362 of 367 people found the following review helpful:
1.0 out of 5 stars
Misrepresented!, October 29, 2007
This review is from: The Official Get Rich Guide to Information Marketing: Build a Million-Dollar Business in 12 Months: Build a Million Dollar Business in Just 12 Months (Paperback)
This book was, without a doubt, a waste of my time, paper and ink. I own a number of Dan Kennedy books, two audio programs and his manual on writing sales letters. I waited for a month and a half to get this book. I waited for Entrepreneur Press to run copies off in their supply closet. Can you tell I feel cheated? It's because Robert Skrob (the real author) recycled Dan Kennedy's old stuff. In the book they promote this practice and call it repackaging.
Dan Kennedy did NOT write this book! Neither did his second lieutenant Bill Glazer. Although, you need to give Glazer credit for writing the first chapter (16 pages), at least he is a contributing author. Kennedy wrote the introduction but in my experience that does not make you THE author.
You also get a FREE CD? It's not free, you pay for it, believe me. On this very poorly recorded farce Robert Skrob interviews Kennedy and Glazer on a bad phone connection. It is a PLUG for the book and yields no useful information. During the 90 seconds that Kennedy actually speaks, he complains about the call and declares he wants to get off the call. He jokes about Skrob keeping him on the call until the end of the interview. - No class!
But that isn't the worst of it; turns out the book is really 274 pages of the longest sales letter I've ever read. Where is the meat? The examples are good stories, relevant to what you want to learn but they stop short of delivering the truly helpful info. These anecdotes are inspirational examples but they all end by steering you to the Glazer-Kennedy website to purchase the real information. At REDICULOUS prices!
My recommendation; skip this book. Get yourself one or two of the previous Dan Kennedy books (used) and log onto their website read through it. Pay attention to the process of how they are trying to sell you. To be fair what they are doing isn't rocket science so it would be tough to deliver good information over and over again. Their website is an excellent example of what works for them. If this is what you wan to do, copy their stuff right off the net. Heck they even suggest doing this in their book.
The following is a breakdown of the 9 Steps to Build a Million Dollar Info-Marketing Business in 12 Months. My paraphrasing of course:
1st You are only a lead to them, Amazon is how they identified you this time. The next time it may be their website or most likely some annoying piece of junk mail.
2nd Information marketing is selling paper and ink, web-conferences, tele-confrences, CDs and DVDs. By their standards it barley needs to be relevant to the people they are marketing to and that's the end of it. Providing real value, like this book could have been, is not necessary.
3rd Culling the herd of leads down to those that will buy is a matter of follow up and follow through. Send letters and communications to the prospect over and over again.
4th Converting leads to sales = writing compelling copy that:
a) tells your prospect you understand their need,
b) tells your prospect why your product is the best solution they can buy,
c) offers proof through testimonials etc.,
d) explain all the ways the product will benefit the customer,
e) presents the price in a way that makes it sound like a great deal and promote your money-back guarantee so it looks better than it really is,
f) add bonus material to really motivate the customer to buy,
g) make it a limited time offer or add even more bonus product, and
h) ask for the sale.
5th Gain trust with money back guarantees - other than Amazon's return policy no guarantee was offered for this book.
6th Sell the customer once and you can more than likely go back to that trough and drink again and again. That is until they figure out that you have hoodwinked them by selling them the same stuff over and over again.
7th They tell you to start selling your customers more product over and over again. From what I read in the rest of the book, the authors believe you can change your information product and repackage it in different media. Then sell it to you again, just like they did to me. They believe this is the real source of their income.
8th Skrob goes into some helpful information on pricing for profits and media buys. But then he blows it by offering the Kennedy Glazer Merchant Services packages to handle your credit card purchases. He attempts to make the case that all of the other Merchant Services providers are going to freeze your money for 6 months at a time. I know, first hand, that this is not true. Frankly, by the time I was done with this chapter I was so sick of these thugs trying to dig into my pocket I just about threw the book in the garbage.
9th There are some nuggets of wisdom in step 9, "Avoiding the Common Info-Marketer Mistakes before They Find You". I found their market warning about not researching the market and lack of knowledge regarding the target a good reminder. But before I could get to that, Skrob tells you not to bother making a great product. "What you need to do is create something. Get something done and move forward with it as fast as you can. Then you can move on to the next product and the next." Granted, he goes on to say the product needs to deliver the promised benefit, but that is in a discussion of "Good enough is good enough".
I want to take a shower.
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83 of 84 people found the following review helpful:
3.0 out of 5 stars
A rehash of material from books about infopreneurship by other authors that predate this book., December 17, 2007
This review is from: The Official Get Rich Guide to Information Marketing: Build a Million-Dollar Business in 12 Months: Build a Million Dollar Business in Just 12 Months (Paperback)
This book was OK. It provides the overall game plan for successfully selling information online. Unfortunately, however, the overall game plan doesn't require a book to explain. All it really involves is creating an information product (article, ebooklet, ebook, or ezine) and reduce it to a PDF file. Then build a Web site to be your distribution center, and promote and market the URL to the Web site.
Chapter 2 in this book does a nice job explaining that not just any information product will do. To be successful you have to strategize a little bit. Create an information product that lots of people will want to buy. If nobody will want your information product, then you are wasting your time creating it.
But the book falls short on how to design and build a Web site that will be your distribution center. If you want some solid information regarding this topic, then consider taking a look at "The Ultimate Guide to Electronic Marketing for Small Business (ISBN: 047171870X), "Web Business Success" (ISBN: 0974924504), and "The Web Savvy Writer" (ISBN: 0977830403). Google "websavvywriter" to find this last book since it doesn't seem to be sold on Amazon any longer. But it is still being sold by its author.
And there are better books on how to promote and market a Web site than the instant book. One that comes to my mind is "Make a Fortune Promoting Other People's Stuff Online" (ISBN: 0071478132).
What the instant book seems to be good at is providing success stories of real world people. You will find many of these stories throughout the book. However, in my opinion, a better book regarding success stories is "Success Stories of the Online Marketing Superstars" (ISBN: 1419505017).
Probably my biggest problem I had with the instant book is that the title says the book is a GET RICH GUIDE, and that statement is clearly false. This book is not a roadmap to success. It is a sales pitch that may convince you to get a roadmap to success. But it it not a guide. The closest thing to a "guide" on the subject that I have seen is "The Portable Empire" (ISBN: 0470135077). And I didn't particularly like that book because I didn't like the system it described. There are other ways to make a bundle selling information online.
All in all, this book doesn't really provide any new information that other books that predate it have not already covered. And this book is not exceptional in the way it presents its material. Furthermore, the pages are small and the price is kind of steep for what you get. I didn't buy the book at B&N (I just read it there), and therefore I have not listened to the CD attached. But another reviewer says it is a dud. Based on my reading of the book, I suspect the CD is a dud. 3 stars!
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55 of 57 people found the following review helpful:
1.0 out of 5 stars
Not very good, October 31, 2007
This review is from: The Official Get Rich Guide to Information Marketing: Build a Million-Dollar Business in 12 Months: Build a Million Dollar Business in Just 12 Months (Paperback)
I agree with the last reviewer. This book was not written by Dan Kennedy, nor does Bill Glazer have much to do with it. I couldn't wait for this book to come out and now that I've read it, I'm very disappointed. If you've read Dan Kennedy's "How to Make Millions with Your Ideas: An Entrepreneur's Guide", this book isn't going to tell you much more, in fact, I think it was less helpful. It would have been nice to see a case study where someone took an actual hobby and had success with a product they created.
Honestly, I'd give this book two stars, but I hope to offset some of these 5 star reviews that are suspicious to say the least.
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