Behind the Scenes of a DIY Book Launch
Part Two: Tellman’s Infoproducts
Tellman Knudson went from selling his own special brand of salsa to dominating both the Attention Deficit information market and the list-building strategy guide market online. 
Using specialized knowledge he’s culled from cognition research, NLP, hypnosis practice, and the art of motivational selling he quickly applied the basics he learned from building the ADD success list into creating an infoproduct about the most effective way to build and grow a list. And he sells this package on List-building for $197.00 at myfirstlist.com. Instant ADD Success and How-to’s on how to create information marketing products has provided him with a lucrative income. His almost zen-like emails arrive without fail five or six times a week into one of my email accounts. He has partnered with over a hundred other marketers, selling some of the most niche-specific information you can imagine. Tellman Knudson went from broke to millionaire so quickly that his credit couldn’t keep up and he was forced to pay cash for his mansion.
Tellman ultimately became successful not because he published information replete with theory, but because he sold exact step-by-step instructions that, if followed, made people money if they understood the structure of what they were doing. He sold clear, concise recipes to use online. My author friend recognized the power of inherent in the model that Tellman Knudson had developed. And so they began to work together, a result of that first electronic book and attendant community experience growing into a sustained partnership by way of a group mind dynamic, or Mastermind.
Masterminding is a term that has its roots in entrepreneurial culture, thanks to Napoleon Hill’s book Think and Grow Rich. In this book, Napoleon Hill identifies the common thread among all the successful people as being that they hung out together. It’s more complicated than that, but essentially that’s what it boils down to.. they hung out, supported each other, brainstormed together, and created a group dynamic or pattern that in turn helped sustain the energy of that group, generating a feedback loop. Joining the mastermind group that Tellman had organized placed my friend into an elite circle, a group that had grasped and implemented auto-responders, search engine optimization, list building squeeze pages, Google Adwords and Adsense, secrets of converting traffic into sales, setting up merchant accounts, and tracking and analyzing site statistics to constantly tweak presentation to better improve profitability. The mastermind group was very carefully structured, with each member getting a minute to address goals they’d achieved from the previous week and things they were grateful for, then ten minutes a piece to present a concern or issue they’d like advice on, after which the focus moved to the next individual. At the end of each session, again the focus went around the room as each member of the group announced what they’re goals for the coming week might be, after which the group closed. The mastermind group had its own consensus as to which infoproducts were most important. Simple-ology by Mark Joyner and David Allen’s Getting Things Done, combined with Joshua Shafran’s Net Profits on Demand made up the Holy Trinity of the effective infomarketer, to this elite circle.
Tellman himself had certainly mastered the Net Profits on Demand system. Routinely an idea he’d not fully have articulated in one meeting would have come to fruition withn a week’s time. On one particular Thursday he’d woken early in the morning to an idea, and had then gone to sleep that night having made forty thousand dollars from putting that idea into a marketable form throughout the day, then pitching it that night on a teleconference to hundreds of people. That, he would probably say, is the power of having a massive list.
My friend was a memeticist in a former life. During his stint in the corporate world, he’d been assigned that label to denote his ability to design marketing campaigns that people couldn’t help but spread via word-of-mouth to others. He was good at it. He went into private consulting so he wouldn’t have to do this kind of work to someone else’s tune, and in working with Tellman he’d hooked up with one of the top salesmen of Mark Joyner’s Viral Marketing Chemistry Set. He took the corporate world’s version of memetics, and combined his expertise with Tellman Knudson’s masterful grasp of entrepreneurial network marketing approach, heavily informed by aspects of marketing that most mainstream advertisers completely overlook. In other words, he’d found access to a community that already understood how he could be of value. And there is a lot of money in being in the right place at the right time. But this coordination with Tellman Knudson was again only one piece of a much larger book promotion.
If you’ve ever seen a page that asks you to enter your name and email, you’ve seen the basics of a ‘squeeze page’ list building campaign. What was once a small box on the side of a web homepage has evolved among the most sophisticated infomarketers as a double-blind tested revenue stream with a page all to itself. Those I’ve talked to personally state that a good email pitch can bring in about a dollar for every hundred names on your list, on average, once you’ve topped a thousand or so email addresses. To put this in perspective, Tellman Knudson is well on his way to his stated goal of having a million person list. Let’s do some quick math.
The marketers I’ve known say that you can assume that about 1% of the people on a list will actually hit a conversion page you link to in the emails you send out. What this means is that if you have a list of 1,000 people and you send them all an email with a link to a page that has a product for sale, about 90 to a 100 of them will end up on that page, and maybe 8 or 9 of them will buy the product on that page. A lot of other factors come into play, of course. If you have a list that caters to pet owners and you send your list a link selling Dog Training videos, you’re going to see more sales than if you send them to a page selling Hypnosis Weight-Loss audio mp3s. In the world of information marketing, a targeted niche has massive income potential. And in the world of desktop publishing and the wikification of resources, anyone can become an expert in some specialized niche.
Let’s assume that instead of sending your list through an amazon affiliate link to something you’d only make 4 or 6% commission on, that you sent your list to a high-test info-product you’d arranged through one of the affiliate services like ‘Click Bank” to something you made a 50% commission. So you were selling something like the Wealth Autopilot for $1,497.00, and for each one you sold you’d then end up with $748.50 in your paypal account. Suddenly that list that could generate 8 or 9 sales begins to pay rent, food, and bills, instead of just providing you with the occasional Amazon gift certificate. If you were to sell a ‘continuity program’ through affiliate links, you could actually generate an ongoing residual stream of income as you recieve a percentage each time they pay their monthly fees. Tellman Knudson’s continuity program is a monthly fee of $497 that provides the member with weekly teleconference access to Tellman, and full access to the entire line of Tellman’s infoproducts. Honestly, getting hundreds of people to spend nearly $500 a month in return for a few phone calls and a bewildering array of ebooks and audio files has to be the most lucrative business I’ve ever come across. Selling that kind of program, even as an affiliate, can put a person in a very good position financially.
Tellman Knudson swears by the list. And, taking this coaching to heart, my friend planned accordingly. He not only focused on building his own list, but also on cross-promoting with others on their lists. (More on that in part three.)
Several of Tellman Knudson’s links:
My First HTML
My First List
My First Emails
My First Conversion
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