The Video Wizard

As you probably know I get very excited about the power of video and social media marketing and the opportunity it provides for businesses of all sizes.

Recently, you may have been exposed to the launch of Frank Kern’s List Control and also Andy Jenkins’ Video Boss products.

When I first saw the way Andy Jenkins was using video to launch his product I have to say I was very impressed. As far as I am concerned, the technique of content delivery, relationship building and online sales was groundbreaking and literally blew me away.

A few weeks later, Frank Kern pops up and emulates almost the same model to launch List Control.

If you haven’t seen these launches or are familiar with what I’m talking about, fortunately this post will explain it all for you.

So in a nutshell, this is the way they approached the launch of their products – you can expect to see many more people taking on this model because for so many reasons it has to be the most powerful marketing I’ve seen online in a while.

So they have a site setup with a video that gives away great content and advice. I’m talking really, really good value here – the type of thing you’d expect to pay for, and because it’s free, you feel compelled to share it around with your network.

The first video you watch from both of them is longer than most sales videos you see for sales pages, simply because it is jam packed with content. You can opt-in to get notified of when the next video comes out too which is pretty enticing because they have already demonstrated fantastic value upfront and you want more, so of course you sign up.

Another thing that you’ll notice is a dramatic demonstration of social proof. They allow people to comment on these videos. The power of this is immense because they manage to generate hundreds of live comments that are raw, genuine, and more powerful than a heap of video testimonials. These comments make you feel more comfortable with the content of the page and because most of the comments are people asking questions for more advice or simply fans sharing their gratitude for Andy or Frank sharing, it makes these guys look even more like heroes.

Shortly after that, they release the next video and this is when I noticed exactly what they were doing. The site design changes slightly and all of a sudden you can see four links in the menu. One goes to the first video, the next goes to the second video, and the third and fourth links say COMING SOON.

Do you see how clever this is?

They are building anticipation for you to come back and watch the third and fourth videos. So why is this so smart? Well, after a week or so you’ve potentially watched four videos that might add up to be an hour long. In this time you’ve not only become more familiar and comfortable with Andy and Frank, you’ve also learned a heap of great things for free and they’ve flaunted hundreds or thousands of comments to let you know (in case you had any doubts) that they really are the leaders in their fields.

The other good thing this does from an affiliate marketing point of view, is the way they allow their JV partners and themselves to email out to their list four or five times, rather than just once, to promote the product and the information to generate an audience and up to four or five times the traffic!

Throughout the length of the campaign where they release each video, they have built up a qualified audience, a very excited crowd of hot leads just waiting to get more and built the buzz around their content so everyone is starting to link to it and share it around.

At this point they flip the site into a sales page with a limited time offer and create a bucketload of sales.

Now just imagine for a second if they decided to release one page, with an hour of content and a sales pitch at the end, with an add to cart button, no comments and tried to get the same result. It just doesn’t compare.

I feel this is a very well oiled machine that combines the power of online video and social media very effectively, and I have no doubt that both of these guys generated hundreds of thousands of dollars, maybe more than a million dollars in sales from this process.

So what can you expect next? I wouldn’t be surprised if they launched a new product on how they made it happen. A “Learn My Product Launch Boss Formula” type product. Wouldn’t surprise me at all.

What I thought was interesting is that in Frank Kern’s sales video currently live on the List Control site is that he actually uses almost exactly the same graphics as Andy Jenkins did in The Video Boss. Do you think these guys are working together?

I was very impressed when I could see the social engineering that went in to The Video Boss and was disappointed that I never got any screen shots of it, fortunately when Frank launched List Control, I made sure I had some screen shots of these pages before he flipped it into the standard sales page…

The above image is the first video page, when this launched originally, it had coming soon across the top for the next three videos.

How incredible is this for social proof? Frank got over 1700 comments!

I guess having a big list and a few JV partners helped with that…

Notice down in the side bar the video thumbnails for the other vids in the campaign. Before the last three were released these also said coming soon to help build anticipation.

I took this screengrab this morning – check out the header graphics in this video and how it matches with The Video Boss logo below…

I wonder how long it will be before List Control has a page like this up?