In 2013, I attended a networking event in Melbourne, one of the regular “Lean Startup” meetups.
The feature guest for the night was Jonathan Teo, a Singapore born, Aussie raised guy, who moved to the US, worked for Google and eventually found himself part of the venture capital world.
Jonathan’s past investments include Twitter, Instagram and Snapchat, so it’s safe to say he is having a good run.
Product Is Marketing
Although Jonathan spent much of the night during his interview talking about things related to investing, he is well known as an expert at “product”.
Early in the evening, he made a simple statement that really stuck with me –
Product IS marketing.
I felt the need to elaborate on this idea, including how it impacts information marketers like us bloggers who sell training products.
You can watch my video here –
Click Here To Listen What Exactly |
Products That Market Themselves
The core idea is that today more than ever, your product is your marketing.
This means that the product is so compelling, simple to use, valuable and easy to share, that it doesn’t require artificial stimulation to drum up demand.
Word of mouth is the most powerful form of marketing and we all know how effective technology is for viral distribution.
If your product is unique, incredibly functional for a technology savvy group of people, they will share it. They have it — it’s part of the culture to distribute interesting things and be first to do so — that’s how you stay cool.
Mobile Apps fit this criteria well. They rest in your pocket so can easily be demonstrated to other people. Often they function on networked models, which means the more people who use them the better each new user’s experience is.
Combine this with a media industry hungry for technology news, and you the perfect environment for huge viral growth. This was clearly demonstrated by each of Jonathan’s investments – Twitter, Instagram and Snapchat have all exploded in a very short period of time.
For this to work of course, your product has to be very very good. Usability, function, value, interface design and many other subtle elements go into a product that sells itself. Simplicity is not simple.
As I talked about in the video, I am very curious about how to apply this idea to information products.
I’d love to hear your take – how can we as bloggers create information products that sell themselves?
Leave a comment below with your ideas.
I’ll talk to you soon,
Yaro Starak
Yaro.Blog
P.S. Affiliates are already making sales of my new e-guide, you can be one of them too.
The only way to create top class products that are simple and sell themselves – is to be the best YOU = you are selling yourself – you are the product.
If you designed, created, wrote, chose the elements then the product is you. Your taste, viewpoint, reasoning and personality pulls together the elements that comprise the overall product.
The Best Educator, Researcher, Developer, Creator, Visionaire AND Personality..
Mediocrity will never go viral.
Be SIMPLY THE BEST clearest concise EDUCTOR that people cant get enough of.
OR
DISCOVER / RESEARCH or DEVELOP / CREATE / ENVISION an innovative, new simple way of making $$ online, an Application or Tool, or perhaps a Method, maybe something that is already available – probably right under our noses, but no one is looking at it, trying or testing it.
Thing is, no matter how good your idea, product, education is – it needs a personality to enable it to go viral – as the personality behind the method, product, tool, you provide the emotional context. You are the driver that will be trusted or not, the virality factor or not. People have to be intoxicated by you and all you stand for, to want to share you en mass.
I have seen this again and again, where I purchase a program, or friends/clients purchase a program, and the voice of the presenter is painful, or lack lustre, bores them silly, puts them to sleep. Why on earth they don’t hire a voice over artist . . ?.?
But that critical factor, prevents customers from sharing, and encouraging others to buy.
Aside from that – it may be the best training around BUT playing silly games with subscribers about Scarcity for digital products – eh what?? Insults the intelligence of their potential customers, gets them off side- and no way will you buy or share the info if you are put off in any way.
In this case the mission is out of kilter with the message, if your mission is to sell and you upset people by being same old dumb sheep copying every other mktr out there with scarcity nonsense – your message is the killer.
I think everyone looks for magic pills, when there isn’t any, it’s plain old common sense, be the best version of you, you can be. Do your best work, something you can be proud of. Aspire to creating, developing, envisioning something that will be treasured, read, used, or practised long after your time has passed.
Combine that Ideology with a Clear Mission and Message, and you may just get there.
Great comment Jade, and I agree with what you are saying. I think the personal brand for a content creator is your best chance of getting word of mouth distribution.
I do think it can be applied as a whole to an educational institute, like a university with a prestigious reputation, or perhaps more recently sites like Linda and Udemy that bring together lots of teachers under the one umbrella brand that has the status.
Books are another good example. A good book spreads organically, and although the author might gain fame from the book, it’s that big hit book that creates the fame, not the author.
Jade & Yaro, thanks for your ideas.
GREAT topic…..I am launching a wellness coaching biz and am dealing with this.
My thought is to try to offer simpler, faster solutions to common wellness problems
+ a heavy dose of recognition & support.
any thoughts anybody? My beta web is above. My main biz is a digital luxury travel & tour agency. best from Spain!
Dan, I was thinking – is there an example of a wellness product or person who has enjoyed viral word of mouth distribution?
I can think of fad diets like the atkins diet, or paleo, or slow carb. These often have a personality attached to them that kickstarts the viral growth, or sometimes a key exposure point, like Oprah featuring it.
Look at successful examples close to your product for the best ideas.
Yaro
On Gruen Planet (an Australian TV panel show about advertising) a panellist remarked: advertising is the tax you pay for not having a remarkable product. It sounds like this is the same idea as Jonathan.
My idea for information products are catalogue apps. I don’t know if they have another name for it already but I am thinking that apps can also be the new websites advertising products. Maybe that sounds strange but I feel it is going that way with the app I am developing.
I work in the scaffold industry and my app is not finished yet but originally I wanted something functional for scaffolders and others that use scaffold from builders, bricklayers and other trades. So it’s primary function, I thought, would be to make calculations easy for the use in scaffold. But part of that is the scaffold products that are needed to do the calculations. Therefore, a scaffold library or catalogue of gear is needed within the app. As I have been developing it is actually this catalogue that has the most potential with scaffold products and the thousands and thousands of companies and manufacturers of scaffold who want to put there gear in my app for exposure and maybe sales, I don’t know.
My idea is an idea for the niche market that could be applied to many industries I think. I feel like utility apps becoming product catalogs for many manufacturers and product creators can give a new platform for them to communicate with prospective clients and customers.
Does that sound on anyone’s radar?
I have been wanting to get this off my chest for a while but I am not sure if it will be realized anywhere near by what I am doing in my industry. I suppose that is what is means to be an entrepreneur.
While I haven’t experienced this with info products, I’ve seen it with other things. When I was 18, I imported some textiles (such as scarves) from a Thai market to sell in the States. I identified my target market, and, when I set up shop at an event and my target market got a look at what I had to sell, they practically devoured it. I didn’t have to talk up my products, I just had to try to keep up with collecting all the money without going crazy. I did two separate events where in each, I would collect between $200-$500 for between half an hour to two hours of work.
I didn’t get to watch the full video because it froze on me like 2 minutes in but I do believe this premise of Product Being Marketing to be highly intriguing and is ultimately what a product should do for you.
But not all products are created equally. And not all of the market is created equally. Especially the information buying market.
One of the commonalities of ALL products that are successful in the market is that it is very easy for people to see how they can get Specific, Tangible, Measurable, Observable & Physical Results by using the product.
But not all products are easy to get kick ass results from and therein lies the need for the marketer to slay the nine-jillion excuses people tell themselves and others for not being able to get the results you’re promising – which takes more than a two-minute video intro video to do.
The advantage that apps like Twitter, Snapchat, Facebook and Instagram have is that they are DEAD SIMPLE to use and get desirable results with.
They are designed for even the lowest common denominator to gain success with. When you consider the laws of human nature that dictate that humans are addicted to being right and that we become addicted to what we’re good at and what is easy to get a sense of significance from, it’s not very hard to see why these apps blow up.
For me, it’s an apples to oranges comparing Instagram with a product like Eben Pagan’s 12 week Guru Blueprint course.
Both are kick ass products and they both have the potential to be their own best marketing but one lets a person who can’t even read and is on welfare get access to it and get massive fulfillment from using it which in turns sends them raving about it to any and everyone they know (plus telling everyone they know about it reinforces their social standing on the platform when the people they know interact with them there) . . . and the other one requires you to be a courageous, talented and ambitious person with the wherewithal to come up with the thousands of dollars to pay for it and then essentially work a second job in the form of studying it and then implementing what you’ve learned.
So even if Guru Blueprint were a free app, it is my belief that it would never blow up like a Instagram. Why? Because it points out your flaws and asks you to be something more than you are now. It asks you to WORK – to study the hours and hours of material and then go out and apply it and risk money and pride.
Instagram appeals to the unwashed masses and only demands you have a phone and to know how to work the camera. Very low hurdles to overcome.
Aweber is another example of an application that doesn’t need to use a big launch or a big salesletter to sell it but the HIGH CONCEPT of the result if offers is very easy to grasp – it sends my broadcast emails out to my list for me.
I think one way people get themselves into big trouble is when they try to mimic a business strategy that doesn’t apply to their offering.
As I pointed out above, information as a product is a completely different animal than are brain dead apps that appeal to the joy-seeking, easy-button-oriented mob mentality. And this begs the question of . . .
How Do You Define Information Marketing?
#1. It has to do with figuring out who a specific responsive market would be and what specific topic is reigning supreme in their focus at this moment in time (preferably landing on a topic that is under served).
#2. Then, you figure out what selling approach would be most appealing to this market on this topic, how to deliver it and then how to make the math work so that it is a profitable venture.
#3. A huge part of making the math work for an information marketing business is packaging the right information together along with services that meet your prospect where they are (not where you want them to be) that are created either by you or by someone else.
Where most people go wrong with this business is deciding on a product to offer before narrowing down the specific person they want to be in front of and the specific topic that is dominating their focus as of now.
Why is this so important with an information marketing business? Because the perfect prospect for information is a unique individual and is vastly different than the majority of society.
Here Are The Commonalities Of Kick Ass Information Customers . . .
If you don’t know what makes for a kick ass customer, how can you be expected to find them?
You can’t.
So here are the commonalities of the sharp needles you need to be looking for in small haystacks . . .
The Hunter
These are people who lust for the edge over their competition or are incredibly driven to counter any other obstacles placed in front of them personally.
This causes them to be driven to find answers that keep them ahead of the pack, or to stay alive in the instance of being faced with a super threat.
Look at three ways people respond to getting told that they’ve got diabetes . . .
1. They do nothing or . . .
2. They ask a doctor to tell them what to do or . . .
3. They scour the internet, the bookstore, talking to people who are living with diabetes and kicking ass, they go into the mode of finding the best way to beat their condition. And they find it. And they hold the disease at bay and live a better quality of life than they lived before diagnosed.
This third person has problems show up and they go into “problem solving mode”. They don’t sit there with their dick in their hand or take advice from only one person who is attached to a system that doesn’t have their best interest in mind.
This third person is the ONLY person you’re interested in. This is your perfect customer. It’s way too expensive for you to try to get people in the door who don’t do this and then teach them to do it.
This is why Dan Kennedy has found the people who’s introduction to him through his BOOKS are SO VALUABLE to him.
These people got off their ass and drove to a bookstore, where on average they bought more than one book as is the norm for biz book buyers, they went home, read the book, read the offer inside, and then responded. That’s a winner. And this is why he wants to keep that lead generation strategy healthy and alive even though it barely makes him money on the front end.
The next attribute you’re looking for is . . .
The Thirsty Pupil
You need people who get a boner from studying and unearthing revelations.
Your best students are more likely than not, someone else’s best student. And this directly correlates to the law of the marketing universe that says your best customer is somebody else’s best customer.
Co-operative competition is often better than adversarial competition.
These star pupils will give your presentation the time it needs. Someone who is only willing to read tweet-sized pitch or watch 2-5 minute YouTube videos is NOT going to give you $5,000 dollars to come to one of your seminars. Nope.
People who WON’T study (which if you create your marketing right and make it valuable in and of itself will feel like studying to them) are people you need to ignore.
The next attribute you’re on the hunt for is . . .
The Go-Getter
You cannot presume that everyone in your market has ambition. This will KILL you.
And it’s easy to fall into this trap when you’re talking to these people online on your Facebook page or on Twitter or your blog because they speak ambition-ese. They say all the right things that they’re supposed to so that they don’t look like a loser.
But talk is vastly different than talk backed up by action.
On your web pages these people sound like Tony Robbins and Dan Kennedy but if you were to follow them around for a week, you’d see they act completely contrary to what they say they’re about and they do the opposite of what they know they should be doing.
Most people won’t be 100% honest about NOT having the ambition to do what it takes to succeed and this leads them to tell a story that makes them feel good and makes them look smart in the eyes of others.
You want to find evidence that this person is walking it like they talk it.
And don’t let anybody tell you they’re priced out of doing well. With just the blog posts and YouTube videos published there’s more than enough to get your shit straight.
All the free stuff might not take you to the top but it can DEFINITELY help you pull your head out of your ass and get moving in the right direction getting positive results. So with this being the case, no one should be doing bad. And yet, a ton of people are.
You don’t need any lazy ass non-resourceful people coming into your world. They will be bad customers and I’d rather have no customers than poorly behaved customers who make my life hell.
“Be Your Own Boss Guy”
And part of the market that is NO GOOD for you is the “Be Your Own Boss” crowd who started a business just because they didn’t want a boss.
This is different motivation than the person who is a winner starts a business for. The smart business owner is akin to the smart investor. The primary reason they put money into a starting a business is because they can see a clear Return On Investment and can see much, much more money coming in when the idea is scaled to the next higher level.
“Be Your Own Boss Guy” has “good investment” very low on his list of why he’s starting a business. Their low ambition reason for shoving money into a business is so that they can make the same amount of money as they were working before and do so without having someone else telling them what to do and when.
But they’re operating from delusion thinking that they’re the boss now.
Their customers are now their boss and they tell them when they want them to work and they can fire them as their supplier/vendor/consultant/etc. and stop paying them money just as their employer could have. And you better believe that if “Be your own boss guy” is struggling, he’s jumping when the customer tells them to. If they’ve got shareholders, those guys are their boss as well, hovering and hungry for this thing to start churning out money.
This is why if you up show telling them they’re doing everything wrong and give them a big ass list of shit they need to be doing instead, you will not be the welcomed prophet. You will be seen as Satan just the same as their old boss was.
Do you have a friend who fits into this Be Your Own Boss category that is a struggling restaurant owner? If you want to give them what they consider to be WORST Christmas gift ever, go buy them Rory Fatt’s Restaurant Marketing Kit. They’ll look at this like you just forced them into a second job they hate.
The following example is HILARIOUS . . .
So even though Dan Kennedy is teaching everything about how it’s dumb to be casting pearls on swine to all of his clients and has been doing so for years, he found himself doing it.
One of his relatives was getting married and they put out a request with the RSVP that the only gifts they wanted were Target and Home Depot gift cards. Well, Dan being the generous soul that is he, replied back to them that he wasn’t coming and that come time for the wedding he’d get their gift cards to them and then . . .
. . . he let them know that he is juiced in with people who can help them get ahead in life. So if they were interested in improving their credit scores, starting a part-time home based business, investing in real estate, etc. he would, on top of giving them their gift cards, he’d joyfully buy them tickets to go an event on these topics or buy the resources for them.
Two months had passed and he still hadn’t heard anything back. And like he said, “I know exactly what happened. I annoyed the pig with this invitation to better themselves. And now I’m going to be on my death bed regretting the ten minutes of my life that I invested in writing this letter to them.” Hahaha
The Real Small Business Owner
This person has a tiny amount of ambition.
The extent of their ambition extends to fixing problems so they can keep the lights on for another month.
If you’re fixing problems, these people can be an okay market for you. If they suck at hiring and they’ve got a constant disaster with who they’re bringing in, they’ll buy something about hiring better or outsourcing.
They might even buy some Done-4-Them services.
The Entrepreneur
These people are incredibly valuable to you. These are the people at the top of the pyramid of any niche/market. And what gets them to the top and keeps them there is their legitimate ambition.
You’re looking for evidence of ambition. This is HUGE.
The first bit of evidence is the fact that they’re buying resources on how to improve. This is very good evidence. And different purchases indicate differing levels of ambition.
The guy who buys the ab belt you wear that’s supposed to shock the fat away is a lower quality prospect than the guy who bought P90X. Why? Because one guy bought the laziest option possible. The other guy bought a product knowing he was going to have to work to make it work.
You want customers/clients who are giving you evidence they’re willing to do something to make something happen!
The next attribute you’re searching for in a super star information buyer . . .
The Realist/Optimist
You want people with realistic expectations and with a belief in themselves based on them making their own luck by taking right actions consistently.
Next . . .
The Person With Money To Invest
You aren’t the Welfare Department.
You’re here to make money trading value for value.
This means that you need to be speaking to people who have money to pay to you.
Having the skill set to triple someone’s income when they’re only making $30,000.00 a year in their business, isn’t all that helpful to you. $30,000 dollars barely keeps the bills paid and a roof over their head. There’s nothing left to give to you.
Now if they’re making $90,000 dollars a year, that’s better because you won’t be taking 100% of the money they’ve got left over in order to help them.
Even better is if they’re making $200,000 dollars and are aiming to make $400,000 dollars.
The highly appealing option is the person making $1 million dollars who isn’t interested in making more but is instead interested in making it easier on themselves to make the $1 million dollars by optimizing what they’re doing – with less strain, less stress and less time involvement.
When people are making good money, they don’t mind spending money to get what they want and they’re not stressed about spending money because they’ve got plenty of it. They actually LIKE spending money on things that make their life easier and being able to write big checks affirms to them who they are.
These people are a joy to deal with because they don’t have petty money pressures nagging at them. Customers only making $80K a year are gonna be sweating bullets over every cent they spend. Especially if they’re spending it on something new to them that hasn’t proven itself yet.
And the key thing to keep in mind that it is NOT a 100 times harder to get the high income clients. It’s not even 10 times harder.
The next attribute you’re looking for in a prime information buyer is . . .
The Person Who Is Receptive To Your Way Of Selling
One thing you’ve got to keep in mind is that the way someone buys at first, is the way they’ll buy over and over and over again.
The hardest lists to monetize are infomercial buyers.
These people have watched pieces of a 30 minute presentation 4-5 times before they bought and then watched the show beginning to end before they finally bought. These people are buying on impulse, sleep deprived, half-engaged intellectually and these are conditions that are hard to re-create with anything besides an infomercial which is why one of the best ways to sell these people is with DVD that has an infomercial style pitch on it.
And then people wonder why they rent these infomercial lists and get shit results when they email or direct mail them.
Remember, how a person buys first and most often is how they buy. Going against their preference is trouble for you.
You need people to be responsive to a direct response approach to marketing. This is the opposite of people who only buy at a department store. You need people who are comfortable picking up the phone, filling out a coupon or going to website and entering their credit card and contact information.
The best way to know if someone is willing to do this is if they have a history of having done this. If you can’t find a history of them having done this, that’s no good. As soon as people refuse to pay attention to the way you need to sell them, that business is over.
Infomercial companies like Guthy-Renker are doing everything they can to bring products into their business that older people will want to buy because older people still respond to infomercials on TV as opposed to college kids who only have a TV in their dorm room so that they can play X Box.
There is no sense in putting together ineffective sales presentations to prospects who don’t want to see them.
The next attribute of the perfect prospect for information . . .
The Person Who Respects Your Model Of The World On This Topic
You want to pay very close attention to the head space a person is in with a certain media channel.
For instance, I am a polarizing individual and this means that leads that came to me from advertising on Mother Earth or NPR would probably be repelled once they came into my tent. That’s no good for me. Better to just leave them to their own devices out in the world than to deal with any of their bullshit if they happened to buy something.
You don’t waste money being in front of people who see the world in the opposite light as you do.
You probably aren’t going to be doing 180 in your personality and beliefs anytime soon.
This means you need to be finding and attracting people who agree with your model of the world or you’re not going to keep them around. There are ways you can do this when you really narrow down who your perfect prospect is.
For instance, taking Geography in account, if I were going to do direct mail, there are certain states I wouldn’t mail to. I’d take the whole state out of the mailing. One easy way I could do this is by looking at the density for the Mother Earth subscribers and get rid of those states where the highest number of them are. Vermont is one of those states for him.
There’s also Urban/Suburban/rural segmentation. Some businesses may warrant you excluding mailing to city addresses, the first ring of the suburbs and perhaps the further suburban rings and rural areas would be the sweet spot. Same opportunity would probably do better in the Heartland states than it would to the coast states. And you’d be aiming at a blue collar population – not white collar.
You’ve got to take Gender into consideration. Weight loss doesn’t sell to men. Getting bigger muscles does as has been proven to work by the very profitable protein and supplement market, but losing weight appeals don’t. This means Jenny Craig or Weight Watchers would be well served leaving men off their mailing lists.
Age is something to consider from both the need and the way they respond to marketing you want to use.
Certain Types/Sizes of Business could be completely left out of your marketing efforts. One segmentation could be single unit operators vs. multi-unit operators.
Strange Biases are something you want to keep your eyes open for.
The Purpose Driven Church authored by Rick Warren is a book Dan Kennedy highly recommends you go get because it is an excellent lesson on the million dollar question of . . .
“Who Can We Rule Out, Avoid Marketing To and Deliberately Repel With Our Marketing?
Do you see how this kind of segmentation could fully influence the message you send to these people and the enormous amount of money and headache you’d save yourself from keeping the wrong market away from your business?
Notice Dan’s experience has taught him that you focus on the product last; not first.
The WHO that your marketing is in front of accounts for 40% of the success. The other 40% is your offer. And the copy/marketing you use only accounts for 20% of your success.
So you can clearly see that with this being the case, that free apps appealing to the anyone with a pulse are 180 degrees different in their appeal and how they’ll spread.
Once the information marketer understands and fully own this reality, they will be creating and marketing products that can sell themselves to THEIR PERFECT PROSPECTS who have very different attributes than the majority of society.
I thank you Yaro for igniting this discussion and making me remind myself of such an important lesson! If this post is too long for this thread, feel free to delete it. The only reason I’ve made it so long is that after spending 10 minutes on it, and still not making the point yet, I decided I was to write as I long as I needed to in order to make my point and in turn, use this for a post for my blog.
So if you want to clear it to make room for the other posts to flow better, I won’t take offense. And once again, I thank you for making me think today. 🙂
Lewis I think you just won the award for longest comment ever made to my newsletter.
I love all of what you write, there are some gems in there about targeting that everyone should read.
The thing is after reading all of that, it’s fairly clear that an information product can’t go viral under the premise that the product is marketing. That’s the obvious conclusion because like you said, it’s not a “simple” product and it doesn’t appeal to the masses. Those seem to be two critical ingredients for a product to spread on it’s own merits.
If your product is complex and your customer is unique, perhaps the closest thing we can get to “viral” distribution is a quality referral program, although even that is a form of artificially induced marketing, so not quite the same.
Yaro
I very much agree with you Yaro and would say that niched information products that are built to get results are pretty much impossible to make go app-like viral because not everyone is interested in doing something to fix their lot in life.
But . . . generalized philosophical information can go viral-ish and I believe the easiest way it has done this is in years past is through books and TV.
Look at the enduring popularity of Napoleon Hill’s Think and Grow Rich which was first published in 1937.
Think and Grow Rich remains the top seller of Napoleon Hill’s books – a perennial best-seller after 70 years (Business Week Magazine’s Best-Seller List ranked Think and Grow Rich as the sixth best-selling paperback business book 70 years after it was first published).
And it accomplishes this with ZERO marketing by the publishers – all sales being made by word of mouth recommendations.
Hill called his personal success teachings “The Philosophy of Achievement”. “Philosophy” being the operative word in that sentence.
Look at the success had by “The Strangest Secret” authored by Earl Nightingale. In 1956 he produced a spoken word record, The Strangest Secret, which sold over a million copies, making it the first spoken-word recording to achieve Gold Record status.
In 2007, the Aussie Rhonda Byrne was featured in Time Magazine’s list of 100 people who shape the world. She gained her fame and fortune after appearing on The Oprah Winfrey Show. Her philosophy is that believing will allow you to achieve your wishes and dreams.
The Secret . . . which is nothing more than Earl Nightingale’s “The Strangest Secret” made cool and perhaps easier to accept because it came in a new wrapper with a modern writing style and examples and was endorsed by the current heavy hitters from the personal development niche . . . sold more than 19 million copies in more than 40 languages by the spring of 2007, as well as more than 2 million DVDs.
According to a January 2009 Forbes.com article, Byrne’s book and film have made $300 million; The Secret alone generated her an income of $12 million in 2006.
And I won’t even get started on the world-wide wildly viral-ish multi-million dollar success streak that spiritual guru Wayne Dyer has been on since the 80’s by just telling stories and talking about his philosophy in his books and speeches.
The one thing all of the information has in common is that it is focused on selling compelling ideas i.e. philosophies; NOT action-plans.
These philosophies can be appreciated by anyone with a pulse whereas not everyone with a pulse is a business owner or a real estate agent or a chiropractor or any number of the narrow-t0pics that are being addressed by information marketers today.
Napoleon Hill’s, Wayne Dyer’s, and Rhonda Byrne’s products/books all tell stories about doing the right thing, tell you what the right thing to do is (be nice to people, set goals, do more than is expected of you, think positive thoughts, etc.), but none of them give you a well-designed progression that makes it all but impossible for you to NOT get the outcome they preach about – peace of mind, wealth, etc.
And yet they sell thousands of books every year without ever being marketed.
What Is The Essence of a Viral-ish Information Product? Cool Ideas That Educate and Enlighten
One of the most important lessons I ever learned in my life relative to information products was that of . . .
“Learning = Behavior Change”
If your behavior didn’t change as the result of something taught to you, you didn’t learn it. You may understand it, but you don’t KNOW it. Knowing it comes from applying it and having your new actions transform your behavior.
And this is precisely why the majority of people like getting ideas more than they like getting instructions.
New ideas don’t put you on the spot; step-by-step instructions do.
If you get the proven plan handed to you and you don’t do anything with it, this comes with the hard implication that you’re being lazy or that you’re a scared loser or that you really don’t want this outcome.
But if you just get handed some cool sounding ideas and no specific blueprint for applying them, no coaching calls, no accountability whatsoever, you’re let off the hook.
Think about how if a contractor told an architect to draw them up the plans for new building they wanted to erect. The architect goes to work, and lays out exactly what to do and delivers the product. The product shows what they need to do to bring forth a building out of the dirt, he has access to the partners to help him and has the resources to put the plans into action. But then he does nothing with the plans, perhaps never even pulling them out of the tube they were rolled up and delivered in. Think about how much sense this picture doesn’t make.
You have to keep in mind that if you’re successfully doing what it is that you’re talking about, you are NOT your customer. Most of them are NOT like you. And them saying they like and agree with the same things you do is NOT the same as being like you.
When your market thinks of the idea of being successful, they like it and say they want it but their current actions and results reveal what they really want.
If they aren’t on your level, beyond your level, or making moves to very quickly be approaching your level . . . they are not going to be satisfied with only being given instructions that make them accountable for doing something.
You’ve got to remember that only 1-5% of the people you sell to are actually going to use it. The other 95% of people you do business with are not going to do shit. Someday some of this 95% might evolve into the 1-5% but they aren’t there now.
One smart thing that people do when it comes to offering information is encouraging the delusion of activity equaling achievement.
An example of this would be emphasizing the idea that buying your product is a massive achievement. It is not. In reality, it is only the first in many steps to having an actual achievement.
Most people are very happy with a false sense of accomplishment and you want to help them get it knowing that someday this person may pull their head out of their ass. This person deserves a lot of credit for at least being beyond the other losers out there who refuse to even entertain the idea of improving their situation.
You’ll find that if you just try to ram actionable content down the throat of your audience for two days of a seminar, there’s going to be large portion of them who are disgruntled with you by day three.
But if you were to instead let the audience have fun with ideas at your event like Mike Vance, an authority on creativity, who used to have 99.9% of his event revolve around playing with creativity in group exercises and only 1% of the event being instructions, people would love you for this.
So the name of the game is to keep bringing people ideas that they think are COOL. Cool is the operative word in that sentence. Nobody said anything about bringing them NEW ideas.
As you’ve seen above, and if you study what gets people excited about giving you money, you will see that there isn’t all that much that is new under the sun.
But you’ve got a wide creative license that allows you to make the old, cool. And the bonus points come if your ideas are not new in genesis, but are new to this person.
Going Beyond Just Selling Philosophy And Going Viral In Your Niche
Unlike Napoleon Hill, Rhonda Byrne, and Wayne Dyer… Tony Robbins went beyond writing books and speaking and actually built a POWERHOUSE information/training business.
And unlike Tony’s mentor, Jim Rohn, and every one I just named, Tony took his philosophy and made it paid off at the supreme level . . .
Robbins’ work has been featured in major media including Time, Newsweek, Fortune, Forbes, Life, GQ, Vanity Fair, Businessweek, Tycoon, the Oprah Winfrey show, and SUCCESS magazines, the CBS Evening News, NBC News, ABC’s Prime Time Live, Fox News, CNN and A&E as well as newspapers, radio programs, and Internet media worldwide.
Robbins’ programs have reached over 4 million people from 100 countries around the world.
In 2007, he was named to Forbes magazine’s “Celebrity 100” list. Forbes estimated that Robbins earned approximately $30 million USD in that year.
In 2002, Robbins was ranked as the 45th “Top Business Intellectual in the World” by Accenture’s Institute for Strategic Change. Tony Robbins has spoken at Harvard Business School and was ranked by the school among the “Top 200 Business Gurus” (Harvard Business School Press, 2003).
I guess you could say Tony has gone Viral in the self improvement market.
Tony started in the early 80’s holding his small transformation workshops in hotel meeting rooms.
From here he gained the momentum that inspired him to release his “Unlimited Power” book in 1986 and the exposure he received from this propelled him to doing bigger workshops and getting more lucrative private client relationships.
But it wasn’t until he put together his Personal Power course and launched the shit out of it with infomercials that he was able to take things to the level of being viral in the self help niche.
And this popularity with that info-product which was brilliantly packaged so that it could be sold for way more than a book was, was heavy-handed on getting you to use what you’d been taught with an action you were supposed to take at the end of each audio before moving to the next one, allowed for the economics in his business that let him venture into the three-day mega seminars which served as a platform for him to not just sell his numerous products at the back of the room, but to also sell 1-5% of the audience into his $10,000 Mastery Weekend Events and then eventually sell maybe one or two people at each event a $65,000.00 dollar membership into his private coaching group called Platinum Partnership.
And there’s many more money-making moving parts of his business that I’m not listing here which would include his multi-million dollar private client business.
Tony Robbins is a MAJOR LEAGUE information marketer and I would highly recommend that anyone who aspires to build a SOLID information marketing business to closely study his ascension to fame and fortune and to pay close attention to how he not only stays relevant but stays DOMINANT in this crowded market (most recently re-establishing himself as the king in that realm with his big time alliance with Oprah).
If you’re looking to advise business owners, I would highly recommend paying attention to how Dan Kennedy ascended to viral-ish status in the small-business owner realm and how he’s gone far beyond just having a book or a blog to having a REAL MAJOR LEAGUE information marketing business with tons of products, multiple paid newsletters, and moving parts that have earned him a plush living and kept him relevant AND dominant in this market since the 90’s.
Conclusion:
It’s my belief that it’s not impossible for information products/businesses to go viral.
It’s just highly improbable from the stand point that most people are unwilling to put in the work it would take to do so, surround themselves with the talent that would facilitate the process, and consult with the winners who could lay out the winning plan for them as Tony Robbins did with Jay Abraham back in the day.
Of course, part of the right plan means being in front of the right people with the right High Concept.
And this High Concept can be appealing to anyone who is optimistic about their lot in life (The Secret or Personal Power) or it can be as narrow as (Magnetic Marketing – Dan Kennedy) speaking directly to a niche as small as optimistic small business owners.
And I would never tell anyone that unless they were Tony Robbins huge, they couldn’t be considered successful as an information marketer.
Your success in this business should be determined by how much money you want to be making and how you want to be making it.
Some people are low maintenance and would be absolutely horrified at the thought of running Robbins International.
And some people can’t stand the idea of playing small when an opportunity to play huge is standing before them.
Whatever a person decides their enough-is-enough number is, I would encourage them to maximize their opportunity so that they get everything they can out of everything they’ve got and they get the highest return for their time invested with the least stress possible.
When you succeed on your terms and you’re proud of accomplishing what you set out to with your information business, I would call that winning – whether your products went viral or not.
Thank you again Yaro for encouraging this conversation and I wish you the best in your efforts to impact your perfect prospects. 🙂
Lewis once again I have to say thank you for such a well thought out and described comment.
If you listen to the latest podcast I did with Walter just this week I came to the same conclusion regarding a book being the best possible viral tool for an information marketer.
Your comment has actually further cemented the direction I want to take with my own business in the future, including my plans for beyond being just a make money blogging teacher.
I hope you continue to stop by my blog and newsletter!
Yaro
Glad to have been of service Yaro and I’m wishing you the very best on the next leg of your journey. 🙂
Of course I’m appreciative to you because my record-breaking comments here were turned into the post I published this morning.
And without a doubt, I’ll back here witnessing your evolution forward. 🙂
Lewis, WOW. Just wow! And thank you. That was a masterful lesson in target marketing. Dan has, of course, driven much of it into my head – but your post helped reinforce many components of the message. Thanks 🙂
Dr. Mani,
You are most welcome. I’m very delighted to have served someone here. And I’m also delighted to be meeting with a fellow Dan Kennedy fan! 🙂
If you haven’t gotten a hold of Dan’s “Business Building Blueprints” DVD set, I cannot recommend you go stalking it, highly enough. It’s been a long while since I watched Bill Glazer do the A-Z Blueprint seminar years ago but in my eyes, this one is WAY better and it’s his most current insights on what’s working in information marketing.
For me, it is a must-own product for any aspiring information marketer – especially the ones who favor Dan’s raw wisdom and delivery style.