Check out the video below.

Cheers,

Check out the video below to see my take on the clever marketing tactics used in this launch.

Kajabi Guru Popcorn Video

What I failed to mention in the video, even though I meant to, was how incredibly good Andy Jenkins is with narration. He’s a guy who can practically speak on two tracks at the same time: He can say one thing with his words and use tone and rythm to say something else. Reminds me that I want to work on my own speech skills.

Also: Sorry for saying “clever” about 200 times in my video…

Leave a comment below and let me know what your thoughts about this launch are! Do you agree with my views of Kajabi? Or do you think I was too much “under the influence” of the marketing message, because I’m actually interested in this product?

Cheers,

If you have no idea what I’m talking about, watch the first AffiliateDotCom video here and then watch my (brilliant) analysis of it below.

Otherwise, watch my brilliant analysis right away:

As always, your thoughts and comments are welcome.

Cheers,

That was my first reaction to Perpetual Traffic Formula, or rather the free report, which you can get here and which is the first part of a launch sequence for Ryan Deiss’ next product.

The landing page is really slick and awesome looking and the report itself has great production quality as well. As for the content? Marketing at it’s best.

Read on to see the genius way in which this system is positioned as something new and different in what may well be the most saturated market ever… (video after the break)

The premise is this: “SEO is actually really easy”.

Think about that for a second. How many products are there, that have this basic premise? How many products promise to teach you some super-simple SEO secret? Tons of products have this premise because so many people are after “free” traffic (still need to pay for all the SEO ebooks, so it ain’t exactly free…).

What does Mr. Deiss do to make his product stand out from the crowd? Well, check out the report and be amazed. He brakes down SEO to three factors, one of which is “new” in that no one has talked about it before. Not in a big product, anyway. That element is “activity”. In other words, he says that Google checks for human activity on sites and uses that data to adjust rankings. More human activity equals better rankings.

Is this true? I don’t know. It’s certainly not true that human activity is necessary for good rankings. But whether it helps or not, I honestly don’t know. I’ll be testing it, for sure.

There are a few things that struck me as particularly interesting about the sales-process that’s going on with this product. More on this in the following video:

To get the free report, go here.

How did you like the report? And what about the marketing style? Is it appealing to you?
Finally, do you have any experience with whether on-site activity makes a difference to rankings? I’d love to hear your thoughts.

Cheers,

Case in point: The new Product Launch Formula videos by Jeff Walker.

Okay, I guess I know where this is coming from. It’s the same with the launches in general. Why does every marketer use the same kind of pre-launch process, the same kind of build-up, the same kind of hype generation? Because it works…

And I guess that type of video also works. But does that really mean that every marketer has to go and make a carbon copy of the Video Boss videos? Same style, same background music, same fonts, same colors and even the same text-animations? Seriously, you can’t select a different animation effect?

Apart from anything else, I bet that almost no one has actually tested the Video Boss type video against a different type of video. Video is a b***h to split-test, after all. Let me just say that I’ve been running a few tests with different video types and I’ve found some pretty surprising results.

I think that Internet marketers who market to the Internet marketing crowd have to start thinking on their feet a bit more and start innovating more quickly. You see, outside of the IM market, you can go ahead and use all of those tactics and techniques you know inside out. Use free ebooks as sign-up incentives, do the product launch formula, use Video Boss videos, use fake time-constraints, have one-time-offers that aren’t really one-time-offers and claim that the price is about to go up “any minute now”. Outside of the IM market, people haven’t all seen this stuff a million times before.

But if you’re marketing to online marketers, start thinking outside the box and be the guy who comes up with the next formula rather than always relying on methods that everyone got fed up with last week.

And seriously, consider using a different text-animation, if nothing else.

By the way: While Product Launch Formula is certainly going to be big and spectacular and cool and everything, one of my readers recently pointed me towards a product about launching products that looks way more interesting. Check out the Interactive Offer and see for yourself. It’s a really cool way to market (one that I like to use myself) and I learnt some very cool stuff just from the pre-launch videos. Coincidentally, I had already been doing almost exactly what the videos talk about, before I saw them.

Too bad that the Interactive Offer also suffers from Video Boss-itis…

Let me know what you think. Is this rant justified? Are you also fed up with the same old formulas? Do you use them yourself?

Cheers,

I also happen to believe that you can probably learn more about marketing by observing and analyzing what the successful marketers are doing than by buying their magic pills. Guru Popcorn is about following the big product launches, but instead of frothing at the mouth with anticipation for the product, we will watch, be entertained and learn from these marketing spectacles. It’s a bit like going to the movies, really.

Read on to see my run-down of one big launch that’s going on right now.

Our first candidate to watch and analyze is Eben Pagan’s Guru Blueprint. This product is going to be about creating and marketing info products. Having created several multi-million dollar products himself, Eben Pagan is definitely a qualified teacher on this subject. Better yet, most of his products are outside of the Internet marketing niche, so he’s not a guy who can only make money by teaching people how to make money.

Breath of Fresh Air

My Guru Popcorn series starts out on a very positive note, with the Guru Blueprint. First off, the pre-launch process is a breath of fresh air, compared to what we’ve recently seen. The last three big launches – Andy Jenkins’ Video Boss, Frank Kern’s List Control and John Reese’s Outsource Force – were all incredibly uniform in their appearance. They all used very similar site layouts (video on top and comments section below), they all featured four videos (video 1: introduction, video 2: free info give-away, video 3: more free info plus a bit of hype build-up, video 4: full-on sales pitch) and particularly Outsource Force and Video Boss were almost clones of each other.

Eben Pagan does a very different style of video, he set up a pre-launch site in a standard blog-format and he’s delivering more than three videos. He’s pleasantly breaking the product-launch mould.

Master of the Free Line

Eben Pagan is the guy who coined the term “Free Line”. In a nutshell, the free line is the line separating what you give away for free from what you charge for and the idea is to give away great value for free and selling even-higher-quality products at a premium price.

Everyone and their dog has adopted this model to a certain extent, as you get free giveaways left and right and they are part of practically every product launch and sales-funnel online.

However, if you watch the free content Pagan is giving away on the Guru Blueprint blog, it becomes very clear that he is not only the founder, but also the undisputed master of the method. The information on product creation that he gives away is, quite frankly, mind-blowingly valuable.

Sure, Andy Jenkins did a nice video on how to put together a decent sales-presentation and Frank Kern gave away an interesting viral script (that was badly coded and had some security issues, from what I gathered) as well as some of his older courses, but that stuff just doesn’t even come close to what Pagan is sharing.

For me personally, the reaction to the Jenkins/Kern/Reese freebies was somewhere between “that’s nice” and “meh”. My reaction to Pagan’s videos: “HOLY CRAP! If he’s giving this stuff away for free, the stuff he’s selling must be AWESOME!”

And that’s exactly what’s supposed to happen. That’s what the free line is about.

Proof and Confidence

One thing I found very interesting about the Guru Blueprint pre-launch was how, particularly in the first video, a lot of emphasis is put on how much money Pagan has made with info products.

He goes on and on about how his company is grossing close to $30 Mio per year and how each of his products is selling like crazy. He also goes to great lengths illustrating the growth in the info-product market and explaining how absolutely vast the potential market for such products is.

He goes on about this stuff for much too long, for my tastes. And that’s what makes it so interesting.

You see, Eben Pagan is not just some rich dude with an inflated ego and no feeling for how to pace a video. If he puts “too much” of something in a video, he does it on purpose. I’m sure of that, because he’s nothing if not deliberate.

It seems that this is a way to address some common concerns, as people tend to worry about a market or method becoming over-saturated (“affiliate marketing is dead”, “do ebooks still work?” and all that).

Closing Thoughts

Personally, I enjoyed the Guru Blueprint pre-launch videos immensely and I’m quite impressed with the whole sales-process. I usually couldn’t care less about Guru-products but in this case, I have to admit: I’d love to see what is offered in this course and whether it lives up to the price tag.

I wonder whether this will be a “limited” launch as the Guru products typically are. Pagan generally offers his products indefinitely, but lack of scarcity could seriously hurt sales, given the very lofty price-tag (according to the affiliate information, there will be several levels to the Guru Blueprint, ranging from $2000 to around $5000).

It also remains to be seen how exactly Pagan will present the final pitch and I’m looking forward to that, as well.

UPDATE:
I’ve added this video with my analysis of the final “sales-pitch” video for the Guru Blueprint: