IS GENIUS NETWORK A SCAM?
9
Cover makeup, and it netted me more
money than all my books combined.
And yet I never saw it or really any other
infomercial, assuming they only offered
things I didn’t want for $9.99 or $99.99. you ever feel like you’ll be left behind
in today’s ever changing world?” successful than almost anyone you’ve
ever met and focus on the task at hand.
No talk of warm feet could provide
that kind of emotional connection. Dean Graziosi changed all that for me. That new intro, Graziosi explained, blew
the book he was selling out of the water.
“The first intro validated me,” Graziosi
said, “but it didn’t get into people’s heads.”
While Graziosi went on to explain that
the key to marketing is to ask what the big
question is and then present the solution,
he also told us that millennials are most
concerned with being left behind while
baby boomers worry the most about
living in uncertain times. And thus the
question “Do you ever feel like you’ll
be left behind in today’s ever changing
world?” emotionally engages both groups
from jump. (While he didn’t mention my
generation, I think I can offer up the fact
that Gen X-ers worry about everything.) That couldn’t have been easier when
Mike Koenigs took the podium. Now,
a word about Koenigs: If there’s anyone
on earth that seems to have more energy
than Joe Polish, it may be Koenigs. The
frenetic fireball handed out a worksheet
titled “You Everywhere Now” and then
talked about the ineffectiveness of email
campaigns and explained that the best
sales technique involved a few minutes
with your phone. He suggested going
through your phone, texting the people
you’d met at conferences a photo of the
two of you that you’d taken along with a
note about how you’d been thinking about
them and then follow that with a video
that explained what you were trying to sell.
To be clear, this guy’s no average
infomercial dude but one who made
his first one in 1998 and now hires
Larry King to interview him for them.
Seems he’s had it all figured out for
years, right? As it turned out, no. He
started by showing us an intro where
King touted him as a New York Times
bestselling author recommended by
Tony Robbins and Richard Branson;
photos of Graziosi with celebrities and
on private jets flitted across the screen.
This ad, Graziosi explained, did
okay. It didn’t blow sales out of the
water. He tried to figure out why.
Then he attended Polish’s $25K Genius
group and heard Stanford professor and
New York Times bestselling author Robert
Cialdini talk. Within moments, Graziosi
realized he had a solution, ducked out
of the group and got on the horn with
King. Within a week, he had his new
intro—which he then showed us.
Set looked the same, King looked the
same. But instead of talking about the
uber-fabulous life of Graziosi, King looked
into the camera and asked, “Have you
ever looked in the mirror and thought,
‘I wish my life had turned out better’?”
King mentioned that his guest grew
up in a dysfunctional home and lived
in a trailer park before asking, “Do
At lunch, I talked to someone who’s widely
considered the most fascinating three-
foot-tall man alive: Dr. Sean Stephenson,
a 30-something therapist, self-help author
and motivational speaker who was born
with a rare bone disorder, gets around on a
wheelchair and started doing motivational
speaking as a teenager. He’s been mentored
by Tony Robbins, appeared on Oprah,
starred in his own reality show and gave a
TED talk that has over two million views.
You’d think it’d be hard to keep things
interesting after that but when you get
to hear from the CEO of the world’s
leading email marketing company—
Infusionsoft CEO Clate Mask—on
how to 10X your business, you can let
go of a three-foot tall man being more
And then, suddenly, the two days were
coming to an end. With the Koenigs
recommendations fresh in my brain,
I ran upstairs to take as many photos
as I could with people and put their
numbers in my phone. Who cares that I
don’t have anything to sell them? I was
taking the first thing I’d heard at the
event—don’t let one opportunity pass
you by—and getting as many of them
stuffed into my phone as I could.
I walked away with ideas that could
10X if not 100X my business and the
numbers of some people who’d already
done it themselves. It’s safe to say that I
learned more about how to be successful
in two days of Joe Polish’s $25K Genius
Network meeting than I had during
my entire time on the planet. I was
left with only one lingering question:
Where do I sign up for the next one?
BY: ANNA DAVID
Anna David is the New York Times-bestselling author of six books. She’s been published
in The New York Times, The LA Times, Details, Playboy and Women’s Health, among many
others, and has appeared repeatedly on The Today Show, Hannity, Attack of the Show,
Dr. Drew, Red Eye, The Talk and numerous other programs on Fox News, NBC, CBS, MTV,
VH1 and E. David is the Founder and Editor-in-Chief of the addiction and recovery site
AfterPartyMagazine, hosts the podcasts AfterPartyPod and You’ve Got Issues and is a coach
who speaks at colleges across the country about relationships, addiction and recovery.
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