Info-Product Entrepreneur -- or Info-Product Huckster?
Tuesday, August 11, 2009Info-products, especially e-books and video courses, are everywhere on the Internet these days. A handful of them are excellent products in which the information is well researched, is very useful and is presented in a professional and attractive manner. Buying and reading one of these info-products is very rewarding, making you glad to spend the money and giving you confidence in the provider's expertise.
Unfortunately, most of the info-products out there are just junk. Research is minimal and usually limited to searching through internet articles. Information is often incorrect or not very useful. The writing and presentation is amateurish and sloppy. Purchasing one of these info-products is not only disappointing, but also leaves you feeling swindled.
The people who provide the first kind of info-product are true info-product entrepreneurs. They understand that a happy customer is a repeat customer. By impressing customers from the very beginning, these entrepreneurs create a huge market for additional products because their customers trust them and rely on them for good information. Their revenue streams continue to grow and grow.
The people who do a good job selling junk disguised as info-products are nothing but hucksters. They are like the snake oil salesman of lore who rides into town, sells all his bottles of tonic water disguised as a miracle cure, then leaves town never to be seen again. Info-product hucksters hire "writers" in India to write 50 pages on a topic for a $100 or so, then try to pass it off as the revelation their customers have been waiting for. They sell a few thousand copies, then move on to another popular info field and start again. They may or may not be around to dole out the many refunds that get requested.
If you're going to go through the trouble of creating a product and creating a market for it, you might as well create a quality product so that you don't have to start all over again to build your market. All the best info-product "gurus" tell you this: Most of your profits do not come from your first and main product; they come from the second, third, fourth, and fifth products. That's because it costs a whole lot less to market to a group of people who are already loyal to you than it does to reach out and find a new audience that may be interested in your product. Less marketing expense means more profits
The additional products are also more profitable because they can carry a larger price tag. When you've proven reliable on products with smaller price tags, your customers are less hesitant to buy more expensive products from you--because they know they can trust you. Of course, you have to prove yourself again and provide a product with the quality to support that higher price tag.
If you're in the info-product business--or want to be--plan to be a long-term info-product entrepreneur--not a short-term huckster. Life is easier that way, and more profitable.
***SELF PROMOTION***
I've written many top quality information products for entrepreneurs who are making excellent money online. Shoot me an email today at john@fikopy.com or call me at 419-371-2302 and we can talk about what it will take to make you a successful info-product entrepreneur with a reputation for being an expert in your field.
Labels: Content, Internet, Marketing, Product Quality, Research, Web
posted by John E Fike @ 7:43 AM,
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Direct Mail/E-mail Secret #2: Research That Identifies the Desires and Fears and Uncovers A Fresh Marketing Approach for Your Campaign—Part II
Thursday, July 24, 2008Yesterday I explained that good sales copy in direct mail and email campaigns requires research to be successful, because it provides details that your prospects need in order to make a purchasing decision and it reveals fresh, unique marketing angles.
Today let’s talk about what kind of research you should be doing and what you should be looking for in order to achieve these objectives and motivate more customers to buy.
Features & Benefits
One of the first kinds of research I do in preparing for a direct mail or email campaign is uncovering all the features and benefits of the product or service that I’m selling. Features and benefits help the prospect understand what your product or service does and how his or her life will be improved by it.
Features include all the technical details of a product or service, including shape, color, functions, purposes, who made or provides it, how it is made or provided, how it does its job, how or why it was invented, etc. Benefits are all the ways these things make life better, easier, simpler, or more exciting than it is right now.
Uncover the features and benefits of your product or service by looking at the product or service itself and experiencing it with your hands, eyes and ears (and any other sensory organs that may apply). You can find additional features and benefits by sifting through customer feedback, examining how it is made or provided and why it is made or provided that way.
If you sell computer software, for example, your features are all the things the software does and the experience that it provides. I’ll use Achieve Planner by Effexis Software for an illustration. Two of Achieve Planner’s features are that it allows time mapping and automatic product scheduling (based on the estimated time it takes to complete the project). The benefit of these features is that the user can organize and take control of his schedule by designating certain times of the day for certain kinds of activity, such as client work or marketing efforts. Then the user can easily see how long it will take to complete a project based on how much time is available for the type of activity that the project falls into. It cuts down on scheduling confusion and reduces estimation errors so the user experiences fewer headaches.
That’s sort of an obvious example of features and benefits. A less obvious example is how Achieve Planner is delivered to the customer. The feature is that Achieve Planner software is downloaded off the Internet immediately after purchase. The experience-based benefit is that the customer doesn’t have to wait for a CD-ROM to arrive in the mail and can immediately begin experiencing the product’s benefits, like reduced scheduling stress and fewer headache-causing errors.
Don’t ignore features and benefits that are shared by competitors. Copywriter Claude Hopkins took Schlitz beer from the fifth best selling beer to the first by being the first copywriter to describe why Schlitz beer was pure. All the other brands claimed to be pure and made their beer pretty much the same way. But Hopkins’ Schlitz ad was the first to explain it all. By providing proof that it was pure, Hopkins gave Schlitz the competitive advantage.
Use the features and benefits of your product or service to prove the claims and promises that you make about it.
Identify new marketing angles
I’ve already covered this a bit in the Schlitz example above. In researching your product or service, you can uncover new ways of thinking about it that will increase your prospect’s interest. Hopkins’ ad got beer drinkers to think of Schlitz as The Pure Beer because Schlitz can prove its purity.
Going back to the Achieve Planner example, most of Achieve Planner’s features are available in other software-based planners. But those planner systems typically sell for $250 to $300, while Achieve Planner sells for only $89 (at the time of the posting). So Achieve Planner is positioning itself as the planner system that delivers $300 of value for less than $90.
So far we’ve talked about research involving the product or service and how it is produced and/or delivered. Another way to uncover new marketing angles is to research your prospects and their needs and desires. This assumes you have good information on who your prospect is. As mentioned in a previous post, you probably aren’t going to sell Omaha steaks to a vegetarian.
Let’s assume that you do sell steaks (not necessarily Omaha steaks). What do your customers want out of a steak? They probably don’t care that the steak is delivered to their door by truck. In fact, that feature may seem a little weird—wouldn’t it be easier to just drive to the market rather than wait for a truck to arrive? Wouldn’t the meat be fresher that way, the customer thinks.
But your customers probably do care that their steak is thick and juicy and so tasty that it practically melts in their mouth. Perhaps you found a survey or series of customer testimonials that support this idea. So you’ll play up the thick, juicy and tasty aspects of your product. You could also use this desire of your customers to eliminate the weirdness of having steaks delivered by truck by explaining that the only way to get a steak so fresh tasting and mouth-watering is to deliver it directly from the farm to the customer’s door.
Lastly, do research outside of your product/service and market as well. Keep abreast of headlines and surf the Internet using key words about your product/service. While this is harder to systematize, many times an unrelated topic can give your product or service a fresh marketing angle that none of your competitors had thought of previously.
Just yesterday I read a sales letter for a wealth-generating information product that compared Houdini’s failure to escape from an unlocked safe to the close-mindedness people often have in regards to wealth-building schemes. I won’t say that this is the best example, because it didn’t get me to buy the product. The letter also had some other issues that prevented it from being successful. But you can see how tying in an apparently unrelated topic can put a fresh spin on your marketing.
So, research is absolutely critical in developing fresh, unique marketing angles that get your prospects’ attention and proving to your prospects that your product or service actually lives up to the promises and claims that you make about it. Without the research, all you have is hype.
All right. Next time we’ll move on to Secret #3 in the Secrets to Generating Huge Response and Outstanding Profits in Direct Mail and E-mail Campaign series. Secret #3 is An Outstanding Offer that is Difficult to Reject.
Talk to you then.
John E. Fike
http://www.fikopy.com/
Labels: Advertising, Copy, Copywriting, Direct Mail, Direct Response, E-Mail, Internet, Marketing, Marketing Campaign, Research
posted by John E Fike @ 5:21 AM,
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Direct Mail/E-mail Secret #2: Research That Identifies the Desires and Fears and Uncovers A Fresh Marketing Approach for Your Campaign--Part I
Tuesday, July 22, 2008We’ve been talking about the 5 Secrets to Generating Huge Response and Outstanding Profits in your direct mail and e-mail campaigns. Today I want to address secret #2—which really ought to be secret #1, because this is the thing that is lacking from 99% of all unsuccessful direct-response campaigns: RESEARCH.
There is a lot of copy out there that relies on an over-abundance of emotional superlatives and shock-factor headlines to sell products and services. Emotional superlatives are words like Awesome, Great, Fantastic, Out of This World, Dynamic, etc. They are supposed to make the prospect feel that the product or service is so wonderful that they absolutely must buy. Unfortunately, it rarely works. Audiences are becoming immune—no, they’re becoming annoyed by these marketing tactics and choose not to buy.
While shocking headlines and superlatives have their place in their copy, they cannot be relied upon to make the sale. Without facts, figures, details, and other ingredients that prove you can deliver on your promise, all you have is hype. Once upon a time, hype was fairly successful at making sales. Today, however, your audience demands to know why you think your product or service is so great.
Research does two things for your copy that will dramatically improve the response you get from your campaign:
Research provides the information your prospects need to understand why your product or service is exactly what they need and why yours is better than better than any competing products or services.
Research helps you identify a fresh, unique marketing angle that eliminates the need for hype and shock and hard-sell tactics.
Ok, that’s all I have time for today. Next time I’ll get into more about what I mean by “research” and what kind of research you should be doing for every marketing campaign. After that, I’ll get into how to use that research to develop a fresh marketing angle.
So long for now.
John E. Fike
http://www.fikopy.com/
Labels: Advertising, Copy, Copywriting, Direct Mail, Direct Response, E-Mail, Fikopy, Marketing, Marketing Campaign, Research
posted by John E Fike @ 7:11 AM,
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Successful E-mail and Direct Mail Campaigns: 5 Secrets to Generating Huge Response and Outstanding Profits
Thursday, July 17, 2008
Direct mail and e-mail campaigns can generate higher return on your investment dollar than any other form of marketing—when done correctly.
But if you’ve tried putting together a campaign for you business without the guidance of a direct mail/e-mail expert, you probably got dismal results from your campaign. When I look at failed campaigns—especially email campaigns on the Internet—they are missing 1 or more of five ingredients essential for a successful direct mail or e-mail campaign. Most failed campaigns lack 2-3 of these ingredients and some are missing all five!
Without these five ingredients your campaign efforts are wasted because you will not reach an audience that desires your product or service with a marketing message that appeals to them and motivates them to buy. Nor will you be able to test various parts of your campaign to make it even better and generate more response and more revenue.
The 5 Secrets to Generating Huge Response and Outstanding Profits are:
- A highly targeted list to people who desire your product, service or information
- Research that identifies the desires and fears and uncovers a fresh marketing approach for your campaign
- An outstanding offer that is difficult to reject
- Response mechanism that tracks response for testing and follow-up promotions
- Excellent product or service that excites customers and offers many benefits
Over the next week or so, I will be blogging about these 5 Secrets to Generating Huge Response and Outstanding Profits so that you will understand how to make your next direct mail or e-mail marketing campaign a huge success.
As I get the blog entries posted, the each of the five secrets above will become a live link to the appropriate post.
Make sure you subscribe to this blog so that you don’t miss any of the five secrets.
At any time, if you wish to get more information about making your next direct mail or e-mail campaign a success, give me a call at 419-371-2302 or email me at john@fikopy.com for a free 15-minute consultation about your campaign.
John E. Fike
http://www.fikopy.com/
Labels: Copy, Copywriting, Direct Mail, Direct Response, E-Mail, Fikopy, Marketing Campaign, Product Quality, Research
posted by John E Fike @ 12:32 PM,
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