Archive for January, 2011
Report From the Front Lines: Filling Events
Wednesday, January 26th, 2011Here’s what most info-marketers who put on boot camps ought to ponder: why do you have to work so much harder and spend so much more money to fill your event(s)? I do a lot more work for clients I write copy for, to fill their events, than I need to do to fill ours. I put a lot more steps into their sequences than we need to use in ours. Why is this? There is no one single, simple answer—but there definitely ARE answers. A lot of it has to do with the quality, the strengths of the relationship between me and my members/customers/readers and with the personality/character I have crafted and present.
These two factors are huge. Most info-marketers do not work hard enough on either of these things. They do not agonize over their choices of stories and life experiences they share in each issue of their newsletters, in their products or other media. They do not let people into their lives and psyches as much. (Why, for example, did I write and promote the ‘Unfinished Business’ autobiography? Because people who read that will be more interested in me, and that translates to money.)
Do You Know the Info-Marketers’ Secret Handshake?
Wednesday, January 19th, 2011In many ways, our world, of entrepreneurs who use my kind of marketing, and focus on marketing information products and services, seminars and coaching, is an “underground community” much like the smaller underground community of seduction gurus that Neil reveals in The Game. We are working on moving up-ground with initiatives like the Information Marketing Association. But in past, and pretty much still in present, we are more a secret society than not; we are unrecognized and more misunderstood by more mainstream “brother” communities, like the traditional book publishing, newsletter publishing and professional speaking and academically oriented coaching and consulting communities. They’d have far more to learn from us than we would from them, if notes were ever openly compared.
What Neil is quickly discovering is a secret society of modern-day wizards and alchemists shockingly adept at spinning newborn ideas and paper and ink into gold, in large amounts, in hours, or days, or at most months—while more traditional versions of us take years and require huge amounts of capital to produce comparative pittances. I have often said, if ordinary people eavesdropped on my conversations with associates, clients, Platinum Members about the amounts of money being made, the speed and ease with which it’s made, their heads would explode.
A Big Lesson: One Step Away From Vaudeville
Wednesday, January 12th, 2011Bill and I did the embarrassing Vanity Fair cover; this year we added a “gimmick” speaker certain to be controversial to the SuperConference and (coincidentally?) had biggest attendance ever. I use tons of grabbers and objects in mail for us and even more for clients … silver platters, compasses, stop watches, bags of sand, aspirin, stuffed animals … just in Rory’s one boot camp sequence: packaged magic tricks, a top hat, a full size pizza box. The little race cars in the “zoom, zoom” mailings, switched for SuperConference to a little toy airplane. I go to the ASD/AMD Show to find this stuff for my clients. You’ve certainly seen some version of the “Are ya nuts?” letters from a squirrel, that I created, based on the famous “s. mouse” letters of, I think, the 50s. My copy and my mailings are LOADED with gimmicks. (Which is one of the reasons I prefer offline to online: so I can stuff everything to the gills with gimmicks.)
Still More About … Riches in Niches & Subcultures
Wednesday, January 5th, 2011Riches in Niches & Subcultures—I keep nagging about this because it is infinitely easier and more certain to make money with very, very, very precisely targeted Message (products/services) Matching to a small, tightly knit Market with a passionate interest in a shared activity or occupation than it is to make money with a big, broad, fuzzy, for-everybody Message directed at a big, broad, fuzzy Market. If you want the most reliable way to develop an info-business, this is it.
The other day, on the same day, I had a phone conversation with Matt Furey and did a Gold interview with Carol Frank. Matt is, of course, bringing in more money every day than, just a handful of years back, he could have imagined making in months, plural. It is important that he got started with a niched product to a passionate subculture; Combat Conditioning to wrestlers, body-builders and martial arts aficionados. He has since broadened from very niched publications to places like Men’s Health; broadened products to health, fitness, Oriental sex secrets and Psycho-Cybernetics. But he began in a small subculture. Carol Frank sells $3,000.00 (!) deluxe bird cages to parrot owners.