chapters of the book and create an audio program for each chapter. This is especially useful if you do not have any idea what the category is but you take the chapters because they are already organized for the book. However many chapters there are, you can make a chapter into a CD or you combine a couple of chapters into a CD and add some examples and you're done.

Adding a workbook utilizing the main points of the audio tracks can add perceived value. If you wanted to give them a step-by-step process at the end to help them implement your product, then you provide them with six or ten questions they can use as a jumping off point. The fewer the questions you use, the more pleased the customer will be, even though they will implement less. The objective of these questions is to help them work through and the answers will help in creating whatever it is that your product looking to help them create.

If you need additional content, you can always bring in a couple of interviews to add variation. Feel free if you need a particular piece of content to get somebody on the phone, interview them for fifteen minutes and add that to the CD for that particular unit. You can do this by giving a small intro, "On this program you're going to learn this, you're going to learn that and I have a special guest and this is what they're going to bring. This is their name that's all part of this program" and then you jump into that CD. That way don't feel like you have to give anybody you interviewed a full hour and you still get the additional content for your product.

My only caution these days is that more and more customers want things distilled for them. Customers are fairly dependent and although it's our inclination to give our customers absolutely everything they could possibly need to know; very often they are looking for what are the essential five things they need to know are. There is some value in that as well. Rather than saying "let me expand the content here," use instead a "this is how you get started," program. In that case, you walk them through the main points. Instead of making this a twelve audio CD product, you make it four audio CDs and what it is giving them is a step-by-step guide to the things they need in order to implement this product.