Writer Dad is a sublime site about family and fatherhood with well written tales alongside helpful hints and strategies to help render our children into remarkable writers. Please subscribe (for free) by RSS or Email. Thanks! Ah, that felt good. Longtime readers probably know where I’m going with this. Thanks for being patient. :) About a year back, Cindy, Dave and I decided to create our first info product. And um… yeah, it was about poop. It was called Potty Training Power and was designed to help parents make potty training an enriching, positive experience, rather than the purgatory of conflict it often is. This was after we closed our preschool, but before all our students had left. We still had one in diapers, but had just finished training a dozen in a row. We were transitioning from running the preschool to facing a zero income scenario. So we wrote the book, designed the site, and started to run it quietly in the background of our many other projects. Sales were modest, but reasonably steady. Yet far more than the generated income, the site has afforded our company with a constant learning experience for learning how to build, market and continuously improve an online information product. Early last summer we decided to overhaul Potty Training Power, relaunching it on Writer Dad’s first birthday. We transformed the product from a simple e-book into a full potty training system with several separate components, each designed to help parents potty train their children with minimal strife. Publishing weekly content on potty training, in addition to helping a steady procession of parents get through the process, ballooned our knowledge base and further equipped us to solve customer concerns. Because each system came with full e-mail support, every family who bought the product helped us to make it better. We continued to incorporate our customer’s experience, spending another six months refining the product. Last week we launched Potty Training Power’s third version, which now includes phone support. This project has been interesting for our business in many ways. At first, Potty Training Power was designed to be a set-it-and forget-it enterprise. We wanted to write an e-book, build a site to host the sales, then move on. Yet Potty Training Power is slowly growing into what I believe will be a sustainable business over time, where we can continue to help families turn their potty training into a positive experience, while also delivering a product that is unique to the market place. This is infinitely more rewarding. Earlier this week there was a post on Copyblogger on a similar topic. Johnny Truant wrote about how he spent his first year trying to make money building niche sites targeting dollars from AdSense before finally realizing it was best to make money the old-fashioned way – by connecting to people and offering them something of value. I’m done with set-it-and-forget-it. Creating something of value, that I can continue to improve over time, is far more in alignment with my natural instincts and intrinsic values. If you have a parenting blog where a mention of Potty Training Power might be a natural fit, I’d really appreciate a shout out. If you’re a regular Writer Dad reader who happens to be potty training, drop a comment (before the end of this week) and we’ll set you up with a complimentary download. Even if you’re not potty training, Dave’s awesome design deserves a look. The site is squeaky clean and easy to navigate. I’ll leave you with this cute little commercial we made last summer. As we say on the site… Related posts:
Caca, poo-poo, pee-pee, dookie…Potty training power… AWAY!
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