Being The "Guru"

They did JVs with people with big lists.

Once you make enough money you hire people to do this for you.
Frank doesn't have to do anything other than appear on camera.

It's not "necessary" for "making money online" but it IS necessary if what you sell is largely a byproduct of your public persona. "Frank Kern" is a character, a product created by a real guy named Frank Kern. If that's the kind of business you want to have, then yes, you DO need to become a guru.

The way I view the guys on that end of the IM spectrum is that they are money-getting-information celebrities, the same way that movie stars are entertainment celebrities. Because they are part of the marketing, they themselves are part of the product.

Consider that what the guru is "best at" is actually just the being a guru part. None of them sell expertise, or else they would be providing services. What they sell is information. Some of that information is tied to results.

Some of it is "how to" but a lot of it is purely informational. They are no different than the person selling stuff on QVC. They didn't make what they're selling. They acquired the info and are re-packaging it.

Again, nothing wrong with that at all. You don't have to be a restaurant-owning 4 star chef to write a cookbook that people like and use, you know?

NOTE: I'm not singling out any guru here, just talking about what "guru-hood" is about in this industry.

Not all of them. Some of them even admit otherwise. Kern has talked many times about how he went straight from working in a billing call center at a merchant account company to selling "how to make money online" products right out of the gate.

Not necessarily. That happens when you launch as a natural consequence, because the launch structure is about ballooning demand on the front end through artificial manipulation of the flow of information to the public. So of course post-launch, sales will subside. But they don't decline to nothing if you continue to market the product. Why would they?


Everyone knows John Reese had the million dollar day with Traffic Secrets 1. But what no one talks about (even though you could just pay attention and see it) is how for the next couple of years, he continued to market the same course as his main product.

I would bet hard cash that he made more money in the long tail, AND got to keep more of it since as you said, the affiliates did all the hard publicity work to get the product out there, but after they bailed, he just kept right on selling it to the people who were interested.

One of the only reasons to make "New" products is because people will buy something simply BECAUSE it's new. And so you can sell something else to the customers you already have (because that's easier than finding new ones).

No one who knows what they're doing will just keep creating new products over and over and only focus on new sales.

They don't have to come up with killer products all the time. They just need "stick" once you buy, and that's largely a function of being an entertaining personality, so we go back to the importance of being a guru as a sort of figurehead, a personality that people can mentally interact with.

Yes, you CAN rely on your list forever if you care for it and feed it properly. It's a LOT easier to get a big list with a launch, and then keep it big. You only have to pick up enough subs to compensate for how many unsub, which is not many if THEY LIKE YOU. Which has nothing to do with how good of stuff you send necessarily.

It has to do with being likable.

This is true, but not because of why you said. It's just a possibility, a different way of going about things. But it's important to note that you can't charge a premium on something that has no identity.