Unless you’ve been living under a rock or are brand new to Internet Marketing, it was a virtual impossibility to NOT hear about the BIG launches this year.

I’m of course referring to the Stompernet’s SMARTS program; Frank Kern’s Mass Control and Jeff Walker’s Product Launch Formula (I’m sure there were others, but these were the ones I was paying attention to).

Right after Frank Kern’s lauch of Mass Control, I had a chat with some of my buddies on Skype who mentioned that they ended up unsubscribing from several lists because of all of (what they called) the ’spam’ concerning the product. Around the same time I also noticed similar dialogues on various forums… where people were ticked off at all the emails they were receiving.

I personally was surprised about this response, particularly since my buddies call themselves "Internet Marketers"…

Don’t get me wrong, I do get irritiated by some marketers that constantly jam my inbox full of the latest offers and NEVER give any useful or good content. I can name a couple of big name guys that do this all the time… but I still subscribe to their emails.

And generally speaking I don’t mind getting stuff in my inbox… since there’s a lot to learn from various marketers. You’ve probably even heard the advice of ’subscribing to the gurus lists to learn how they market’… So, I’ve taken heed to this advice and instead of hitting the "delete" button I actually file each one of their emails into different folders (generally by author name). And I consciously add myself to new lists (I must be on a few dozen lists). I also print some of the emails (that I really like) and keep them in a folder (my swipe file).

But when I was first starting out, I talked a lot of crap about the super affiliates and gurus too… I mean "HOW DARE THEY", wasting my time with all of this hype and BS.

And when I started getting these promotions, this was my thought process and what I ended up doing: (perhaps you’ve had a similar experience)

• I’m just going to delete it because I can’t afford it anyway…
• This is so hypey and ‘over-the-top’… then get irritated (which made my day even worse…)
• Get pissed and hit ‘delete’… I even pushed the "spam" button on some of these offers
• If I was in a really bad mood, I wouldn’t even read just ended up ‘unsubscribing’ from that person’s list.

I mean, how STUPID could I be…

All of these promotions and messages were marketing lessons and I completely MISSED THE POINT! And I continued to miss the point, until an Internet Marketer who I admired told me to: "SNAP OUT OF IT!"

So, after getting raked over hot coals by my "mentor", I decided for a…

PARADIGM SHIFT

Unfortuately it wasn’t that easy… I did what everybody was telling me to do: "Save the emails and save the sales pages"… and even though I kept saving all of these I really didn’t understand what I was supposed to do with them, except for using them as a "swipe file".

And to be honest, it probably took me a good year before I started to "get it" and understand what to actually do with all of this stuff.

Let me give you some examples of what I noticed from the most recent launches. For instance, did you notice that all of the launches:

• used different modalities to get to their audience (audio, video, PDF reports, software)…
• used video squeeze pages…
• used the reverse squeeze page model (giving away a lot of content on the front end)…
• used blogs to share their content…
• used live video footage (of themselves)…
• used a laid back approach (informal presentations)
• had all their affiliates email their lists in unison (hence it was impossible for us NOT to notice their launch)

These are some of the more obvious parallells between the product launches. And since they all know each other they use similar strategies… but you have to wonder, "why would they all use the same strategies"?

Obviously… because they work.

When I started to look at all of these launches and messages in this way, I paid attention even when I couldn’t afford the products. Because I was essentially getting "free lessons" by studying these launches.

My question to you is:

What Did YOU Notice?

Just to help you along with the process, here are some of the other things that I paid attention to:

• Do they offer case studies?
• Is there a pattern in the way their emails are sent, and the language used?
• What about the affiliates?
• How do they communicate with you?
• Do they use "pre-sell" pages? (if so, how are they structured?)
• Do they link directly to the product pages?
• How are the "super affiliates" structuring their bonus offers?
• And on and on…

You could break down each and every marketing piece this way… which I don’t do… but I do take the time to do this with the BIG launches. And my feeling is that anyone who wants to build a profitable Internet Marketing business ought to:

PAY ATTENTION!

And more importantly, watch what they’re doing and emulate them… identify their strategies and tactics and implement some of it into their business. I’ve taken many of the lessons and implemented them on a much much smaller scale to some of my niches. And I can tell you that many of these techniques work even better in a non-IM niche… (and it doesn’t have to be a "launch").

By the way, I hope you all took the time to watch the freebie videos that were given in these launches. There’s a lot of great infomation in there that you can implement into your business right away!

And please share any of the takeaways you’ve had from watching these launches below (in the comments).

To your success,

Tags: jeff walker, stompernet, product launch formula, frank kern, mass control