Here’s an interesting video from UK marketer Andrew Stark where he’s throwing away five thousand dollars worth of information products that he bought over the years:

AndrewStark.com

In this pile of DVDs, CDs and manuals are the following courses:

(1) Traffic Secrets 2.0 by John Reese

I bought this course and I’ve still got it in a box in the garage somewhere. It’s doubtful that I even went past the first CD but it looked pretty on the bookshelf for a while…

What I do remember is that I bought it on 15th July 2008 (thank you archived email stored in Google Apps!) and I paid $476.95 in total. The course was $399, the remainder was for postage.

There were issues with delivery – John Reese made several excuses about the packaging, something to do with the CDs rattling about.

There were lots of doubting posts on various forums and lingering suspicions that he’d launched without getting the product ready properly. Reese even admitted that he’d only written the sales page the night before.

Not that it mattered though, most bought because they remembered the first course, the original Traffic Secrets which was pretty good.

Shipping ended up being delayed and my course was only shipped 3 weeks after purchase.

John eventually chucked 2 DVDs from his good buddy Frank Kern in for everyone as a kind of apology.

The problem with this was that some of us ordered on launch day specifically because the DVDs were only for those who bought in the first 24 hours. That ended up being a waste of time when he gave them away to everybody.

He also chucked in digital access to the original Traffic Secrets course and a short-lived buyers’ community at income.com but both have long since disappeared as far as I can gather.

Not sure I would throw this away – I’m sure you could get up to £100 on eBay for it.

Here’s the original sales page:

http://web.archive.org/web/20080716045144/http://www.trafficsecrets.com/

(2) Million Dollar March by Keith Wellman and Marc Horne

I didn’t buy this myself but I have seen the contents because the download page for the digital version wasn’t protected by Keith Wellman.

Probably says something about his attention to detail.

The main USP was that Keith would take 4 newbies in to his fold (his office in Atlanta) and teach them how to be millionaires like him.

The DVD footage showed Keith, Marc and the four students who allegedly paid $25k each describing their perfect launches and speculating on how much they would make. It was rather strange.

On the DVDs there was nothing about the products they were selling, only theoretical ideas about how much they’d make on the first day, what prizes they’d offer to affiliates and how they’d attract the big fish of the internet marketing world to promote for them.

Highlights included Keith spending 10 minutes searching GoDaddy for domain names for his students.

It was expert tuition as you can probably imagine.

Andrew’s description “… it… was… RUBBISH!”

Launched on the 4th March 2008 it cost $997.

One of the four students, Hollis Carter, was soon to be seen sharing the stage with Keith and Marc at their seminars so it remains a mystery whether he was actually a student who paid $25k or an employee who was asked to fill a chair for the cameras.

Having seen all the footage, and considering that Keith doesn’t appear to be making money online any more, the tip (garbage dump for those in the US) is likely the best place for this course.

“Complete and utter waste of about a thousand dollars” is how Andrew summed it up.

http://web.archive.org/web/20080306024200/http://www.themilliondollarmarch.com/?

(3) Product Creation Workshop by Keith Wellman, Gary Ambrose and Mike Filsaime (and other non-visible DVDs)

I think I’ve seen this workshop but not on DVD, only online.

It was possibly a bonus I received for buying something else, perhaps the 7 Figure Code.

That led to the ridiculous happenings with Keith Wellman – more about that later…

The workshop wasn’t very memorable. If I remember correctly it was filmed from the back of the room and you had to strain to hear what Keith, Gary or Mike was saying. Probably from around 2006 and filmed at some event in the US.

(4) Affiliate Millionaire by Andrew Fox

I never saw this one but apparently it was released on 23rd February 2010.

From one review site I discovered that it contained 7 DVD training Modules plus manuals, blueprints, mindmaps, resources, case studies, insider audio interviews and video footage.

Andrew summed it up as “reasonable but, again, completely and utterly over-priced…”

The price was $997 or 3 x $397

The sales page appears to have been only a video, there’s more written info on the order page:

http://web.archive.org/web/20100406060637/http://affiliatemillionaire.com/order.html

(5) The 7 Figure Code by Mike Filsaime and Tom Beal

This is another that I bought myself and I remember that it was released on the 7th July 2007 – get it, 777?

I bought it on the 8th of July through Keith Wellman’s affiliate link and the cost was $524.50 (probably $497 + shipping).

At the time Mike Filsaime ran a Warrior Special Offer where he offered full digital access to his Butterfly Marketing course to anyone who bought the 7 Figure Code through an affiliate link.

He got a lot of respect for that as he was basically offering extra if you chose an affiliate to buy the course through therefore helping his affiliates to earn more money.

Keith Wellman was the lucky recipient of the affiliate commission on my purchase of the 7 Figure Code because he offered what appeared to be a great set of bonuses.

Unfortunately Keith banked the money but neglected to supply the bonuses and you can read all of that sorry saga on the other website – Keith Wellman of FX Marketing Inc and Everyday Wealth LLC

The course was quite good – plenty of meat in the DVDs and the folders contained transcripts of all of the presentations and the slides.

Again, I reckon Andrew could’ve got the best part of £100 for this on eBay as it’s a solid course and he had it in pristine condition (the folders were still in cellophane).

Here’s the sales page around 10 days after launch:

http://web.archive.org/web/20070717183806/http://the7figurecode.com/

(6) Butterfly Marketing by Mike Filsaime

This was released on 31st January 2006 and cost $997 or so. Later on the price rose to $1497 and then $1997.

It sold very well and propelled Mike Filsaime onto the list of top internet marketing experts.

On March 24th 2009 Mike released Butterfly Marketing 2 which an updated version of the script as well as the “Manuscript” for the price for a token payment towards postage. It was somewhere around $20. Tacked on to it was a subscription for a newsletter.

By April 2010 Mike was giving away the whole source code for free.

Butterfly Marketing was a superb example of how to get it right back in the good ‘ole days.

Create a good product, market it well (Mike started the “pre-launch” over 2 months before releasing the product) and offer your affiliates a great deal.

Back then, as Andrew states in his video, people would drop $1,000 on a product and just slap it on a credit card. More people had disposable credit and so there were more customers willing to pay big money for the latest internet marketing must-have course.

Those days are long gone.

If Mike hadn’t given away the source code for free then this course probably still would have attracted a few bids on eBay but as Andrew wasn’t using it then he’s probably best to throw it on the tip.

Unfortunately the Butterfly Marketing sales page wasn’t captured on archive.org but the sales page is still live – selling the original package for $1997.

Any why not? With a little luck Mike may just get some sales from it even after all these years so he might as well leave it online forever.

What to take away from this blog post

Not all expensive courses are valueless after a few years and if it were me I wouldn’t throw anything on the tip unless absolutely necessary as I don’t like adding to landfill.

What I would do is list each course on eBay with a reasonable starting price and let others bid for it. Sometimes this can lead to you getting a nice chunk of change if two people start battling to win the auction.

In this case I do feel Andrew was right to get rid of the courses. I’ve no doubt it made him feel better (as long as he didn’t dwell too much on how much he spent to get them!).

Just remember what happened here the next time you’re drawn in by a sales page for an expensive product on launch day.

Five years down the road you too could be loading it into the boot of your car to drive it to the tip.

There are hundreds of companies who have made money by selling information products that teach the purchaser how to make money from selling information products.

It has been a “business” for years.

It’s the reason there are so many people attracted to forums like the Warrior Forum – because they have all been told that in order to make money online you need to sell information products.

The people that flock to that forum have also been told that it’s easy to sell information products and that they don’t even need to create the product themselves.

Yes, everything can be outsourced for pennies.

Didn’t you know that?

Thousands of willing workers in third-world countries are lining up to create your product for next to nothing.

And what’s more, they’ll be positively thankful for the few shiny pennies you chuck their way for doing it!

Once your product’s been created, extreme riches are just around the corner.

All that’s left to do is create a sales letter that tells potential customers about the benefit of your product and publish it to the web.

Job done, money’s on the way… or maybe not…

From one of the big UK information publishers, who in the last couple of months have heavily promoted a copywriting seminar, comes this gem in their sales letter:

“…if I’m honest, an element of creative talent you’re simply born with is what’s needed to write a really BIG-money sales letter…”

What they’re saying is that providing you’ve already been born with the creative talent required to write a sales letter, you too can make money.

Funnily enough they didn’t mention this when promoting the copywriting seminar a couple of months ago.

Surely anyone who wants to train as a copywriter should be assessed before attending the seminar to make sure they have this creative talent, shouldn’t they? Otherwise it’d be a complete waste of time and money for them.

Moving on for a moment, let’s assume that like the vast majority of the world you can’t write a sales letter. What do you do then?

Easy – the answer comes in the same sales letter as the above gem of a quote, you simply pay for it:

“…£10,000 plus handsome royalties for a single letter…”

Of course, what the sales letter doesn’t mention is that for this price tag to apply you would still need to have a superb product and not some rubbish created by a non-English speaker.

Good copywriters (the ones who were born with the creative talent for writing sales letters) know when to pass on a sub-standard product. If they are going to get royalties then they want to write a sales letter for a good product.

Put some ghost-written rubbish in front of them and they’ll laugh you out of the building and ignore any further advances you make.

Here’s the truth: you’re not going to make money as an information publisher despite what you’re told in the silly sales letters that you get through the mail.

You might make a few quid selling hype and rubbish to idiots in the WSO forum but real information publishing is for the big boys with the deep pockets.

Their job is to sell you the dream.

In order to sell you the dream they need to create superb sales letters – by spending big money to hire one of the talented copywriters.

To make more money they need to create more and more products to sell to you because as every aspiring information publishers knows, when the customer is hot on a niche they get into a “buying mode”.

As if to prove the point you’ll regularly receive new sales letters, often contradicting the one that came before. Just like this:

Month 1 – make your fortune by attending this copywriting seminar for only £1000 – become rich as a copywriting legend

Month 2 – become rich using our ready-made sales letters because you can’t be a copywriting legend unless you’ve been born with the talent, it can’t be acquired – only £1000

With each product you buy you come away with a little bit more information but less in the bank.

And in the background the information publishers work on their next offering using top-notch writers – before hiring highly talented copywriters to sell the product.

Despite what they tell you in the sales letters, information publishing costs you a great deal if you want to make money.

If you weren’t born with copywriting talent it’ll cost you cold, hard cash.

And if you’re one of the minute percentage who were born with the talent, it’ll cost you

“…years of practice, intuition, and deep concentration…”

– time, in other words.

Chances are if you’re receiving these sales letters then you’re both time poor and cash poor so you’re not going to be able to commit.

That’s why you’ll never make money from information publishing.