Frank Kern – List Control

After watching the videos almost twice over I wanted to write a little review here.

In a nutshell: List Control covers it all – Coming up with a potential niche, identifying personas, building the website, promoting it, maintaining it. It is very complete.

How well does it do it? Pretty well I must say. He has the right focus -or at least my same focus- across several KEY areas.

1 – Frank mentions in one of the early videos of the program that the goal of promoting someone’s product via your list isn’t to be an affiliate – its to test the market for YOUR OWN PRODUCT. Yup, he knows where he is going. Even before I started promoting shitty Clickbank eBooks I knew the criteria wasn’t just popular stuff – it had to be something I could visualize myself with my own product out there.

2 – The way the program transitions from ‘driving-to’ the list and selling products is so smooth I wonder if Frank even makes the distinction in his head. The constant throughout is good will – see #3

3 – Good will. This shines through his entire program. “Do the customer right and they will do right to you.” Now I don’t ascribe to the ‘kumbaya drum circle hippy surfer pothead lets-make-the-world-a-better-place philosophy – the way Frank presents it, however, works. It works for very simple reasons, see #4

4 – Frank seems to have read a couple of texts on NLP and influence. I’d bet any money he has read Robert Cialdini’s original book on the six principles of influence -that one is a masterpiece. Now NLP, or Neuro-Linguistic-Programming, is a pseudoscience at best – however the parts of NLP that seem to be in the program (you can tell by the funky names of mundane shit) are very mild and clearly in line with more scientific literature, so it works well.

Some higlights that come to mind as I’m writing this:

1- Understanding that you want to be selling your own products, and even have affiliates sell your stuff.

2 – The idea of forming a Trade Union. Good discussion on how to go about it.

3 – The explanations of his tactics on what he calls ‘triangle of trust’, boomerang, and results in advance.

4 – The discussions and highlight of what worked in about 4-5 other launches and products – those are invaluable case studies.

5 – The walkthrough the “mysterious stranger’ video he put together earlier this year – really good. You can see he is thinking of the emotions he wants to evoke on his target market. I’ll add to this that the idea of evoking emotions is a great thing to do while creating text for websites of sales pages. I’ve got an interesting process to do this for written pieces, which I’m hoping to share someday when I get a bit of time to write it out.

6 – Walthough the Magic Bullet System launch videos and messages.

7 – The ideas on building trust and understanding trust as a currency with your list subscribers – as well as mean of generating reciprocity, scarcity, and authority.

Somewhere along the line you have to ask yourself how much Frank knows about marketing stuff to people outside the internet marketing community. Its a bit of a mystery – it does seem Frank has been extremely focused on the Internet Marketing market for the past few years, and that takes away some punch from the program.

The bottom line is that this program is very-very good. However this doesn’t matter one bit unless you put it into practice.

Is it worth the $2K price? It depends. If you’re not going to apply it, then it isn’t worth two cents. If you’re going to use it then it might be worth it.

There is, however a way of selling via mailing lists that I believe is just effective, does your readers not just good but “awesome”, it isn’t new, and Frank doesn’t cover. I think its a real gem since I don’t see folks really doing it – probably because everyone has their heads up the shady Acai rebills instead of focused on getting folks to their destination. I’ll write up on this idea in a future post – not to be a dickhead and leave you hanging, I’d like to test this stuff before I write about it.