2010

So I signed up for Kajabi today to see what the hype was all about and to see if it was worth the effort and expense. First let me get this out of the way right now, you won’t find any affiliate links in this Kajabi review. This is not one of those thinly disguised reviews meant to get you to click the affiliate link so the author can make some money. With that out of the way let’s get to it.

What is Kajabi? Kajabi is a few things but the bottom line is this, it’s expensive web hosting with some very nice tools. I’m sure Andy Jenkins (One of the developers) wouldn’t call it that and probably won’t be too happy that I call it that, but in the end that’s exactly what it is.

But it is much more that just hosting and in the end that’s what your paying for. You can also say that Kajabi is an all in one tool for publishing a complete sales/membership site. You can create squeeze pages, sales letters (sales pages), a member community akin to a forum, create and publish a course and deliver all your content through your admin panel, and you can integrate social networking into all of it. You can create a complete sales funnel with upsells, downsells and everything in between. You can set up your content (course) to be published based on the length of time an account is live. In other words you can drip out content every x number of days or weeks so you don’t give everything away as soon as someone signs up. Currently there are 4 themes you can use though they all look very similar. You can create your own themes but you do have to have the know how to do that. There is a built-in theme editor that allows you to change the colors and backgrounds and it is very easy to use. The tools are very cool and designed well and easy to use. You really don’t have to be a techy to get any of these things accomplished. There is an extensive video library to walk you through all the tools and features and the videos are all very well done and easy to understand. Everything about Kajabi is polished and detailed and in the end it is a very nice set of tools.

There are also a number of additional modules that will be available in the future. One is a blog module that will allow you to publish a regular blog but what kind of features it will have is unknown at this point. The other is an A/B split testing feature that is supposed to be and I’m sure will be push button easy to use. If you watch the video at Kajabi.com you’ll hear this stuff for yourself.

So am I blown away by Kajabi? Yes and no. Yes it’s a cool set of tools and very easy to use and in fact does deliver on all the promises of the sales video and sales page. There is not one thing that is promised and not delivered here. Before I go on to tell you why I will not be staying with Kajabi here’s what you get:

For $99 per month: All plans below also carry a $99 setup fee:

• 1 Full featured project – Read as 1 product to sell
• 500 Portal users – Read as 500 paying members of your course/membership
• 25 GB’s of bandwidth with $0.48 per GB overage charge
• 10GB’s Storage
• 1 Admin account
• Upload your own videos

For $199 per month

• 10 Projects
• 2,500 Users
• 50 GB’s Bandwidth
• 20 GB’s Storage
• 10 Admin accounts
• Krunch Media Encoder – This enables you to create videos viewable on iPad/iPhone
• CDN Network – The use of Amazon s3 content delivery network

For $299 per month

• 30 Projects
• 100 GB’s Bandwidth
• 50 GB’s Storage
• 10,000 Users
• 50 Admin accounts
• Krunch Media Encoder
• CDN

So who is Kajabi good for? Kajabi is for someone who has their own product and who knows how do drive traffic to their site. This is designed for ease of use and a newbie marketer can use it to set up a sales funnel very easily but at the same time unless you have a load of money your willing to spend on traffic or you have experience in driving traffic through social media or article marketing it will not help you sell a thing. There is no way that you’ll be able to drive traffic through organic search results. The one glaring omission is any kind of SEO capabilities of Kajabi. Yes you can create content but most if it will be hidden behind a membership meaning that search engines will not be able to see it therefore they will not index your content. Other than a meta title I so nothing else that can be used for SEO purposes.

I said in the beginning that Kajabi is expensive hosting and that’s not 100% accurate. You cannot for instance use anything other than Kajabi. So if you wanted to use WordPress for your blog that is not an option. And as far as I know you can’t have your own IP address. To me this is an important point. Consider this, everyone who signs up for Kajabi is an internet marketer, everyone is selling something. Everyone at that IP address (whatever it is) is going to be selling a product. Google will know this and they may penalize you for it. Not necessarily directly but you can be sure they won’t be sending you any kind of organic traffic. Google’s mantra is “Relevant Content” and they have no way of knowing whether your content is relevant if it’s hidden behind a membership module.

When you create your project the URL (or address) will be youproject.kajabi.com. If you want to use your own domain name you can but you have to change some A records and point the domain to the Kajabi servers so you can have yourproject.com.

So, to wrap it up. Kajabi is a very cool and complete set of tools that will allow you to create sales funnels and a community of users (members) but only if you know what your doing in terms of marketing and have the ability and know how to drive massive amounts of traffic to make it worthwhile and to see any kind of success. Kajabi will not do anything for you if you don’t have a following or are not experienced in driving taffic.

Furthermore you can accomplish pretty much everything Kajabi does with Easy Video Player 2(EVP2) which is launching in a couple of days and Wishlist Member which is a great WordPress plugin that allows you to create a membership site and allows you to drip out content the way Kajabi does. Yes it’s a bit more work to set it up with WordPress and EVP2 but economically it makes more sense to me. Consider that you can get EVP2 and Wishlist Member for a total of about $200 while it would cost you $200/month to run a site off of Kajabi, does that make sense to you?

Bottom line, if you are an experienced internet marketer and know how to drive traffic, have a solid product, are willing to spend money on traffic then Kajabi is for you, if not then it isn’t and you should look at other solutions.