How to Profit in the Template Business With Tony Laidig

We're going to be talking about templates today.  Something
that I love, and I know you love as well.  It's a great way to
take  your business in a new direction that, perhaps, you
haven't considered before.  So, that's what we're going to
focus on. Benefits to Offering Templates in Your Business I
think it's important to recognize, first of all, that we as human
beings are hardwired to respond to templates.  I mean, after
all, we are based on templates.  DNA, right?
 Everything that surrounds us falls into some sort of
template.  We may not think about it that way, but
the fact remains. Anything that takes a long process, a
long series of steps to do, over and over, repetitive-wise, can be
turned into templates.  Anything that is outside your
wheelhouse, like maybe designing a book cover... You're not a
graphic designer, or whatever, but you want to have something
professional-looking.  You can accomplish that using a
template. So templates, across the board, save us time and
save us energy, they save us effort, and that's one of the reasons
why I refer to templates as "the perfect product type", because of
those reasons alone.  We love saving time, money, and
effort.  That's really it.  Imagine taking product
development, from that perspective.  You have customers,
regardless of what business you're in.  How can you help them
save time, save money, save effort? Even McDonalds, their
hamburgers are made using templates.  The process is a
template.  Actually, the hamburgers are too.  They may
not be the best hamburgers, but they are still made using
templates.  Why?  Because out of the hundreds of
thousands of McDonalds stores, restaurants, they want the
hamburgers to be the same.  It's a form of
branding.  You know, you want predictability. 
So, templates give us that opportunity. Part of my career past was
that of a cover designer.  I worked in the publishing industry
for 20 years as a book cover designer.  So, it's easy for me
to create a professional-looking cover.  I've done it hundreds
of times, but for a new upcoming writer/author who wants to publish
their book, they don't want it to look like crap.  It won't
sell.  But, they don't know anything about designing a book
cover. If I, as a designer, create a template that they can
follow and just plug in their information, now all of the sudden,
for a fraction of the cost and a fraction of the time, they have a
professional-looking book cover that they can be proud
of.  It will boost their sales.  It will boost
their following.  You know, all of that.  I think that's
just the beauty of working with templates. Let's say you want to
start a new LLC, a new company.  You go to
MyCorporation.com.  What do you do?  You fill in
a template, and you pay a nice chunk of money for that template,
but still, it just speeds up the process.  Imagine
having to fly across the country, and sit down with an attorney,
and fill out all of that stuff manually, face to face.  Holy
crap!  We'd never do it.  So, it just saves us so much
time, and not only that, think about what you have in your
business.  What are people asking again, and again, and
again?  What are they communicating with you like, "It's so
hard for me to do X."  You know, or "I'm having a lot of
trouble doing Y." What are those things in customer
support, or in FAQs, or in your Facebook group, or whatever, that
people are struggling with?  How easy would it be to
help them to provide better support and create a new product by
creating templates that help them solve that problem?  Another
thing, like courses, they can take days, if not weeks, to put
together.  Templates you could bang out in an afternoon. 
A couple of hours and then you're done.  I love that
feature.  That's why I say that it's such a win-win at so many
levels. Identifying and Developing a Template or Template Bundle
You know, we have our friend Felicia Slattery.  Felicia is a
speaker, trainer, and she's brilliant.  She's coached me on my
speaking, teaching on webinars, and all of that.  She
noticed something starting to occur within her business where
people were wanting to get more speaking gigs, and she teaches how
to do that.  In order to professionally reach out to
groups and reach out to organizations, and places like that where a
speaker would want to be, folks were struggling.  They didn't
know how to make that connection.  She's like, "You need a
one-sheet.  You need a way to communicate what your speech is,
and where you've been featured, and who you are as a person, and
all of that." They just really weren't sure how to accomplish
that.  So, Felicia had the great idea, "You know
what?  I could create a series of templates that people could
just fill in the blank, and all they would have to do is put in
their information, what the name of their speech is, their bio,
their photo, and so on.  Then, they could pick
colors, they could make it look professional, and Boom! Done!" She
set out to do that.  She created a series of templates. 
I believe there were four or five.  It was one basic template,
and then she changed the colors.  Ten different colors, and
now instead of five different templates, there's 50 different
templates, or whatever the case may be.  But, it was just
different colors. People loved it.  Talk about
creating a service.  She had never done anything like
that before.  She had never created templates like that
before.  Coming from something that was a little bit outside
of her wheelhouse, because she normally teaches speaking, but saw
that need, provided a solution to that need, in the form of
templates, and now all of the sudden, here's this little product
that turns into a $15,000 payday for her.  The other side of
that being how she did with it. I remember whenever she released
them, people tagging her on Facebook with a screenshot of their
speaker template that they just created for their own thing, and it
was fun to watch.  It was fun to see people achieving
that level of success so quickly, when they didn't have any idea
what to even do before those templates were out. 
It's such a great example of what can be done, very quickly, just
by identifying a problem and then producing a template to solve
that problem. Step 1 - Identify What Your Customers Are Asking For
The first step is to identify what your customers are asking
for.  What are the sticking points for your clients and your
customers?  You need to be looking at things like your
FAQs, and what people are mentioning on your support desk, and on
your support emails, and what they struggling with as communicating
on social media, etc.  That's essentially Step 1, and
then the second step is to create a template that sort of fills
that gap you have identified. Step 2 - Create a Template That Fills
in the Gap One thing that I want to point out is that you
should ask yourself what you would need to experience success
whenever you are identifying what to create.  As the
template creator, one thing that you would really need to be aware
of, and conscious of, is that when you are really good at
something, like cover design or whatever the case may be, the
process can become invisible to us, where we think it's easy when
it's not.  You want to even think about templates from that
perspective.  "Oh yeah, I can whip up a cover in no time," and
somebody else, they're like, "What? I got nothing."  They
think it looks pretty, and well, we won't say what it looks
like.  So, what would a template look like to accomplish that?
We're not talking about step-by-step training, but we're
talking fill-in-the-blank, is really it.  You know,
what blanks need to be filled in order for your customer to
experience the results that they want?  You talk about Real
Fast Results.  That's the name of this podcast.  How will
someone achieve real fast results from a template that you're
creating.  What are those blanks that have to be filled in?
Templates are all really unique.  Felicia's templates are
perfect for speakers, and that's what they were created for. But,
quite frankly, authors could use them to advertise their books,
coaches could use them to advertise their coaching service, and on
and on it goes.  Real estate agents could honestly use it to
talk about what markets they're in and that kind of thing. 
So, there's a lot of adaptability there, and that's the other facet
of templates.  Don't pigeonhole them to the point where, "Oh,
you've got to only use it this way."  You know, our
job is to create a framework where people can be flexible.
Adding Templates to Your Business Decide what kind of template will
best serve your audience. Of course, there's the creation
process.  You have to create that template. 
There's a number of programs that I like to "play in," so
to speak, when it comes to template creation because a lot of the
templates that I work with are information-driven. 
Tools to Develop Templates

My favorite, probably, is PowerPoint. 
That's the same program that Felicia used for her
templates.  It's really easy to set up, to modify the data,
and so on.


Microsoft Word could be another example,
because Word documents are very easy to fill in.

Even Adobe Acrobat, you can use to create
some pretty cool templates.

From a cover design perspective, I've created some templates
using Photoshop, which of course is the #1 image editor on the
planet.  But, I've also created them in PowerPoint. 
So, it's identifying the tool.

Now, something to keep in mind here, with the tools,
it depends on who your audience is.  You don't want
the tool that they need to use to modify the template to be
cost-prohibitive, or require a steep learning curve, or those kinds
of things. It's usually a good idea to include some sort of
instruction on how to modify the templates, but you can get
PowerPoint as part of the Office 365 Suite for $10 a month. 
You know?  And, if you really don't want to do that, you can
get OpenOffice for free.  So, there's a lot of flexibility in
using a presentation-style software for creating your templates
because... free, $10, I mean, whatever... It's available to pretty
much anybody, and it's pretty easy to figure out.  So that
would be the next step. Free Templates Vs. Paid Templates If you go
to the Microsoft website, where they have Office, you'll notice
that they have hundreds of templates there that you can download
and use for free, which begs the question, "Yeah, if my
customers can go to Microsoft, or other places, and find templates
for free, why on earth would they buy templates from
me?"  And, it's a good question; it's valid. 
I've never let that stop me. To me, it's a non-issue that the
templates are available for free because they aren't mine. 
They aren't my templates.  So, whenever you're buying
templates from me, or from whomever, you're not just buying a
template that you can download somewhere.  You're
buying expertise, you're buying insight, you're buying business
experience, professional results, and those kinds of things.
You're not just selling a template.  You are, but
you're not.  You're selling yourself.  You're selling
your results.  That's a huge factor in it. 
Relationship certainly plays a role in that.  Felicia
certainly has a reputation of being a great speaker.  She has
spoken thousands upon thousands of times.  So, she can draw
upon those results and that experience to bake that into those
templates. I've created nearly 600 book covers.  That means I
know a thing or two about book cover design, and I can bake that
experience into my templates, and that's really what it comes
from.  That goes back to the question of, "What
specialized knowledge do you have that will solve problems for your
customers that could be turned into a template and save them time,
money, and effort?" Step 3 - Sell Your Templates The
last step is to make them available, to sell them, which is an
obvious thing.  I had a thought that I'd like to share really
quickly just, again, to drive home an example.  So, let's say
that you serve the publishing industry, and you have a first-time
author who wants to publish their book.  What all do they
need, as it comes to you as the publishing professional? Obviously,
they need a book cover.  They need the text of the book laid
out.  They need a website.  They need branding. 
They should have an author one-sheet.  They need a media kit,
a book trailer, an Author Central page, a professional bio; you
know, all of those things to help them promote their book,
right?  Every one of those, every single item, can be
template-ized, and they should be.  That's just one
small market, and the same could be true of a myriad of
markets. Learning More and Connecting with Tony I have put
together a pretty stout on-demand webinar.  It's available to
you right now.  You can head on over and register at
RealFastTemplateProfits.com.  The easiest way to connect with
me would be to visit TonyLaidig.com.  I've been working on
redesigning my site, making it look pretty and functional. 
But, that's the best place.  You'll get to learn more about me
and see what I'm up to.  My courses and trainings are all on
there as well. Real Fast Results Community If you are diggin’ on
this stuff and really love what we’re doing here at Real Fast
Results, would you please do me a favor? Head on over to iTunes,
and make sure that you subscribe to this show, download it, and
rate & review it. That would be an awesome thing. Of course, we
also want to know your results. Please share those results with us
at http://www.realfastresults.com/results. As always, go make
results happen!