A few years ago I spent my professional life in what I thought was a comfort zone. This consisted of dressing in the standard “business casual” attire, commuting to work; tethering my head to a VOIP console inside a cubicle and retreading the same path back home at the end of an unfulfilled day. The unpredicted “great recession” brought an end to that dream as the software start-up venture where I worked lost customers and forced them to lay off many of us. Having gone through a corporate downsizing some years before, I had had enough. I was ready for something new. The thought of becoming an entrepreneur had always been a dream and there was no better time than now to grasp it. I knew I wanted low start up cost, low overhead, a large customer base and I also wanted to work from home or where ever I happened to be connected at the time. After much research, interviewing, calculating and recalculating I decided on a home based affiliate consulting service. Because of online home based business, I make a bit of residual income from it. But, my testimony is not the focus of this writing. The focus is what I learned from my own experience and through other people’s lives that is: WORKING FROM HOME IS AWESOME! Working on an online home based business allows me to enjoy working in the comfort of my own home. I wouldn’t be bother getting another job just to earn extra income. This would certainly help anyone who wishes to pursue a much better life.Prior to the 1990′s the phrase “Work At Home Business” invoked images of writers and accountants with stacks of 5″ ¼ floppies and 3.5″ disks. Home based artisans and craftsmen built samples and scaled-down models to amaze the potential clients. These demos of products and services and many others were hand delivered or sent via “express mail.” Then along came the high-speed networks, the World Wide Web and email. The evolution of this technology during the first decade of this millennium to where we are now has redefined the “Work at Home” and “Home Based Business” paradigm. Wireless technology is even reshaping this model as we speak. A “Work Anywhere” empowerment is available to anyone suited for this type of work environment. Down-sizing by large corporations, on a global scale, are forcing a new “breed” of workforce. “Necessity is the mother of invention” and I think we are seeing this invention/evolution take place before our very eyes. I read just today on one of the leading job-search forums that “2012 will be the year of the Personal Brand.” We’re seeing individuals marketing their skills, their ideas and their experience as products themselves. Programmers, copywriters, project analyst, designers and thousands of others are on the working end of their connection, where ever that may be, collaborating with whoever may need them.Working an online home based business, I believe has become a viable alternative for so many people. Making money is a definitely certain goal that most people are keeping achieving for. The amounts vary from business to business, though. But saving money on work wardrobe, business lunches, commuting costs, and headaches are the basics that most describe as my reasons for choosing the alternative. Having personal satisfaction, more quality family relationships, and fulfilled dreams are truly the benefits I and you can get out of this.

One of the keys to succeeding in information product creation is to break the process up into discrete steps. This frequently isn’t an instinctive reaction for the typical information marketer. Especially on the internet where small sized learning products are the norm.

However, it is extremely important to your ultimate success. In fact, I would go so far as to say that if you don’t do this you probably won’t succeed… even when you are starting out let alone as you move forward.

Your product creation system should do this for you if only to help you to understand the overall task.

But why?

In this article, I’m going to ignore chunking and focus on the practical aspects. That’s not to say that chunking isn’t important. It is. It’s important to understanding and to learning the process. But while you can use the same chunks as you move forward, long term your focus needs to be on the operation of the system not the understanding of it. Unless of course you are constantly training new people!

So why is chunking important to long term use of the product creation process? (Yes, I know systems design uses a different term for this process but I’m not teaching you systems design. So I’m going to use the word learning content designers use.)

The first reason that having individual discrete tasks is important is one of schedule estimation. Frequently it is very difficult to estimate how long the total task of creating a product will take. After all, the size and type of the products matters as does the number of products in your product funnel. And those are just the most obvious elements. However, estimating a discrete task is often much easier. The total can then be estimated as the total of the discrete tasks.

Secondly, scheduling a large task can be problematic. However, by segmenting the task into a number of discrete tasks, you gain a much greater flexibility in scheduling. Not only that but as your business begins to add people you are able to schedule multiple people to the product creation.

Finally, segmenting a large task into smaller discrete tasks allows you to have much better control over the product creation. This affects two different areas — status and quality.

By segmenting your process into discrete tasks you are able to schedule and record the progress at much more detailed level. As a result you are more in control of the status of the product creation. You know what everyone is doing. When they should complete it. And how much it should cost. You also know exactly what has been done.

You also improve your overall quality. Instead of waiting until everything is done you can check quality as you go. This allows you to immediate react to low quality products without absorbing their costs. This means that you have less rework and your rework costs less. And if the product is not going to meet its quality requirement you will know about it in time to stop the development, change the requirement or fix the product.

Information product creation requires extensive preparation, no matter which niche you work within and you want to make sure that your information product has a successful launch. That probably sounds scary and intimidating but here’s the thing: this is a one time effort and it will pay off in a foundation that is strong enough to get your ideal clients to invest in your high-end programs and services without the perils of a traditional funnel. This article will teach you a few of the things that you need to remember if you’d like to invest in yourself and start on the information product creation path using your unique talents and abilities. Remember that you never have to worry about anyone ripping off your ideas because if you understand how to properly position yourself around your story.

Understand Both Strengths and Weaknesses: It is good to have an impartial view of your own strengths and weaknesses when lay the foundation of selling yourself within the information product creation process. It helps you figure out where you are, what you lack and how to move forward so that you get as much growth as possible. It is more than important, it is urgent if you want to create fast success for yourself to have personal positive reinforcement and deep belief to provide yourself the support you need so that you can get over your own limitations to ensure that your information product is as valuable as it can be.

You also need to know exactly who your competition is so you can study them and use their methods to help you improve your own standings. Down recreate the wheel, but understand the wheel and position yourself going uphill from the competition. Check out which kinds of opportunities you’ve already got and try to figure out how best to use them while taking care to remember your strengths and weaknesses. This is a great way to figure out where you stand against your competition which helps you figure out how best to grow.

Launch on Time: No matter what, even if you haven’t officially announced your “launch date” you should launch the site when you’ve said you would. This will force you to stick to your goal and actually work on it. Thinking that “I’ll launch it when I think it’s ready to launch” will only hinder your efforts. You’ve got a responsibility that you need to live up to with your launch, and you can’t move back on that one. If you get close to your launch date and you are getting hung up on your self limiting beliefs in your information product creation, don’t worry this about getting it out there and not perfection. As long as it is usable you should launch it. Launching on time is the professional thing to do and it is more important than creating a “wow” effect in your site visitors. You can always update/upgrade your website when you have to, so there shouldn’t be any issue with that.

Analyze Your Own Concept: If you want to make your information product creation successful you need to understand how good your concept is: is it really going to work for your chosen audience or would something else be better? You already know about your competition; how does your concept measure up? If you haven’t come up with your own idea and are trying to work with someone else’s concept, do some more work on your own before your launch. People want original ideas because they’ve seen too many other me-too websites already.

Test Your Concept Before You Commit To The Information Product Creation Process: One of the biggest failures people have with information product creation is not testing an idea before putting a lot of effort into producing an information product. PPC to a small 5 page site with a landing page is a great way to test an offer before you even produce it. If people will sign up to get it, you can be sure that you can create an information product that will target eliminating the pain of your target market. The small amount of money will be invaluable in using crowd sourcing to direct the final outline of the information product creation process.

You’ll have lots of hurdles to clear after the launch of your information product and the only way to truly take care of them is to follow the advice in this article to work smarter. Plenty of people work hard, but it is the ones who work smarter who make real money online with the information product creation business model.