Uh-oh! Where is it indeed? What happened to all the good intentions?



I've gotten off track! I had a funny feeling when I started on the section on how to select a product to work on, but I hadn't anticipated just how much I would get derailed by the now infamous 12-product survey. And apparently, I wasn't the only one.

It's a great idea! Sure, you would want to know that the product you're about to invest all this time and energy in will be successful. But if it stops you from creating one in the first place, maybe that's not the right approach. At least for now.

My approach with learning tends to be to start with the easy stuff, whenever possible. Why start with the most difficult thing first, when I can do that later?

The fact is, we can learn a lot from just plain creating a product or two even if that product won't be the best selling product we were hoping for. It may still sell at least a few copies.

And the tools are all there. Once I had a closer look at the later steps, I realized that hey, I could take that interview and pretty it up right into a saleable product. And those manuscripts? Perfect ebooks. Plus I could add an audio feature to boot.

And, who knows? Even if it doesn't sell too well by itself, my newest creation may be the perfect bonus to include with another product I'll create later (the ?real? thing?). It might also work nicely as an extra sales offer on the thank-you page. Who knows.

There are so many ways to put a nice little product to good use even if it may not be the hottest thing since Squidoo.

So what am I trying to say here?

Marlon's dashboard contains such a wealth of information, resources, and how-to steps that it is possible to start at any one of a number of different places and build a product right there.

There's always time for the survey later. Maybe once you have a few products and you're ready to create upgrades or higher-priced item for your product funnel, that would be a good time to survey which one of them to go with first.

Besides, once you've gotten used to the product creation process, you may happily spend some time and money on doing the survey for the next round.

Moreover, once you've gotten started to actually create products, your mind will be so full of ideas for even more products you'll need a way to weed through them to find the best ones. Voila! Perfect time for a survey!

At least that's what I plan to do. I have quite a few half-baked projects sitting around on my hard-drive (and some of them still mostly in my brain). What could possibly be wrong with starting on some of those and turning them into finished products?

Once I've got a few of those done, I plan to go back and work the dashboard the ?proper? way: Starting with surveys for my new projects that I'll create from scratch.