If you are a marketer, you must market your own products… you HAVE to admit.

So what is the number one hurdle for creating and launching your own products?

Is it TIME? Sure, it takes long time if you’re still creating products and using conventional methods.

Myth of PDF Reports

If you are a marketer like me, you sign up for special reports. These are made out of PDF files digitally delivered to you.

The problem for a marketer with “PDF distribution approach” is that writing is not for everyone. Worse, depending on the demographic, if your writing is less than perfect, your special reports can damage your credibility.

Give Audio Reports

What if you started giving away audio reports? You have been told all this time that you thought you must give away a special report in PDF.

Sure, everyone else does this, but to stand out from the rest in a competitive market, you have to zig when everyone else zags. So give away audio for a change.

Why Using Audio Is Smart

The good news about publishing audio is you can outline what you want to say and record it. Unlike written reports, your grammar does not have to be perfect and listeners are more forgiving.

Audio reports are easy to consume – think about this, with iPod, in the car, MP3, it provides great passive modality. In fact, you can podcast your way to iTunes to leverage even more.

If you sell premium products, people need to know you better. With voice and passion coming through your audio stream, you can better turn subscribers into paid customers. Especially if you’re selling high-ticket items, your audio will paint a better picture of you to the audience.

Here is the 7 steps you should follow when launching a quality audio product. Keep in mind, the best audio recording style (or most entertaining style) is when you team up with another like-minded partner and speak in a group.

Even if you’re the absolutely the best in your subject matter, listening to your solo recording will get boring. So get yourself Skype, download free MP3 recorder and outline with a partner what you want to talk about.

1. Give a nice intro and ask a pop question. If your audience doesn’t know the answer, you got them pay attention to you the rest of your podcast. Let them know they need your info.

2. Tell them what’s in it for them.

3. Tell them why they should listen to you.

4. Tell them what’s NOT working, like in this article, PDF is not working for everyone.

5. Introduce solution – in this article, I used audio report as its solution.

6. Validate – share example of your solution is helping as opposed to the conventionally used solution

7. Call to action – now they heard you, you need to ask them to do something.

There you have it, you’ll have an audio product to launch it. Hey since it’s not another PDF report, why don’t you charge more money than what others normally charge for similar written reports?

By the way, do you want to learn more about creating product funnel to drive sales for your online business?

If so, I suggest you to check this out: Turning Point – A Marketer’s Guide to Changing The Rules for Extraordinary Results.

Business establishments all over the world need a proper channel of cash flow so that they can maintain regularity in growth and diversification. As it is rightly said, finance is fundamental to the growth of an old business and vital for any businessman to put the business planning take into action.

Loans for business purposes are available by pledging commercial properties or by borrowing without supplying any security. In both cases, there are lots of differences like the loan eligibility, the rate of interest offered by the lender, the loan tenure and repayment conditions. A successful business project is very often an organized one. You have to plan it well and supply with right dose of capitalization. If over capitalization of business can result in lower earning per share, the under capitalization can also have its negative effect in the form of unnecessarily high stock prices that are unrealistic.

A successful businessman always takes care of under investments and over investments. More complex financial aspects are taken care of by the financial experts and brilliant business minds. But, arranging for the daily cash flow requirement is relatively low level task that is handed over to the delegates having authority to deal with day to day functioning of the company. Business loans are one of the easiest means to ensure that any shortage in funds is met effectively at lower rates and in a competitive environment.

If you are seeking funds for a new venture, it will be perfect to take care of every possible aspect so that no problem arises later on. The root level problem that people face is the lack of knowledge when they go out and start searching for a commercial loan at low rate [http://www.loans-park.co.uk/commercial-loans.html]. The second obstacle comes when finance is made available to you. It relates to how to generate profits out of it so that interest payments can be justified. Both these things can be answered by a well-planned and well-implemented course of action. There should be a clear-cut plan of what you are going to do with money and how you are going to generate the profits. This should be your biggest and legitimate concern if you are to reach the top of the business world.

Market trends and in-depth knowledge about the business is necessary before take a plunge into it. If you are not confident, it is not advisable to take commercial business loans and risk your capital; business is surely not a fun expedition. On the other hand, there are people who lose valuable opportunities because they think that the cost of capital is too high. The market rates are bound to fluctuate in the market. There is an opportunity to refinance commercial loans if the interest rates fall drastically in the time to come. So, do not waste too much of your precious time and proceed with your plans if you are confident of the business project you are handling.

The author is a business writer specializing in finance and credit products and has written authoritative articles on the finance industry. He has done his masters in Business Administration and is currently assisting ask4loan.co.uk as a finance specialist.

Myth 1 – They won’t work in portfolio planning

Structured products are often considered as stand-alone investments and compared as direct alternatives to for example cash, equities or corporate bond funds. This approach is based on limited understanding of how to construct investment portfolios that manage risk and create asset diversity.

They work best when used in conjunction with other investments where the defined returns and capital protection can be used to balance, perhaps, higher risk unprotected equity strategies or in lower risk portfolios to offer better than cash returns without risking capital.

In sophisticated portfolios structured products can also offer investors access to other assets or markets such as commodities or emerging economies with capital protection where investors can benefit in any uplift without directly buying into the market. This creates asset diversification into potentially volatile markets without necessarily increasing risk to capital.

Myth 2 – They are too complex for retail investors

Just as there are many kinds of mutual funds, there is great variety within structured products. Depending on their needs investors can select from the vanilla to the complex, similar for example to buying open ended tracker or hedge funds.

What makes structured investments stand out from the crowd is their transparency over how their returns are calculated. Payouts are often described as a formula based upon well known world indices with a specific investment horizon. Such products allow potential investors to clearly understand how a product will perform, both from a positive performance and downside risk perspective.

For a provider of a structured product to deliver transparent payouts that often differ from more traditional funds, products are hedged internally, a task that often needs derivatives. Considered in isolation derivatives are complex, but within a structured product they simplify investing because providers can define investment risk. It is perhaps the success of structured investments and their transparency, that there is a desire to understand these elements.

Myth 3 – Investors cannot get out of them when they want to

Structured investments are designed to payout on a given day in the future and as such are designed to be held until maturity. Terms often range between one and five years depending on the product.

This fixed term nature is often misunderstood as meaning that there is no opportunity, no matter what an individual’s circumstances are, to exit a structured product prior to this maturity date. This is often not the case. Within Europe there is a vibrant and active secondary market in structured products, and there are many possibilities where the ability to sell such products and potentially realise any gains made, can form an important part of a clients regular portfolio review.

What investors must be aware of is that all fees are predetermined and taken upfront on a structured product and there are many market attributes that can affect the current price of a structured product such as interest rates, market volatility (as well as the index level be) and time to maturity. The impact is that even for products offering 100% capital protection, investors can get back less than they invested if they chose to exit a structured investment early.

Myth 4 – Investors can’t access them in the same way as funds

It is true that financial advisers and investors have historically not been able to invest in structured products through fund platforms. Which is in part been due to the infrastructure challenges of adding fixed term structured products to such platforms.

However, the market is evolving. Platforms are listening to the demand from financial intermediaries and investors and some already offer structured products from selected providers.

Myth 5 – They underperform unprotected equities

Structured products can under and outperform unprotected equities depending on the structured product, the type of equity that is being compared and the prevailing economic environment when the comparison is made. The clear difference between unprotected equities and structured products is that the potential returns from a structured product are clearly defined and there is usually a degree of capital protection, which many investors find attractive when making the comparison.

Myth 6 – Consumers cannot judge risk since providers don’t disclose the counterparty or credit risk

A number of providers in the past used the credit ratings of external agencies, such as Standard & Poor’s, to describe the counterparty risk associated with a product. As the Lehman’s event showed, a greater level of disclosure was felt necessary for retail investors. Today the leading providers of structured products take particular care to provide information such as naming of the underlying counterparty and education relating to counterparty risk.

Myth 7 – Investors should avoid structures because they don’t benefit from share dividends

Structures often link the performance to the growth of an index, for example the FTSE 100. Normally the index chosen is known as a price return index which tracks the growth of underlying equities but does not include any dividends.

The reasons for this are clear and transparent. Structured investments are designed to deliver specific returns based on expectations of market growth, often providing a level of security against market falls. Defining returns in this way means it is possible, in simplistic terms, to exchange one feature for another to create different returns.

Dividends are a good example, as often their positive ‘value’ can be used to help offset negative market risks – exactly the type of trade off that structured investments specialise in. However, not all structured investments forgo dividends and there are many products linked to assets such as commodities or emerging markets where there are no dividends.

Myth 8 – They are not always available

The market for structured investments has grown considerably over recent years and continues to grow. 2009 has already seen more than 900 product launches with October alone seeing more than 100 product launches (structuredretailproducts.com), indicating there is a varied and regular stream of products available.

Myth 9 – Investors can’t monitor progress of them

The structured investment market has developed rapidly and the ability for investors and advisers alike to monitor performance has been one of the many areas that have seen advances.

Many providers are now offering product-monitoring tools on their websites and the introduction of structured products on platforms will mean more tools like this will become available. Structured investments are not an investment panacea, but they can and do provide excellent investments that millions of investors currently hold as part of a balanced and well allocated portfolio. That they will continue to do so is not a myth.

Myth 10 – They are too expensive

As with all investments, there are fees associated that reflect the launch costs and expected profits. Whether it be the product research, creation of literature, distribution costs or indeed the cost of advice, these fees can be defined at the outset of a product’s design and thus allows such costs to be ‘in-built’ into any product returns. This is due to the fixed term nature of structured products which allows providers to offer returns net of any fees. This enables investors to consider whether the investment meets their needs without having to consider the impact of charges, which can be an advantage.