By Phila Hoopes
At 9:00 a.m. on Sunday, January 30, 2005, an e-commerce revolution was launched.
Like most commerce, it's based on the bedrock principle of buying low, selling high: in this case, buying the work of freelance ghostwriters, then massively marketing that work. It's not based on millions of fast-track sales for a single product. Instead, it operates on an incremental principle: many thousands of steady sales for multiple small products, adding up to millions.
And within weeks, this revolution will touch every freelance market on the Internet.
Boom time for the likes of us? To read the sales letter that's lighting the fuse to this powder keg, no. It's the freelance equivalent of sweatshop labor.
It started early in January: Google changed the rules of its Adwords program, which had previously been touted as a cash machine by Internet marketers. Under the old rules, anyone could earn affiliate commissions by posting ads for a vendor's products, paying only a small cost per click to do so. When multiple ads for one or two popular affiliate sites littered search pages, however, Google ruled that only one ad could be displayed per root URL.
Marketing gurus responded by advising their followers to create their own small sites for individual niche products (affiliate or otherwise), and to advertise those unique URLs instead.
A few weeks later, after whipping up anticipation with teleclasses, email blasts and other promotions, Frank Kern and Ed Dale launched a marketing package called Underachiever Mastery (www.underachievermastery.com). Only 700 copies were available at $1,497 apiece, as Kern and Dale chose not to offer continuing information or support a virally growing audience. By the 7:00 a.m. pre-launch release, nearly 12,000 people were on the waiting list. Six hours later, subscribers to just one listserv had snapped up more than half the available copies.
What was all the fuss about?
Frank Kern is the Internet marketer who was sued by the FTC for selling a wildly popular package called "Instant Internet Empires" that allegedly made claims of guaranteed wealth. As he says, he learned his lesson, stopped creating "make money by selling `make money' information for the incestuous Internet marketing community," and instead embraced and promoted the idea of ultra-targeted marketing to micro-niche audiences. For the full story in his own words, see http://netpreneurnow.blogspot.com/2005/01/frank-kern-call.html.
Kern's micro-niche idea arose thanks to a site that he had created as a joke years before the Instant Internet Empires debacle: www.yourparrotwilltalk.com. For an E-Lance bid of less than $700, with no rights or royalties, he'd commissioned a ghostwriter to produce an e-book titled How to Teach Your Parrot to Talk in 30 Days or Less…Guaranteed! By selling this e-book for $37.77 on a two-page site (sales letter and order form), he quietly pulled in an average income of several thousand per month.
When the FTC shut down his Internet empire, he took a second look at this faithful little micro-business site and built his Underachiever program on the principles it had proven.
Here are the principles (to quote the Underachiever Mastery sales letter directly):
Step #1: Find a market to sell to that's irrationally passionate about... something... anything. This needs to be a group of people who are easily identifiable but not too great in number, yet have plenty of money and are insanely rabid about a certain hobby or topic. For example, golfers or, say, brides-to-be. These folks are crazy about their interests and will spend money on just about anything that fuels their desire!…
Step #2: Find out exactly what they want to buy right now! (And not what they need to buy. Big difference!) Fortunately for you and I, the Internet has made much easier to do this in most cases. In fact, you can even find out how much they're willing to spend, if you know where to look. We even show you many ways to do this absolutely free!
Step #3: Create the product they want. But YOU don't have to, and you shouldn't, create it yourself. You can create what it is they want on the cheap, without any effort or work on your part. Heck, for just a few bucks, you can have a product created that sells over and over and over again, without ever having to lift a finger in creating it!
This is vital! Listen, the moment this process starts to look like work, or if it stops being fun, it defeats the purpose of the Underachiever System. Why sweat over something that can be easily outsourced to someone else for just pennies on the dollar?
Step #4: Have a website that sells, and put it in front of the very people you just identified! Listen, thanks to some new developments we've uncovered, getting your website in front of the right people might just be the easiest step. You don't need a fancy website, an affiliate program, an email list, join-venture partners, or any of that fancy stuff that can drive any sane marketer mad!
Principle #3 makes it clear: the whole idea is to do this fast, cheap, and easy: to haul in millions using many small, "underachieving" sites, by outsourcing the actual production work "for pennies on the dollar." It's the same principle used by corporations from Wal*Mart on down.
This kind of exploitation would not be possible without freelance writers' undervaluation of our own work...our willingness to accept terms like those offered for the Parrot e-book: low pay, no rights, no royalties. Meanwhile, as Kern says, there's no effort or work for the marketer, just profit and fun!
Sweetening the deal for marketers is the fact that e-book publishing budgets are a fraction of those in the legitimate publishing industry: there is no agent, no editorial, artistic or marketing staff, no printer to pay, no physical plant to maintain. Sales sites can be launched within a day or two, with a paltry few hundred paid for domain, hosting, and e-commerce utilities.
Promotional expenses are minescule compared to those of the publishing houses, with tools, tricks and techniques such as "hypnotic" language achieving immediate results that mainstream advertising campaigns never could. More than this: niche sites may be further promoted by one or more levels of affiliates, giving the product (your work product) near-viral distribution across the Internet.
And once the minimal product, setup, and promotion costs are paid, the marketer earns virtually pure profit.
Over the coming weeks following the release of Underachiever Mastery, freelance writers can expect to see a tidal wave of e-book projects being posted on E-Lance and similar sites. Those e-books will be marketed massively to niche audiences, and will profit their marketers many times over the flat fee paid to the ghostwriter.
Before you leap to bid on projects like these, consider carefully what you are asking and offering. If you are content with gleaning a flat few hundred dollars from a book that may earn many hundreds of thousands (or more), that's certainly your option.
The question, however, is: how much do you value your own work...your own time...your own dignity? Do you choose to see yourself as a professional among professionals, or as a cottage industry worker, laboring at sweatshop wages with no rights? The Underachiever system is based on the latter.
Protect yourself! If possible, find out what you're getting into before you bid. As you would for any other ghostwriting job, quote a living wage. Most important in this case, however: require royalties. After making an "Underachiever" site possible, you have a right to a portion of its profits.
Phila Hoopes is a freelance writer of nonfiction articles for local and national publications, newly escaped from Corporate America and particularly passionate about fair trade and living wage issues. Her website is www.pathstoprosperity.org.
