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Is it possible to be an ethical internet marketer? I don’t doubt that a great deal of money is being made from IM and I would dearly love to grab a slice of it, but I’m more and more convinced that it is impossible to garner lists, followers and sales without making promises which you know to be false. It seems all too easy to slide into complicity with this murky exercise. One marketer for whom I had huge respect, who at one time was urging everyone to unsubscribe from lists and abandon the whole sorry charade, now regularly mails me with the latest flavour-of-the-week astounding offers.
And as people get desensitised to the usual promises, the techniques get more and more sneaky, for example:
- free webinars ( who has the time to listen in to these things 5 times a week?)
- highly specific results claims “$342.63 every day!”
- “your confirmation code enclosed” for something you have never heard of
The only things which have actually made me any money are the genuine recommendations I have made for products which I actually use. And these are a slow burn, coming in when I least expect it, from seeds sown months ago.
Intellectually I get it and I can see how it works from the inside. But at some visceral level it all still works on me as a buyer. For some reason, it is still a slap in the face when the marketing turns out to consist of bare-faced lies. The latest was a Monster Betfair Bot, which used the words “autopilot” and “fully automated bet placement” throughout its advertising and turned out (after turning down about 6 “one time offers”) to be nothing more than a stakes calculator for a martingale progression. I was surprised that Clickbank referred the refund request to the vendor, but happy to see that after two days a full refund was issued and my complaints were not disputed.
Which is why I love Clickbank, as it gives you the chance to believe all of the claims on a contingent basis, and get a prompt refund when they turn out to be another crock…
Show me the money!
Now this is perplexing. From one perspective my autoblogging systems are working well. For a few of them I seem to have selected the right keywords within WP-Robot to ensure that every 8 hours, as regular as clockwork, a high quality article, Youtube video or product review is pulled into the site’s content. The WP Syndicator plugin will then tweet, blog and post a summary of each item as a nested link in over a dozen places around the internet. And the indications are that the tweets and blogs which reference these posts are being followed by an ever-increasing group of people. The visitor stats for the autoblogs have long since left my manual blogs in the dust. And so far as I can tell I have correctly coded in my Clickbank, Amazon, Shopzilla and other userids.
So where is the money? I can’t see a single cent of income in any of the affiliate accounts, or even any indication of traffic going to the linked offers. Have people really become so blind to adverts that not one has taken the bait in over two months of traffic. Anyone who can suggest where I might be going wrong or who is in a similar situation, please leave a comment!
The worst spammers of my inbox are currently those people who have previously sold me something. They have a particular edge over regular spammers, in that I will always be concerned about unsubscribing from their list in case I miss out on the next version of their software or update of their materials. But Lord do they milk that advantage. As Turbo Profit Sniper had singularly failed to deliver on its promised avalanche of targeted traffic, I was less than impressed when its vendor (Ian Ross) started trying to entice me into every me too product launch under the sun. I said as much in a return email and suggested maybe he should focus on trying to deliver on the initial commitments. Imagine my surprise when I received a mail entitled “From Ian Ross (Personal)”. Imagine my lack of surprise when it turned out to be yet another product advert (Auto Mass Traffic anyone?). Time to unsubscribe regardless and scratch around to see whether its too late to get a refund on the original product.
Out With The Old…
Its fare thee well Traffic Annihilator and CB Pirate this week. I thought you guys could work together, what with TA delivering unstoppable floods of laser-targeted traffic and CB Pirate converting such traffic to massive while-you-sleep commission earnings. I actually liked the technical aspects of both and had I earned even a penny in the three months I have been using them I might not now be cancelling my subscriptions.
Why are “auto-pilot” and “while you sleep” such powerful magnets for my paypal clicking finger. I think I may have done it again with Turbo Profit Sniper, which on first blush looks to have been marketed with another hugely exaggerated set of claims. Gloves off time – if it doesn’t deliver the promised automated income stream, it will be refunded in due course.
The weekend has been mainly taken up however, with an overhaul for all of my autobots, following the acquisition of a great WP plugin which posts extracts from your main blog to various other blogging and miniblogging sites (with higher pagerank than your own). So far the WP Syndicator plugin looks to be the real deal, as I’ve seen an overnight uptick in traffic, twitter followers, and of course the spam which goes along with any increased profile. Once you’ve been through the signup process once for all 15 target sites, the rest of your blogs can be syndicated in about 5 minutes apiece. Once I have got all of my autoblogs updated in this way, I can turn my attention to how I have managed to spend over $300 commissioning over 3 million ad impressions on mobile phone apps, for a clickthrough total of around 3,000 and confirmed commissions of around $3!
Quick Postscript with a picture of the effect the WP Syndicator plugin had on this blog (after the cut)
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After the Gold Rush
Well the mystery about Ryan’s upfront goodies was quickly solved when he launched his full product for just south of £2,000. So, its thanks for the freebies Ryan and …lets move on.
This week the IM world is resounding with the noise of jaws hitting the floor as people read and absorb the contents of Mobile Monopoly. Not even worth my pasting an afflink here as I’m sure most of my half dozen readers already have it or are buried under a range of offers for it. Many products claim to be game changers, but cynical as I am, I have to say this really deserves the tag. Seasoned SEO experts, bloggers, email responder gurus and copywriters are all downing tools to work their way through the 50 videos included in the course. This guy overdelivered by a large margin. Want to know of a mobile advertising network? He hooks you up with about 5, and has detailed videos for how to use some of them. CPA offers specifically for mobiles? Here’s a list of dedicated sites. And at cost per click of 5 cents and less, your Adwords campaigns suddenly look a little sick. I did a little trial run on a Peerfly offer, which although not mobile optimised, did refer to ringtones. In about an hour I got over 100,000 impressions and clickthroughs of 600 for some banal line like “Get 25 Fresh Music Ringtones Now!”. For a cost of $36 or about 6c per click.
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Freebies worth a damn and the Whitelist
Everyone is piling on the bandwagon and touting this, so there’s really no need for me to give yet another link, but Ryan Deiss has got me scratching my head. He’s giving such valuable information and resources away for free that you have to wonder what is he keeping back to earn some money down the line? The Cherry Picker software was a good start, his analysis of what you need for traffic generation (including freshness of content) breaks some new ground, and his codes for finding .gov and .edu sites to get backlinks from are immediately exploitable. Gold star or dunce’s cap to Ryan, depending on your perspective (I’ve gained less info and resources from some courses I’ve paid $77 for – see below).
Another of the good guys who has given me tangible information for free is Phil Henderson of Stupidly Simple SEO. He got on my whitelist with some good tips about how quickly Xomba gets indexed for Amazon affiliate write-ups, which helped me sell a £130 CD book set in half a day. More recently he sent me a great demo of how to whip up an advertising video with a free version of animoto. Great signal to noise ratio from Phil.
CONFIRMED Mark, your first Clickbank Sale..
and it continues…
Hey Mark, I think you need to see this immediately... http://anotherspammyoptinbunchahooey.com Imagine getting your hands on a system today that could dump fast cash gains into your Clickbank account like ..$677.12 ....$1063.05 .... and $1752.42 in a single day. In as little as 48 hours from now! etc etc etc blah blah blah
I’m getting swamped by this stuff recently with ridiculously misleading titles, whose SOLE purpose is to make me open the mail. Well, I’m pulling the plug on every one of these I get (and I’m sure there will be more). So farewell Jason G, Tim B, Nathern J. Too much, too often.
And while I’m feeling sour, who has the time to watch 9 hour-long videos or listen to huge audio files? My heart sinks when I part with my cash (even if only temporarily) to find I am expected to give up my next week of free time to listen to some thickly-accented verbose bore padding out his or her threadbare offering. Worse still if their idea of a video accompaniment is a glacially-paced rolling powerpoint presentation containing nothing but bullet points of every word they are saying. Come on guys – these things have been old hat in “proper” business circles for decades. Even the US military has turned its back on Powerpoint.
Gold star to the Consumer Wealth System (no, you’re not getting an affiliate link) for supplying its main course modules in about 6 different formats, including video, pdf, powerpoint, audio etc. On the downside, their idea of “plug n play” sites is laughable, in the amount of work you have to expend to get them up and functional.
Enough of a rant. I’m just pleased to find this post again when I thought it had been irretrievably lost a week ago.
To vary the tone, the next post will be nothing but sweetness and light and plaudits all around…
My phoney friends
Best of buddies? I don’t think so. Even though every email list I’m on addresses me by my first name and sends me all manner of exclusive, secret, hot, VIP, pre-launch hand-picked goodies, the shine comes off the offer somewhat when you get the same identical offer from 5 other affiliates. If George sends you an exclusive offer from his good friend Bill today, you can bet Bill will be promoting something of George’s tomorrow.
Sometimes I fail to recognise the game that is being played and take it all a bit too seriously. So, for example, I wrote to George Brown to say more or less “thanks so much for bringing Miracle Traffic Bot to my attention, but were you aware that it has very poor features compared to Article Marketing Robot”. No reply! More recently, some other, probably hypothetical question was raised in another of his letters to me. I thought I had a sensible response to offer, so I did. Again no reply!
The Reason We Are All Here
OK, it’s not the mystery of the Universe laid bare, but one principal reason for setting up the blog was to explain the slightly hidden path to obtaining a clickbank refund for those who haven’t done it before.
Imagine my relief when I find someone who has already explained the procedure more succinctly and precisely than I would probably have managed. Check out PR Barlow’s MoneySchemes.Net Blog in general (I haven’t yet found a post I didn’t like) and in particular the post on CB refunds – http://www.moneyschemes.net/clickbank-refund-how-to-get-a-clickbank-refund/
I left this comment, which I reproduce here as it hasn’t been moderated into visibility at the time of writing this…
“Heck – I had a whole domain name and blog set up to tell people how to do this. Now the best thing I can do is just give a link back to this. Actually, I read of another method which I haven’t tried, which is just to mail your purchase id to refunds@clickbank.com, without any explanation whatever, but I find that one implausible. I did (only) once get a vendor block the refund (97% winning sports bets which actually relied on a martingale progression) but on appeal to clickbank they relented.”
Meanwhile, the battle against dross continues apace. I just succumbed to another purchase with huge claims ($25,000 in a single day!) only to find the first 32 pages out of 40 telling me how to buy an old domain name and set up a wordpress blog using fantastico! The “meat” of the stunning new greyhat technique was hardly worth waiting for either. I tweeted it thus:
“Blogging Espionage? Buy old domains, fill with backdated blog posts, sell links, posts and banner ads. That will be $37 thanks very much”
Rinse and Repeat
There is something magical about the word “Blueprint” when used for marketing purposes. It implies an engineered level of precision in delivering exactly what is being promised. Who can resist an offer to view the “exact blueprint used to make thousands of dollars in a single day”. I have certainly bought into many such offers. It was only when not achieving the expected level of income (for which read “any level of income”) that I started thinking about the whole concept of following in someone else’s footsteps.
To start with, why are they spilling the beans on something which has been successful for them over a long period of time …unless it has recently stopped being so successful. If a system goes off the boil, wouldn’t it be tempting (while your recent stats still look reasonable) to cash in by selling on?
Secondly, why should one person’s success with a particular niche or product mean that the same success can be replicated by dozens, hundreds or even thousands of new entrants, using cookie-cutter squeeze and sales pages competing for the same size pool of customers (or even smaller, if the originator has been particularly successful).
Thirdly, why should I believe any of the weasel words of their sales page anyway? The large fonts and bright colours go to the big juicy rhetorical questions “How would you like torrents of unstoppable cash pouring into your Clickbank account?” Very much thank you – is that what you are promising? Err… no, actually. If we read the very small print at the bottom of the page we will find that not only is such performance not guaranteed, if they are particularly honest they will be saying that most people will not make a penny or will actually lose money after buying the product. Read the bottom section first and carefully next time you open a sales page – you’ll be amazed at what they are obliged to tell you these days (and don’t think for a second that they would be doing this without a regulatory gun to their head!).
Such an easy decision…
You send me a mail with the header Confirmed: Your 1st Sale Online and there had better be a commission figure inside. But no, affiliate DrSuzanneG decided to promote Affiliate Silver Bullet with that headline and then cut and paste a standard sales email into the body. Bye bye Dr Suzanne, ggaf_hm list at aweber, Dr Jon and Affiliate Silver Bullet as a whole.
Seriously, that would have had to be some ace piece of copywriting to overcome the disappointment I felt at being suckered into opening that mail up. A sinking feeling in the pit of my stomach at being tricked again isn’t the way you want to maintain our relationship.
Meanwhile, I’m still in two minds about Conversions Confidential. Nice piece of sales literature – I’m sure there are things I could learn from it. But George Brown’s endorsement isn’t worth what it once was. After all, he tried selling me Miracle Traffic Bot and SEO Linkvine. And he doesn’t answer my emails when I tell him what’s garbage and what’s not. On the other hand, he films his videos in exotic locations with reasonable production values, which lends credibility when compared with unshaved hoodie-wearers transmitting from run-down student bedsits.
I finally opened up CB Pirate. Who told them that a Pirate map was the best way to orientate the new user? If I have this right, then they have already set up all of my squeeze pages and sales sites and all I need to do is get some traffic to my individual links. This is one of those many instances where I bought the product but didn’t have the time or the inclination to sit down and study it. Looks like I might have missed a trick. I can remember exactly what tipped the scales in their favour – they showed a Clickbank account with pennies, pounds and low hundreds in commissions, rather than the thousands of dollars of unstoppable income that most advertise. That little bit of restraint and humility on their part (even if it was faked) earned them a sale. Marketers take note… or maybe I’m not that typical a consumer!