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By Matt, on November 30th, 2011% Putting My Money Where My Mouth Is . . .
Okay, I’ve moaned about hype and lies, I’ve talked about refunding products, it’s time to start naming names!
I am currently on the lookout for some worthwhile beginner products for some friends and family who want to get started online, so I’m going to start buying things for them, testing them, and reporting here.
Of course, I do have to be a little careful in what I publish – but I can produce useful reviews of things that are worthwhile, and admit to refunding others. Who knows, I might even get to say something about the gulf between the sales page claims and the reality of the product (but probably in a milder form than if we were sitting together having a chat).
The first one I’m going to try is Adsense Recipe (careful, that’s an affiliate link so I can have some of your money if you just go mad and buy!  ), which says it will tell you how to create a large income from Google Adsense adverts. I’ll get it some time soon and report back shortly thereafter.
Meanwhile, if you have had a pleasant (or otherwise) buying experience with the products I’m looking at (or know of a better alternative) feel free to comment – but forget about blatant self-promotion and link-spamming!
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By Matt, on November 29th, 2011% Top Tip Number 8 for Beginners to Online Business:
Formulate a Plan – And Stick To It
After your self-enforced learning period, decide exactly what you will be doing in your online business. Niche marketing? Reselling? Affiliate Marketing? Creating your own Product? Do not get yourself totally confused and overwhelmed by falling for a variety of sells that might take you down every one of those paths, and more.
Once your decision is made – select your target market. Note we use market in the singular? The only way to really get traction is to have a pure, driven focus on your selected market (you can start hitting multiple markets with different income components once you’ve become familiar, comfortable and successful with the online business process). Then the plan becomes:
Your Online Business Success Plan
- Do Something – launch your carefully considered and planned online business.
- See Something (as in a result, be it success or the failure that teaches you where you went wrong and how to get it right second time around). Understand that small successes at first can be the building blocks for large successes later.
- Be persistent. Push that market and watch it grow. It doesn’t have to turn over $10,000 in the first month (that only happens in sales pages!), even $100 will do – as long as your persistence grows that income on a month-to-month basis until you consider the initial project a successful starting point.
- Do it again. Once you have figured out how to make this work, feel free to pick another market, even another style, and launch a second project.
- As I said a second ago, be persistent! Go back to Step 1 and start the process over and over again as your first project(s) provide the financing for growth. They can pay for Google Adwords campaigns. They can pay for outsourcing. They can feed your momentum until you really are earning the “kiss the job goodbye” money you wanted.
Beware The Traps!
Speaking of Adwords campaigns – don’t try to buy all your traffic, you’ll end up paying Google more than you earn, especially in competitive (high cost-per-click) niches. Adwords should be considered a supplemental traffic tool, bringing people to a proven seller – and therefore paying its own way. Monitor the cost effectiveness of any advertising and only stick with it if it is making you a profit (many people get caught up in the thrill of making their first few sales and let their ad accounts run wild in the background).
Okay, let’s go back to point 1, “Do Something”. Remember, it is based on your well-researched decision during the period that you didn’t buy into get-rich-quick schemes or fall for “anyone can make a fortune” sales letters.
Once you’ve made the decision, it might be time to buy things, but there’s a distinctive set of rules here too.
Rules For Spending Money
- Only download/join/buy 1) content that fits with your market choice decision or 2) tools, techniques or training dedicated to improving your site content or traffic. If the latter, do your research and be very selective – this is one area where the hype is through the roof!
- Don’t be in too much of a hurry to slap what you consider to be money-earning items all over your site. You need traffic before you can have sales.
- Start your site with content. Build a reasonable selection of meaningful content before you do anything else. The more meaningful and useful you make your content, the more valuable you make your “brand”. Throwing half-baked PLR and other third-party information at a site (without some real, meaningful and preferably unique and original content) might get you visits from search engines but typically won’t get you repeat traffic – the people that trust you and buy from you.
- Once you have the content, chase the traffic. (Yes, more on that, as with everything else we’ve summarised so far, later).
Have some worthwhile giveaways (and add/change on a regular basis) so people come to value your site as a resource, not just see it as a money-grabber. If you give them something good, they are a lot more likely to also buy, or return (and maybe buy next time). And the freebie is a great way to build a list.
- When you have decent content and traffic, introduce the money-earning components (maybe that’s sales, maybe it’s advertising, maybe it’s both of those and a number of other related income-producing streams).
- Work hard to build a responsive email list – and don’t bombard your list with endless money-grabbing emails. If that’s all you do, unsubscribes will come thick and fast. Provide some useful information, links to free downloads, and scatter sales emails (that sell useful things – the “anything for money” approach will kill your brand!) in regular but not-too-frequent broadcasts.
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By Matt, on April 28th, 2011% The Wizard of Oz is at it Again
My old friend (and a truly honest, value-for-money marketer) Oz, at Addictive text, has a competition running where you can win one of six iPads just by joining his research competition – and reading his posts on how “You Can Create A Six-Figure Asset… Starting Today”
You just sign up for the contest as you work your way through his fascinating material – his gain being to get you to participate in a short and simple research project (two questions!).
You can earn contest points by referring others, and you can win an iPad in a random draw – too easy, especially as it’s worth any marketer’s time to read Oz’s postings.
I told you about Oz in this item: Addictive Text – Oz is a Magician. back in October, and since then he has continued to release superb products (yes, I buy them, keep them, use them! )
“Freemium Content” Auto-Blogging
For those interested in auto-blogging without suffering duplicate-content penalties and without any black-hat tricks (the core of so many products), Oz has put a lot of further development into his earlier product, and renamed it to WP Easy Content (WPEC as we all know it). This is a fantastically powerful tool at a reasonable price, with none of the negatives of the typical competing product.
WPEC is well worth checking out – and, as I told you last time, so are all his products, including the powerful free reports such as SEOn Trial and the Q Experience.
My Number One Marketer
Oz is so generous with his free reports and blog content, and his paid products are so good and so fairly priced, that he is one of my three preferred marketers of the hundreds I hear from regularly or occasionally. You really do owe it to yourself to get onto his list for great value information (without cheesy cons and without email bombardment).
VN:F [1.9.12_1141] Rating: 9.0/10 (2 votes cast) VN:F [1.9.12_1141]
By Matt, on April 22nd, 2011% Top Tip Number 7 for Beginners to Online Business:
Free Stuff Now! Forced Continuity
One of the big things these days is internet marketing membership sites, where they get to charge you every month. Many are expensive, useless toys, although some provide exceptional value in constantly sourcing new products for you to sell or learn from (these sites are often easily picked from the crowd because they have a free membership option – you don’t get access to all the best goodies, but you do get to look around to see if it’s worth spending the upgrade cost).
In the same category is “member products” – sites where you must do your work and possibly your hosting through the seller’s online site. Access to the product you thought you had paid for is conditional on you remaining a member – with a horrible tendency to charge you $97, $127, $197 or even more for each month.
Now I can’t write off every site that uses this approach – every now and then one of them is actually worth the money – but the majority prey on beginners who blame their lack of progress on themselves rather than the deficient product they are paying for. It takes months (and lots of dollars) before they realise whose fault it really is.
Your Unwinnable War
Many of them (and many for-sale-once, done-for-you products) create an unwinnable war for you – giving you what appears to be great content or complete web sites (or affiliate campaigns) that they are also selling to 200, 500, 1000, or 10,000 other people at the same time. How can you stand out among such a crowd of absolute duplicates? How can you get traffic (the lifeblood of any site)? How can you get anywhere in the search engines, who recognise duplicate sites/content and discount them in the rankings?
Sure, if you’re a marketing/traffic/SEO guru you can win the war – but you’re being sold this as the beginner’s answer to overnight riches, and you have no chance of competing until you learn a whole lot more, by which time the product/site/service is stale. In reality, the winner of the war is the person who sold you the product in the first place – because he/she not only got your money, but also got the material to the top of the search engines before you even purchased.
“I Own You, Sucker”
And remember, “free hosting, no technical knowledge required” really means “I own you, you’re stuck with your monthly membership payments until the day you wake up to the fact this isn’t going to work for you”.
Forced Continuity
There are two very common ways of sucking you in to forced continuity these days:
- One is the never-ending string of “Get this wonderful (physical) product Free!” (their cost is covered by the shipping they charge anyway). Your free product includes a bonus membership or monthly newsletter, and there’s a huge reliance on inertia – that you’ll just let the monthly charge keep coming off your credit card without really noticing. Quite often you’ll be so buried in information overload that even when the newsletter does arrive you’ll put it on the shelf “for later”.
- The other is the “get all this for just one measly dollar!”, getting you to sign up for the 5-day, 7-day, or even a generous one-month trial before your monthly fee is automatically deducted from your credit card or PayPal account.
Too Tempting to Resist?
It’s extremely tempting, especially based on the hype-filled (and information-poor) sales letter. It is so easy to spend that dollar, or sign up for your free CD or iPod-clone to be shipped to your door, that I can hardly blame anyone for doing it.
However, there is one important thing you must do immediately after you sign up (or before, to be safe if you’re the forgetful type) – and that is to make a plan for cancelling unless you discover the product is one of the rare gems that pops up occasionally.
Set the Alarm Bells
When we sign up for one of these schemes, we put an alarm in our diary for before the end of the initial trial (or immediately after, if we really want to see the “bonus”, so we only need to pay one membership payment) – it says “Cancel XYZ product today, before they charge me the membership fee”.
We don’t actually insist on cancellation – the diary entry (usually in a smartphone with calendar alarms) is to remind us to make the decision on whether this is really a worthwhile product before any more money is taken from our accounts. We don’t want to be the sucker they rely on for continuing income – the one who forgets until it’s noticed on a credit card bill six months later . . .
Your Memberships
Found a good membership? Been sucked into a useless one? Leave a comment so others can have the benefit of your experience.
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By Matt, on April 19th, 2011% You Spammers are Crazy!
This poor little blog has had more than 5000 spam comments posted (and stopped by Akismet) in its relatively short life.
It’s obvious that many people are using (useless) software to try to get their backlinks. How stupid is it to be posting comments on the site map, about, and other such irrelevant pages (irrelevant in that they don’t deserve commenting).
And who in their right mind is going to approve comments with 40 links in them, or with the commenter’s name being “make quick money online”, “diets weight loss”, “hyundai santa fe reviews”, or, to scrape almost to the bottom of the barrel, “webcam sex girls”.
And I can often tell how poor a product is by the huge volumes of spam promoting it.
Please, people, make a useful comment – something that refers to or adds to the information here (that’s what comments are for, right?) – or leave us alone!
Don’t Fall For it!
If someone tries to sell you automated commenting software, think long and hard – and find some unbiased reviews – before you even think about touching it. The junk produced will have a negative effect with the search engines anyway . . .
Anyone found a useful product in this area? Feel free to comment, but let’s not turn it into advertising in the process.
VN:F [1.9.12_1141] Rating: 5.5/10 (2 votes cast) VN:F [1.9.12_1141]
By Matt, on April 17th, 2011% Let’s get Back Into It!
After promising to be back in action in January, I ended up in hospital for spinal surgery. But let’s get back to work now, and get some of those free downloads I’ve been promising ready!
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By Matt, on December 27th, 2010% Things Have Been Quiet . . .
My apologies for the silence around here lately, but there has been a critical illness in the family that has kept me away from computers for a month.
It’s not over yet, with a further “repair” to follow the initial emergency surgery, but things are starting to settle down. During January our tips series will resume, as will the large collection of free downloads I had planned and was only a few days away from implementing.
Drop back in occasionally, soon there will be some pleasant rewards for your patience . . .
VN:F [1.9.12_1141] Rating: 0.0/10 (0 votes cast) VN:F [1.9.12_1141]
By Matt, on November 2nd, 2010% Vote With Your Feet!
I mentioned it in Tip 6: Understand The (Evil) Tricks of the Trade, but if you haven’t done it you must go and watch the fantastic video demonstration called “IM Victim Services: Beware Of Scandal” (better referred to as “outing the unethical scam marketers) on Mark Dulisse’s Blog – watch the video, read the comments, and absorb it all.
Remember the line “I’m mad as hell, and I’m not going to take this any more!“? Well, that’s how I feel after seeing the scum selling scrap with their stock-format sales pages so many times in recent months. This has been happening for years, but it’s becoming an epidemic as these people steal money from (mostly) newcomers to the online business world. And, as Mark highlights, there seems to be a clique of UK-based marketers locking in on this formula.
I see part of my job as buying some of these products, just so I can be able to advise my friends and readers who ask whether they’re worthwhile. I’m getting to the point where just the sound of one of those polished Brit accents makes me either want to close the page or be sick on the keyboard. Every nation has its scammers, and the UK has some great people (like Alex Jeffreys and Lee McIntyre), but it just seems there’s a Mayfair Mafia in action at the moment, all supporting each other and all copying each other’s evil lies and sales tricks.
And Vote with The Refund Button!
We must protest! A lot of newcomers don’t realise how painless it is to get a refund from places like ClickBank, or feel embarrassed to do so. Don’t feel embarrassed, you’ve been lied to and cheated – just do it! I don’t just refund these products, I give both ClickBank and the vendor an earfull about the deceptive tactics (when I am going to buy anything, I always save copies of the sales pages, videos and everything else through the process so I can go back and compare what I received to what I was promised.
Don’t just refund, tell them why – and tell them you believe in ethics in marketing and will never deal with them until they show they’ve changed.
Next, give every affiliate promoting this rubbish a quiet word as well – pointing out that even though they might not realise it, they are promoting junk and earning themselves a bad name. Tell them you’re not interested in hearing from them again unless they, too, start believing in ethics in marketing.
And Vote with the Unsubscribe Link!
After you’ve sent the marketer an email telling them what you think of their tactics, point out you will be unsubscribing and do so immediately. Tell anyone who’ll listen to do the same.
Then do exactly the same with the affiliates. Both are people you don’t really want to hear from again because you can’t trust them!
If enough of us refund, unsubscribe, and tell these people exactly why we are doing it, perhaps they’ll re-think their tactics and some sanity will return to the Internet Marketing World.
Naming Names
The big problem with publishing the names of these people, or the products that identify them, in the same breath as calling them liars, scammers and scum is the possibility of law suits. I’d love to list a bunch of names here (and there are several mentioned on Mark’s Blog), but I’m wary.
However, I think I’m going to start an entirely different thread soon, listing what I buy and making comments on the products. For some products the only comment will be “Refunded”.
Let’s beat some sense into them!
What do you think? Are you refunding things, or have you bit your lip and stuffed the rubbish in the digital bottom drawer?
VN:F [1.9.12_1141] Rating: 10.0/10 (1 vote cast) VN:F [1.9.12_1141]
By Matt, on October 28th, 2010% If you’ve been reading my blog for a while, you’ll know I consider Alex Jeffreys a great-value teacher and marketer, and would gladly recommend anything he puts out. You have a great chance to see for yourself with a free video that has some stunning revelations.
Over the last 48 hours, thousands of people have been going crazy about this super-cool training video from Alex (it’s REALLY struck a nerve or two!) . . . and hundreds of people have left their raving comments, as Alex strips away the hype & exposes the truth about how he earned over $1,000,000.00 in just 21 Days!
Go here and watch it!
But this is your last chance to grab one of Alex’s most popular training videos ever . . . and remember, it’s free.
Don’t let this pass you by!
P.S. I’d hate for you to miss out on this. There’s even a chance to win an iPad, fully loaded with Alex’s latest training program, ‘Forward To Marketing’!
https://marketingwithyou.infusionsoft.com/go/ftmpre/kdelta
Let me know what you think – especially about his insane plan to destroy his complete email list and start from scratch!
VN:F [1.9.12_1141] Rating: 0.0/10 (0 votes cast) VN:F [1.9.12_1141]
By Matt, on October 24th, 2010% Top Tip Number 6 for Beginners to Online Business:
I’ve mentioned it before, I’ve referred to it in some tips, and I want to point you to a fantastic video demonstration called “IM Victim Services: Beware Of Scandal” (better referred to as “outing the unethical scam marketers) on Mark Dulisse’s Blog – watch the video, read the comments, and absorb it all.
Treat every sales page and claim with contempt, then examine it closely and see if it deserves to move up a notch to “vaguely, possibly believable”. If it gets that far, and fits your plan, read it again from start to finish and see if it really tells you what you’re buying.
If you get that far and still believe, check that it is refundable. Only if it satisfies all those conditions, consider buying it.
Sucking You Dry?
If the often endless streams of OTOs (One-Time Offers) that follows your initial purchase are mandatory to achieve the claims of the original sales page (as opposed to supplementing them and significantly improving your chances of success), that’s another indication of sleazy tactics.
If you get to the “Add to Cart” stage and push the button, download and test it quickly to ensure it isn’t another re-hashed, half-baked mind-number, and if it doesn’t pass that test don’t even think about waiting more than a couple of days before demanding your refund!
Tricks of the Trade?
Yes, the tricks they are playing on you! Violent attacks on your emotions, probably when you are at your most vulnerable, to make you believe there is an Internet Marketing Millionaire’s Heaven and you are about to claim your cubicle in it for just a few dollars.
Be rich for the price of a night out! Invest the value of a couple of Big Macs and get ready to order your Ferrari! So easy anyone can do it. Just 7 clicks and go on holidays while the money rolls in! Oh, and now we have your money for that, buy this super-deluxe platinum version and get really, really rich really, really fast. It’s a no-brainer! AutoPilot! All your dreams will come true before breakfast!
There is no magic bullet. Anyone selling you something decent will make it clear that some work is required if you want to succeed. Secret discoveries, “glitches”, magic software developed at super-expensive prices but sold to you for $37? Dream on!
Market without Marketing . . .
The “you don’t need a web site, PPC, ads, article marketing, or any of the things the Gurus will tell you to do” claims are usually just BS, if you’ll excuse the expression. As soon as you pay and get in there you find the bulk of your time is spent downloading someone else’s rehashed PLR videos telling you how to work your backside off getting traffic, registering domains, buying hosting, learning FTP, and all the rest of the things you didn’t need.
How do they sucker you?
- Extraordinary (often extremely expensive) copywriting
- Appealing to your emotions, not your business sense
- Sometimes, with pure lies.
- Urgency, countdowns, “Offer ends soon”, “Price rises dramatically soon”
- Free web sites for the non-technical, as if a thousand near-identical traffic-free sites will make anyone but the seller any money. (Not to mention the hefty referral fee they usually get from the web host you have to sign up with).
- For every good product or system, there are a thousand Internet get-rich-newbie-bunnies trying to make their “system” sound better. You need to see a huge selection of these offers before you’ve learned enough to separate the good from the bad.
One of the first signs to trigger your super-skeptic mode is the sales page that starts with monstrous earnings claims (and yes, all that proof is easy to fake or else it comes from an entirely different product/launch cycle).
If it then goes on to show you the million-dollar house you should start noticing the wafting smell of rats in the room. The rats become dead and smellier when you get to see pictures of not just one, but two or more extremely expensive and desirable cars.
Anf then the pictures of exotic holidays in faraway places (what the hell does his holiday have to do with internet marketing?) complete the picture of an outright and violent assault on your emotions – all this could be yours, for $37 and 7 clicks! How could anyone walk away from such a dream of a life?
Don’t Walk Away – Run!
Get a real recommendation from someone you trust (don’t just Google it and get the raving reviews from affiliates who haven’t even seen the product), research the seller, test the claims, and be ready to believe it is a complete con. If you have a feeling it might work, and know if fits your plan, then make sure it is refundable.
Refunding on good products is not nice, and a lot of good marketers (“a lot” is a relative term) get hurt by “serial refunders”, but I could make a case that places like ClickBank shouldn’t even touch some of these extremely dubious products. They solve that issue by insisting every product has a 60-day refund period, and you get no arguments when you ask for your refund. Make sure you’re in those sort of safe hands unless you know and trust the marketer (and if you do, (s)he won’t be guilty of most of the sins expressed above anyway).
Don’t ever feel embarrassed, and don’t let laziness come between you and your refund – it’s time we all took a stand against these scammers. Vote with your feet and your dollars (and unsubscribe from their lists, and those of anyone promoting them) – if they see their ill-gotten gains falling away, they might just have to re-think things and start acting ethically.
VN:F [1.9.12_1141] Rating: 10.0/10 (2 votes cast) VN:F [1.9.12_1141] Rating: +3 (from 3 votes)
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