Dave’s Information Marketing Blog A Transparent View Into One Adventure

Steve Jobs at Next illustrating his business plan circa 1991.  It’s a great example of logical business plan that didn’t make sense to the larger market.

Pork and Beans by Weezer is a masterful bit of viral marketing since it contains many popular Internet memes. They’ve had 14.3 million views in five months. But it’s really lame that the video is not embeddable.

Edited video with lyrics and names of the memes.

50 dollars, bucks, bones, clams

Both contests END October 31, 2008 so don’t delay entering.

The Lazy Slacker Contest #1: Win $50 or $100 in PayPal Cash

This is the easy one that takes just a minute.

• Subscribe to LazySlacker blog via RSS or e-mail
• Leave a comment on the post saying you subscribed (Registration required.)

He’ll pick the winner using a random number generator.

Enter Contest #1

The Lazy Slacker Contest #2: Win $75 in PayPal Cash

This one takes more than a minute.

• Subscribe to LazySlacker blog via RSS or e-mail.
• Leave a comment on the post saying you subscribed
• Link
• Tell friends
• Promote it
• E-mail him or leave a comment saying what you did

Enter Contest #2

The Lazy Slacker is a new blog that started two days ago. His goal is to show how to take a new blog and reach $1M residual income. He may be a lazy slacker but this doesn’t appear to be his first foray into Internet Marketing. I’m definitely going to watch over his shoulder. He’s running contests to build initial traffic. The Lazy Slacker

I learned of his web site after he started following me on Twitter.
Me: trustavenger Him: thelazyslacker

I haven’t been whipping through the 30 Day Challenge lessons but have been making steady progress. The last two weeks has been spent moving a month’s worth of content to this blog and adding original content to the Best Temecula Wine Tasting site.

Nevertheless, I’m still very impressed by the 30 DC lessons and am looking forward to seeing how WordPress Direct can make it easy to add content.

Thanks to a direct response to my Twitter account (trustavenger), I learned of a WordPress plugin called Viper’s Video Quicktags. I just tested it with the previous YouTube video and it worked like a charm.

Viper’s Video Quicktags will save you lots of time embedding video from YouTube, Google Video, DailyMotion, Vimeo, Veoh, Viddler, Metacafe, Blip.tv, and more. Get the plugin.

One of my favorite YouTube videos.  And I don’t even like soccer.

Since having fun is critical, I’ll link to at least one fun video every Friday. If you’re not familiar with the Numa Numa Guy (Gary Brolsma), you need to first watch the video that started the craze.

• Numa Numa (19.8 Million views)
• Numa Numa - digitally remastered (2 Million views)

Numa Numa Yoda #09 (2 Million views)

And my favorite spin off without CGI. Numa Numa Girl (0.5 Million views)

Anyone interested in information marketing should watch the video on Seductive Selling by Frank Kern. Here’s a word of warning; near the end of the video he states, “This stuff is a little bit sneaky. It’s a little bit black ops stuff.” Even though this is the type of stuff I usually detest, there is enough valuable content to make it worth your time.

It’s a bit of a sales pitch on how to do a sales pitch. Frank used Jeff Paul as a good example for a loss and redemption story. I know very little about Jeff Paul except that he’s listed on several scam sites. Here are two links: infomercialscams.com and federalhomebusinessreview.com

Even with these disclaimers, Frank’s video has a number of valuable insights that are important for anyone marketing and selling information. For that reason, I’ve included some notes below so you can refer to them later.

Watch Frank Kern on Seductive Selling

• Old Way: Now that I’ve hit you over the head with this ad and therefore gotten your attention, let me hard-sell the hell out of you before you get the chance to escape.
• Real World: Now that you know me and we have a relationship, it’s time to invest in my stuff.

• A search engine user is usually in a problem/solution or a getting ready to buy mindset
• A blog reader is usually in a news-getting/entertainment frame of mind.
• An e-mail reader is usually in a “Let’s be productive” or “I wonder what’s up with so and so” frame of mind.

More “C Words” for Fun and Profit!

• Why You Got ‘Em: Content
• How You Keep ‘Em: Character (You become a character they follow and are interested in.)
• Bottom Line: We remember and respond more to entertainment

You Can Assume Different Roles

• The Leader: You’re their drill Sgt. Think Tony Robbins.
• The Adventurer/Crusader: Makes shocking discovery. Kevin Trudeau. It’s THEIR Fault, not yours.
• The Reporter/Evangelist: Before and after story. A story of loss and redemption. Rocky, Karate Kid, Jeff Paul, Neil Strauss.

Story Line

• The Before and After
• Discovery story
• Telling Secrets
• Third Person Testimonial
• Us vs. Them Saga

Eliminate Resistance

• Find your market’s FRUSTRATIONS and hammer them remorselessly

Associate Objections with a Common Enemy

• Stir up this frustration, find the common enemy, and blame it all on them.
• The object is to bond with the reader and give them absolution for their own incompetence.
• You’re not making money because those pesky guru’s aren’t telling you everthing
• They’re trying to sell you these crazy PPC schemes and Joint Venture schemes …but they quietly use the REAL secrets to make fortunes
• It’s simply not their fault.

Absolution yields Obedience

• REALITY: If you’d actually read the directions, take action, quit hanging out in forums, stop being a whiny shitwad, and not quit a the first sign of trouble, you wouldn’t have this problem.
• WHAT TO SAY IF YOU WANT MONEY: Of course you’re having problems. The so-called GURUS aren’t telling you the whole story. It’s THEIR fault. Follow me as I show you what they’re hiding.

Go Ahead, Admit It

• We love flawed characters
• Make a damaging admission
• It can be about your product or yourself
• This isn’t a magic bullet. Sometimes, you’ll use this system in a new market and it won’t work. Hell, nobody hits a home run every time…
• Turn your damaging admission into a selling point. (FTC Story.)

With You…

• Use your damaging admission to invalidate the other guys.
• Sure, I might be bad but at least I told you about it. These other guys are much worse …I guess that’s why they try to hide it.
• Sure, learning to write copy might take time and effort. …But you wouldn’t want to waste time building tons of trashy AdSense sites …only to have Google kill your account.

Total Loserdom

• You’re not one of those people are you?
• My stuff isn’t for everybody. It’s not for losers, terrorists, or people who kill kittens.
• So if you’re not a kitten-killing terrorist loser, you will benefit from putting my methods to work for you.

Real World use: Mass Control is not for people who don’t take action, not for people who aren’t willing to step out of the box a bit, it’s not for people who are unethical.

One WordPress feature is automatic trackbacks (pingbacks) by other blogs powered by WordPress. I learned of my first trackback via a Google Alert. It’s a source of back links that may yield some traffic.

These trackbacks are tagged with the “nofollow” attribute so it won’t help Google Page Rank. WordPress 1.5 and above automatically assigns the nofollow attribute to all user-submitted links (comment data, commenter URI, etc). Source: WordPress Codex

In contrast, Blogger doesn’t support trackbacks.