A few months ago, a few affiliates sent out a series of emails that caught my attention.
It was a medium sized launch, but they had blogs around the world asking the same question.
It made me drop what I was doing and read that email. I wanted to know:
“What is FeBeNe?”
It out to be part of a program developed by Jay Conrad Levinson, author of ‘Guerrilla Marketing’, co-authored with Paulie Sabol and Ben Mack. Ben was the man behind Think Two Products Ahead, an ad man turned internet marketer. From what I heard, he was also the man who behind the strategy which caused the yoyo craze in 1998.
Branding seems a lost art in internet marketing, so I get excited when someone does it right.
People were saying ‘FeBeNe is the future’, ‘FeBeNe is the future of marketing’…but what was it? I actually wanted to buy the book to find out!
What these guys did is a brand-building lesson. They basically caused a wave and rode on it, using their product name to brand and incite curiosity. The pay-off? You got to find out, what is FeBeNe.
The word is very catchy, another product naming principle. Alliteration. You’ll find this used frequently. Double your dating. Coca-cola. Sound familiar?
FeBeNe. It just rolls off your tongue. I was baited.
I couldn’t resist, so I Googled it. Someone revealed the secret on their blog, and it turned out to be a made-up acronym from “Front end†(Fe), “Back end†(Be) and “Never-ending†(Ne).
It actually means just means Front End, Back End, Never-Ending.
FeBeNe encapsulates it very well, but it’s all something that we all already know.
It’s not ‘Greek’. It just means what it says.
Front End — create an ‘educational information product that answers your target audience’s initial questions and explains why these answers are so important’. It also outlines ‘the benefits of taking this information to the next level’.
Back End — any selling point after the Front End, either ‘inviting your customer to an ongoing opportunity’ or ‘offering an incremental larger purchase’. (In other words, up-sell.)
Never End — anything you give with a recurrent bill.
We’ve been progressing and improving on this front. We’re going to practice what we preach, making sure that we incorporate this key principle when planning/building/selling all our products.
Ok: if you are a long-time Internet marketer, you aren’t learning anything new just yet.
But it sounds logical, and it falls in line with Mary Ellen Tribby of EarlyToRise.com’s advice. Everyone should think like a marketer first. FeBeNe. It falls right into the vocabulary every employee should know.
Let’s face it, it’s a good way for everyone to think of their products.
Think: what is your front end? On your buyers list, can you still sell to them on the back end? Do you have anything in place to sell ‘never-endingly’?
Focus on this for every single product. You can even do all three at once: sell, do a forced upsell (honestly and ethically, of course), and sign them up on a monthly subscription.
A very simple example would be selling affiliate products. Or for a continual, residual stream of income, try membership sites.
It’s not exactly revolutionary, and I was disappointed when I saw this.
But at the same time, what was very interesting and what intrigued me was this: we talk about FeBeNe, but it’s all over the place. We can pick it up and we can come to a conclusion. It’s definitely not rocket science, and you may even have been using it before ‘FeBeNe’.
The difference is this: Ben Mack coined a name for it.
What he did successfully was to encapsulate it in one word.
Hats off to him. He coined a maven term, and now he is the Father Of FeBeNe.
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