Behind the Scenes of a DIY Book Launch (Part 3)

Part 1 – Part 2 – Part 4

Some of the most successful online marketers have become wealthy not because they sold hundreds of thousands of these ebooks and vanity press publications, but because they sold one really expensive book to a couple hundred people. Blair Warren, who sold a 14 page special report on persuasion for $97 in ebook form, also sold a home study course on persuasion for $1,997. It included binders and access to teleseminar training courses. A person really doesn’t need to sell a lot of books at two grand a pop to be ahead of the game.

Even at this level of pricing, the numbers being kicked around in infomarketing conversations hold that some 70% of all infoproducts are never even unwrapped. 30% of the people buying these products actually get into the material, and only 10% actually make it through to the final cd, or dvd, or the last page of the ebook. This seems to indicate that the purchase is an emblem, a talismanic action, not an informed decision. The buying is a ritual action signifying a desire embedded within the subconscious mind of the buyer, and that impulse was brought to the surface and triggered by extremely effective sales copy. Not surprisingly, this need to pitch to desire resonates most strongly when the product is a fool-proof step-by-step manual that appears to fulfill the emotions the salesperson is evoking.

Personally, I find it fascinating that what is being sold is not pure information but rather processes and specific instructions, occasionally with attendant code or computer software. There is no high-end market out there for encyclopedic references, but instead the most expensive information are primarily recipes, the more specific and focused the recipe, the higher its value as an information product. If the formula within a product can be proven to generate instant wealth, then it can be sold for prices that massively overshadow the cost of the materials. While selling .PDF files that are unencrypted for hundreds, or even thousands of dollars utterly baffles my comprehension, but doing just that has made the fortunes of more than a few infomarketers out there. While the effect of cornering and then selling a niche market ways to market more effectively to itself often creates a kind of heat-death. One only need look at the migration into myspace of an affiliate marketing culture that appears to be happily going about selling each other friend-adder and profile surveillance software, alongside the various dick-enlargement pill comment spam and the ubiquitous unsigned bands seeking a fan base. Links lead to spamming sites overloaded with in-browser pop-up ads, suspect sign-up pages, and irritating and band-width hogging audio or video pitches overloaded with every NLP trigger the pitchman could distill into the medium.

These products and their marketers are on Youtube and Google Video of course, but even more are attracted to models like Revver.com or Lulu.tv, and as of the middle of April there has been a new service called FreeIQ,
which purports to be the info-marketers answer to video embedding services. The magic word is MONETIZE: Infomarketing seeks to monetize every interaction the marketer has with the prospect online through some sort of profit-maximizing strategy. The last year has seen this kind of monetization become mainstream with Google incorporating Adsense into blogger, and with Amazon now providing contextual linking for their affiliates, creating a web presence that’s heavily monetized is simple at the most basic level. This affiliate marketing system has sprung up from the edges of network marketing strategy and has become a part of the way that the internet itself is structured. There are a couple primary reasons for this.

First, network marketing by its very nature generates tracking data. Research is so important in an attention economy that supermarkets provide discounts to the shoppers who willingly provide the store with their shopping habits, for example. And in the online world, where a few tweaks one way or another can skyrocket the response rate of “click-throughs to conversions”, tracking and research IS the game. Secondly, affiliate marketing has a huge benefit for the producer of the product. The producer simply makes it known, via a resource like Click-Bank, that they’re willing to pay anyone who can sell their product. The salesperson, the affiliate marketer, only gets paid if they complete a transaction, and the producer pays only out of the profits generated by the sale. Salespeople invest themselves into spreading the message, effectively becoming the medium. Working at the level of emails to hundreds of thousands of people who have consciously opted into one’s email list makes adding a block of Google Ads to a private blog of a ham fisted approach, but there are marketers out there who have put Google Adblocks on thousands of blogs as well, and appear to be doing okay as a result, despite how frustrating these non-signifying blogs can be when they make their way into the search engine results.

And ultimately what this is all about is about driving traffic past advertisements, at the most base level. Whether that traffic is driven by a high-octane pitchman, someone like Joel Bauer, who uses a refinement on the carnival barker pitch combined with NLP stage presence to draw massive attention at trade shows in the real world, Tellman Knudson’s formulaic approach to generate massive traffic online through email campaigns, or Google’s massive and top heavy affiliate scheme to seed the blogosphere with it’s own eyeball traffic past the musings of a million blogspotters online, or the almost quaint attempts on television to keep the couch potato from thumbing the fast-forward on the dvr, to keep them caught in a trance through the commercial advertisements, all of this betokens a split: the old economy has broken down into its three primary parts. We’re looking at the manifestations now of an economic reality that runs on capital, attention, and reputation. Increasingly, capital is made to serve the needs of attention and reputation, to the point I suspect capital may actually be unimportant, that attention and reputation can generate leverage in terms of actual currency much quicker than the old ideas of capital. Another way, probably more accurate in a traditional sense, is to view the ideas placed into motion by the attention and reputation to be the invested capital. In either event, recognizing this allows for some remarkable fortunes to be made off of information being sold on home-burnt cd-roms and dvd-rs filled with unencrypted .pdfs, mp3s, and .movs.

More Affiliate Infoproduct Examples:



Mike Filsaime’s Butterfly Marketing



Eric Rockefeller’s List Monster



Joshua Shafran’s Net Profits on Demand



Yanik Silver’s Instant Internet Profits



The Internet Marketing Main Event