Mass Control Diary: Week 2

Here’s the second entry in my Mass Control diary. I posted my first entry on March 6th, so you can see that I am far behind on this course! (But I have a good reason: I have been inundated by some very good clients – to the extent that I have been turning away clients. I’ve had to say no to 3 clients, in fact. This is the first time ever that I’ve had to do this.)

Back to Mass Control. I decided to test the 4-Day Cash Machine with a joint venture partner who has a list of over 6,000 members. Wow, I thought, even with a conversion rate of 1% we would do very well. But guess what? Our 4-Day Cash Machine experiment was a major FAIL! From that list, we got an incredible result of seven sales. You read that right – only seven people from that list of more than 6,000 responded positively to the “irresistible offer” and grabbed my partner’s product. My earnings from this little experiment: $116.68. That is not a typo, there isn’t a 0 or a comma missing. That’s really my half of the “profits”.

I don’t know what went wrong. It feels like I am the only one on the planet to fail with this magical 4-Day Cash Machine formula. And it really WAS easy, cut-and-paste easy. The hardest part for me was finding a JV partner and producing the bonuses.

Looking back, any number of things could have gone wrong:

• It’s possible that my partner’s list was of very low quality. That is, they are mostly freebie seekers who never ever want to pay for anything.
• We didn’t make the right offer. Perhaps the products we used for the campaign were not the ones the list wanted.
• The product was too expensive for the list. To increase the final value of the product, my partner and I bundled a number of her products to come up with a higher-priced product. As a result, the final product may have been beyond their reach.

I thought of trying it again with another JV partner but, finally, I got too busy and I just wanted to get on with the course.

The end of week 1 involved something called the Howitzer Method. I will not get into any details here, but I will say that I am not comfortable with this method since it borders on the unethical. As a workaround, I let my VA do the work for me. Not only does this arrangement save me hours of work, but it also keeps me honest.

I asked some fellow MCers on Twitter about this and finally, we came to the conclusion that you just have to take those parts of Mass Control that you believe in and modify the other parts. This became even clearer after listening to Clement Yeung’s interview of somebody who did make money from Mass Control, Mike Stelzner of whitepapersource.com.

Other than this, all the other parts of Week 1 were truly eye-opening for me, a newbie at information marketing. Week 1 is aptly called “Planting The Seeds of Domination”. The techniques Kern teaches make a lot of sense. His approach is similar to other product launch plans I have seen elsewhere, except that Kern’s MC is more intentional and comprehensive.

The second week is all about developing your story so that it creates liking and trust among your market. The exercises here are very interesting as you are forced to really dig deep into your life, your personality and experiences, to come up with a public persona that is still truthfully you, but who will resonate more with your market. Frank Kern emphasizes that you must never ever lie about yourself. This part of the course is about learning to highlight those parts of yourself that will make you more credible, more likable and more trustworthy to your market.

I should mention that aside from the print booklets and the DVD, the course includes CDs of Kern’s audio recordings for the Mass Control monthly members. Apparently these are from monthly teleseminars where Kern responds to questions and feedback from the monthly members. Listening to these CDs almost makes me regret not joining the MC membership. It would be nice to send Frank my questions about the actual implementation of MC. At least I get to hear other people’s questions and Kern’s responses to them. And their questions turn out to be very similar to mine anyway.

I am now rushing to get through Week 3. I was supposed to launch my product next week, but it looks like that will be postponed. I had planned to make the launch of my very first infoproduct to be simple. Really, for a product of this price, an elaborate launch is unnecessary. But I will apply Mass Control to the extent that I feel is appropriate and relevant to my market – and consistent with my personal values as an entrepreneur. We’ll see what happens.

photo credit: hans.gerwitz

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