Tip 5: Mottos to Live By

Top Tip Number 5 for Beginners to Online Business:

Another set to print out and stick on the wall:

•    It won’t go away at midnight, or when that (usually) fake clock finishes its countdown . . .

You can see examples of countdowns that never end (or re-start when you refresh or re-visit the page) elsewhere on the blog (for example, “The Evil of Internet Marketing Sales Pages”). There, we showed a countdown timer which started at 3:00 minutes, and when it got to zero you got a “Time is Up” message. Of course, if you simply refreshed the page, the timer started again! And if you came back 12 minutes later (as we did), or the next day, or probably next year . . . that timer is going to start at 3 minutes again, and again, and again.

We’ve seen this so many times it makes us sick. Have you ever seen a retail store say “you have 3 minutes to buy, or we won’t let you have it”? Can you think of any reason why someone in the business of selling you things would decide not to sell you something because you weren’t quick enough?

“Go away, I don’t want your money any more, you took too long to decide!” I’d like to read the marketing book that teaches this philosophy . . .

•    If it sounds too good to be true . . . it usually is

It costs you almost nothing, but will turn you into a millionaire overnight. You can expect your first income within 48 hours, and your four-, five- and six-figure months will follow almost instantly. Yeah, right!

It’s all true – as long as you know how to spot and correct the failings in the product, have an army of employees to set things up and generate the traffic, and have no scruples about conning people out of their money.

Oh, yes, you might also need to have a spare $5000 a month for Adwords to get the prospects to your page (and if you use half the Adwords techniques these people promote, you’re likely to get banned from Google anyway).

That very old saying – If it sounds too good to be true, it probably is – should be burned into your brain. People put more money, time and effort into the sales pages that extract your cash than into the product they’re selling you. And all too often you’ll make a purchase only to be hit by multiple One-Time Offers (OTOs) and upsells that you really have to purchase to ever get the capabilities the original sales page highlighted.

•    If you believe there’s only 100 83 47 25 12 3 copies left, you’re probably wrong!

We’ve seen this one so many times it makes us sick too. The most recent classic was the Cambridge Business Academy’s “Secret penny-per-click Google Adwords” product, where the video we watched a month ago went to great lengths to convince us only 100 copies would be sold. The same video, with the same promises, appeared on their blog this week. Either they are very poor at selling, or the 100-copy limit is a bit of a stretch.

It takes me a month to sell 100 copies!

I have watched plenty of those “3 copies left” sales pages, re-visited them, left them on my screen, and a week later clicked the order button to see if I would be rejected. I’m sure you can guess what happened.

Again, we have to ask ourselves – why on earth (with the few types of exceptions we have mentioned already) would someone stop selling something that was bringing them money? Why sell 100 copies when the income doesn’t even cover the claimed cost of development of the product?

It’s yet another of those emotional marketing techniques to separate you from your money as quickly as possible.

•    Never buy without exiting the sales page first – they’ll almost always make you a better offer.

Please, never get a dose of “oooh, I have to have this” and click the “Add to Cart” or “Buy Now” button. Copy the URL, then try to close the sales page – at least 50 percent of the time you’ll get the “wait, click cancel to see the next page” dialog.

And on the next page there will be a significant discount, a cheaper offer with some of the useless extras left out, or some other form of “we still want your money, even if it’s half as much”.

If the page actually closes without the fake human discussion or other form of discount offer, just paste the URL back into your browser and go back to the original sales page.

And another useful point is to always save the sales page to disk before proceeding with your purchase – gives you concrete evidence when you ask for a refund because the product description was misleading or incomplete.

•    “You’ll never see this page again” is rarely true, and easily beaten.

Yes, it’s yet another of those emotional marketing techniques to separate you from your money as quickly as possible.

In very rare (about 1 percent) cases, you’ll have trouble getting back to that page – the rest of the time it’s just another scare tactic to get you to buy now.

Mostly they’ll just put a  cookie on your machine to say you’ve been there (if they even bother to try to stop you getting back to the page). So tell your browser to clear its cache, and head on back!

In those 1 percent cases where they want you to believe they’re serious about OTOs, they might record your IP address. Might. It’s a lot of programming and a lot more hard work than a cookie, so it hardly ever happens (even when the page claims that’s what they are doing),

If they really are doing it, just borrow someone else’s machine, head down to the local free wi-fi hotspot, or use a proxy service (plenty of free ones, just type “free proxy” into a search engine).

•    Ask yourself “Why does this person want to make me a millionaire?”

The question that always occupies my mind. If you believe the sales pages, there’s so much noble intention on the internet that we should have world peace by now!

“I want to give back to the community!”

“I used to struggle like you, but now I’m a millionaire and I’m happy to spend all my time helping you get there too.”

Oh, yeah, right! And while you’re doing me this incredible service, all you want is a tiny $97 for your $5438.26 worth of product/information/bonus. You’re so generous!

Please, while you’re at it, show me your million-dollar house and at least two fancy cars so I know how rich I can become thanks to your generosity . . .

Seriously, ask yourself the question – do you believe the “generous, noble, giving” lines squashed between the pictures of hugely profitable ClickBank accounts and the million-dollar house? Is there any more than about 0.25 percent of the population who would put all that effort into online generosity rather than just giving to charity?

Why the hell does this person want to make me a millionaire? Or is he making himself a millionaire by fooling me into believing I can get there too?

Update: Take a look at this entry on Mark Dulisse’s blog where he discusses scamming and poses the “Internet Marketing Victim Services”. It’s just the asort of thing I would love to have published . . .

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