The Internet Marketing Arena was held hostage by Frank Kern, who was launching his latest product,
L I S T C O N T R O L (offer expired!)
last week.
‘LISTCONTROL’ is a one month interactive video training program for people who want to start an online business.
The course has a strong focus on email marketing and relationship building.
I made a quick teaser video about the launch.
Video produced by Mr. Blue Eyes.
Create your own video slide-show (↑) at animoto.com.
At the $1,997.00 price point it’s not an inexpensive program, but at first Frank Kern has a great reputation, secondly the buyer is protected with a rock-solid money back guarantee, and thirdly Frank addresses issues most beginners get stuck with in other courses, ebooks, and trainings.
In a live interview with video marketer and co-founder of Traffic Geyser (↑), Mike Koenigs, Frank said
[…] Listcontrol particularly covers beginner questions in module 1. […]
Something his famous and legendary product Masscontrol (fall of 2008 and 2009) did not teach that directly. But Listcontrol wouldn’t be a course by Frank Kern if very advanced topics weren’t covered. And this starts with content syndication in module 1 which is something beginners don’t need to worry about, but advanced folks will love to implement right away.
Major marketers in the Internet Marketing Community Promoted Frank’s launch
Such a launch stirs up the pot and while Frank’s affiliates feed the frenzy, others condemn such product launches altogether. There are usually three groups of people. Wait, really it’s four.
buyers
almost buyers
non-buyers
those who don’t notice the launch at all
It’s usually the non-buyers who loudly protest against that sort of product launches.
However, there are two critical facts to consider:
Launches work for many reasons (enough stories for another post.)
The largest group is people who don’t notice the launch at all. (6 Billion people or so; a product launch is very targeted and not a spam campaign.)
As usual with Frank — techniques get refined — this launch is different. I don’t have any accurate figures on the metrics, and I know Frank Kern would not talk about specifics before the refund period is over anyway.
… therefore, just a few comments from me as they came to my mind during the last couple of days.
What a surprise — for the first time I got search results surfed by Microsoft's Bing search engine. And I did not even intend that. All I wanted to do was to find a particular project for a Wave client (software) I read about on the Web. I typed my query into the address bar, hit enter, and got these results below.
Not necessarily what I was looking for. But wait a second … Why didn't Firefox serve the result from Google as usually?
Search result from Bing! Why? (Click on the image to enlarge in new window.)
Well, I played around with Bing a tiny bit, right when Microsoft had launched their new search service but I did not stick with it for long. Honestly, Google is my most favorite search engine. Period. Google did not only catch me for search, but with a plethora of other great applications. From Gmail, to Google Docs, AdWords, … to their translation tool, and … Wave is the latest on the list. They hooked me up. Probably for life.
So I was quite surprised that I suddenly got Bing results displayed.
What has happened?
I remember that I had updated my Alexa Sparky add-on for Firefox this week. I also remember having seen a note about new features but I kind of ignored it. Now, it's obvious what had happened. Alexa Sparky is one of the FireFox Add-ons I use.
It started out with a big, big rush around September 15th 2007, when legendary Internet marketer, guru, self-made multi-millionaire John Reese, fired up his revolutionary BlogRush network. Everybody and their mother was blogging, tweeting, and talking about it. The big run on BlogRush showed the size of John's tribe. His brand new site approached the 1,000 Alexa ranking mark within a couple of days.
Nothing to buy, nothing to sell. The service was free and should deliver a lot of highly targeted traffic to everybody's blog. All you needed to do was to install the widget.
The promise: Lots of free traffic fast especially for smaller blogs
Some wrote this new blog syndication network were not as revolutionary as John tried to sell it to us. Others claimed to know that everything John touches will turn into pure gold.
If you are following “the” Internet Marketing Masterminds you certainly have been overwhelmed by the large amount of free quality information that was given away prior to following product launches lately.
I am talking about the following launches:
SMARTS (link expired) from StomperNet Pulled off the market for strategic reasons soon after the launch (the story is quite long, I don't really want to blog about it.)
Internet Marketing Explained (link expired!) from Armand Morin Homestudy course, still available; it's not limited in quantities sold as far as I know.
Masscontrol (link expired) from Frank Kern 30 day class, limited to about 500 people, sold out in less than an hour at a ticket price of about 2,000 $
Now, look at the Alexa graphs (screenshot on 2008 Feb 03)