MindValley Labs Internet Marketing Blog

Lately, I’ve been think­ing a lot about the suc­cess of our com­peti­tors such as Cen­ter­pointe and espe­cially, Agora Pub­lish­ing. I don’t know how I did it, but I stum­bled across the entire col­lec­tion of Agora swipe files.

Michael Mas­ter­son is the founder of Agora. I’ve read some of his work, and I have bought his books before. Ear­ly­torise is just one of Agora’s mini empires, because Agora Pub­lish­ing itself is a $100M com­pany, based mainly on inter­net mar­ket­ing. Although they have phys­i­cal prod­ucts e.g books, the bulk of what they do lies in inter­net mar­ket­ing or using inter­net mar­ket­ing channels.

I found it really inter­est­ing because most inter­net mar­keters don’t get that big. Most inter­net mar­keters cel­e­brate when they earn $1M a year, or like Eben Pagan mak­ing $20M a year. What Agora makes is almost akin to the direct mar­ket­ing giants, the offline mar­ket­ing giants like Board­room and Weiss International.

We need to start doing what suc­cess­ful busi­nesses are doing, so I thought to myself, what is Agora doing that we aren’t?

5 Dis­cov­er­ies on Agora

1. Think like a direct response marketer

Mary Ellen Tribby said ‘think like a mar­keter’. She didn’t say with the accu­racy that I would like it said. I think that is too gen­eral a state­ment, because what kind of mar­keter do you want to think like? After study­ing Agora, I think this is the answer: think like a direct response marketer.

Ken McCarthy said the inter­net is a direct response medium. A lot of other peo­ple have said it too. The prob­lem is this: we don’t know what direct response really mar­ket­ing is, because we don’t study how the direct response giants really work. I believe Agora stud­ied and repli­cated their for­mats of the offline giants, the peo­ple who have been in direct mar­ket­ing for the last 100years.

Do you know that the best sales copy­writ­ing is not from web­site copy? The peo­ple we cel­e­brate don’t even begin to com­pare to the offline mar­keters. When you sub­scribe to Board­room, Weiss Inter­na­tional or some of the things that Clay­ton Make­peace is involved with, you find that the qual­ity of the direct response copy­writ­ing is extremely good.

It is pre­cise and extremely tar­geted to the prospect because they can­not afford to lose money, whereas inter­net mar­keters put up a sales page, put in a swipe file and hope that it works. These guys know the mar­ket, and the key thing about think­ing like a direct response mar­keter is this: they idol­ize the great­est mar­ket­ing genius of all time. Who? The prospect. Not Jay Abra­ham and not Dan Kennedy. The prospects are the ones who hand you the money.

If you are mar­ket­ing a prod­uct or a ser­vice, you must think like them. Think in their frame of mind: when they surf the net and search some­thing in the search engine, how do they search? What is the buy­ing process? What is their rela­tion­ship with you?

Direct mar­keters are really good at this; it’s one-on-one mar­ket­ing in its most per­sonal and inti­mate form. A lot of inter­net mar­keters don’t do this, but Agora does this really well.

2. Make newslet­ters your main form of marketing.

We often write newslet­ters quite flip­pantly as a way of get­ting rev­enue. Agora, on the other hand, has made newslet­ters their busi­ness and their busi­ness model. It’s almost their only way of mar­ket­ing. Agora has made newslet­ters their dri­ving force, and their main source of rev­enue, and that’s made $100M for them. I can only spec­u­late why this has worked so well, but I think it’s this:

A newslet­ter is the ulti­mate form of rela­tion­ship build­ing because it is con­tin­u­ous. This is the exact oppo­site of a free report, where you get a lead and you get them to give you their email address. A report is one-off, and they may not wel­come what you have to offer them later.

When peo­ple sign up for a newslet­ter, they want to know what you have to offer, and they expect you to keep in touch. They expect you to give them infor­ma­tion and value. They are in a dif­fer­ent frame of mind, and it dri­ves lead gen­er­a­tion because peo­ple freely give their email want­ing to get some­thing of value, which Agora gives.

It gives the newslet­ter the right to keep bom­bard­ing them with mes­sages, which has proved very use­ful for Agora.

3. Always be there.

Dan Kennedy taught me this; peo­ple are not loyal to brands. The key way to get money out of your prospect’s pocket is to make sure you are there when they need you.

For exam­ple, if you’re in insur­ance and if you’ve been talk­ing to me and I haven’t bought from you for six months, when my aunt dies unex­pect­edly I’m not going to look for the big names. If you’re not there at that point in time, I’ll look for some­one else, whoever’s near­est and most eas­ily avail­able and speak­ing to me then.

Most of the time, you don’t know when you are reach­ing peo­ple at their point of need. The only solu­tion, there­fore, is to keep being there for them. Ear­ly­torise is there Tues­day, Thurs­day and Sat­ur­day. They are there first thing in the morning…so guess who you turn to when you have a need to gen­er­ate wealth or health.

Another thing — the more fre­quently a mar­keter com­mu­ni­cates, the more recep­tive the prospect becomes – the best friends are the ones who are always there (or they can unsubscribe).

4. Put rela­tion­ship before selling.

Agora does this. A few of their sites do have one-time offers, but this is very rare. It’s usu­ally tiny, maybe a $37 book. They build a fan­tas­tic rela­tion­ship even before they ask you to buy.

As the newslet­ters keep giv­ing you value, they grow as a friend and become the author­ity, so that the minute they give some­thing to buy, peo­ple do. I sub­scribe to these newslet­ters, and chances are if they asked me to buy, I might have to stop myself because I have devel­oped an emo­tional bond with the newsletters.

And of course, they treat their buy­ers right, which is often seen with offline and direct mar­keters. Clay­ton Make­peace told me this; the way to know how they treat their cus­tomers is to keep buy­ing their prod­ucts. Let’s say you sub­scribe to Board­room and you buy keep buy­ing from them — sooner or later, you will see mar­ket­ing that is very tar­geted towards you: tar­geted copy, value and offers that you don’t find if you don’t buy from them and you study them from the surface.

After you’ve bought 3 or 4 prod­ucts, they start offer­ing you ten thou­sand dol­lar prod­ucts and at that time, you buy. We just need to see the for­mula and repli­cate it.

5. Uti­lize the 2 Lever­age points: Con­tent and Copywriting.

Inter­net has opened the mar­ket, so as an inter­net mar­keter you have to work a lot harder than a direct response mar­keter. What dis­tin­guishes what you are try­ing to sell from what peo­ple can prob­a­bly get online, free?

Agora’s model, in direct con­trast to direct mar­keters, for exam­ple, gives away a newslet­ter for which they should prob­a­bly be charg­ing you. Direct response mar­keters will make sure that you pay for those newsletters.

The key is to cre­ate great in-house con­tent, and to give more value than the cus­tomer expects. Agora caught onto this early, so they don’t sell it to you, they give it away. They make you a buyer down the line, they become more attrac­tive than any inter­net mar­ket­ing com­peti­tor online. They have no big names work­ing there — they have a process to build up adver­tis­ing stu­dents into bril­liant con­tent writ­ers and copy writ­ers who they never leave because they get royalties.

For exam­ple, their copy­writ­ing is so good that for a $27 book, with­out using prod­uct launch for­mula, purely on email mar­ket­ing and sales copy­writ­ing they gen­er­ated 6million.

Their empha­sis is on con­tent and giv­ing you value – you do not get what you pay for, you get some­thing that you would pay to get. Michael Mas­ter­son has a lot of good advice that can actu­ally make you money. And the only way to keep com­ing up with con­tent like this 5 or 6 times a week is by invest­ing in many in-house peo­ple to pro­duce con­stant and con­sis­tent content.

All of this is prob­a­bly the secret to Agora’s success…

Last 5 posts by

• Are You a Direct Response Gazillionaire-In-Waiting? — Octo­ber 28th, 2008
• 3 For­bid­den Twit­ter Mind Con­trol Tricks to Explode Your Mar­ket­ing — Octo­ber 1st, 2008
• Email Mar­ket­ing Demys­ti­fied — July 24th, 2008
• An Intro­duc­tion to Tro­jan Horse Mar­ket­ing — July 2nd, 2008
• The Paprika Effect: The Brain-dead Sim­ple For­mula to Instant Cus­tomer Delight — June 25th, 2008

About the Author

Kenneth Yu is a tormented artist, but he was determined not to be a starving one. This is the primary reason why this D&AD award-winning advertising creative has plunged into the world of Internet entrepreneurship, and the rest -- as they say -- is history. Straddling both the creative and business realm, Kenneth combines bullet-fast ideation and his vast experience working with the big brands to alchemize marketing gold as the Head Copywriter and Marketing Strategist in MindValley. He shares more out-of-the-box marketing and copywriting tips (plus cool irreverent stuff) on his Twitter

Check out other posts by Kenneth

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