I don’t know about you, but I am absolutely sick to the fucking gills of all the hype, and lies, and spin, and half-truths, and false promises (despite their lip-service disclaimer notices) and general all round gilding of the lily that goes on in internet marketing.
This week we’ve been hammered by every man and his dog about Frank Kern’s Mass Control program selling for a shit load of money and promising the Earth, as usual. Look, not to diss that program coz I know nothing about it; I’m sure it’s a ripper… that’s not my point… I’m just tired of the endless circus that this has become: Product launch after product launch after product launch.
Ain’t nothin wrong with good products.
But the problem is that they seem to be so fucking few and far between.
And I am totally and utterly sick to the stomach with all the crap that I see in emails that are sent to me and sales pages that I read. (Yes, I could opt-out—and I do. Often. But I stay in the “game” because I want to learn all about it. I’ve learnt quite a lot so far. And the more I read and the more I do, the more I learn. Many times, it’s what not to do. Or what would probably work really well, but make me feel like I needed to wash the snake oil off me every night before bed.. and even then not be able to sleep right.)
So, anyway, in response to all the outright lies and disingenuous practices, I thought I’d start a blog (it took me about 15 minutes from idea to the time I’m typing this–including registering a domain, setting up an add-on domain, setting up two different redirects, installing wordpress, tweaking it ever so slightly, and banging out this first post).
Look, maybe I’ve just had a bad day and the ease with which anyone can set up a blog nowadays is feeding my desire to rant and rave. But truly, I’ve had enough.
(Haven’t you?)
SO… I’m going to start cataloguing all the crap that I come across.
All the false scarcity claims on webpages that I bought from 5 years ago and which still to this day read “This offer ends at midnight tonight! Hurry, buy now or the trolls will come and eat your children!” and shit like that.
All the dodgy products that I’ve found recently in an overhaul of my hard-drive.
All the membership sites that are a complete waste of your time and money.
All the stuff that is being sold for $47 and which I know you can get for $7 at some PLR site. Or for free.
All the hypocrisy from the self-proclaimed good guys, like “gurus” who write 127 page “Special Reports” railing against all the hyped-up, no-content offers out there that waste our time…
Reports that turn out to be thinly-disguised sales pitches for their upcoming $1500 product launch. (Three easy payments, no problem. Heck, PayPal and Clickbank both do recurring billing now, whoo-hoo!)
Whenever I find tosh like this, I’m going to blog about it here.
And when I find stuff that I think is good value, I’ll also blog about it here. If you want to check it out, you can choose either the red pill or the blue pill (my affiliate link or the non-affiliate link). Crap will receive no link whatsoever. You will not find ANY straight affiliate links on this site without a non-affiliate counterpart. So, for example, a banner ad might have my affiliate link embedded within it. Well, you’ll find a non-affiliate link under or above or beside it–in plain view. If you don’t want to take my recommendations (and why should you when you don’t know me from Adam?), no problem.
Of course, over time, I hope that you come to realise that I’m not fucking around here; that I really truly am ready to scream at the gallons and gallons of snake oil that many of even the supposed “good guys” of internet marketing are churning out.
This idea to throw up a blog and see how I go with it came to me just a little while ago, as I said. But I think it’s been rattling around in my head for quite a while, to be honest.
I think, perhaps, that I didn’t think it was worthwhile pursuing. That maybe I’d spend a lot of time writing honest reviews and doing all the standard traffic generation techniques only to find that people couldn’t care less.
I’ve been working in another niche (which happens to be the area I’m trained in and would like to set up a “real” enterprise in–the reason I’ve been educating myself in marketing and business) and it seems that folks in that niche are just not interested in investing in their education. Or they think they can find everything for free. Or they can find everything for free very easily. Or they have the time to find everything for free. Or something else. But whatever it is, that’s been a really frustrating experience for me, actually.
So I don’t want to throw myself into this if (a) I’m not getting any readers, (b) the readers I do get don’t bother to get involved in any discussion, or (c) I’m spending a lot of time and not making any money from it.
“Now, hold on a minute!” I hear some people shreik “I thought this guy was looking out for the little guy, dammit!”
But I’m not promising to be some Robin Hood. I’m just promising to tell it as I see it. I see a lot of rubbish that makes me mad and I think it’s time that names got attached to deeds. (So if you’re reading this and I’m on one of your mailing lists and you send me shit, you can bet that it’ll end up being talked about here–with your name attached to it. Ain’t no law against publishing the truth, bud. Look it up). Thing is, I’m not a charity organisation. I have a LOT of things competing for my time and I need to earn a crust while I’m at it. So this little project is part altruism, part rant, and part marketing exercise.
To that extent, then, I will be using all the “tried and tested” marketing techniques to get a readership and then expand it.
But I won’t be doing it dishonestly. That’s the difference. No special reports that GUARANTEE to teach you how to make $5000 by the end of next week; but which are just vague outlines for tired old affiliate techniques and a legal disclaimer against projected earnings (never mind the bit about the $5000 guarantee on that squeeze page that got your email, eh?). No Adwords ads that send you galloping here looking for that “secret strategy” for getting Google to pay YOU to run your ads. No teleseminars that set out to “grill” someone for 60 minutes–less, of course, the 15 minute personal-story intro, the 10 minutes of assorted banter, the 15 minutes of amusing anecdotes about things related to the topic–but which don’t actually offer anything of real value to the listeners–the 5 minutes of QnA when the moderator magnanimously “opens up the lines”, the 10-minute sales pitch for the guest’s latest program/ebook/seminar/bootcamp/etc… and then the 5 minutes at the end where I tell you how goddam lucky you are to have been on the call; that 4000 psychotic gun-toting Afghanis were on the waiting list for the teleseminar and how privileged you are to have our guru guest (who prides himself on only working 4 hours every leap year that the moon is in Saturn) could take time out of his busy schedule to come on the line, talk complete vacuous boy’s club bollocks and then pitch you. Oh, and then I’d have to describe it as “pure content”, of course. Hynosis is a beautiful thing.
None of that.
Actually, I expect that this will get off the ground rather slowly…
…if at all.
I am currently working on a niche product and when that’s out of the way I have an affiliate site that I need to go back and tweak and run some tests on for a few weeks. Then it’s spring vacation.
But when I have a spare minute, I’ll endeavour to do some article marketing, viral reports, social bookmarking, maybe even PPC to get readers. If you’re reading this from anywhere other than some kind of random organic search, then you know exactly what I’m talking about, I’m sure.
In fact, you could forward the URL to anyone you know who might be interested; that would help enormously. Thanks. I appreciate it. Truly.
So… leave a comment. If I come back after doing some traffic generation leg-work, check my analytics and see that a bunch of folks have visited but only a few have bothered to leave a comment expressing their interest in this little side-project, then I will know one of two things:
1. I’m targetting the wrong people with my traffic generation strategies and/or message
2. I’m targetting the right people insofar as they were motivated enough to click on over here… but people who are too apathetic to even leave a comment saying “Yep, I’d be interested to know who to steer clear of, and which sites make outrageous claims, and which products are great and which ones are crap, and which membership sites and paid newsletters are going to bleed me dry and offer very little of value in return, and whose email list will just hammer me senseless with offers, and whose emails make the most outrageous claims, and all that good stuff that’s simply accepted as part of the IM game…”
And in case you hadn’t realised already, I have no problem at all with bad language. If you do, then I imagine you would have stopped reading a while back.
If you do have a problem with the way I speak (and this is just me emptying my head in a way that is not the same, it’s true, but very similar to the way I speak), I couldn’t care less. Surf away. Don’t read it. I’m not going to call you a cunt for doing so. I simply don’t care. Not my problem.
Perry Marshall (yes, the Adwords dude) is a Christian with totally ridiculous views about DNA that he thinks prove the existence of God. His hypothesis is completely idiotic for such a smart guy. I doubt that Perry and I will ever be chummy because our different perspectives on theism and atheism would just get in the way of the friendship sooner or later. But I listen when the man talks about Adwords and basic marketing.
Sidenote: Jury is still out on Perry Marshall and what he has to say about Adwords and marketing, to be honest, but for now I’m listening to what he has to say regardless of whether I think he’s a Christian creationist nut.
See my point here? He doesn’t care if whether I listen to him or not on that basis. He’s only interested whether people listen to him when he talks about Adwords and marketing. Well, likewise, I couldn’t give a shit whether you listen to me or not at all. If you do, then I’ll keep talking to you. If you don’t, I’ll find someone else to talk to; about this or about something else. And if you’re not interested in listening to me because I’m foul-mouthed, or because I’m an athiest, or maybe even because I’m a foul-mouthed athiest, then I really couldn’t give two fucks.
There’s a mantra in marketing that I’ve heard so many times: “People won’t buy from you until they know, like, and trust you” and y’know, that’s probably true most of the time. But not all of the time. If you’re SMART and not just one of the herd, then you’ll be less interested in me as a person, and whether or not you get a warm fuzzy feeling about me, and more interested in whether you think what I’m saying is beneficial to you. Or just more crap to add to the ever-growing, steaming pile.
I see so many gushing comments on the blogs of hucksters saying “Oh, [insert name of snakeoil pusher], you’ve done it again! You’ve overdelivered with this latest report. It’s amazing! I can’t wait until you release your “Murderous Web 2.0 Skyrocket Your Business Without Having To Lift A Finger Program”. Sign me up now!”
These slaughterhouse victims have bought into the cult of personality thus: [Internet Marketer ABC] is a nice guy. He’s charismatic. He’s charming. He’s friendly. He’s handsome in a boyish kind of way. He make a gazillion dollars a year. And he has a lot to say (about nothing much). He MUST know what he’s doing! (And in many respects this is entirely true, ironically) And he’s so good to his loyal subscribers, isn’t he, by providing all this “content” for free?
If people could get past whether they like or dislike someone and actually listened to the message, then Nixon wouldn’t have been “seen” to have lost the first televised US Presidential debate (1960) because he didn’t come across as smooth as our boy Jack.
But people are morons. I trust that if you’ve read this far, then you aren’t.
But I could be wrong.
Prove me right, eh?
