This Is Just Beautiful
Following on from my post on Saturday about someone unsubscribing because they missed an email (which is a deliciously ironic case of cutting his nose off to spite his face), I also received yet another unsubscribe.
Why?
Here's the reason he gave.
"I think charging a fee to read a blog post is outrageous."
Now there's a guy who isn't using his brain, and also being completely hypocritical to boot.
The mailing list he's on is for my digital delivery product, SmartDD.
Therefore by association, he must be a provider of either software or ebooks, or information of some kind. So he's a vendor of information, he sells info products.
But, he thinks it's outrageous that someone else should want to charge for information.
I just checked the size of the blog post I made about my techniques in rising to page 1 in the search engines that I'm now charging for. It's 18,308 characters and comes to 3,387 words.
I've paid $47 for reports that were a third of the size of that, and nowhere near as valuable.
Prediction: He will never make any substantial money online.
Why? In his core, he believes information holds no value. If he has no respect for information, then he'll never appreciate its true worth.
I hesitate to write this, but… what a loser.
If he doesn't appreciate it, then that feeling will come across to his customers. He'll be the guy who believes the lowest price always wins.
Consequently, he'll never make any money, and never be independent.
But that's okay.  Only 2% of people ever do apparently. 98% would rather complain, make excuses and do nothing.
-Frank Haywood
Filed under internet business by on Feb 24th, 2008. Comment. 
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Comments on This Is Just Beautiful
Hi Frank,
I am not sure if you will want to publish this comment as it is intended just for you. I admire what you have done and all the work you put into your business. But I am a little concerned that you have become somewhat negative lately. It is not like the Frank I thought I knew when I first subscribed to this blog.
Don't worry, I think what you have to offer is very valuable and I intend to stay subscribed, if you don't kick me off the list.
I would just hate to see you go down the same road as another blogger I once read. I have removed him from my favourites and unsubscribed from his blog. Initials JB.
Anyway, don't let me dictate terms to you. It is just my thoughts and it is your blog.
Cheers, Brendan.
Hi Brendan,
I understand, and if you spoke to me you'd know that I'm one of the most positive people you're likely to meet.
And I've helped people all over the world with problems completely unrelated to what I do online. But there's only so much of me, and so I've had to withdraw from offering free help by email in the way that I have done.
(Despite the number of people I've helped, I've been called everything you could think of by cowards hiding behind anonymous email addresses. Not one has ever replied to my nice but thought provoking emails in reply. Not one.)
So my only choice was to offer the free help in another way, and that's here on my blog.
If you knew my background, you'd know that I've been taught to market in a certain way, and I think most of those ways make good business sense, but they've never really sat that well with me. So I decided to look around and see if there were better ways, and I think there are.
However, I've also decided that it's time to nip in the bud all the negativity I've received in the past, by dissuading people to be negative in the first place. If it means making an example (shudder – schooldays flashback) of some of them, then maybe that's what I have to do.
I really did hesitate putting the word loser in the post, but I think in this case it warrants it. This guy has simply lashed out without any thought whatsoever.
Whichever way you look at it, there are people out there who will never be successful because it's a mind set thing. Don't get me wrong, it's easy to make money online, but I think people get a little jaded and assume everyone who is selling online must be a bad person.
Once they have a limited mind set, it limits what they can achieve. They think that's the way they should behave too, and of course they're unsuccessful at it, and lash out at anyone who *is* successful.
And so we have the guy who thinks it's outrageous for me to charge for information, even though I can tell you he's an info seller himself. He's not the only one who wrote to me about this. I also had a lady write to me and say:-
"I don't think anyone should have to be paying out $10 let alone $25 for the privilege of reading your tomes."
What's *that* all about? She's an info seller too. I wrote her a very nice email back, and said that I'd reconsidered the $25 and that I thought I'd just leave it at $10. I also said:-
"Think about this. If I wrote a long sales page featuring all the benefits of buying what I wrote in my free password protected blog post, and put it up for sale for $10, would that make it more acceptable to you?"
The reason I wrote that was because I suspect it would. If I re-wrote it and offered it as a PDF, then people would buy it quite happily.
I think she's been trained to accept paying for information in that way, but not when it's provided in a manner that has long been seen as a method of getting free (if sometimes dubious) information. I've not had a reply back from her yet…
I thoroughly believe that the information I gave away for free to my subscribers is well worth at least $10. Like I said, I've paid $47 for far less quality info than in my post.
Anyway, I've taken on your comments about James, and I'll try to keep it in mind if I go too far down his path. You keep an eye on me okay? And let me know if I'm getting it wrong.
It's worth mentioning that the techniques James uses are well known. There are 6 principles of persuasion that drive people to do things, and I'll talk about them in another blog post.
Yes, I use them myself.
All the best,
Frank.
Hi Frank,
You hit it when you said "…he thinks information has no value…."
Information has no value to someone who has no need, desire or use for it. I've written grants using information that, to other people, is useless or trivial at best. I've turned that information into almost 7 figures.
Isn't this whole thing about USING information in an effective manner? If they can't or won't see that, it's their problem, not yours.
Remember your physics: Every action has an equal and opposite reaction. I.e., positive and negative!
Keep up the good work Frank.
Alice
Frank wrote "Not one has ever replied to my nice but thought provoking emails in reply. Not one."
I think we have all been trained that if we reply to the ""standard"" marketers email we will never hear a reply.
I know my self I have replied to marketer’s emails in the past only to get an email back saying this is an automated response no one is actually here. Even when the email itself says reply and I will "personally answer" you obviously do not fall in this category.
I think charging for information is exactly how we ALL arrived on your list in the first place and what is the difference between a PDF, word document, blog post, or forum that charges one time or monthly fees? I agree with your statements about people have been trained. We can tell the people who do not think outside the box and obviously these people do not!
I say "TEST" EVERYTHING is that not what we were all taught to do if you want to succeed? Try new things?? Want make a personal bet Frank??? I am sure you would agree that if you charge for this blog post and make a few bucks then tomorrow you see another person doing it then it becomes a trend the Lady would be doing it and following the heard right behind you. I bet you…
Sorry for the long ramble but Wanted to let you know some people do listen and just used to the positive Frank because that is what we were taught..;)
I guess I mis-understood what you were doing Frank. The way I see what you are doing with your blog is, you are making it into a paid membership site (sort of). That's a unique way of doing a membership site. Kudos to you Frank.
As far as you being negative, show me any person on this planet, including Anthony Robbins and tell me they have never been negative at some time in their life. Everyone has negative moments or time in their life, and most people have some everyday. It's human nature and if we all learn to keep that to a minimum that's good.
Keep up the great work.
Alice:
You're very kind thank you. And I agree that information is useful to you only if it's provided at the right time and place.
That's if I've understood what you've said.
One of my coaching students said to me recently "when the student is ready, the teacher will come" meaning he was at just the right time and place in his career to get the best benefit from signing up with me.
I'm a student too. I'm always looking for novel ways of doing my thing online. Many of what I see though are really just "flash in the pan" methods with no real substance.
The ones that work are the ones based on the principles that have always worked, long before the internet arrived, and you can see them at the top of this page.
Product creation, traffic, list building and automation.
Simple Profit Ebooks:
What I meant was, when someone has lashed out at me and I've written them a polite personal email, not one of them has ever bothered to reply to that personal email.
Which really tells me that all they wanted to do was vent their negativity.
I agree, there's no difference whatsoever in how information is presented, if it's valuable, it's *valuable*, and that's that.
And yep, testing is the name of the game.
A decent split tester is on my list of products I plan to create this year. I'm tempted to buy KaizenTrack but it seems a little too rigid in the way it performs testing, it's follow the rules or nothing.
That may be naive of me to assume I can do that and get good results, but I often find that if I think I *can* do something, then I'm also *able* to do it.
Maybe I *will* buy Kaizentrack and give it a whirl.
-Frank Haywood
Ernie:
Not every post will be password protected, but if I feel I have something of more than normal value to share, then why not?
But I want to keep my subscribers too of course, so they get all the password protected posts for free.
It's a win-win. Stay subscribed (I win) and every so often you get $10 worth of valuable information for free (you win).
By me placing a value of $10 on the posts, it's an amount that anyone who is serious about their business wouldn't mind parting with. And all they have to do to get any later posts for free is to subscribe…
-Frank Haywood.
Frank, I was one who was able to read your blog report for free, because I had the sense to signup to your newsletter
For those that missed out on the last report, get signed up so you get the next one for free.
It's interesting that if you had offered this report in pdf format, or within a membership area, there probably wouldn't have been complaints. But since it was delivered via a blog, people expect it to be free.
You're welcome, Frank!
Alice