Technology Used in the Frank Kern Case Study

If you’ve read through my Frank Kern Case Study, you may be wondering exactly how the various marketing components were actually implemented. So here I’m going to provide you with a quick cheat-sheet on each of these applications:

Screenshots

Throughout the case study, I provided jpg photos (or screenshots) of the actual web pages Frank Kern used in his campaign. This is done using super-easy s free download software: Snap N Drag for Mac and King Kong Capture for Windows PC. You can also use your existing windows software to take a screenshot.

Opt-Ins, Email Marketing, List management, database segmentation, Autoresponders

You’ll notice that the emails from Frank Kern, Jeff Walker and Andy Jenkins utilized a number of email marketing tools: trackable links (enables database segmentation), personalized salutations and headers, opt-ins leading to autoresponders, mass email broadcasting to a list, etc.

Well, here are the tools you can use to utilize these same marketing techniques with your prospects:

If you need a basic solution to these marketing needs and you also need a shopping cart, then 1ShoppingCart should work well for you. However, the big drawback with 1ShoppingCart is there is minimal database management or segmentation available.

If you don’t need a shopping cart, then aWeber should work well for managing your email marketing campaigns, newsletters and autoresponder series. It does not provide database segmentation and management though.

If you’re making a decent amount of money online and can afford the creme de la creme solution, then InfusionSoft is your all-in-one answer. The big drawback to InfusionSoft is simply that, because it can do so much, it is quite complex and time-consuming to set-up and program. A number of companies have sprung up to address this concern though, so you can pay someone else to set it up and manage it for you ongoing. Here’s the one that I use and at only $29/hour I believe it’s the cheapest: EcotechCRM & Design.

p.s. Frank Kern and Andy Jenkins use InfusionSoft. Jeff Walker uses aWeber.

Video

Whenever you have a large number of people who are going to be watching your videos, you need to use separate hosting. Even if you have a dedicated server, it will not be able to handle a large number of viewers simultaneously.

If you don’t have much cash, or if your list is on the small side, or if you’re not shooting high quality footage anyway, then just upload your videos to Viddler (you can also use YouTube) and then embed the videos on your web page.

If you’re shooting with a very high quality camera, or you have a ton of prospects/customers, then you’ll want to go with the specialized hosting that Amazon AWS provides.

Every big internet marketer (and many of the small ones too!) uses Amazon AWS to host their audio and video.

Teleseminars

There are plenty of free teleconferencing services available. Just do a Google search on “free teleconference” to pull up a whole list of them. If you are really broke, or, you do not charge for your teleseminars, then this may be a good way to go.

However, if your reputation for excellence is important to you, or if you are charging participants, then you definitely should NOT use a free teleconferencing service. These free bureaus often use internet-based lines and the quality can be really poor. You are almost guaranteed to have glitches on these calls at some point – hey, they’re free, what do you expect?

So, if you want to provide consistent, good quality calls, then use a good quality teleconferencing bureau that, yes, you have to pay for. However, as I found out, just because you pay for the service doesn’t mean they will provide good glitch-free service either!

Since I’ve been in business online for the past 10 years, I have contacts with a number of the “big players” in internet marketing. So I tried a bureau that well-known guru Dan Kennedy / Bill Glazer uses for their calls – and I know they have hundreds of people on a call, so I figured the bureau would be a good one, right? Wrong. Not only did I have some bad calls using them, but when I talked to the boss of the company after a particularly bad one (a total of 20 minutes of glitches and I have the recording to prove it!) His only solution was to not charge me for the call! This is not a good sign. I don’t want free teleconferencing, I want GOOD, reliable, consistent service.

Anyway, without going into all the different ones I tried, VoiceText Communications is the bureau that I’m happy with and still use:

Now, not being sexist or anything, but this company is woman-owned and perhaps that’s why they’re so diligent….

When I had some glitches on calls with VoiceText, they worked with me to help me figure out what was going wrong and what we could do about it, to ensure they did not recur. Also, be sure and read my post on ensuring glitch-free teleseminars.

Next, I strongly suggest you use this teleseminar web host in conjunction with your teleconferencing bureau so that you can provide your customers with the following benefits:

1. People can listen in via webcast, rather than having to dial in and pay long distance charges, if they prefer.

2. Participants (or whoever you give the link to) can access a replay of the call immediately following it and download the mp3 file if they wish. Note: Recording each teleseminar is automatically included, so you don’t have to pay the teleconferencing bureau extra to do this for you.

3. Participants can submit questions via the “Question Box” online, before or during the call – so you can get lots of feedback and interaction with your listeners. People are often too shy to speak up during a teleseminar and they much prefer being able to ask questions this way.

4. You can send all your customers (or list) to an “Event Page” that gives them all the info they need for each teleseminar. The great thing is, this is a template page that is pre-formatted, so you just enter your specific info for each call. No need to get your web programmer to design a special web page for each event! You can customize the look and feel of the page though, to reflect your style or colors.

Where can you get all this? It’s provided by Instant Teleseminars, which offers a free trial and very cheap monthly rate. Here’s a video that shows you exactly how it works (I really recommend you watch the video as it’s the fastest way to understand exactly why and how this will benefit you):

http://InstantTeleseminar.com/VideoDemo.asp?x=1801174

Or, if you prefer, here’s the written info on how it works and how you can use it in your business:

http://xiosoft.com/instantTeleseminar/specialinfo.asp?x=1801174

Okay, now you’ve got everything set up to deliver great quality teleseminars to your clients, that are easy for you to set-up and administrate!

Blog

Another thing you’ll notice about product launches and product marketing campaigns, is that at some point (and sometimes often) you’ll be directed to a blog post, where you can leave your comment or question.

This is for three reasons:

1) It’s a really easy, low-cost way of interacting with your prospects or customers. Imagine if you had everyone emailing you and had to provide an individualized response to each one? That would be very time consuming (and expensive, since time = money).

2) Search Engines love blogs, so this is a way your content can get indexed and be readily available.

3) Social Proof – when prospects see the number of comments you receive and they see the positive things written about you or your product, this helps to prove that you are a good dude and your stuff is good too. It also helps engender the “I want to be in the club too” feeling.

The important thing to know about blogs, is that you need them to be a part of your own website. They need to sit on your domain and be part of your hosting account. This is so that when the search engines index them, the traffic goes to your site, and your site rises in search engine ranking. Why waste your time and energy sending traffic to someone else’s site and increasing their search engine ranking?

Blog services like Blogspot, or Blogger, etc. do NOT sit on your domain. They are hosted and are part of the blog company’s domain.

WordPress is the best free blogging software that integrates with your own website and sits on your own domain. It is the one I and most internet marketers use. If you want to find out which software someone is using, simply scroll down to the bottom of their blog and you’ll see something that looks like this:
© 2009 – ZIGGAZAG is proudly powered by WordPress

Okay, that covers it! Yes, internet marketing can be a huge learning curve, but, because it’s so varied, it’s also a lot of fun.

soar higher,
Jini