These are my highlights from Dan Kennedy’s Official Get Rich Guide to Information Marketing. I highly recommend buying this book and reading it for yourself, but until then, this should get you going.
You won’t become successful or wealthy without work, but success is not a result of working harder than everyone else. It’s about building a business with specific attributes that enable you to accumulate wealth.
Wealth isn’t produced by thinking, dreaming, or imagining what you want. Money doesn’t care what you think about most. Money is attracted to you when you create a business that produces value for paying customers.
People who buy your information products are much more likely to hire you to perform services than other customers you market to. Quite simply, having your own published information product makes you the obvious expert. It shows the customer the complexity of the services and the special ability you have to perform them. The only possible conclusion for the buyer is that he should hire you when he needs additional help with his business or hobby. Publishing your own information product will only increase the services you’re currently providing and expand your businesses far beyond what you’re doing now.
In addition, the people who buy your information product will buy other information products from you, whether they are products you create yourself or products you license from others. You can partner with other information marketers to sell their products to your customers. Once you find a customer who wants information about a particular subject, that customer will continue to buy information from you on that subject.
While dentists go to school for years to learn the anatomy of the mouth, no one teaches dentists how to get patients into the chair and to pay their bills. That’s where Ed O’Keefe has stepped in with a monthly membership costing $495.00 that provides dentists with ready-tosend marketing campaigns they can use to keep their appointment schedules booked with patients.
Even though you may be a black belt in martial arts, it’s still difficult to get families to enroll their children in classes at your studio. Stephen Oliver provides home study courses as well as a franchise program that does all this work for the studio owner.
While computer repair services may know how to fix your computer, they don’t know how to get customers to call them or how to properly charge for their services. Robin Robins has created a home study course and a coaching program, and she offers seminars by speaking at industry events around the country.
Recognizing that few restaurant owners want to learn marketing themselves, Ron Wilkinson has created a system that teaches an employee of the restaurant how to implement a marketing system and generate new customers.
At the base of your Information Marketing Business Pyramid™, you have the free content you offer to attract new customers to you. Your free content could be articles you publish, videos you make available on your website, or an e-mail auto responder series that provides ongoing free content. You’ll have your largest number of users at this level. It’s free, so there is a low barrier to entry.
product that moves customers up to the second step of their pyramids. To maximize the number of e-books you can sell, you must invest in marketing. When you build the rest of your pyramid, you increase the revenue you generate from each customer, allowing you to invest more in marketing to get a new customer than you could with an e-book as your only product. Your business grows faster and is more stable. Once your
It’s impossible to build one product that provides all the information any of your customers could want or need about a particular topic. Instead, you provide a high-quality introductory product that outlines your strategies and provides useful examples to follow. Then for different areas of expertise, you provide additional products that provide additional details about that particular aspect. You will be able to sell these specialty products for much higher prices, from $495.00 to $1,995.00 or more.
Once customers experience your introductory product they are a lot more likely to want your advanced products. These additional purchases have a large impact on your customer value and boost the amount of marketing you can do.
With a large base of low-priced customers, you’ll have a certain percentage that will want to increase from one level to the next. You must build additional levels to give your customers that opportunity. That’s why if you try to run a business by only selling e-books, you’ll never reach a high level of success. That’s because you won’t be increasing your average customer value by offering additional products and services.
Too many new info-marketers assume they know everything about their market. Researching your market and interviewing potential customers is the shortcut to launching a profitable business quickly.
The most important factor in a successful info-business is finding a market with customers who eagerly desire information.
You must find a market of individuals who are aggravated, who need help, and who want to escape from everyday problems. Using my fishing example, it’s a lot easier to catch hungry fish that are in a netted area under a dock than it is to go to a random shady spot at a lake and drop in your line.
Using my fishing example, it’s a lot easier to catch hungry fish that are in a netted area under a dock than
First, understand your market and create a product people want. Don’t create the product first and then try to find customers to buy it.
Too many info-marketers create what they believe is the “world’s best information product” based on what they wish had been available to them when they were starting out. Often, they then struggle to find a market to sell their product to. This is backward. Your success depends on understanding the needs of your potential customers and then offering them the product they want.
Your customers don’t want to have to learn or to work harder to implement new strategies; as much as you can, remove the work from your products.
Specialize, Specialize, Specialize! When you create your product, the information should appear as specialized as possible. It’s critical for your potential customer to look at your product and say “Oh, that’s for me. I need that!” You must understand your market and then design your product to be exactly what your customers want. Basically tell them: “Here are the four things you asked for. Here are the four things we delivered.” Then they’ll say “That’s for me” and buy your product.
You Must Deliver to Make Money The most important product, the only product you can sell in the information marketing business, is one you can deliver. Even if it’s not the perfect product, even if it’s just Phase 1, you must execute it and deliver it. Once you’re selling your product, you can incorporate your customers’ feedback and add their ideas to your product to improve it. Too many beginning info-marketers spend months or years trying to create the “perfect” product when in reality the only perfect product is one you can begin selling immediately.
Teleseminars allow you to get paid to create a new product. Within a few short weeks, your new product is complete, and you’ll gain a lot of insights into your market from the questions your participants ask during your teleseminars.
That is why developing a teleseminar series in ten weeks is a great way to create an information marketing business. You set a date ten weeks out. You develop five topics with five bullet points for each one. You write an attention-grabbing headline and put a statement at the bottom of the page saying you will send out the CDs of all the calls at the end of the series. Then you ask for $100.00.
set a date ten weeks out. You develop five topics with five bullet points for each one. You write an attention-grabbing headline and put a statement at the bottom of the page saying you will send out the CDs of all the calls at the end of the series. Then you ask for $100.00. Even if you sell only five of them, that $500.00 will
A CONFERENCE CALL SERIES IS EASIER TO SELL THAN A PRINTED product home study course, an audio program, a A membership site, or even an in-person seminar for three reasons: 1) the content feels more current and timely, 2) audience members expect, or are hopeful of, the opportunity to interact with you, and 3) there is a firm buying deadline.
Whenever you are promoting your teleseminar series, you want to emphasize the fact that you are offering new and current, never-before-available content, because that’s one of the greatest benefits of participating in a teleseminar series.
However you decide to balance your call between information delivery and questions and answers, you certainly want to emphasize within all your marketing materials that you’re going to have open Q&A opportunities for your listeners so they know they will be able to get the help they want.
out and don’t have a lot of resources or if you don’t have copywriting experience or a team of
The one-page handout described in the previous chapter is a great place to start. It has a big headline of what your teleseminar series is going to provide your listeners, the title of each of your modules, three to five bullets about each module, a price, and a way to sign up. With those simple elements, you have the handout you need. It is also good to include some information about yourself, a little biography, some information about why you’re qualified and particularly knowledgeable about the topic. With that, you have all you need to begin promoting your teleseminars, and it will fit onto just one or two pages.
People magazine has a circulation of 3.75 million subscribers while Newsweek has a circulation of about 1.9 million. That tells you what the American populace values. They value stories about people and people’s lives. So be sure to include those in your program. Whenever you’re teaching something, tell a story that illustrates your point. A case example involving you or your client or even someone you’ve observed is going to be a lot more effective than trying to simply teach the lesson.
Fred is quick to say he is not an interior designer, “but I can help them with the sales and marketing skills they don’t get in design school.”
Because interior designers are artists, Fred says they tend to take themselves for granted: “They give away their time; they give away their expertise. They go to design school and learn everything they can possibly learn about fabrics and furniture, and when they are dumped out in the real world and have to start a business, it gets clobbered. So I’m teaching them the kind of business skills they don’t get in school and especially need in this economy; they’re fighting the battle of trying to come across as a necessity instead of as a frill.”
Working with Fred has given Hunter Douglas an edge in a very competitive market. “In the old days, Hunter Douglas wanted to showcase its products to interior designers, and the problem was they would have these programs and none of the designers would show up,” Fred says. “Now, they have Fred Berns offering a 60-minute program on how to set and get higher fees, and they get a huge audience of designers coming to this event. In the meantime, they can showcase their new products to a much more receptive audience.”
This tool allows you to use your prospects’ natural curiosity to get them engaged with answering the questions. And the questions themselves force your prospects to confront whether or not they are adequately solving a problem they have in their lives. Here are the questions Cindy Ritzi used in her diagnostic questionnaire to generate leads for her jewelry store marketing product. As you read through the questions, notice how they point out frustrations and inadequacies that would lead a jewelry store owner to want to invest in a product to learn better marketing.
“I spoke their language,” Dave continues. “I talked about my pain, my struggle; about having a dream but not being able to fulfill it; about having a lousy job and knowing that magicians not as good as me were making more money. So, I hit upon all those emotional hot buttons. This is the key. You’ve gotta hit upon the emotions.