Anybody who’s kept half on eye on me for the last few years has seen me crank out product after product. Some, like Sonic Memo and Article Architect, really took off. Others (that shall remain nameless here) sputtered and coasted to a stop.

I’m in the middle of a project where I’m going back and pulling together all the products I’ve created, the articles I’ve written, and the videos and audio I’ve recorded, and thought I’d relate how I came up with the idea for my latest product, Adsense Eliminator.

If you’re interested in the process (maybe you could do the same thing to create, or have created, a product of your own), sign up for the Select Marketing Info list using the form to the right and I’ll send you a link to a page explaining what happened.

And, as a member of that list, you’ll receive coupon codes good for big dollars off my products — it’s worth joining, for sure!

Let’s start by looking at two things we can probably all agree on…

Here’s axiom #1 — Unless you’re J.P. Gotrocks and outsource everything, you’re going to spend an awful lot of your time creating content for your internet marketing business. Maybe you’ll do it all from scratch, maybe you’ll use some PLR (private label rights) materials as a base, but however you do it you’re going to be creating content.

And here’s axiom #2 — Leveraging your time is a must of you’re going to be successful in internet marketing, so you can’t spend time recreating the wheel. You must be able to repurpose and reuse content in your online business or you’ll never be able to grow your business past a certain size.

Two principles we need to follow — create content and reuse content — that can be very powerful when put together.

The key to making those two things work together as seamlessly as possible is to “think generic.” Here’s an example…

For my product creation course I needed to create a video showing how to hire a software programmer. Creating that fairly quickly is a no-brainer. But I’ve also been thinking about putting together a product focusing on selling downloadable software and I know I’ll need a similar video for that product.

Plus, I never know what’s going to come down the pike in the future, so making sure the video isn’t “specific” to a given product is a smart thing.

It’s pretty easy to make something generic. In general, don’t mention the product name in the video. The video I just created walks through the process, but I don’t do any kind of introduction. Instead of saying, “In this lesson for Product Creation Station we’re going to hire a programmer…” I just jump right into the process.

That gives me a piece of content I can use for any product now or in the future.

And when I do need to use it for something, I can “wrap it” in something more specific — I can record a quick intro talking about this lesson in the course, etc., and then combine that with the generic piece to get a piece of content that’s unique — but built on top of content that’s generic.

With text-based content you can always do a search and replace to reuse content for another project, but even then if you can write the piece as generic as possible you’ll come out ahead.

For step-by-step instructions on creating your own digital products see the Product Creation Station site. Product Creation Station