Frank Kern kicked off back in 2012 with his State of The Internet address. This is a speech where Frank talks to the Internet marketing community and discusses where he thinks things will be headed for in the upcoming year.
This year was a simple speech, but I believe it has the potential to make a profound impact. For those that missed the talk here is a recap.
The 3 Pillars Of Internet Marketing
Frank believes there are three areas of focus or pillars for internet marketers:
- Technology
- Marketing
- Excellent Product
Let’s break each of these down into a bit more detail.
Pillar #1 – Technology
The first pillar Frank describes as technology. This is like the icing on the cake. Frank describes it as a nice paint job on a car, it’s nice to have but not essential.
In essence I believe he is referring to “shiny objects” which I have addressed in previous articles. Things that promise the world, print money on demand for us, but really distract us from our more important and long term sustainable goals.
Use technology to your advantage, but don’t let it use you. When in doubt about whether you should buy the latest gadget or gizmo, just remember the famous saying “no money gets made until something gets sold?” and ask will this piece of “technology” move you closer to that goal?
Pillar #2 – Marketing
Anyone who has followed my articles knows that I’m a big fan of marketing. But once again no money gets made with just marketing. Money gets made by selling.
I like how succinctly Frank sums it up:
Internet marketing is using the internet to deliver the right message about an excellent product to the right people at the right time – Frank Kern
There is plenty of good marketing advice from market research, to copywriting to key marketing concepts to marketing resources.
One of the major obstacles to getting things done is a lack of proper goals and focus. I’ve talked about proper goal setting and productivity before. These issues will always be relevant as long as you are working to achieve something and you have not put systems in place to control and minimize the interference they can have on your productivity.
You may surprise yourself with what you can get accomplished with some clear cut goals, restrictions on email, Facebook and Twitter and well scheduled breaks to help recharge and rejuvenate yourself. I highly recommend Tony Schwartz’s The Power Of Full Engagement or you can watch this great presentation at Google explaining our cyclical energy and the importance of proper work day breaks.
Pillar #3 – The Magic Bullet For Making Money
The magic bullet I’m going to reveal for making money has worked for me for many years and I feel confident will work for me for years to come. If you were to get as close as possible to a magic bullet, it would be as Frank says “a product so exceptionally good, your customers have an experience that is almost magical in their eyes.”
If you make a really great killer product, it makes selling and therefore making money a whole lot easier.
A blatant example that Frank gives is the iPhone. For a large majority of its users it’s an awesome, awesome product. If you walked into a room of 20 year olds who had never seen an iPhone, how hard do you think it would be to sell them one? Once you showed them how it worked, what it could do and all the capabilities it had – it would probably be pretty easy. That’s the power of a great product.
Frank believes lack of a good product to sell is at the root of most Internet marketing failures and frustrations.
I’ve talked at length about how to create a great and valuable infoproduct.
If you can do your market research and satisfy a hungry crowd and deliver something of great value to them, then you have a great winning formula. Combine that with savvy marketing and you are moving towards having a “magic bullet”.
But I Don’t Know How To Create A Great Product?
You personally don’t need to know how to create a great product. This is true for both infoproducts and physical products. There are thousands of people around the world that do know how to make your idea into a digital or physical reality.
Previous generations had it tough. They had the hurdle of the great idea and then turning that idea into a reality. I believe nowadays we still face the first hurdle of a great idea – that is something you can’t outsource. But once you come up with that great idea you can outsource the creation of it.
I recommend that people at least do the initial market research and leg work for their product creation. You will need to do this to find out what type of product you are going to create, how you are going to position it and how you are going to market it.
Are You Ready To Make An Infoproduct This Year?
Info-marketing can be a great income source. If you know what you are doing it can be a project you can get off the ground and making sales in a very short amount of time. The start up costs can be minimal compared to getting a physical product off the ground. Plus once up and running the maintenance costs are little more than the cost of your website and payment processor.
Why not make this year the year you finally do it.
Yaro
Leevi
first a person must create a valuable product that people will get something good from, then that person must have a strong marketing strategy to put that product in the market in a targeted audiences face.
the result equals an excellent product
this blog all together is great and i love it…adding value to the market place is a sure way to get you what you want
I really liked your article. Too few articles talks about product quality and focuses on marketing, clients, … You need clients/marketing/etc. to sale but selling something good is a lot easier. Personally I think, the difference between a marketer and a conman is the quality of their product.
“But once you come up with that great idea you can outsource the creation of it.” I don’t know a lot about it (heard about outsourcing cover design, etc. but not entire product). Can you tell us more ? (or is it non relevant).
Thanks, Thomas.
Hi Thomas,
I cover how to outsource your product plus handy product outlines if you don’t want to outsource in my info product course, which is soon to be released.
Get on the early bird list by clicking the link in my resource box.
Thanks, I’m on your list 😉
Totally agree with you Thomas.
A lot of courses start off with Keyword Research and skip the Market Research which should come before it. Assessing if their is a market for the product and if the product will do the job for the client.
I’d learnt this the hard way in the early days with a product that doesn’t sell.
I agree with all your points, except you’ve glossed over the ongoing costs if you’re actually really successful. I have 7000 students in over 20 countries. Imagine how many possible contact points there are from them as well as my potential clients. Once you are a thought leader you will have hundreds of people contacting you daily between email, blog comments, Facebook, twitter, phone etc. On top of relationship building with all of them, you still need time for new product development, ongoing education to stay on top of ever-changing technology, networking, blogging, etc.
Hi Debra, I think this is where outsourcing comes in. If you try to do everything yourself, you will only burn out. The real problem though, I believe, is finding competent hands to outsource to. But even that is not much of a problem if you know where to look.
I think what you need to do is outsource your
1. Social media and
2. Product creation.
Oh, you will need a slew of VAs too 🙂
A mistake which I see a lot of online entrepreneurs make is ..well, two mistakes really, are either micromanaging or totally going hands-free with the part of their business that they choose to outsource.
You can get someone else to update your status (as many of them that there are) while you keep an eye out for stuff you need to reply to personally.
Then you think up the concept for your product and hand it over to your product creation team.
I don’t know but I really believe that while this online thing is hard work, once it gets to the place where it totally consumes you so that there’s little time for other things (like smelling the roses), then it might be time to step back a bit and re-evaluate.
I’m sorry, I didn’t mean to go on like this. It was an excellent post Leevi, thank you so much.
I agree that market research is key if you’re going to create a killer product. And not basic research. In depth, talking to real people type of research to understand your market.
Leevi,
I am glad you mentioned outsourcing (at least) some of the process of product creation. I think it is key to the success of many info marketers online. Thank you for your article!
Great post, I really agree with what you said about Technology. That’s the problem most marketers have, they have the feeling like “If I can just get these last few articles up… the traffic will just flow!” when it’s really about connecting one on one with others and building those relationships :).
This is exactly what I had in mind myself. I’ve only recently thought about outsourcing the actual creation of what I had in mind.
It’s great that you focused on the importance of having a great product because I agree that money comes in when you are actually able to sell something. Even if you have the most brilliant marketing strategies if you don’t have a great product then people are not going to bite.
– Cristina
While I’m not ready to create a product just yet I am interested in finding some to promote. I have looked on Clickbank but they all seem super competitive.
I love me some Frank Kern. Very sharp guy and all of his big launch products have proven to be highly valuable to me .
The one product I can not recommend highly enough to the person struggling with how to create an information product is Brendon Burchard’s “Total Product Blueprint”.
Unlike most people who bought this and only went through 5% of it, I spent WEEKS with it taking notes so I can truly say this is an AMAZING resource. It’s the very best product I’ve come across that shows you how to to create a world class product and then the real world examples of how he marketed the product.
If you’re an information marketer, I say your education is incomplete without this resource. IT’S A GEM IN AN OCEAN OF USELESS ROCKS.
Thank you Leevi for sharing these notes you’ve taken on Frank’s speech here. I didn’t get a chance to watch it so I appreciate you bringing me up to speed and giving me the highlights.
Hi thanks, It’s great that you focused on the importance of having a great product because I agree that money comes in when you are actually able to sell something.
Creating info products is not as hard as so many people make out. I create audio products and being an ex teacher I find that it is like being back in the classroom except I’m teaching with no naughty kids!
Kay
Hi Leevi,
Great article and some great ideas. The one thing not covered is ‘leading the field’ which is probably almost a different subject. Sure, iPhone is great now (if you like that sort of thing), but there was a point where someone had to introduce it and have the courage to say “This will be the next big thing.” Research beforehand in this case can only say that this may work or at least has a high probability of working, but if you are the first to market, you do have that huge risk that no one will like it. The rewards though, can be enormous of course.
I guess that’s what they mean by ‘feel the fear and do it anyway’.
Regards,
Steven Lucas