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A common misconception is that Indian cuisine consists entirely of curry-based dishes. While the term curry in general refers to the distinctive spiced dishes of various regions in Asia, it’s often used specifically by Europeans and North Americans to refer to dishes made with curry powder. In fact, one could even go so far to say that the (ignorant masses) general populace thinks that adding curry powder to any bland dish makes it palatable to Indian sensitivities. Or (worse yet) that curry is used as a cover up for food of questionable origin or preparation.

Which brings us to today’s topic: resale rights. In my opinion, and without meaning to offend anyone of Asian origin or inclination, resale rights are the curries of online marketing.

Let me explain.

What Are Resale Rights?

Broadly defined, “resale rights” are the rights to sell a product that someone else created. Resale selling is different from affiliate selling because resellers interact directly with the customers — in other words, the reseller is the vendor. In affiliate selling, the affiliate is not the vendor and is merely acting as a sales agent for the vendor.

There are different kinds of resale rights. Private label rights, for example, allow a reseller to pass a product off as their own creation. PLR articles, for example, can be used to create content-based sites that make money via AdSense and other advertising programs. Master resale rights let you sell not only the product, but also the rights to resell the product. And there are umpteen variations that we can all lump under the general category of “resale rights”.

Resale rights are not unique to Internet marketing. Book and music publishers often sell resale rights to other publishers. And retail selling is perhaps the simplest use of resale rights that everyone understands.

Resale Rights for Online Products

Resale rights for many software and infoproducts are readily available today. On my hard drive I have well over a hundred different products with resale rights, most of them obtained from free membership sites like Mr. OverDeliver and MyFreeGiveaway. I’ve only been able to review a few so far, like Desktop AdSense Cash Machine (review) and Keyword Niche Power (review). It takes time to sort through all those products and find the ones that are worthy of a review.

Every day, more and more products with resale rights appear on the market. Sometimes it’s the same products you’ve seen elsewhere, but in different form — remember those private label rights? — but many are entirely new products. So why are online marketers so hot for resale rights? There are two reasons, one obvious and one not-so-obvious.

Reason 1: Back End Sales

You’ve surely come across free e-books and software before. Just recently, for example, I offered a free copy of Google AdWords Made Easy to my readers. These free products exist primarily to promote, directly or indirectly, other products, products that are not free. This is the “back end” of the sales funnel, so to speak. Give away a product, or sell it cheaply, and make money from the other things you sell to the customer. (For Google AdWords Made Easy, for example, the back end sale is a product called Keyword Elite, which I hope to review here at some point.)

Again, giving things for free in the hopes that you’ll become a paying customer isn’t unique to online marketing — how many free samples have you had at the grocery store? But the cost of giving away product online is basically nothing, so it’s much more prevalent.

The problem with free products is that there’s no money upfront. But with resale rights you can get some money immediately and then make more money later. You also get motivated sellers who get to pocket more of the profit from selling resale products than they would through normal affiliate programs. They can also (depending on what resale rights were acquired) market the product differently, set their own prices, add their own material, etc.

Reason 2: Switching the Market

Here’s the real reason so many products are sold with resale rights. Recall that in Understand Your Meta-Market I described the two online meta-markets: consumers and resellers. When you add resale rights to a product you are changing the meta-market. You’re not targeting the end consumer, but rather the reseller. You’re pushing the product out instead of waiting for consumers to pull the product. It’s a very clever model.

The Curry Analogy

And now you understand what I mean when I say that resale rights are the curries of Internet marketing. Want to spice up your sales? Mix in some resale rights to your products and your product will all of a sudden appeal to a whole different demographic.

The fallacy, of course, is thinking that resale rights will hide product flaws. Better you spend your time creating a better product than tempting others to resell a poorly-made product. If the dish isn’t tasty without the added curry, you’re doing something wrong.

Technorati Tags: resale rights, AdSense, curry, private label rights, meta-market, affiliate, reseller

Update: Keith has promised to fix the transcripts, so I’m bumping the rating from 6/10 to 7/10 for being responsive. It may become 7.5 or 8 out of 10 if he does it. I’ll also be posting a review of the List FX Official Manual shortly. [end update]

A few weeks ago, a home-study course called The List FX by a guy named Keith Wellman was heavily promoted by a number of high-profile Internet marketers. What made it so interesting was the low price — $9.95 — and the potential for 100% commissions for anyone who joined the affiliate program. So let’s see what The List FX is really about and whether it’s worth the $9.95 it costs to purchase it.

Product: The List FX
Audience: List-building newbies
Price: $9.95
Rating: 7/10

Let’s face it, ten dollars is a small amount of money to pay for an Internet marketing course these days. Just the other week, for example, I got an email from someone insisting that I absolutely had to purchase AdSense Wealth Empire, which is a steal at only $2000…. me, the guy who obviously knows nothing about AdSense… So really, $10 compared to $2000 is nothing, is it not?

Here’s what The List FX squeeze page promises you for your $9.95:

• The List FX modules, a set of downloadable audio interviews with famous Internet marketers
• A bonus module (another interview) describing how Keith launched his “ViralFX” product
• Access to some teleseminars with Internet marketers
• The “100% commission” affiliate program
• Access to a private forum for people who’ve bought the program
• The opportunity to join (at a reduced cost) a monthly program run by Keith Wellman

So, let’s look at two aspects of this product: the content and the upsell.

The List FX Content

The course consists of these modules:

• How to Create Hyper Profitable Lists From Scratch — Keith interviews Ewen Chia of Secret Affiliate Weapon fame. Ewen talks about the fundamental principles of building lists, including his three factors for profitable lists: subscribers that are targeted (interested in the topic), qualified (able to spend money), and responsive (willing to listen to and trust you). Then he talks about getting the right mindset for building a profitable list (it’s OK to sell things to them — the OK-to-sell attitude is something I had to work on myself) and something he calls the Three C Strategy: congruence, consistency, commanding. Transcript length is 23 pages.

At this point I should interject something about the transcripts… the course is actually delivered as a set of audio files, but transcripts of the audios in PDF form are provided as well. However, the transcripts have mistakes in them and obviously haven’t been proofed very closely. For example, the transcript above refers to “viro marketing” instead of “viral marketing”. I’m disappointed that Keith didn’t take the time to go through the transcripts and fix the mistakes. Busy people like myself don’t really have the time to listen to the audios, it’s much faster to read the transcripts.

• Massive Profits From Tiny Lists — Keith interviews Stephen Pierce. I can’t say this interview did much for me, as it’s more inspirational than specific tips. Some decent advice about thinking in the long term, though, and keeping your list happy by sending them lots of free stuff with no strings attached. Transcript length is 28 pages.
• Responsive List Secrets — Keith interviews Alice Seba. In this interview, Alice talks about building relationships with the people on your lists. By writing your content (and she emphasizes that you want to send your own content to your list, not someone else’s) as if you were writing to a single person. By only sending the best-quality material to your list. By only recommending products that you’ve actually bought and used yourself. By being honest about a product’s flaws (see The Power of the Negative Review for my thoughts on this). Transcript length is 15 pages.
• Niche List Building Secrets — Keith interviews Mike Woo Ming. Mike, a medical doctor by training, talks about building very targeted niches. The first thing you need is a good autoresponder, like AWeber (that’s who I use for my lists — and yes, I can heartily recommend them). Then about building a name squeeze page, which is basically a short sales letter getting people to enter their name and email address to get them to the next page where they’ll actually get your offer. (Mike points out that his conversion rates for these squeeze pages are a lot higher when going after niche markets and not the Internet marketing crowd.) Good advice about using pay-per-click programs (like Google AdWords) to get targeted traffic — it costs, but the subscribers are very targeted and quite willing to be sold to — including advice on creating good AdWords ads and landing pages. (Aside: if you’re looking for a good source of information about AdWords, download Brad Callen’s free e-book Google AdWords Made Easy.) There’s even a good tip about using phrases like “Instant Access” instead of “Subscribe” on the opt-in form as a way to increase conversions. And discussions about other ways to build lists, including things to avoid (like buying leads). Transcript length is 28 pages.
• Email Deliverability Secrets — Keith interviews Gary Ambrose. Gary spends a lot of time explaining why mailing list services are needed to ensure your mails get out, which makes sense since that’s his main product. But he talks about things like using real language when composing your emails, pointing out that Fortune 500 companies don’t resort to using misspellings and bad grammar (think “f.re.e” instead of “free”) to get around spam filters and they still manage to get through. Transcript length is 32 pages.
• Secrets to Getting Your Emails Read — Keith interviews Jeff Levesque. Tips about formatting emails for maximum effect (we’re talking plain text emails here, not HTML). Then how you can make some easy money by getting a domain name that is almost the same as the domain name for a product you’d like to promote — for example, adding or dropping an “s” at the end, or using a domain with or without dashes compared to the main domain — and then getting people to subscribe via that as well as sending them to the product sales page. Tips about selling e-books you have resales rights to very cheaply on eBay and getting the people who buy from you to sign up for your lists. Transcript length is 22 pages.
• Massive List Building Secrets — Keith interviews Liz Tomey, the person behind a huge array of products including ViralEbookAds.com. A lot of more inspirational stuff at the beginning, then some tips like always include links to your signup/update pages in all your emails, send your customers free updates and try to sell them on related things, how many emails to send out to your list. Transcript length is 24 pages.
• Viral FX Beginnings — Russell Brunson interviews Keith about the launch of his Viral FX product (sometimes referred to incorrectly in the transcript as “Viral Effect”). Keith got started in Internet marketing by building his own product to sell, but he discovered that a product does not just sell itself, no matter how good it is. So he got into the mailing list side of things and decided to build a product that he could use to build a large mailing list. That product was Viral FX, which is essentially a set of long interviews with various Internet marketers (kind of like The List FX) about virual marketing. The calls were recorded using a teleconferencing service he found via Google, so they were very easy to create — and many marketers are happy to talk about themselves and their products/techniques for extra publicity. Then five-minute excerpts of the audios were given away for free to anyone who signed up for the Viral FX mailing list. Those people then had the opportunity to upgrade to a paid membership and get access to the full audios. The viral effect was that anyone who signed up for a free membership received an affiliate link that they could use to encourage others to sign up — and if any of those referrals upgraded their membership, they’d get a fee. (Many sites use this technique, for example Mr. OverDeliver.) Lots of discussion about how it pays to give away most (75%-100%) of the front-end commissions to joint venture partners and to make your money on the back-end and by being able to sell further products to the list later. Transcript length is 32 pages.

Total length of all the transcripts together is 204 pages.

There’s also a bonus video of Keith being interviewed and access to The List FX private forums. And later some free teleseminars.

The List FX Upsell

With Keith giving 100% of the commissions away to his affiliates, you must be wondering where he’s making his money. Well, it’s all in the upsell, as he describes himself in Viral FX Beginnings (see above). Besides garnering some extra publicity for his Viral FX product, he also sells The List FX Official Manual for $147. I have not bought the manual, so I can’t review it. Keith claims that it’s a “step by step manual on how to build a huge list in just 90 days”. It includes videos showing you how to do various things like setting up autoresponders, hosting accounts, creating graphics, etc. It seems to be a list-building course from the ground up, but again I can’t tell any more than what I see on the sales page.

The “viral” part of this whole strategy is the two-tier affiliate program, of course. As an affiliate, you get the full $9.95 for everyone who joins The List FX, plus $22.33 for any of your referrals who purchase the official manual upgrade.

Keith is also, of course, building himself a nice list of targeted customers interested in list building.

Is The List FX Worth It?

The List FX reminds me a lot of a book I read recently called The E-Code: 33 Internet Superstars Reveal 43 Ways to Make Money Online Almost Instantly — Using Only Email (now breathe). The advice in that book is very similar to what’s said in the teleconferences. Given that, I’d say The List FX (the $9.95 level) compares favorably to the list-building parts of the book. (Note that The E-Code also covers product creation and product sourcing. It’s amusing to note that one of the infoproduct creation methods described in The E-Code is exactly what Keith did: tape a bunch of interviews and sell them.)

If you’re new to list building, then, I’d say that The List FX makes for an interesting read, but don’t expect any detailed how-tos, just a lot of general advice, exactly like The E-Code. The specifics have been reserved for the “Official Manual”. You can find most of the information for free on the net, of course. Access to the private forums is one of the benefits, though I see a lot of Keith’s answers there are “read the Official Manual for the details”, so I think the value of the forums is more in finding a community of like-minded people interested in and new to list building.

The typos in the transcripts really turned me off, though, so even though it has a low price, I’ve decided this product only rates a 6 out of 10.

Technorati Tags: review, list building, Keith Wellman, The List FX, Viral FX, AWeber, autoresponder, teleconferencing, audio course, affiliate, The E-Code

Since I’m running a free course on profitable niche discovery, I thought it would be useful to look at some of the keyword software that’s out there and hopefully uncover some hidden gems for my students. Alas, the first one I ran across, Keyword Niche Power, turned out to be fool’s gold.

Product: Keyword Niche Power
Platform: Windows only
Retail Price: $97
Fair Price: $5 (on sale here at that price)
Rating: 1/10

These days, I don’t expect everything I buy to come with a manual, but even a simple “README” file is nice to have. When I purchased Keyword Niche Power (KNP), I ran the install and then started the program and I must admit I had no real clue what to do next, which is unusual for a software developer like myself. I played with the tabs a bit, but nothing was really obvious, until I noticed that buried within the ZIP file was another ZIP file called “KNPDemo.zip”. When I extracted it I discovered a web page with a Flash video demonstrating how to use the program. Well, rather than explain it to you myself, just watch the video yourself (opens in a new window). The video’s just over 6 minutes long.

Once I understood how you were supposed to use the tool, I immediately ran it on my personal site to see what keywords it would find. Here the first problem presented itself: KNP only accepts URLs that start with “www.”, which means I couldn’t use it on my pet fence guide site, which is not accessible using a “www.” form. Oops.

The second problem was less evident: when I entered www.EricGiguere.com, it found only one link on the page. When I entered www.ericgiguere.com, however, it was able to spider 10 pages. Nevermind that it missed a whole pile of internal pages (I had set the search depth to 10), but treating EricGiguere.com and ericgiguere.com differently is inexcusable.

I then got it to extract keywords from the pages it did find. This took a while, because I think it got confused by my Amazon order page that automatically redirected you to Amazon.com and added a copy of my AdSense book to your Amazon shopping cart. Oops.

After adjusting things, the final list of keywords it came up with was less than impressive, especially since there were repeated URLs in the list. Yeesh.

Maybe the keyword density tab would redeem the product. Again I entered www.ericgiguere.com (lowercase only, of course), only to be presented with this lovely message:

Oops again. So much for analyzing the keyword density of my page. But that’s OK, there’s a much better (and free) online keyword density analyzer available here.

It looked pretty hopefully for KNP at this point, but I decided to try the last feature, the keyword lookup feature. The user interface was even less obvious for this one, so I’m glad I had that video to guide me. Basically create a list of keywords in a text file and then run it from the “Search Specific Keywords” tab. The text file normally comes from the keyword extraction process we tried earlier, so I went back and redid an extraction and saved the results to disk. I then ran the search.

Now, the programmer who wrote this stuff is very lazy, because KNP doesn’t prompt you for a directory to use. It just saves things in a “Keywords” directory wherever you installed the application. Lazy, lazy.

What the “Search Specific Keywords” function does is take each keyword in the text file and run it through Yahoo!’s keyword suggestion tool, storing the results for each keyword in separate files in the “Keywords” directory.

Of course, the Yahoo! suggestion tool is actually free to use, so the only benefit to this is making it easier to scrape the results for tens or hundreds of keywords, saving them either as text or Excel files.

And that’s why I think this product is only worth $5, not the $97 it’s advertised at. If you’re a programmer you could probably write yourself a quick app to scrape the keywords in short order, or find someone else’s script to do so, so really only non-programmers will find this function useful.

Bottom Line: If you want a tool to extract keyword suggestions from Yahoo!, Keyword Niche Power does an adequate job, though you’ll probably have to edit the input file manually to make sure it gets all the right keywords you want scraped. Otherwise, look elsewhere for better tools. If you really want it, you can buy it for $5 from me and I’ll go buy myself a latte for my efforts at reviewing it.

Technorati Tags: keyword, Keyword Niche Power, review, resale rights, Yahoo, keyword suggestions, software