How Much Lead Time You Should Give Yourself Developing Products

By Stu McLaren

Do you have business questions that are stopping you from really progressing within your market? I know as my business grew I came across road blocks, big and small, that sometimes would put me behind schedule or just stump me. In this article I will answer two of those questions on product creation.

Lets start with the first question:

How much lead time and how much of the product should I have finished if I am creating a product that has monthly send outs and teleseminars?

When creating a product and knowing how much lead time you will need, always give yourself as much time as possible. Usually, one way or another, it will take longer than you expected.

Let's take for example a 12 month course. For that type of product I would give yourself a three to four month buffer and continue to stay that far ahead throughout the course as it goes along. By doing this you will keep yourself in a real safe zone.

When it comes to product development that is just the reality that I have encountered, sometimes it just takes longer than you expect. The dream is to be able to get the product created really quickly but there are hiccups with packaging, delivery.

Expect it to take you longer, so give yourself a buffer zone, which will allow you to get it developed as quickly as possible. Keeping that buffer zone should be your focus so you'll be able to get your product completed and stay ahead.

Here's the second question:

If I'm an expert on a topic, what would be a really quick way to create a product?

There are a variety of ways to do this, even when you may not be an expert on the topic. A teleseminar series is a very easy and fast method of creating a product. From personal experience, I have just started selling courses for the first time as a a teleseminar series. From those calls I can then turn them into a series of products. Those calls that not been created before, but as soon as they were conducted, those calls were transcribed and a course was built from there.

This is very easy to do and you can do the same thing. Map out what kind of content you want to teach and put it into a modular format. I use this format a lot because it makes it very easy to create content. Pick major topics for individual modules, then within that you can cover all the strategies and methods within that topic. This allows you to crank out content very easily and quickly because you don't have to have the material prepared ahead of time, just use the teleseminar calls to create the content.

To get more of your product creation questions answered and more, check out www.InstantBusinessAnswers.com

About the Author:

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