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Creating Products For Your Service Business Is Easier Than Ever

Products and business go hand in hand.  You can’t have a business if you don’t have anything to sell.  Now that I have earned my master’s degree in stating the obvious, what I really want to do today is inspire you to keep creating for your business.  Especially now that creating products for your service business is easier than ever.

Despite the fact that creating products for your service business is easy, there are still a lot of businesses not creating for their business.  By not creating new products, these business owners are missing out on the opportunity to engage with their clients at a deeper level, tap new markets and grow their business in the process.

What’s the reason for the neglect?  It could be the usual suspects:

• Time
• Money
• Don’t have the right players on the team
• Not sure how or what to create
• Maybe you even think you don’t have any good ideas

Do these sound familiar?  Business owners are notorious for using them.

In today’s day and age, there is no excuse for not creating products for your service business.  Take a look at some of the traditional product creation vehicles and how easy and inexpensive they are to use today:

• Video-  It used to be that you needed a ton of expensive equipment.  Digital format for videos wasn’t invented until around the early 90s.  Since that time, creating a video is as easy as pointing a camera where you want it and start creating.  With equipment like flip cams you can record a video and plug it straight into your computer to start editing.  Apple computers has made editing videos easy as well.  Don’t have a video camera.  Use a service like Camtasia to roll a slide show that you can talk over and put music to.
• Audio-  You don’t have to have a professional recording studio to record professional sounding audio to use with products and podcasts.  Microphones like the Snowball make creating audio as easy as plugging the mic into your computer.  Free services like Audacity make editing simple as well.  You can use an inexpensive program like Reaper to capture your audio as well and lay multiple tracks.
• Workbooks- You don’t have to spend a fortune to have a professional looking workbook laid out and designed for your products.  Places like Elance make it easy to find solid professional designers to out together great looking material at a fraction of the cost.
• Books-  Whether you are creating an e-book or self publishing, creating a book is easier as well.  Not only is it easy to create content through channels like a blog where you can literally blog your book.  You also kill two birds with one stone by not only creating content to engage your following but you are also working towards a finished product of a book.  Amazon has a number of options to help you put out a finished product that can be used as an e-book, physical book or is compatible with their Kindle reader as well.  They will find editors, designers, etc.
• Home Study Courses-  Do you have a service or process that you take clients through?  If you do, are you missing out on the opportunity to capture that in the form of home study course?  A home study course will incorporate a number of the elements that I talked about above.  Videos, audios, a workbook, etc.  This is a great way to show people what your service is all about at a lower barrier to entry.   You can offer this as a physical product or make it strictly digital or even do both.

As you read through this ask yourself the following questions:

How good is your business at creating new products?

What holes are missing that need to be addressed with products?

To get you started and help you overcome some of your product creation obstacles, here are some of my most critical tips for getting more product created:

1. Have a clear vision of what you want to accomplish with each new product you create.  This seems fairly obvious but it’s easy to not articulate this upfront and then lose sight of what it is that you are really trying to accomplish.  Keep your end user in mind.
2. You have time here’s how to use it.  Creating new products for your business is about setting aside the time.  It’s all about creating the time and the space in your calendar to do this.  I would set aside time in your calendar each week that is focused on product creation and idea development.  If you don’t create the time on your calendar and stick with it, it will never happen.  It’s about creating a rhythm that you work in.
3. Holes that exist in your knowledge.  You may have avoided creating because you don’t feel like you are “tech savvy”.  I hear this a lot about entrepreneurs but the great thing about tech savvy people is they don’t come out of the womb knowing how to code in HTML and PHP, they learn it.  Granted some people have more of an interest in these things than others.  If tech ignorance is getting in the way of you growing your business, then you need to get over your fear or dislike of technology and make it your friend.  If you need help, then find it.  There is a lot of talented, inexpensive help out there.  They may already be on your team.
4. You don’t have any good ideas.  I don’t hear this a lot from entrepreneurs as typically I am trying to get them to rein in the “good ideas” but there is a decent percentage of entrepreneurs who feel stuck or are down on their abilities to come up with good ideas.  My suggestion here is to create quiet time for yourself to create in a location that is not work.  We call this time a “power hour” and it happens before we do anything else in the morning.  Having some quiet time to work-out, brainstorm, read, meditate or pray is a great way to get your creative juices flowing.

You know what to do and how to overcome obstacles, now it’s time to go out and do it.  Take a minute right now and put some product creation time on your calendar and stick to it.

Tags: business, creating products, experience design
Posted in Ideas and Strategy, Total Experience Design | Comments Off