Wednesday, January 16, 2008

Frank Kern Free Build Your List Video

I just watched a video by Internet marketing expert Frank Kern. He’s the one behind the most successful recent launches. I think it’s worth a moment to precis his video.

Regardless what you might have heard, Kern states emphatically that YOU need a list if you are going to be successful marketing on the Internet.

Here is his magic formula for building a list and making money
a. Get traffic
b. Offer a freebie
c. Sign them up
d. Sell them stuff
Pretty self evident. The magic of course is in the execution.

Where do you get traffic?

According to Kerns, you buy it, develop SEO optimized sites, or get if from JV partners. Kern buys it from Google Adwords, Yahoo Paid Search, Banners from Google and Yahoo, and Cost Per Thousand (CPM) drops.

What are CPM drops? Giant emailers with legitimate lists that will send an email telling how to get your free thing for a price per thousand recipients. If you do it right, you will get subscribers (in reality leads) that you can later email to on your own. Treated correctly these leads can be turned into buyers of either your stuff, or stuff you get a cut on (affiliate products). With careful nurturing, these buyers will turn into repeat buyers. If you do this right, you will make more, a lot more, from sales than you spend on lead acquisition. (Kern never goes give the names of the emailers he uses.)

An example Kern gives is:

Pay 10 cents to get a visitor. Create a great page which converts at 20%. You are now buying leads or subscribers at a cost of 50 cents each. These leads should be converted into buyers during the first week at the rate of about 3% - which is about normal for quality leads. So, if you generate 200 leads, you need to generate $100 dollars from six sales to break even.

Kern suggests that you sell a product worth $97 so that you gross $582 and net $482. I am not sure that you will get $97 for a first sale. If, however, you sell a $17 product, you will break even and be positioned to make money on all future sales. You should be able to double your sales of this product to this group by continued marketing. Later, you will be able sell many other products to this group.

This is the way Kern built up his list of 400,000 subscribers. He generates around a million dollars a years from this list, which boils down to about $2.50 per lead per year. By the way, if Kern who is an expert earns only $2.50 per lead per year, you would be wise to budget a much smaller number. When I started in this business, a good lead was worth about $1 per month. I suspect that today that number is closer to $1 per year.

Okay, you know what leads could produce, but what do you give them to sign up? Kern suggests the old standby the free report. Even better, you might try a downloadable audio or video. Just keep in mind that it must be something that your prospects can benefit from and get value from.

Turn People Into Buyers

To turn people into buyers, you must establish a relationship with them. You do this by giving them good stuff. The better the relationship with the people on the list, the longer they will stay on the list and the more stuff you can sell them. Kern has such a great relationship with a list of about 7,000 leads that it produced over $1,000,000 in sales in 22 months!

Kern’s steps to be different:

Rise above the noise and be different. Kern has done that by telling people how to make a list. He suggests that you should:

1 Use some method other than straight print - videos are current.
2 Give excellent value.
3 Be a straight shooter - lies and hype will catch up with you.
4 Help people decide that they want your stuff. Don’t try to sell it to them.
5 Use, audio, video, teleseminars, and email to communicate. Multiple modalities reach an audience more deeply by providing a clearer message.

Why does it work?

Because we trust only a friend or a person of authority. Following this process turns you into both a friend and an authority, providing you are delivering value. He gives the StomperNet launch as an example. The two guys delivered video after video demonstrating that they were friendly, knowledgeable guys. Once they did this, it was a no brainer to generate the huge orders that they did on the StomperNet launch.

Follow these simple rules and you two can have a large, valuable list of your own.

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Wednesday, March 14, 2007

Entertain, Enlighten or Sell

As an experiment, a friend of mine subscribed to ten different opt-in email marketing lists to see which ones were the most effective. Many web sites and on-line businesses have resorted to sending promotional materials to people who have subscribed to them in an effort to boost their sales or traffic. Opt-in web sites marketers send newsletters, catalogs updates and other promotional materials to web site visitors who have agreed to be updated.

Any Internet user who is on the list will receive updates through emailed articles amd promotions. If a email or promotional material piques their interest they will go to the site to learn more or to purchase the product. For the web site operators or owners, this is a chance to remind their readers of the operator’s existence and to showcase their wares. Since numerous sites on the Internet offer the same products or services in one way or the other, the competition can get pretty rough and it is easy to be forgotten.

Back to my experimenting friend, he tried to find out which opt-in marketing strategies caused the reader to beg for more. Email ranged from the very simple to the extremely outlandish. The quality differences were easy to notice. Only a few have captured the concepts inherent in an effective opt-in marketing strategy. He dubbed them effective because he felt like he just couldn't wait to go their site and learn more. The most persuasive ones even got him reaching for his credit card before he realized he was only researching.

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