Info Marketing Is Dead

Well, I wasn’t quite as quick on the draw this morning with getting this newsletter into your inbox. I was in “family mode” most of the weekend with a bunch of home projects going on… plus Mother’s Day yesterday.

Happy Mothers Day to all the moms out there, BTW. 🥰

But, a busy and slightly shorter week coming up. Shorter because the family and I are taking a short weekend RV trip this weekend and leaving on Friday. So, I better get to it! Lots to do!

What’s coming up in this issue:

• Information Marketing Is Dead For Real. And Here’s What’s Selling Instead
• WordPress Quick Bits (controversy regarding how plugins are installed?)
• How not to get STUCK with your email service provider (important!)

Let’s go…

Information Marketing Is Dead (Really)

In “internet years”, I’m kind of an old man. 🤪 I started my first online business way back in 1998. It was a technology blog and I managed to turn that site into something cool. It funded my college, went on to turn into a full-on business and ultimately shaped my life direction.

While I’ve generated revenue in all kinds of ways during this time, information marketing has played a very large part of it.

I remember the days of the “ebook”. This was the beginning of regular people getting into information marketing. And it quickly went into this idea that “the more the better”.

Things evolved into big product launches. The big $1997 online courses. Packed with bonuses. Lots of videos. All the rest.

My first big online course was Blog Masters Club. 16 freakin’ modules. I even had a cool image made of it. Look at this bad boy…

Impressive? Aren’t you just eager to spend countless hours watching my videos! You surely need that! 🤪

I launched that course and it did very well. Generated a lot of revenue for me. That course still exists and you’ll find it in the course library of the Blog Marketing Academy if you’re interested.

But, courses like that? Or even a fraction of the size?

It just doesn’t work anymore. Not even close.

In fact, I will say that information marketing is… dead.

Big online courses are dead.

People don’t buy them nearly like they used to. The ones who DO buy them don’t even complete them in most cases. I think it probably peaked around the pandemic, but really backfired off of that. Today, online courses just don’t sell that much. Sales numbers on that stuff are not doing so well.

People don’t have the attention spans. People are also already overloaded and overwhelmed. Plus, let’s face it… information is everywhere. Online courses have become commodities. You can find almost anything you want for free on Youtube… or in some courses being sold for peanuts on Udemy or Skillshare. Online courses have been “Netflixed”.

The golden age of information marketing is over.

So, in this world of infobesity, people no longer value information. Information is just not considered useful or valuable any longer. It is like trying to sell ice to the eskimos.

So, then what DO people value?

They value TIME. And they value SIMPLICITY.

So, how can you sell them time and simplicity?

You do it by selling implementation. Don’t sell the “how to”. Sell the results directly.

By far, the most direct way to do this is by selling a service. Whatever it is your target market wants… just offer to do it for them and sell it as a service.

To get more strategic about it, you want to get into a productized service. This is a service that you package up into a repeatable process and systematize. Then, you can sell that outcome over and over again. In fact, you can build nice sales funnels around it.

I personally believe productized services is the best way forward these days. In fact, I feel as if I need to go back and revise a lot of what I talked about regarding “blog monetization” back in the days to show how to build those funnels around the idea of productized services. I think this is the best solution to operating in an information saturated world.

But, it isn’t the only option…

Selling implementation doesn’t have to be “done for you”. It can also be “done with you”. In other words, things like coaching or consulting. That can work very well when done smartly.

Selling implementation could also be done by way of software. I’ve seen several people move from the info business into creating software applications. Software and apps work because they provide solutions for implementing something. They are shortcuts to implementation.

And lastly, there’s also the idea of building membership sites built around community implementation. This is where you probably still have a bunch of information in there, but you’re putting a LOT of effort into building cohesive groups where people will work together to implement things. Could be by way of masterminds, cohorts, etc.

Regardless of your specific strategy, you need to be focused today on selling implementation.

This is exactly why I pivoted Blog Marketing Academy hard into services and why Concierge is now the core offer of the website. I’ll be frank with you…. if I hadn’t pivoted into Concierge, Blog Marketing Academy might not exist right now. Because I was selling information and that business was dying FAST. I adapted to a rapidly changing market by moving directly into implementation. Today, my business is completely different than it was just 2-3 years ago. I no longer have students…. I have clients.

This Week In Concierge

Here’s a bit of the activity from last week among Concierge client sites:

• Migrated several new sites into my own hosting. In one case, Elementor was failing to open because it was choking on memory on my client’s old hosting. Fixed immediately once the site had more room to breathe.
• Numerous layout adjustments for another client site I fully built for them
• Built a nice setup for how members-only content will show up for non-members, with beautiful call to action to upgrade to access. This is part of a custom-built online class setup I built for a client.
• Re-built the process of “free trial” setup on another client’s site
• Built a new member dashboard for a client.
• Did yet another conversion of a Thrive Themes site to Kadence. This site was super small, so had the whole thing done in about 30 minutes.

Also, I created two new videos mainly aimed at Concierge clients. They are:

• Best practices for using Basecamp.
• An exit plan. Yes, in this video I am showing how to migrate your own website OUT of my hosting and over to any host of your choice. Because as a proponent of digital sovereignty, I think it is important that my clients know they’re always in full control of their own sites. And, even if something were to happen to me, they know how to move.

These videos are on the new Client Information section of the account dashboard.

WordPress Quick Bits

xCloud Hosting Announces 2 New Features. xCloud is moving fast when it comes to development… and it’s awesome to see. This last week, they announced a new site disable feature where you can flip a switch and lock down a site while still keeping it on your server. Also, they announced support for WordPress Multisite… making it easier to manage a network of sites from one central dashboard. Check it out.

Cloudways Brings Back Vultr And Linode. Not too long after Cloudways was acquired by Digital Ocean, they shut down the ability for new accounts to use competing providers like Vultr and Linode. I didn’t particularly like this move since I consider Vultr to be a better VPS provider than Digital Ocean. Well, apparently I wasn’t the only one who expressed frustration. Cloudways has now reversed course and issued a big “oops” on their blog. Yes, they have re-introduced Vultr and Linode as options yet again.

WordPress 6.5.3 Released And Causes A Little Stir. If you haven’t noticed, the process of installing a plugin to WordPress changed a little bit. Now when you activate a new plugin, it just… sits there. Before, it used to redirect to a new screen where you would begin to use the plugin you just installed. Well, with 6.5.3, now they’ve put a “Refresh” button on the plugin screen to try to make it easier. But, in reality, all they’re really doing is adding stupidity to the whole plugin process. And, I actually agree with Syed Balkhi here on this issue. He’s just part of a much large debate among the WordPress community about what the process of plugin onboarding should look like. Personally, I have no idea why they even messed with it at all.

Newsletter Glue Getting A Big Update. Newsletter Glue is a dedicated tool for running a newsletter out of WordPress. And they’re introducing a big Version 3 Update. Newsletter Glue is an interesting project because it enables you to write and control your newsletter within WordPress while sending it via popular providers like ActiveCampaign, Aweber, MailerLite and others. It is a very different kind of product than something like FluentCRM. And, BTW, a worthy solution to what I discuss below about how not to get STUCK with an email list host.

Try Out Divi 5 Alpha. I know Divi is popular with some. Personally, I’ve never been much of a fan. Plus, the performance sucks. Well, they’ve been working really hard to re-build the entire platform. Divi version 5 is getting closer and, in fact, you can test drive the Alpha release right online. Here’s the post. It honestly does look like a huge improvement over past versions. That said, I don’t envy their position because I feel they’re playing catchup.

How Not To Get Stuck With Your Email List Host

Last week, I took a look at a secondary site on behalf of a Concierge client. This particular site isn’t enrolled in Concierge, but I took a look at it anyway.

This isn’t just any “secondary” site, either. Because it has a super large email list of over 45,000 people. But, here’s the problem…

The whole thing is on an email list host called Klaviyo.

And as my long-time readers know, I am an advocate of digital sovereignty. And this is a massive asset to be stuck on “rented land” that they don’t own.

So, just move the list elsewhere and move on, right? Well, they’ve got almost 400 past issues of the newsletter inside of Klaviyo. That’s a lot of content. Good stuff in there.

And Klaviyo has no options within their app to export any of it.

Outside of perhaps some possibility of using some external application and the API to gain access to that stuff, those 400 newsletters are STUCK inside of Klaviyo. The only option to get it out of there is going to involve the mind-numbing process of copy/paste and downloading all the images manually.

Did I mention that, due to the size of the list, they’re paying out over $700/month to maintain this account?

Makes my head hurt. 😢

To be clear, this is not an issue unique to Klaviyo. Almost all of them are this way. It is rare to see an email list service that provides the option to export your past email campaigns.

And why would they? It isn’t in their interest to make it that easy to leave!

Sure, you can almost always export your list. Lists are pretty easy to move, overall. But, past email content? Not so much. And if all you’ve been doing is promoting stuff, that might not matter. But, if you’re running a nice newsletter, that sucks.

With my newsletter here…. first I run it out of FluentCRM. So that right there has it all “in house” which means I own all the data and it is backed up constantly. But, I take it even further…

I also save each and every issue of this newsletter to a custom post type right inside of WordPress. In fact, that’s how the archives are powered.

Yes, it is a little copy/paste job to do that. Takes me just an extra few minutes to copy this newsletter over to that custom post type and prepare it for web display. No big deal, really. Once it is there as a post, I can do whatever I please and show it anywhere I want on my site.

And that’s my recommendation for you, too.

If you’re sending out high-quality content to your email list, I strongly recommend that you archive it with WordPress. Consider nothing other than WordPress, too. Because WordPress is well known and practically universal. It makes your data highly portable. It is your’s. It won’t be trapped anywhere.

Plus, you have the ability to showcase your good stuff on your site if you would like. 👍

More importantly, though, you remain free to move your email list around and use any service you like. You know your content is safe and sound.