INTERNET MARKETING PRODUCT REVIEWS…
N.I.A. FINGERPRINT KIT
$99. Beginner through Advanced
Program Includes: N.I.A. Fingerprint Kit™ Owner's Manual (130 pgs), Brandshops — Namecrafting Workshops (29 pgs) N.I.A. Brand Personality Inventory, Brand Eccentricity Diagram, Namecrafting mind maps, and other assorted mind maps & illustrations. 60-day money-back guarantee.
We'll start our review of N.I.A. Fingerprint Kit by saying that it's simply the most impressive internet marketing product to come down the pike in a long time. It's smart, compelling, and will be — for many internet marketers — transformative, especially affiliate marketers, so many of whom struggle to get noticed. This product, in fact, has the potential to transform affiliate marketing.
N.I.A. Fingerprint Kit is inspired and inspiring. It'll get you fired up to go create something. And name it something cool.
Net Intelligence Agency tells you that you'll know what the pros know once you've completed the program. And it's true. You will. With the release of N.I.A. Fingerprint Kit, every marketer can infiltrate the hidden world of pricey branding strategists and professional namers. It's the consummate brand identity package — a step-by-step, start-to-finish brandcrafting process that you can rely on to produce results.
In short: N.I.A. Fingerprint Kit teaches marketers how to create a unique fingerprint.
Now, every marketer thinks they understand what brand identity is. But it seems fair to say that most of us don't. Not really. If we did, there wouldn't be so few distinctive brands out there. A brand is much bigger than a name, an image, and the number of people who have ever heard of it.
Designed for newbies and veteran internet marketers alike, Fingerprint Kit aims to rescue any marketer who doesn't own a unique brand, period. "Unique brand," if you're unclear, is spelled out for you in Net Intelligence Agency's free N.I.A. Black Paper, No Two Fingerprints Alike: Curing The Internet Marketing Identity Crisis, which is an educational document in its own right.
One of the theories underpinning N.I.A. Fingerprint Kit is that, in today's crowded marketplace, marketers who don't stand out ultimately won't survive. Another theory is that struggling internet marketers — affiliate marketers, in particular — devote all their time to this traffic generation tactic or that, instead of investing their energy in building a unique, differentiated identity — from the start, when it matters most.
N.I.A. is right, of course. In the end, the only sure way to generate massive traffic is to build a brand so cool that people seek you out. And you can trawl the forums, pile up backlinks, and SEO your pages until the cows come home, but it's all for naught if your brand (and your products) don't stand out from the crowd.
Net Intelligence Agency rebelliously defies the "if you throw enough mud at the wall, some of it will stick" tactics so often championed by the so-called internet marketing gurus. N.I.A. is of the new breed of marketing educators which believes that the reason so many internet marketers fail is that they're so focused on tactics that they forget to have a strategy. At any rate, N.I.A. gives you both strategy and tactics… they just hand them to you in the right order.
The Owner's Manual, which is the strategic core of Fingerprint Kit, is designed to be read straight through. In fact, you're warned during Orientation that "attempting to operate heavy machinery without reading the Owner's Manual may result in smudgy fingerprints." (Our advice is: don't cheat. We skipped around during our review, only to realize that there actually was a master plan that needed to unfold in its own time.)
The Owner's Manual is a lot of information to digest. But it's meticulously organized (though it won't seem like it at first glance), and the tongue-in-cheek writing style makes it a fun read. The pages fly by, laying the foundation, block by block. (See the mildly redacted Owner's Manual Table of Contents, if you're curious.)
Some may tire of the spy motif, but we found it amusing and cleverly executed — at times the Owner's Manual was actually unputdownable. You get the feeling these guys really do know secrets.
N.I.A. Fingerprint Kit manages to be technical, without drowning you in jargon or boring academic musings about 21st Century Internet Marketing. Fingerprint Kit tells a story — the story of brand, probing every nook and cranny of brand building and brand marketing. In telling the story of brand, N.I.A. teaches you how to build one, flavor it, color it, give it a personality, differentiate it from its competitors, build it into a leader and ward off your competitors once you get to the top.
Teaching someone how to become unique is a tall order. But Net Intelligence Agency is gutsy that way. They've tackled (and tamed) some complex beasts — the N.I.A. Namecrafting Process, for example, which is perhaps the crowning jewel of Fingerprint Kit. The Namecrafting process is crafty, relentlessly thorough and, interestingly, triggers all sorts of creative ideation on the way to producing cool brand names.
While veteran marketers may be familiar with some of the differentiation strategies offered, N.I.A. has a way of freshening, bending and extending them to better fit today's experience economy. Each element of Fingerprint Kit supports the other, just as the elements of a successful brand must support each other — a philosophy that the colorful examples, case studies and namecrafting workshops will ultimately prove to you.
The Owner's Manual concludes with a bonus chapter on making your brand contagious and Trench Marketing tactical maneuvers — or how to infiltrate the niches. The trench maneuvers section is thoroughly blueprinted and offers good resources. It's an excellent tutorial for beginners. Experienced internet marketers may be familiar with many of the tools and tricks. But the devil is in the details, and this particular detailed blueprint just may spark new ideas and approaches for even the most experienced marketer.
N.I.A.'s approach to niche marketing is this: In order to dominate a niche, you must be well-branded. This is, N.I.A. points out, the sleeper tactic that no one is talking about, and one which, we agree, is becoming critical to niche marketing success. Because you can count on the N.I.A. brandcrafting process to produce results, it's perfect for quickly building distinctive, narrow brands. In fact, with a little practice, you can get quite a little name factory going. The process is infinitely scaleable.
The Brandshops projects bring the brandcrafting process full circle. If you've ever struggled to find a distinctive product or brand name, the Brandshops show you it can always be done and exactly how. These workshops invent 5 unique brand names, step by step, using the strategies, tools, techniques and "special weaponry" learned in the Owner's Manual. The Brandshops include a useful variety of internet brands — a little something for everybody: a software application, affiliate marketing e-Books, B-to-B and consumer shopping portals, and a direct-marketed consumer cosmetic product.
N.I.A. Fingerprint Kit includes some innovative toys that are both useful and fun to play with. The Brand Personality Inventory, for example, is a new twist on brand archetypes which will help you mold a distinct, three-dimensional brand personality using selective personality traits and color symbolism. Sound odd? It is, a little. But amazingly useful. In fact, once you get used to consulting it, you won't be comfortable creating a new brand or reinventing an old brand without it. While the main goal of the Brand Personality Inventory is to shape a brand that connects with customers, we found it particularly useful for aligning name and image with brand identity, and lending a distinct voice to promotional copy.
Now, to get the grand prize — the unique fingerprint — you will have to do a little work. But the road is all mapped out for you. For your first brand excursion, we'd estimate, on average, a couple of hours to read, digest, and understand the foundation, then a couple of hours of strategizing and playing with tools and techniques. Small price to pay for a unique fingerprint.
Sometimes the process is even fun. And sometimes you get lucky, even creating a killer brand name in a matter of minutes. The better your grasp of the foundation laid in Owner's Manual, the more likely you are to get "lucky." And the more likely you are to not get your shiny new brand all assembled…only to discover a leftover screw that turns out to be the one that holds the whole thing together.
If you work the process, the process absolutely works. If you have even a halfway decent product or service, the Fingerprint Kit process should produce a solid differentiation strategy, a personable, well-crafted brand, and a distinctive brand name. If you don't have a halfway decent product, Fingerprint Kit has a way of sniffing out product/brand weaknesses and pointing you toward fixes. Whether you're faced with a failing brand, or struggling with creating the next successful one, the reflective and analytical nature of N.I.A. Fingerprint Kit all but forces you to get it right.
Drawbacks? There really aren't any, though we'd like to see Net Intelligence Agency offer a deeper exploration of product idea development and perhaps extend the section on copywriting. (N.I.A. has in fact, sort of hinted that there might be just such a project simmering on a back burner.) And anyway, one product can't (and shouldn't) do everything, as N.I.A. itself points out in its differentiation strategies.
In truth, N.I.A. Fingerprint Kit vastly overdelivers. It's a lot of bang for the buck. Any of the components alone is worth the price of admission — from the brand positioning and differentiation strategies to the impressively thorough N.I.A. namecrafting process. In one cohesive package, N.I.A. Fingerprint Kit delivers all the elements, and convinces you that you'd better pay attention to each of them.
We don't know of another internet marketing product like it. N.I.A. Fingerprint Kit does, in fact, have its own a unique fingerprint. They practice what they preach.
Our recommendation? Buy it. There is almost no internet marketer on the planet who won't benefit from N.I.A. Fingerprint Kit in one way or another. The marketing wisdom and clear vision of the mysterious Net Intelligence Agency trio is a much welcome (and much needed) addition to internet marketing's educational resources.
Can you tell we really like this product? It bears repeating: This is the most impressive internet marketing product to come down the pike in a long time…
For more, visit the N.I.A. Fingerprint Kit site…
|
