welcome to the magnetic marketing podcast in this episode we're asking the question what makes a great info product is it simply it needs to work really well for customers that it's good information Dan Kennedy is going to argue that there's much much more to that in this episode what makes a great info product Dan divulges the real purpose of an info product lays down the criteria for measuring the success and provid some of the key ingredients that are essential to creating an info product that will sell now and for years to come check out part
one of what makes a great info product I don't think there's anybody that has had a bigger impact in the field of direct response than Dan Kennedy the legend of Dan Kennedy should be ignored at your own Peril they're not really lessons they're kind of laws that you live by Dan opened my eyes to what small business marketing looks like Dan teaches strategic direct response that is timeless his ripple effect touches people who don't even know his name the world as we know it was changed because Dad Kennedy became obsessed with marketing welcome to the
magnetic marketing podcast with your host Dan Kennedy we're going to talk about the creation of information product um has high value enduring million doll and multi-million doll assets and uh what goes into them in terms of embedded um Psy psychology what makes products really sell work uh create results for people keep customers coming back for more what makes a product a really really valuable asset and I want to start sort of by talking about the criteria I mean what makes a great information product so we could measure it as many people do purely in terms
of sales and revenue so the product that sells the most that brings in the most money may be the best information product although I would suggest to you that that's somewhat of a narrow and uh perhaps uh shortterm thinking approach probably the opposite would be to consider longevity how long the product lasts once you've invested all the effort to create it another a favorite of mine is how good a job that product does at bringing in attracting creating growing training really really really good customers does the product do a good customer development job and last
its overall impact and in influence um I've been uh pretty fortunate I tried to figure it out when we agreed on this topic how many information proc products I've created and I always tell people I'm far I'm more prolific than good so the the the the quantity is actually quite High I gave up the project effort about 20 minutes of roaming around in my files because it was going to take too much time to get the answer to that question uh but it is well over 500 that have been created over the span of my
career all the way back to the earliest really really awful stuff to the most recent okay stuff uh to a few things that have been really really good if you think about that criteria that we just talked about um some you're familiar with some perhaps you're not but um I have been fortunate to create some products that have had uh multi-million dollar value and have created a lot of good customers um and have done a good job of developing those customers the first one in that category I'm curious if anybody in here because this goes
back a waste does anybody in here own this thing anybody yeah see you're all too oh yeah well you don't count um no one else just bill okay see that that goes back a long ways that product um in 1980 and 1981 uh sold over 3,000 units at between $199 and 33999 uh almost entirely from lead generation advertising uh offering a free uh eight track uh a free audio cassette um um a lot of people don't know by the way this business actually started with records um and and I actually own business and self-help records
um they're both singles and album size records uh the biggest problem with them was the the record player bouncing up and down on a car seat it was hard to keep the it's hard to keep the needle on um um um that's that's only partially funny um uh anyway this for this was a free tape for a dollar and then a sales letter was sent out and the product was extremely successful um in pretty much all of the ways that you would measure product the one you're going to be more familiar with actually is is
the news news letter the the nobs marketing letter which I consider an information product and uh it goes back to uh to to 1992 so that news newsletter um is of course the foundation of today's business how many would like a copy of the first issue we'll try and work that out I'll think of some way that you earn that um there's a great story I hadn't looked at in a long time there a story um I'm not going to get it right now but it's good so there's a there's a there's an owl who
comes in as a consultant to a frog whose problem is is that um other animals keep picking on the Frog and he can't jump far enough to get away from them and the ow studies the whole problem and tells them that the answer to all of his problems is simply to fly because that solves the bird's problems and so he takes the Frog up to the top of a big building and has the Frog fly and of course the Frog crashes to Earth and as he's lying there nearly dying he complains to the ow about
the advice and the ow says you're complaining about implementation I'm a Concepts guy um pretty good story is it it's that is um so that news newsletter has has been around all those years and the most important thing it did was provide a single place to funnel customers into from wherever they originated now that's yeah that for some of you that's that's a wrer downer um a lot of people's information marketing businesses and their product lines are have poorest borders um I thought it was interesting we're we're requiring passports for people to get into the
international session on Sunday morning you you don't need one of those you don't need any proof to vote in our elections in Arizona but to get into our session on Sunday morning you you got to have a valid passport um Mo a lot of information marketing businesses have poorest borders people kind of come and go they can buy something then they can disappear and so what that creation of that product did was create a single place to funnel everybody into regardless of where their point of origination was and get a border around them uh and
build a relationship with them magnetic marketing so how many of you in here own magnetic marketing raise your hands okay for how many of you was that your point of origin your first now again you learn more looking around at them than you do looking at me people not learn anything about me keep them up for a second for how many was that a point of origin okay and keep your hands up now if you've been with us for five years or longer and that was your point of origin again you learn more by looking
around so there you go so that product has sold that we know of because it's a much knocked off so I'm not counting the eBay editions uh but that that um which seems to be a lively publishing Arena from which I get no a royalties uh but um magnetic marketing is now 14 years old uh it has sold that we know of directly over $65 Million worth of product um and has been licensed and translated and it's the only marketing product ever to be sold in Sky Mall catalogs on airplanes uh three different times n
Go conet has rolled it out uh Hume publishing um daytimers catalog um on and on and on and the most important point about that product first of all it's been Evergreen so that product was originally built um against the Jimmy Carter recession um which now looks like a Tupperware party and um uh and it was called the small business emergency survival system then it became magnetic marketing when the economy improved a little bit and and um it literally has been an evergreen product and a lot of people don't really think about that when they develop
product but if you really think about them as assets uh having something that doesn't go away in six months or in three months or after a week-long launch uh can be an interesting part of this business and then when it brings in and trains customers in a particular way of thinking and develops them into good customers it's even more interesting uh so so that's been a good product and I could go on so there are about 10 in my portfolio who I would say meet all the criteria of a great information product I would make
the point that that's out of about 500 so when you think in terms of batting average um I guess that's not very good but it's probably realistic um you don't get one of the every time you step up to the plate um you have to wonder when you now develop something and bring it to the market uh what kind of staying power it's going to have excuse me what kind of influence it's going to have so Napoleon Hill stuff uh goes back to uh 19 19 uh 1917 start 1928 first P publication so 1928 that's
73 years years is anything you or I are doing right now still going to be popular still going to be purchased in large quantity every year 73 years from now uh Earl n Gale's work is about 60 years old malta's work is about 50 years old uh my oldest The Ultimate Sales Letter book will be 20 years old um next year uh is any you're doing going to have that kind of staying power and whether you aspire to that kind of staying power or not it's still a good question because it speaks to the influential
power of the product and so Products that come and go rather fluidly may not be very welld designed to start with so let's talk about what the purposes of product really are so when you sat down to do a product and you sat down to put together a resource that you're going to bring to the marketplace really what are the purposes of doing so well dummies think it's a necessary evil that must be accommodated so you have something to exchange for money so that's actually most people's approach to info product creation and Publishing is it
really says I want 100,000 bucks this month and they're not going to give it to me for nothing so we're going to have to put something together that we're going to deliver and that's truthfully about 90% of the thinking process that goes into it it's literally a necessary evil to exchange for money and I would say to you that the more sophisticated information marketer first of all views it as a starting point or a furtherance of having customers for life so they really view it as not only a thing we exchange for money I'm all
for that but has a relationship development tool as well because when you talk about building million-dollar assets the truth of the matter is the intellectual property has no value without the consumers who wish to purchase it and stay with you after they have purchased a in order to purchase B and in order to purchase C the asset value actually transfers from product to herd and if you're just taking the money out of the product and not developing the herd you're not creating any Equity you're only creating income so for it to do that products actually
have to serve multiple purposes so I'm going to quickly through take take you through uh what I think are the chief purposes of uh of a product so one is product as persuasion um I think one of the one of the things people don't realize and I'll use books mostly As examples even though they are information products they're not particularly good information products from an economic standpoint but their examples we all aware of and I'll use books you've all read so if you take a look at these enduring High longevity Evergreen books so if you
go look if you look at Think and Grow Rich if you look at uh maltz's work if you pick up uh uh Bob Allen's nothing down the original real estate of his line if you look at these books you will find find that they are really sales letters as much as they are howto books they are selling from the very first page to the very last page and in almost every case you could swap out the last chapter and you could put a hardcore offer in there that the rest of the book sold and you
wouldn't have to rewrite much of the book they really are persuasion documents as much as they are anything else and I would suggest to you that every great information product has this has part and parcel of what it is and what it does it sets out to engage in in in a sales process and actually even a conversion process of bringing the person from point A to some predeter point Z of acceptance of an idea a concept a philosophy a b into something and the great information products are really selling multiple things one they are
of course reselling the product that has already been purchased so here's a base a lot of people miss so this is another writer Downer for you okay most people think in terms of sell product deliver product product gets used but they forget that in almost every case there's a lapsed time between sell product deliver product and use used product even in an environment like this if I was selling from the front of the room today and you were leaving at the end of the day with your little bag full of stuff that you bought at
the room back of the room very very very few are going to start using the product in the car on the way home from the event where they bought it at there's going to be a lapse time between the purchase of the product and the first use of the product what happens during the elapse time all of the reasons why they bought the product and all the excitement and enthusiasm over having bought the product evaporates and now they are opening a box opening a notebook clicking onto an online course whatever it is you have them
doing cold don't underestimate this factor that elapsed time has removed the reasons why they bought it and all the en enthusiasm for having bought it I um I recent I recently enrolled to go to a seminar on December 34 and 5 and I registered from an ad in a trade journal and it's not an inexpensive seminar it's about $5,000 plus I'm going to have to travel and um I sort of registered on impulse um I called saw the ad picked up the phone called gave my credit card and registered and that was about uh month
ago other than a little tiny one paragraph confirmation I have received nothing since then guess who's not going to the seminar this guy because I have now talked myself out of it okay the same thing happens with product guess who's not going to get into what they bought because they're opening it now cold so one of the things great information product does is it sells the product again in order to restart the interest and the enthusiasm okay the second thing it does guys if you'll leave the slide up there I'll take it on and off
okay um thank you so the second thing it does you can go to me if you like when I take it off um the the second thing it does then is it sells important Concepts it sells ideas the third thing it does is it sells a particular philosophy now this is another thing people Miss okay here's another thing people miss with information products okay they don't create a philosophical base for the howtos and if you don't get your consumer in sync with you about some sort of belief system I don't care if you're teaching how
to be a plumber if you don't get them in sync with you about some sort of belief system your likelihood of keeping them involved in the hardcore instruction of how to do whatever it is that you're teaching them to do is not great and if you look at all the really great information marketers and you go examine their products okay you will find that a significant amount of the time is devoted to selling the philosophy not just the instruction another thing that great products do is they sell opportunity so they convince this person now that
has this product and is beginning to get into it that they have in their hands an amazing opportunity to transform something business income physique Health relationship and so they frame what's going on in the language of opportunity and we're going to talk a little bit more about that actually in my breakout tomorrow uh this is important the great information product sells the reader on himself now what does that mean well again at the time of purchase the person has become interested in enough and enthused enough about this thing you are putting in front of them
that they forget about their own enormous dysfunction um incompetence long track record of not following through on anything um and the critical environment in which they live with the spouse the peers the friends the employees are who are very very very aware of their dysfunction the fact that they never follow through on anything etc for a moment they forget all about that when you have them whipped into sufficient fervor about this thing you are putting in front of them now again there's a lapse time before they go to use it when they go to use
use it their their realization of who they are has returned and they are back in the environment with all of the people who are very aware of who they are this is not good for us what's good for us is that suspension of understanding of who they are not the recognition of who they are so a great product has to sell them on themselves it has to convince them that this is the time this is going to be different it has to convince them that they're right and everybody else in their world is wrong etc
etc so great products sell them on themselves and of course last great products sell them on the what's next so to give you some very quick examples and again I just picked these out of books so here is I don't even know which oh this is from my direct marketing book so here is chapter one now What's significant about this is again this really is a sales document as much as it is anything else even the even the subtitle of the chapter the first word is why so this chapter is selling them Concepts and it's
reselling them the product they just bought in this case the book The resell line is if you picked it up hoping for huge bre breakthroughs in your business you bought the right book okay this is also from a book I forget which one doesn't make any difference okay again so chapter8 is the title itself is selling the concept the chapter is about using proof and then the chapter title is this is the most important tool for exceptional success in selling right it's selling the concept again here's a chapter 17 this chapter is really about lead
generation but the entire first page of the chapter is a sales pitch for using lead generation okay this paragraph says for more than 25 years this method has been adopted taught and proliferated in over 200 different sales niches then it lists a whole bunch of niches so they can't not find themselves and do the my business is different thing so that entire page now here's a selling reader on himself block of copy this is from the sales book I'm just going to read it quickly to you so understand this is a book about sales for
salespeople who generally are maligned right not as maligned as lawyers and politicians but pretty much close um so to the economy it selling is the most essential lifeblood if the economy required to subsist only on consumer spending done entirely of consumers and business's own initiative only a basic necessities the entire world would come to an end in damn short order we could certainly survive a few months of all politicians on vacation all lawyers on vacation all teachers on vacation and just about everybody else but the doctors who cope with our health emergencies and fire police
Rescue and Military troops who Safeguard our lives on vacation but we couldn't survive even a month with salespeople on vacation America would be in a depression that would make 29 look like a day at Disney World faster than a mouse click and that Mouse see that's and and the rest of the world would follow us off that Cliff like it or not if no sales people sell today nobody eats by next week so that paragraph is selling the salesperson his own self-image and his own self-esteem why because if you leave all that out and just
teach selling you don't have a great information product because it's not going to Crave Bond relationship etc etc Etc not only are these good examples but if you go through these books carefully and it's easier to see it in a book than it is in a multimedia product because if you're listening and you're looking and so forth if you go through the book carefully um you're not going to find you you're you're hardly ever going to catch me going two pages without some persuasion without some selling it's not like a page at the back of
the book suffices no it's interwoven all the way through and if you get an information product same thing you're going to find that the selling is constant and woven all the way through the product then the second thing I think that makes a great information product is is that it is about something big not just its core competency content but it is about some big Ideas the most enduring entertainment product as well as information product tends to be about Big Ideas who knows who is the of all the comic superheroes who's lived the longest and
made the most money for its owner so Superman yeah you're absolutely right that's absolutely correct by far okay um why biggest idea uh which they've modified only very recently in a nod to political correctness but Superman was about three things truth justice and the American way Big Ideas okay Earl nightingale's product was about lead the field it's a big idea Tony's original product personal power that's a big idea and you want to wrap your product in some sort of big idea magnetic marketing is about a big idea it's about no more prospecting it's about no
more chasing no more Pursuit it's about attracting people rather than hunting people that's a very very big idea and so great information products have wrapped around them and at their core something bigger than 27 ways to sell an insurance policy um not 27 ways to sell an insurance policy is a very good thing if you're an insurance agent but if you want a really great information product that's going to be coupled with some sort of very big idea also there are embedded influential ideas so one is a commitment to a CA well I got ahead
of myself here this thing is commitment to a cause a mission or a purpose okay so somehow the product has you involved so who right now is making the most money in publishing information entertainment who's number one Glenn Beck think what you wish I make no political comment but if you want to study somebody who is pushing product out the door at an incredibly prolific rate in incredibly large sums of money coming back in the door it's back because every product pushed out the door is about a mission a purpose a cause consequently for example
in the book business interesting stat you will if you go look at the New York Times bestseller list if you go look at the neelon book scan list you're going to find the Beck books every one of them shoots to the top and many of them have great longevity the average glenbeck listener viewer buys eight copies of every book not one buy one for themselves seven to proze with well that's a big that's a big multiple that's a big multiple and that is like a hardbound $24.95 book not by the way a i PE I
mean a book you know this guy is pushing product because of mission bonding with the author Guru product great information product bonds to the individual There are rules because what people want more than anything else is certainty the diet that made more money that broke all records it has the second greatest longevity in the diet business is Dr Atkins and so the original Dr Atkins again it's he's dead and a big conglomerate owns it and you know things have changed but for the years that Dr Atkins was promoting Dr Atkins the most significant thing about
Dr Atkins was absolutism no Free Fridays no eat what you want once a week no exchanging points so you can weasle in a pizza no no here's what you eat here's what you don't eat absolute rules a version of the 10 commandments thinking go rich is 17 the original book by the way was called 17 Laws of Success cvy seven habits of gets close everybody's looking for the 10 commandments I had um um I recently had a fairly long meeting with with um with the CEO of Tupperware which is if you don't know it it's
the most successful direct sales company in the world and they own multiple Brands they own Beauty control cosmetics and so forth it's not about plastic pots um and and we were talking about the direct sales business in general but he went actually to the same point that I have made a number of times he said there's two things that people don't really understand about this business and so most companies screw it all up he said one and the direct sales industry by the way went through a phase not too long ago where they tried to
move everything out of the living room and out of the hotel Ballroom onto the internet and it just about destroyed a number of big companies and they all scurried back and so the first thing that he said is what a lot of people don't understand is if you look at every religion since the beginning of time regardless of what hat they wear robe they wear uh God they worship uh the one commonality is a meeting at least once a week and so there's something there's there's a message there he said the second thing is they
all have a version of ten commandments so it tells you what people really want okay now the first thing I mentioned is hard to deliver by product but it's easy to deliver in other means but the second thing is they want these Ten Commandments they want a set of rules so you will find these things has influential items put into almost every product uh the best example of it that's easy for you to find and look at again is in the direct marketing book and it is in a chapter that looks like this and is
titled the rules as an aside by the way just as an aside there's a difference between how we should behave and what we sell to others so the last thing you want to be doing is roaming around looking for the list of 10 rules bad idea because of the owl problem um in that story say most of the people making up the rules are making up the rules for a very specific purpose to extract money from large numbers of people who want rules that's that's that's that's the deal okay and to think otherwise that that's
so everybody gets in a room and figures out a set of rules rules they do it to extract money from a lot of people who want rules you want to be on the right side of that cash register you don't want to be on the wrong side of that cash register so people are looking for simple answers to complex problems there are no such things but if you want to build a great product that will satisfy a lot of them it's a component part really that has to be there here are some of the key
ingredients very specific ingredients that you will find in the most successful information products so one is some sort of a fast start and a small victory now again remember where somebody actually is when they start to use your resource they were enthused they're not enthused now they were confident they're not confident now they are feeling buyer remorse they are snapping back to the person that they were before they made the purchase you have a very short period of time before you lose them all together the reason why most product doesn't get used and you should
know most product does not get used right most product still has the shrink wrap on it and it is on a Shelf or it is in a closet in the old days when people listened to all this stuff in their cars it was under their car seats if you were ever desperate for an audio cassette program all you had to do was look under a car seat that's where it was right so most product never gets used right here's the reason it's because of this elapse time between the enthusiasm of purchase and the attempt to
use and Implement and by then they have snapped back to who they are okay so if they don't get some quick quick Victory sense of Victory when they begin if they don't get a fast start they will get no start at all so something has to happen quick I was talking Craig Proctor who I think is here who's coaching training programs in the real estate industry um not only number one for many years but pretty much at the moment the Lone Survivor um uh and we were talking about the program that he sells now and
I said so what happens when they buy when they join and he said the first call is the next day they're all forced on to the first call the next day day well that's that's right okay I invented some years ago for a client the big decal on the outside of the box call this toll-free number before you do anything else so we could get them on the phone and talk to them and give them a motivational talk about the product that had just arrived at their door without even requiring them to Slit open the
box to get to the motivational message cuz asking them to Slit open the box we're going to lose a bunch of them before they slit open the box so you want some sort of activation you want a fast start you want a fast Victory and you want some sort of activation that occurs very early in the process um I have a favorite story about that that um I was actually going to sa for the breakout tomorrow and then and I decided to tell it here because it's so brilliant in its simplicity so there's an there's
an Oldtimer he's long since left us his name was brainer melinger if you've seen on TV the um the infomercial for specialty merchandise Corporation with Tom Bosley as the host who also just recently left us um um and it sells up business opportunity to be in the the product business well brainer and those guys competed has to head and so Brainard had a thing called the international Traders Association and he put people in the import export business and it was a combination business opportunity and home study course and brainer was an old direct sales guy
vacuum cleaner sales guy which you can take them out of the VAC business but you can't take the VAC the minute you saw the guy you knew white belt White Shoes SE sucker suit I mean a and and brainer was as simplistic as could be but I asked him one time how bad his refund rate was because he's selling a home study course business opportunity about how to be in the import export business to the great unwashed masses and I know that between the time that they order that and the time that it arrives at
their door by UPS 7 Days Later 98% of them have talked themselves you and then the rest of them will talk themselves out of it pretty quickly as they slit open the box he said we cut it in half by making sure that we deliver to everybody the day before their whole package arrives there are 500 personalized business cards with the international Traders logo on it and their name and their title has which I forget now you know certified import export consultant whatever he said because as soon as they got the business cards they ran
around and gave business cards to eight or 10 or 12 of their friends and relatives because they were still excited about this new status in life and now that they did that they really didn't want to back out they had activated their business whether they ever did anything in it or not cut the refund rate in half now I would suggest you had also increased the number who actually did something with the thing that they bought so he figured out this activation Weight Watchers had the buddy system right and so originally when Gene NCH built
the Weight Watchers company they really leaned on every new person as soon as they join to get a weight loss buddy and bring them to the next meeting which occurred the same week that they joined why because once you've involved somebody else how do you gracefully exit leaving the person you involved behind so this activation thing getting them to do something that obligates them that gets them more involved more engaged as quickly as as is possible um this is wanted to show you so here was in magnetic marketing this is from the original magnetic Marketing
System well let me show you this first because we already talked about this so this was almost at the very beginning of the notebook and it's really a stick letter it's a resells the product that they already bought and it is not modest in its promise um how magnetic marketing will change your business life forever and it is four pages long and it resells them on what they bought activation was a thing that looks like this that allows them to send something in for critique now many of you have seen this here's something interesting you
should know about it the logical the smart the sane thing to do with these and there were three of them two of them excuse me and there was also this free marketing challenge consultation so they can write out a question and send it in the intelligent thing to do with this is of course Bank it until you've actually used something in the kit and put together something that would be worth having critiqued you should know that 90% of the Redemption was not that is not that they send something in instantly that they already have which
is awful they don't do any work in order to send something in that it would be useful to critique they grabed the first thing they have laying around and they attach it to the critique certificate and they send it in from my standpoint two pieces of good news about that one critiques are easy okay because it's awful right nothing's easier to critique than crap okay I mean it's something good that you have to do a little work at right secondly it did what it was supposed to do immediate use immediate involvement immediate activation there's also
a road map how this kit is organized all right there are templates I am not going to show those to you so at second important component part then is what is going to make the product stick okay and the best stick letters whether they are audio video print all of those things combined whether they're integrated in the product whether they're sent separately the best stick letters follow the Halbert for format which is congratulations because you bought this you're smart you're a superior human being you're good-looking too and here's all the wonderful stuff that's going to
happen to you and PS since you were so smart to buy this here's something else you might like because the best time to sell them the second thing is when they're in thralled with the first thing which is usually before they actually are required to do any work so it's congratulations promises proof some testimonials everything you can do to preempt them quitting and understand they are on the verge of quitting as they look at the product they bought from you for the very first time even the titles so this was you're not I don't think
you're no going to be able to read them but the one with all the small print over here tape one here's the title your guided tour to extraordinary success applying magnetic marketing to your product service or business Dan takes you through all the exhibits documents and resources so what this tape was it you talked you Page by Page section by section so you didn't get lost because the number one reason why people bail out of an information product is they don't know what to do with it number one question is I don't know where to
start I don't know what to do first now as an aside don't confuse what should be your behavior with what you sell because the last thing we should be looking for is sequential step by step nicely neatly or organized activity that's actually not how you get rich you get rich through simultaneous messy activity but what they want is to be told start here move here then move your game piece here then recite so that's what they want which is what you must give them thank you for listening to the magnetic marketing podcast with Dan Kennedy
if you love hearing in on these lost Dan Kennedy talks and speeches and calls then please let someone else know about this podcast that's how you can help it to grow and the more it grows the more free Dan Kennedy we can bring to you also Dan would love to give you the most incredible free gift ever designed to help you make maximum money in minimum time now this free gift comes with almost $20,000 in pure money-making information for free just for saying maybe you can get this gift from Dan right now at no BS
letter .c not only we get the $20,000 gift you're also going get a subscription to two marketing newsletters that will be hand delivered by the mailman to your mailbox each and every month one from Dan Kennedy and one from me Russell Brunson to get this gift in your subscription go to no BSL letter.com right [Music] now
