• not for profitability
• not for the quality of the products
• not for value delivered to customers

Product Life Cycles without the Maturity Phase?
Even if we pretend for a moment that there was no quality problem with these many products released on a very tight schedule, the fact remains that the product life cycle was cut.
A normal product life cycle looks like this:

Here is a short explanation about the meaning and the function of the four product life cycle phases in terms of profitability:

1. Development and testing naturally are investment phases, where you spend money. The cash flow is typically negative.
2. After testing comes the launch. The goal is here fast and deep market penetration. This helps to establish the necessary scale to become highly profitable and to cement a competitive advantage over me-to products.
3. A mature product should provide a stable positive cash flow over a reasonable time. This should make the whole project profitable, covering the cost incurred in the development phase and in the launch phase, pay for the cost of capital etc.
4. The harvest phase is concerned with recovering as much as possible from the investment when the product becomes obsolete. This may be done by using assets as long as possible and not replacing them, by transferring resources to new projects and by transferring customer trust and brand recognition to a new project, if possible.

Now compare this to a graph I have drawn for a typical internet marketing product launch:

If you watch this graph you will see that the cash flow over the whole project is much smaller. In fact the cash flow is only positive in the final stage of the product launch and in the first part of the harvest phase. This means less profit, but it also means that you must strictly limit the expenses for product development and testing. The result is in diminished product quality.

Why Do Marketers Throw so Much Profit Away?

The shortcomings of this launch-and-run strategy are so obvious, that it begs an answer to the question: Why do people still use these aborted product life cycles?

I think there are several reasons for this. Some of them might be:

• The digital nature of information products sold through the internet means that these products can be copied without effort by anybody. And they will be copied, because there are more than enough people around who do not care about copy rights and intellectual property provided both belong to others.
• Affiliates will run after a launch. A successful launch means high market penetration. High market penetration means conversion rates will fall: Everybody will still buy only once, provided he likes the offer, whether 3 or 15 people tell him about the deal. And lower conversion rates mean less rewards for the same effort by an affiliate.
• Limited product support, caused by the anticipated early end of the product life cycle erodes the value for the customer further and damages the value of the producer’s brand. Sales are hurt even more and the product leaves the marketplace even faster.
• Limited resources for product development make for poor products. And poor products need pressure sales tactics, as they are accommodated in a product launch environment. Mature products do not accommodate pressure sales tactics, as products in the mature stage are readily available. Thus sales will break down after the launch.
• The aborted product life cycle strategy allows still for some profits.

Possible Solutions
I am not the first one to note this problem, or to think about solutions. In fact there have been many product launches promising by themself to provide such solutions. The main strategy in the internet marketing place has been up to now to extend the product life cycle via continuity programs. This means, as far as information products are concerned, to drop-feed the information through a membership website or via coaching programs to the customer. It is easier to detect and act against illicit sharing of passwords and usernames than against outright copying of ebooks, videos etc.
Others left – at least as far as own products are concerned – the information product market and moved to ongoing services like web hosting, audio streaming.
But I think there arises a new opportunity to solve that problem: Platforms such as app stores by Apple and Google, Amazon offers for Kindle devices; probably Microsoft will establish a similar system, and regional book dealers will also try to develop such platforms.
Why do these platforms help us to solve the problem? First of all, they control the content distribution, i.e. on which machine an app or ebook might be copied or not.
But there is more: You can update an app on a mobile device to keep the quality high and the information up to date. This adds an element of the drop-feeding to your product, as mentioned earlier. And it allows you to offer a high quality product to new customers, while keeping the existing ones happy.
A third aspect: The cost for the user of an information product has two components: The money spent on the product and the value of the time used to consume the product. A mobile product reduces the value of the time the customer needs to invest to use the product. He can read and listen while sitting in a train, plane, waiting at the doctor etc. He can spare his quality time for his family and his customers.

Please Share Your Thoughts
I invite you all to share your suggestions how to overcome this problems in information marketing. If you have an idea how to solve the matter, or if you want to add another aspect to the problem description, please leave a comment.

He mentions a few concepts providing me with quite a bit food for thought:

• The huge potential which becomes available whenever people connect cloud computing and mobile devices
• The concept of crowd sourcing. You can get almost instantly a picture of events thousands of kilometers away by receiving information from a magnitude of eye witnesses. Raw information is distributed before spin doctors had a chance to get their hands on it.
• How this changes the balance of power between buyers and sellers
• How this changes the balance of power between government and citizen.

We had the chance to witness The Power of Mobile, which develops whenever millions of people have the ability to access this huge pool of information and the ability to publish instantly what they see, hear and think. Propaganda generated by governments and organizations like Hezbollah can now be dissected. Then suddenly becomes visible that one and the same person was shown as a dying bombing victim on 3 pictures taken in different places on different days, and the same toys scattered in the ruins of buildings on a host of photos taken in different towns on different days. (Examples taken from Hezbollah propaganda during the last Lebanon war)
Even the mere access to mobile phones, without the extra power of instant multimedia publishing has proven remarkably powerful. If people see something in the TV they may call a friend in the area affected and ask. “Are you o.k.? And what is going on.” As a result protests against Israel’s military offensive against Hamas in 2008 were much stronger in Morocco compared to Jordan, Lebanon or Egypt. People could already differentiate between the truth and TV coverage, as long as they were not too far away from the scene.
Such thinking is not new, but still valid and also economically powerful. I remember an article published about 20 years ago in the Harvard Business Review explaining that in rural India at the time the lack of phones was not a mere symptom of poverty, but an important source of poverty. The reasoning: Small farmers had to sell their product for a very low price to wholesalers, because they did not have a chance to know what people were paying in town for food. With a phone they could have called shopkeepers in town and ask what the pay for rice, wheat, potatoes or corn, make an informed decision what to plant and almost immediately increase revenue substantially.

When I became aware of this little secret, I removed several hundreds of drafts for posts and pages. They were many months old, and absolutely useless. It took me quite some time to do this cleaning process.
But by good luck there is a way to tell your WordPress blogging software not to pile up these mountain of ols drafts. If you want to know how this is done, fill in your firstname and email address into the form below
If you want to know how to avoid an unneccessary bloated WordPress database in the first place, fill in your firstname and email address into the form below:
 

How can marketing strategies with a WordPress blog foster the growth of desire in a prospect’s mind? There are several ways a blog can help you out to reach that goal:

1. Post regularly to highlight different benefits of your service without exhausting your readers.
2. Provide samples to help you prospects quickly and gain credibility
3. Ask for comments to learn what your prospects think and gain social proof
4. Control the environment to keep you audience focused.

Our marketing strategies with a WordPress blog use an indirect approach. We do not try to push our prospect to buy. We provide for our audience a context where everybody can try and feel how much safer, more enjoyable and richer his life could become by using our products or services. We provide free samples and explain how to use them. We give people the opportunity to comment on our samples and explanations. Readers can ask questions, suggest improvements and tell us how they use our content. Obviously we remove spam comments, and we will never allow people to hurt others with their comments.

Another important component of my marketing strategy is the blog feed. WordPress automatically creates feeds of posts, and also of comments. This helps to alert people about fresh content, highlighting new aspects of the offer. I use Google’s Feedburner service to get an idea how many people are really keen to see my content as soon as I post it.

Email is also a regular component of our marketing strategies with a WordPress blog. We offer email subscriptions throughout the blog and use the lists to offer extra samples and goodies. Subscribers receive also alerts when we post fresh content on the blog, and if we have any special offers.

We also mail related offers and alerts about valuable content from other publishers, provided they add extra value to our readers.

His newsletter is one of the rare email pieces I miss when I do not get it.

But just read this issue by yourself:

“The Portable Voyeur”
===================

In the last issue, I put out the idea of looking at your online networks and niches as “virtual neighborhoods.” Nothing especially new in that concept, except that almost no-one in the marketing field talks about them that way. That discussion is mostly left to forum operators and social networking geeks.

In this issue, I want to talk about something closer to home. Literally IN your home. People spying on you using your own electronics.

Let’s start with the least intrusive, and work up to stuff you may not believe is happening. The last few are downright creepy.

….

There’s a thing called “IP geolocation,” which uses a database of IPs (numbers locating your computer on the network) and physical areas to show where a computer is located. There are a bunch of these, and the accuracy can be anything from very close to wildly off the mark. The good ones can narrow it down to a few blocks, in most cases. Sometimes to a specific building.

You can see this most often when you notice an ad on a site that’s used by people all over the world, but mentions your city by name. “[YourCity] mom discovers…” or “Man in [Hometown] loses 47 pounds using…”  That’s IP geolocation in its mildest form.

Twitter has offered the option for a while to attach your IP address to a tweet, basically trying to tell people where you are. You have to opt into that, though. It’s turned off by default.

Facebook’s new “Places” settings options enable a more advanced function by default. The idea is to make it easy for your friends to know where you are. Unfortunately, it also makes it easy for people you might not want to share your location with to find you. Or know when you’re not home…

It’s easy to disable this option, if you know it’s there and what it’s called. John Williams sent me a link to the instructions. You can read those here:

http://lifehacker.com/5616395/how-to-disable-facebook-places

Why would this matter? Well, maybe you don’t want your friends to know where you are every minute that you’re online. Or maybe you don’t want
world+dog knowing when you’re not home. Or maybe you don’t want your employer knowing you’re logging onto Facebook from work. Or from the park when you called in sick.

Just how much info should be distributed about you automatically?

But wait… There’s more!

….

There are applications on some portable devices and phones that can transmit the data from a GPS system to other sites. This can be used to pinpoint your exact address, and your location to within a few feet.

That’s how the “Places” function on Facebook works. And, with the default settings, your Facebook “friends” can “check you in” if they’re with you. Handy, if you’re careful about who your “friends” are, and who you allow to share the info. Given the default settings, though, it’s an announcement to the world every time you log in from a mobile device.

That can get into the realm of the dangerous. With it set to “Friends of friends” able to view the info, you could be broadcasting your location to burglars, stalkers, ex-employees, your employer, or even just that annoying person
you’d rather not see right now.

Given recent comments from CEOs Mark Zuckerberg (Facebook – “Privacy is dead”) and Eric Schmidt (Google – “If you have something that you don´t want anyone to know, maybe you shouldn’t be doing it in the first place”), there is every reason to believe these services will be used as aggressively
as possible.

Both companies have said the comments were taken out of context. That could be easily believed of Zuckerberg’s remark. Schmidt’s is a bit less dismissable. None of that matters, though, when you look at the way their firms actually treat their users’ private data. Facebook set this option to “On” by default. Google initially opted every Gmail user into their social networking platform, Buzz, and created significant and foreseeable problems for some users.

I’m pretty sure I don’t want those sorts of decisions made for me without my knowledge or consent. How about you?

And it gets (potentially) much, much worse.

….

Apple has applied for a patent that has some deeply disturbing implications: http://www.commondreams.org/view/2010/08/24-0

The summary: They want a patent on software that, in mobile devices, would let them listen to your conversations and/or take pictures of you or your surroundings, without any way for you to know it’s happening. Just remotely activate those functions, at their own discretion.

It would also let them monitor biometric data and all of your online activities while using their devices. Ostensibly, this would be developed for purposes of preventing theft, or catching thieves. It’s even been suggested to me that Apple may want the patent to keep the idea from being used by others.

I don’t buy it. But that doesn’t really matter.

First, it’s nearly certain that, if this technology is deployed and not made illegal for use by private citizens, it will be abused. The theft-prevention rationale was offered, for example, by the Lower Merion school district, in their program giving laptops to every high-school student. “Only to enable recovery in event of theft,” they said. That didn’t stop people at the school from using it to spy on students in their homes.Yeah. Really.

One kid was disciplined for “improper behavior” that occurred at home, in his bedroom. The Vice-Principal used a photo taken using the webcam in the laptop as his evidence. According to a forensic analysis commissioned by the district, the school took 66,503 screenshots and photos using these systems. The school admits these include pictures of the kids in their bedrooms.

If teachers will do that, what would a corporation do?

….

So, if you have one of these portable devices, where do you use it? In what situations do you simply carry a cell phone, iPad or other portable computing device? Do you want people able to spy on you in all those places, at any time, without warning?

It’s been suggested to me that there is prior art that might cause the USPTO to reject such a patent application, or be used later to invalidate it if granted. That raises other challenges. Specifically, anyone at all could include it in
their systems.

Google has a cell phone OS. Just how much do you want them to add to their collection of data on you?

Then there’s the “social networking” phone, which is designed specifically for use with Facebook and Twitter. Do you want your kids to have one of those broadcasting their location to the world at every moment the phone is on?

This isn’t science fiction, folks. We’re not getting into foil fedora territory here. This stuff is real.

….

And then there are the outright criminals. There is already malware code in the wild that lets remote operators turn on the webcam on infected computers. That’s not a big deal if you use a desktop machine and don’t keep one connected, or disconnect it when you don’t intend to use it.

But what about the laptops and netbooks, and even some monitors, that are sold with a camera and microphone installed in the machine itself? The last two portables that I got have them. Where do you, or your kids or employees, use laptops?

This isn’t especially difficult stuff to do. And the market isn’t restricted to criminals. For instance, on the first related search I did, I found someone asking how to remotely activate the webcam on his wife’s laptop without her knowing.

Some of these devices come with GPS systems installed. Anyone who can access those will know exactly where you are, what you’re doing or discussing, and with whom.

Anyone want to market sound-proof phone carriers, with built-in Faraday cages? A month ago, I would have considered that a ridiculous idea. Now, I’m thinking it’s a niche.

….

Electronic security isn’t just about data protection any more, folks. It’s gotten very personal, and it’s about to get more so.

You can take steps to reduce your exposure to this kind of invasion of privacy. First, make sure you have proper security software on all your computers. That’s good policy anyway, so that’s not too extreme.

With the social networking sites, it’s a matter of watching your preferences. Also just common sense. And easy. Don’t leave external webcams attached when they’re not in use, if you have any objection to what you do in the same room with them being seen by someone else. Using a USB hub makes
disconnecting them easy, and it’s a reasonable precaution, with the amount of trojans running loose online.

With laptops and netbooks, just be aware that this stuff is possible, and take whatever precautions you may feel are appropriate. That might be nothing at all, for many of you. It could mean turning the thing off when it’s not in active use.
Or putting tape over the camera lens. Or, if you have the need or desire to be especially cautious, having a physical switch installed to prevent remote activation of the camera or microphone.

I can’t begin to guess what level of security will work for you. Some people won’t consider it an issue at all, and they may well be right. For them. For others, these are real concerns. It’s getting very easy to install this kind of
monitoring code, and there are too many people with incentives to do it. Employers, co-workers, competition, family members, and various less savory types. Brings new meaning to the word “spyware,” yes?

Make sure your kids are aware of the potential issues, too.

….

I’m told that law enforcement agencies have had the ability to turn on cell phones remotely as listening devices for a while now, with a proper warrant. I consider that a very different thing than random strangers being able to access these kinds of info at will.

As of this moment, I am not aware of this being a problem for cell phones and similar portable devices. Just keep this in mind, and pay attention for it.

Whether Apple gets that patent or not, it’s coming.

….

If it’s installed or used by any corporation, I have a suggestion that seems appropriate: The top officers and all members of the board(s) of directors should be required to carry one of the devices with them at all times, with the audio and video enabled 24/7, and streaming to the web for the whole
world to view.

Hey, if we don’t get to decide what we can keep private, why should they?

….

The idea here isn’t to scare you, or create some sort of conspiracy buzz. If that was the goal, I’d point you to an even more extreme, and equally current, example of invasive observation: http://talkbiz.com/r/iris.php

As you can see, this stuff is real. The technology exists right now, and most of it is already in use. It may not pose much of a threat to many of us, but it’s something to be aware of and to watch out for.

Knowing it’s possible is 90% of the battle.

Be careful out there.

Paul

—–===(*)===—–

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http://www.buy-paul-a-beer.com

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Copyright 2010 TalkBiz Digital, LLC

1. Get more customers
2. Sell more often to each customer
3. Sell more in each transaction

Get More Customers
If you do not want your business to die, you need to acquire new customers all the time. In truth, you lose customers all the time. To grow your business and get more sales, you need to find more new customers than you lose current ones.
Finding new customers is expensive and can be difficult. Many businesses do not earn a profit and even make a loss on their first sale to a new customer, the so called front end sale. They need to go a long way to find a prospect, make him aware of the offer, get his interest, nurture his desire and finally induce him to act on the offer. You need lots of effort and high expenses to guide him through his decision making process.

Sell More Often to Each Customer
It is much easier to get more sales from an existing customer, because you have built already a trustful relationship with him. You can get his attention, and it is easier for him to act on his desire, because his risk to be disappointed or look like a fool is now much lower.
How often you can sell to each customer depends on your product or service, and on your effort. The best scenario you could dream up is a product which needs to be replaced or serviced every couple of months, and you can approach your customer at the right time to remind him about the need. One simple example would be your dentist. He will send you a letter to remind you that it is time for a new checkup and ask you to call for an appointment.
The same system lies behind the riches of Gillette, Procter & Gamble and Coca Cola. In these cases, the body reminds you that you need more razor blades, detergents or drinks. To get more sales the providers of these products need just to be present in your mind as well as in the store.
In internet marketing we use social networks and email to be present in the customers mind. It is a bit more difficult to come up with products which need to be replaced on a regular basis, because we sell typically immaterial products consisting of information. But still, information needs to be up to date, which opens the door for membership sites providing a steady stream of news about a certain topic.
It may also be a good idea to drop feed your information product to your customer. This approach may increase usability in a big way. And every time you deliver the next installment of the product, you have the chance to get more sales by offering him a related product or service. If you deliver too much information at once, the consumer may feel overwhelmed, and your product may end up collecting dust on your customer`s hard disk.

Sell More in Each Transaction
If you have made a sale you have got already your customers attention and interest. He is in the mood to act. The simplest way to get more sales from your existing customers is to offer them another related product, which may increase the usability of the product they just bought. One example would be the sales man for shoes, who will inevitably offer you a shoe polish as soon as you have bought your new boots. This is absolutely legitimate, and your customer has every right to be angry with you, if you do not offer this shoe polish, travel insurance, video tutorial etc. He wants the full value of the product you just sold him, and it is up to you to offer him complementary products and services.

Recommended book:

Manage All Ads from a Single Interface
OpenX structures ad serving by defining ad spaces on a web page, and connecting the spaces to advertisers and banners. An ad can be a picture, html code, java script, flash object, or plain text. Now the adserver manages, which banner appears on which ad space how often.

Manage Ads by Viewer Location and Language
I can also display banners according to the browser language of my viewer or according to his geographical location. I do not want to bother a German visitor with an offer for a vitamin supplement out of his reach because of his government’s customs regulations. And I do not offer that Spanish language ebook to visitor, whose language preference is Russian. The better I target the ads the more conversions I will get.

Manage Campaigns by Time
If needed, I define a time frame for the display of an advertisement. A time limited offer will not show up after the end of the sale. If no ad is available for a zone, e.g. because the maximum number of impressions is exhausted for each ad, nothing will be shown. But I like to use my ad space. So I define a Google Adwords banner as a default ad for the zone, and display Google ads if no other banner is available.

Pick the Winners, Drop the Flops
But there is more: The adserver generates a set of statistics. I know now in detail each banner’s impressions, clicks and conversions. Using these stats, I can easily determine, which banner is profitable, and which one is a waste of time and space.
The statistics allows me to set up a formal banner management. I ad and remove banners and affiliate programs based on real information, not guesswork. This improves my negotiation position with the advertiser. I know how many visitors I sent to him. And I have a clear idea, what I can get, if replace his offer.

Hide Affiliate Links
The adserver has an additional advantage: My visitor cannot see the affiliate link. If he wants to see the offer behind the ad, he has to click on it. This means I will be credited for the lead or sale.

Let me give a short recap:

An adserver allows me to

• rotate ads from different vendors
• limit the time frame of campaigns
• limit the number of impressions for an ad
• measure the performance of each ad
• if Ihave access to the sale page, measure conversions for each ad
• manage ad impressions by location of my visitor
• manage ad impressions by language of my visitor
• hide the url of the landing page of the ad.

Easy Instrallation
I need just a hosting account with php and mysql to run my OpenX server. Installation of OpenX is about as simple as installing WordPress. Basic installation without plug ins does not even take 30 minutes. You can get the server for free at http://www.openx.org

• Signup rate from people coming from my blog: 15%
• Signup rate from people coming from Google Adwords: 5%
• Signup rate from people coming from Twitter: 0%

I got lots of traffic from Twitter, and people seemed to be interested. But no conversion! Adwords remained at 5%. From my blog the traffic numbers went naturally down. I cannot write posts promoting the same offer day by day.

Putting Myself into Twitterers’ Shoes
I was scratching my head for several weeks, hoping to get at least one or two conversions from Twitter. After a while it seemed that even the click rates from Twitter went down. Naturally, because my followers knew the offer, as my blog readers did. Anyway, I was careful enough not to damage that Twitter account, it is still growing.
So, what does that mean? Is Twitter traffic useless? I do not think so, and I know that other people get conversions, signups etc. from Twitter.
I drew two conclusions: The page must be reasonable for people coming from search engines, and for people coming from my mailing list and blog, but not for Twitterers.
Thinking about the reason, I came up with the following conclusion: The signup page was, as thousands, driven by flash videos. But further investigation let me to conclude, that a Twitter link is rarely leading to a video.

Mobile Users Have Different Priorities
A little further brain wrenching reminded me, that even the emails with video links I get, do not work, as long as I open them on my mobile device, because the handset does not show flash.
In fact I use the email on my Palm to skim through the emails, to see if there is something I need to respond quickly. But all these video emails are left to my desktop, and I check them, if and when I have time and desire to do so.
Twitter is strongly geared towards mobile users. They may have difficulty to watch a flash video. And a Twitter user has often a very short span of attention. He may just to get a glimpse about what’s going on in his arena, between leaving the plane and picking the luggage. And unlike emails, tweets go away. They are not saved for later inspection.

Landing Page Must Correspondent to Traffic Source
This consideration seems to explain why my video page did not work with Twitter. And, while investigating, my brain reminded me that I should copy the ones, who get already results. Many of them seem to promote their blogs on Twitter, and then using their blogs to promote their money making stuff.

What do you think? Did you observe the same phenomena? How did you solve the problem? Please share your insight and leave a comment.

1. Traffic Generation: You need to get visitors to your website, and lots of them.
2. Initial Sale: To receive money, you need to gain trust of your audience. The willingness to give you money for a promised product is certainly an expression of trust. The price of the initial sale may or may not cover the cost of acquiring this new customer.
3. Backend Sales: If you have earned the trust of your audience, and strive to earn their trust every day again, they will buy again and again. This is where the real money is.

This is a numbered list, because it is essential to go step by step. Why? It is much easier to sell to somebody, who has already bought from you, and was more than satisfied with your performance. You just need to tell him: “I have this, do you need it?” And he will at least consider your offer. But to come into this position, you must have made already a first sale (or at least built a relationship of trust with the customer).

To get a first sale, which means a sale to a person who never bought from you before, and who probably does not know you, you must have an excellent offer. And you need to present this offer in a very convincing way. You know this long sales letters and these product launches.
If you are not completely new to direct marketing, you know probably also, that the only way to get a real good converting sales letter or sequence of sales messages only by testing. There is no way to know for sure, which headline is performing better, which picture, background color, layout outperforms all others. But the difference between a conversion rate of 1 percent and 2 percent can be the difference between a big loss and a small profit, especially if you realize that you pay for your traffic. And you do pay, either with money, or with your effort.

To get valid test results, you need lots of traffic. If you run a split test only between two headlines or two pictures or two videos, you need at least 30 conversions on the weaker one, to have a reliable result. This means to test only two variants, you need at an average conversion rate 3000 visitors. If you do not have a strong stream of traffic to your website, you may just need a year or two to test every aspect of your sales process. In this case your product will be probably obsolete before you can roll it out.

To learn how the masters are using this sequence, read The Great Formula. Mark Joyner, the author, allowed me to offer you a free download.

Success is something you attract by the person you become (Jim Rohn)