Business Opportunities and Internet Marketing Systems that Don't Work |
||||
|
||||
Internet Marketing BooksExcuse me while I get my soapbox set up... I absolutely have an attitude about internet marketing books, with good reason.This is a VERY long page. Because this topic cannot be explained simply.I have such strong opinions on this that I have taken to referring to marketing online as "online marketing" instead of using the corrupted term of "internet marketing". I do this because internet marketers use the term to mean something quite a bit different than what the readers think they mean. The following sections are excerpted from a book on marketing which I wrote last year: The deceptions in the internet marketing arena are so subtle sometimes, that it takes a great deal of experience to identify them for what they are. And even when you KNOW what they are, they are so cleverly disguised, it can be very difficult to explain the difference between what is legit, and what is not, and why it appears to work sometimes, and utterly fails to work other times.A lot of it comes down to the way in which the average person uses words, compared to the way in which an “internet marketing guru” uses words. They deliberately use different definitions of words than you do. So when they talk, it SOUNDS like they are saying one thing, but they have changed the language on you, and they really aren't saying that at all! Let's take the term “internet marketing” first. The gurus use that term differently than the average person! So you are starting with a premise that they are talking about giving you knowledge about something you need, when they are talking about something else entirely! When you hear “internet marketing”, you think it means, “How to sell goods and services online, and successfully encourage people to buy your product or service.”Unfortunately, the gurus do not mean that at all! They use the term differently!They mean: “How to manipulate people into impulsively buying internet marketing informational products or software through instant payment and download links.”Period.
They aren't talking about any kind of business other than the SPECIFIC business that they do. And THEN, they are talking about doing it in a way that is warped and twisted to start with! See, “internet marketing” by their definition, starts with a set of assumptions which work ONLY if you are targeting a specific group of people, and ONLY if you can persuade them to set aside their common sense long enough to purchase. The people they are targeting share a common set of traits:
The internet marketer then takes it a few steps further, with some other assumptions about the target market:
There are tons of marketers who would never admit to thinking this way, yet their advertisements fairly scream these beliefs when you begin to actually LOOK at what they are saying. I have read probably hundreds of “internet marketing” books. They all seem to have a similar theme. And to a one, they all had a fatal flaw, that if someone followed their advice, they could NOT make money while still being honest!I realize this is a very strong thing to say. And I realize that in saying this, I have essentially declared war on the majority of internet marketing informational sellers out there. But there is no help for it, because what I am saying is true! You can recognize a dishonest or ignorant internet marketer by the phrases they use. They all say the same things, and they all reinforce one another in what they say (helps to sucker more innocent victims). You may know that you cannot trust an author if they give you any one of these lines:
Nothing you find in this site will suggest any of those tactics. Because they do not work for truly honest marketers. I'll never recommend something that is not 100% honest, and that also has a good potential to bring solid, long term customers. Don't trust everything you hear, even if you do hear it from multiple sources. Many of those sources have a motive for wanting you to believe it, and it has more to do with making THEM money, than it has to do with helping you! The Myths that Hamper YouThe biggest myths in marketing successfully online persist because of personal perceptions and human nature. It is our nature to want to believe that there is a fast or easy way, so when enough people promise us that, we cling to that belief in spite of a deep understanding that it must be flawed. We also want to believe that the good people around us would always give us good information. Sadly, with internet marketing, this is not the case. I have heard people whom I admire and respect promote scams. I have heard people whom I really love recommend marketing tactics which I know to be unsound. They do not do it because they are bad, they do it because it is THEIR nature to want to believe that it works. In fact, I have known VERY successful people to use 5 good tactics, and to cling to 2 bad ones, because they NEVER analyzed the results closely enough to realize that the 2 bad ones were actually hurting them instead of helping them. See, we hear something early on, and we have a desire to believe it is true. That desire can come from wanting to believe in the source, or from wanting to believe in the outcome. It can come from liking the method because it is easy. It can come from not quite knowing what else to do if we don't do that. As we learn and grow, it can be very hard to give those ideas up, even when we begin to suspect that they are not good things to put our effort behind! We may advertise on a safelist because it seems easier than posting good information on a forum or group with just our sig line. We may get one response out of hundreds of posts, and ever after be reluctant to give up that method, even when other methods take LESS time for the overall result. We may cling to the perception that it is “fast and easy” and never make the connection that it does not bring in results that are reasonable for the amount of cumulative time we put in at it! Human nature is inherently stubborn. Even when we are told the truth, and even when that truth is proven to us through logic, we may be reluctant to believe it, or we may want to believe that there is an exception.At first, when I began to feel that there was a flaw in the internet marketing world online, I just felt that some of it was flawed. That it only needed a little change to work. After trying a lot of things, I began to realize that there were fundamental beliefs driving it which were themselves flawed, and that the problems were much deeper than I had at first realized.Later, I began to understand the real motives which drive most internet marketing books and instructions, and I began to understand how truly inexperienced most “experts” really are at anything other than bullying people into buying their latest overpriced book or “report”. It became clear that not only were the tactics they were recommending always inherently deceptive, but that they only worked when aiming at a target market that was fairly uneducated, and inexperienced with online security! The average business owner is NOT selling the same thing they are. The average business owner will also “clean up” any deceptive tactics, and try to adapt them to what they are selling. They cannot understand why they do not work! It is because those tactics ONLY work when they are combined with dishonesty! If you try to honestly put together a “one page website” that explains a real business, it looks cheap, and feels shady. No reputable company uses this method to sell solid products, and visitors KNOW this. They feel it, and they run. The business owner does not understand why they did it all the way they were told, and nothing is working! They feel like a failure, and they feel like their business must have been a bad idea. In reality, it wasn't their fault at all. They were simply told to do the wrong things, and in the wrong way! In order to figure out how to do it the right way though, they first have to get rid of the myths. This can be a hard task, because they may not realize how deep those myths run!In truth, in order to sell well, you must understand YOUR target market. You have to prepare a message that reaches out to their needs and wants, and that honestly conveys that you have a solution that they can benefit from. You have to give them facts, in a way they can understand. Once you have that message prepared, you have to find a way to deliver it to them in places where they are likely to be. This means you have to find places to promote your message, that already contain people who are interested – and it means avoiding those places that are filled only with people who are not there because they are interested in what you have! Get past the myths, and progress occurs. It may be slow progress, but it happens in an unmistakable pattern that shows you that your efforts ARE paying off.Stay stuck in the myths, and you'll be forever expending effort, but rarely seeing any results. How Resale Rights have Influenced Internet MarketingNow we get down to the thing that really demonstrates why you cannot trust most of the writers who are producing eBooks. It has to do with something called Resale Rights.See, it used to be that someone would prepare an info-product, hype it up good, and sell it. They started doing this through infomercials and on radio. The internet though, opened up endless doorways to this kind of selling, and made it MUCH cheaper! Back in the heyday of the infomercials, savvy marketers learned that if you took a bit of truth, and combined it with a lot of conjecture and speculation, you didn't really have to know what you were talking about, as long as you made it SOUND like you knew! And you could hire or bribe enough other people to say that you knew what you were talking about, which would persuade other people to buy your overpriced product. The internet took it a few steps further. Now you could join together with other marketers, and all of you could give each other recommendations (look at the names on the testimonials of some of the info product “one page websites” - you'll see a group of people who show up again and again - don't take my word for it, keep your eyes open and you'll see it). As long as all of you supported one another, you could sell whatever you wanted, whether it was what it purported to be or not. And, you could offer affiliate links to anyone who partners with you, so everybody profits from whatever is being sold. Then came Resale Rights. Someone got the idea that since they could join forces, and hold a huge launch of a product, they could make a killing in one huge sale. They could REALLY overprice the item, and nobody would look too closely at it if they offered “resale rights” with it. You buy my product for $400, and you can resell it at whatever price you want. Well, the problem with that, is that as soon as the item reaches the second tier of sellers, there is competition, and the price rapidly plummets. You have to very quickly find another product to sell. And the people at the top of the food chain had to develop another product to have another round of quick, overpriced sales. Since they were including “resale rights”, nobody was really looking too closely at the quality of the product. Suddenly you could take a little mini-app that didn't work too well, and that hardly anybody really needed, that you couldn't normally sell for $5, and people would pay $35 for it just because they could also buy the rights to resell it. They never quite caught on that it was still a worthless little thing that nobody needed. If they could persuade people to buy it so they could resell it, they could still make a killing. So now, there are gazillions of marketers out there churning out bazillions of worthless products, which they sell by including Resale Rights. Nobody really looks at the quality of the item – if it is badly written (and I've seen some lulus), or if it is something nobody would buy in their right mind otherwise, they don't care. Sell it with resale rights, and you can always find someone to buy it.Not that there aren't some products that have resale rights that actually DO have some usefulness, but even those are usually WAY overpriced, especially at first. The vast majority of them though, are sad excuses for a product to prop up a glorified pyramid scheme. Beside resale rights, we have “giveaway rights”, which just mean someone has produced a book that makes its money from something inside the book that they are trying to get you to buy. So what does that have to do with internet marketing?Most of the internet marketing instruction books out there are books that have been produced with “Resale Rights” or as viral marketing tools with giveaway rights. They have been produced with VERY LITTLE consideration to accuracy, truth, or actual experience or quality. Someone just wanted to get it out there and spread it around in a hurry.You are learning how to market products that you don't sell, from someone who is not nearly as experienced as they say they are, and who had no real interest in educating you, but just wanted to write a book, no matter how bad, to prop up a feeding frenzy on Resale Rights, or to serve as a vehicle for their viral marketing of something else. Anybody can write an internet marketing book. You have no way of knowing whether they are telling the truth or not. This includes myself. Part of the reason so many people out there are all saying the same thing is because they are educating themselves ONLY from each other's books, practicing ONLY the same dishonest tactics, and passing it on, because they do not have any experience beyond that - and often they have a financial motive for saying the same old things.I'm writing this book to sell directly. No one is helping me sell it, because I am not welcome in the circle of internet marketers. They don't like me if they know who I am and what I teach. I have only sold resale rights for my books to one person, along with a website that I built that was designed to sell the books – it did not do him much good unless he could also sell the books! I've read most of those other books. Though once you have read about three of them, there is really no point in reading any more of them, because they pretty much all say the same thing anyway – even when one claims to offer the “secret”, or says something like “I read all the other books and this is the only one that really taught me anything”. You'll hear the same things over and over. If you are buying instructional books, look for those that are sold in their own right, from the author themselves, or from ethical publishers. Do not believe what you read in books that have Resale Rights to them – you'll rarely get the truth from them! There are a few freebie books that are worth the time to open and read, but not many. The ones that are worth reading are often a “preview” copy, or a free chapter of something that is being sold through normal channels. Remember, marketers for large reputable corporations, and small stable businesses did not learn their craft from reading tacky internet marketing books, and neither should you! Written by Laura Wheeler, MicroBusiness Website Developer, and founder of the MicroWebmasters Alliance |
||||
|
|
||||
|
Every reasonable effort has been made to provide true and accurate information on this site. We are not responsible for the content of sites that are not under our direct control, including sites that are linked to ours. It is inherent in the nature of business and the web, that things will change over time. We do try to keep our information up to date, and to avoid all defamatory or libelous statements about any individual or entity. If you are aware of inaccuracies in our information, we request that you notify us so we can investigate and make adjustments if our information is in fact inaccurate. We screen advertisements for this site, with the exception of Google ads, which we do not control the content of. Business and marketing success is dependent upon factors that are out of our control, such as individual effort, individual resources, market trends, local demand, and other factors. We make no guarantees of success of any kind. We provide information which, if used correctly,under the right circumstances, will reduce business, marketing, and internet purchase risks by a significant amount, but we cannot eliminate the risks of any of those activities. Use this site at your own risk. If you are dissatisfied with the content or presentation of this information, you may discontinue use of the site. Site Design By Firelight Web Studio, Copyright, 2006, All Rights Reserved |
||||