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Learning To Market Responsibly By James R. Sanders
Don't you just hate writers, or at least the ones that
write up articles identifying a problem then pitching you
information to help you solve your problems for $49.95?
The writing industry has taken a turn where everyone who
has something to sell can write an article, submit it to an
online venue, and wait for us to read it or download it and
see if we'll buy their products or services. Don't you just
hate it when you spend your time looking for the information
only to find that you have to make a further investment before
you can get the actual answers to your problem? You've already
spent countless hours looking for it, and now you have to make
a monetary investment to boot. Is it a practice you've come to
accept, expect, and chalk it up to the costs of running a
business, or are you forever turned away from that writer
because of their approach? Would you rather have the
information up-front telling you that you'll need to make a
purchase to actually get your questions answered or do you
just expect you'll have to make a purchase as the norm?
Don't get me wrong, even in such material; there is still
valuable information to be found. These articles work great
for readers looking for a paid solution or a quick fix, but
they do little for the "do it yourselfers" who are looking for
the "hows" to answer the question and fix the problem
themselves. Then there is the time investment problem where
you have to sometimes spend large amounts of time digging for
the valuable information, sorting out the hype, and tossing
away the chaff. The bottom line is that marketing has gotten
harder on the internet because of the ways that marketers have
conditioned surfers over time. Think back to the earlier days
when banner ads were affective. Today, banner ads have taken a
downward spiral where effectiveness has dwindled to the point
of almost zero. Think about your own surfing habits. What do
you usually tend to do when you come across a banner ad? Do
you even notice them on web site pages anymore?
Full Page Ads and Time Limited Offers.
The latest craze seems to be building long page
advertisement pitches engaging the visitor's emotions and
providing them with mountains of testimonials to convince them
to purchase the product or service. Isn't it ironic how most
of them started out in debt, no money in the bank, house in
foreclosure, and after finding this secret suddenly bought
their dream home, quit their day job, and drive their favorite
expensive sports or luxury car, and accomplished this amazing
feat in just a couple months? These stories have variations,
but the theme is always the same. Although I have no SOLID
proof to offer, I'd tend to believe that many of these
"guru's" found a way to prey on people's dreams. They put
together some information that sounded good, figured out how
to market it, and since almost everyone always dreams of more
money, they pitched their idea to people and made armored
carloads of money. The point here is that they made their
fortunes off SELLING the idea and NOT actually by DOING the
idea. They all use the idea of a time-limited offer too. The
problem with time limited offers on the internet is that if
they do not use a tracking cookie, or if they don't require
you to sign up to the site for a membership, there is no way
for them to track that time sensitive offer. To prove my
point, take any particular pitch you see, bookmark the page,
and then go back in a couple days. You'll more than likely
find that you get the same time sensitive offer and you didn't
miss anything. If that doesn't work, then clear your internet
cache in your browser and repeat the same process. You'll then
understand what I'm talking about. You're being duped, and
they play on that emotion to entice you to make a purchase.
When I see one of these anymore, if the product or service
appeals to me, I IMMEDIATELY scroll to the bottom to see how
much it costs. If it's within my budget, then I MIGHT scroll
back up and read the page, but if not, then I close the
window.
Don't get me wrong, I am sure that at least SOME of them
have been broke, in foreclosure, no bank account, etc, but ALL
of them? There are literally THOUSANDS of them out there. What
about ones that were just broke and had no bank accounts?
Nevertheless, just about every one of those full-page articles
tells the same story. Just switch around the job they used to
do, the style of home they bought, and the type of car they
now drive, and they are all variations on a theme. I am also
sure that SOME of them are legitimate, but try to pick out the
legitimate from the fakes and you'll have a tough time of it.
Then there are those that tell the half-truths. When I speak
of half-truths, I am talking about either those that had
credit to take out a rather large loan to market their
business idea, or those that had friends to borrow the money
from or relatives to give it to them. They never seem to tell
you about the investments they needed to make in order to make
the idea work, just the fact that they make thousands of
dollars a month and have everything they want in life. They
also fail to tell you how much they were making when they
started out. Kind of convenient isn't it. What sense does it
make to purchase that information when you don't know if you
have the extra funds needed to make it work? Sure, I could
sell you an information article on how to make millions waxing
turtles. But if it required you to live in Hawaii and was
going to cost you $5,000.00 in advertisements to get it going
to make those thousands of dollars a month, then what good
would that information do you if you didn't live in Hawaii and
didn't have $5,000.00 in the bank? If you didn't know that
extra information, then you might buy the information, waste
money, and never do anything with the information. That's
exactly what hundreds of thousands and possibly millions of
people are doing. They're buying this information that they
might never be able to use, and are loosing har! d earned
money in the process. Are you getting the idea yet?
Where Past Marketing Practices Effect Present and Future
Marketing Results.
You see, thanks to the other marketers that have come
before you, just as those to come will look back at you in
future, we pave the road for the marketers tomorrow. Using
shady promotion tactics will continue to make the future of
marketing harder and harder. It's conditioning, and just like
Pavlov's dog's were made to salivate through the ringing of a
bell, internet surfers are getting fed up with the shady
marketing tactics and learning to IGNORE them. Take for
instance the value of contextual links used to promote an
affiliate program. When marketers first started using this
tactic, their affiliate program owners received allot of
traffic, and the marketer made a tidy sum of cash. The problem
was that most marketers, in their greed for the almighty
dollar, failed to do the proper research into a company before
they chose to promote it. They were so hurried to post program
links to make the money that they just didn't bother with the
research. Just making sure the program pays it's promoters
promptly and on time is only ensuring half the battle. It's
just great that you make sure you are paid, but what about the
visitor that trusted you to click that link. You know the
visitor that was DEPENDING on you to give them reputable
information. What happens when they have a bad experience with
the affiliate program owners or are ripped off? I'll tell you
what happens. Marketing gets even harder for YOU because your
visitors loose their faith and trust in you. Sure, you can
make a thousand dollars a month for a while, but if your
visitors have problems with the links you send them to, then
eventually you are going to loose income. Not only will you
loose the income, but you will also loose reputation and
traffic to the point that there will no longer be visitors to
send off to those links you promote.
The sad part of the situation is that those types of
marketers are either just misguided or greedy. There's so much
information out there on marketing, and a great deal of it
seems to focus on making the sales at all costs. What happened
to maintaining integrity to ensure your business future for
the long haul? The days of the firm handshake to seal a deal
are long since gone, but has integrity died along the wayside
too? What happens when the shady marketing tactics continue to
dry up the once abundant marketing pockets and it continues to
become tougher and tougher to make sales? Are we that greedy
to squander the pockets so there is none left for future
marketing generations? Is it really worth the costs when your
business integrity suffers in the end?
Better Marketing Principles - Honesty and Integrity and
Ways they Promote Visitor Trust.
It's all about honesty, integrity, and trust. If you can
instill those emotions for your business within the consumer's
mind, and do so in an honest manner, then you are going to be
successful for a long time to come. Like that old adage goes
"You'll catch more flies with honey than you will with
vinegar". Time will always bring out a lack of integrity if
one exists, just as true colors also tend to show over time.
No matter what you do, if you are not sincere then in the end,
it will be revealed and your business will suffer. The bait
and switch is an overused marketing tactic that is loosing
it's effectiveness. Any marketing practice that is
questionable or similar to that tactic is like the vinegar
mentioned earlier. The "honey" is things like researching your
links to make sure your visitor is going to be happy with the
products you suggest. It's letting them know that the link
might require an investment, or letting them know some
personal, honest experience with the link product or service
that you have experienced. Sincerity and honesty will build
trust, and building trust is not something that happens
overnight. Far too many people have been burned on the
internet. It is a time investment to overcome those bad
experiences and turn a visitor around. Prevention is better
than scrambling to fix a problem once it's happened.
Meta Tag Scams and Other Shady Web Page Design Tricks.
Another marketing tactic gone south is the keyword meta tag
and the other various meta tags used in a web site page
design. Shady marketers have abused even those tags. I
remember back when Britney Spears was the craze and their were
all kinds of searches being done at the search engines for
Britney Spears. A few dubious marketers decided to add
"Britney Spears" to meta tags and wound up getting top page
rankings in the search engine reports for the search term
"Britney Spears". The problem, most of those pages had nothing
to do with Britney Spears or her music to begin with. That
didn't last long as Google and all the other search engines
scrambled quickly to change their algorithms to keep the shady
marketers from manipulating their results. We all paid for it
in the end. Web sites that were once ranked highly either
found themselves out of the rankings or dropped drastically in
rank. Another old adage comes to mind "It's the one that
spoils it for the rest of us".
Speaking of the search engine ranking stuff, another craze
was long paragraphs of repeating keyword phrases and text
using the page color to hide it, used as a means to manipulate
search engine ranking. The results are the same as the Britney
Spears meta tag scam. Marketing is definitely an area where
the actions of others will come back to bite you in the
backside in the end. If you don't watch whom you link to, then
you can be "guilty by association". That brings to mind the
link farms that used to enjoy high ranking in the search
engines. These worthless sites composed of nothing but a bunch
of links to other sites and created specifically to boost the
listed sites ranking are another shady marketing practice that
has fallen by the wayside. And the list continues to go on and
on. Some just look at these ideas as valid marketing tactics
that worked, and to a degree, I'd have to agree with them, but
they worked at what price? How many visitors were forever
turned off by questionable marketing tactics? How many
visitors lost substantial amounts of money in the process? How
much money will future marketers need to spend to undo the
negative results past marketers have caused for the marketing
industry? The damage remains to be seen, but little by little,
once tried and true marketing ideas are becoming less and less
effective. Do I want to make a buck? Sure I do, but NOT at the
expense of my company's integrity nor at the expense of my
visitors, nor at the expense of future marketing generations
to come.
Better Marketing Practices - How They'll pay off and who
they Benefit.
All this brings me to the predominant point of this
article. There are a few actually. The first and foremost is
learning to think about your marketing tactics before you just
implement things that could be labeled as shady. The best
relationship you can build with your potential visitors is
trust. This is a long and involved process but offers
long-term payoffs that are well worth the work investment.
Taking the quick or easy route will always cause you to miss
something that will prevent you from forming that bond with
your visitors. With the mass of circuits, tubes, and chips
sitting before you, it's sometimes hard to remember that your
actions are affecting other human beings with some of the same
hopes and desires that you have. Remember that you are
interacting with them and helping them to meet those hopes and
dreams. If you had the same hope or dream you are offering
them, would you want to be treated the way that you are
treating them? It's the golden rule personified. Learn to
practice ethical marketing concepts that protect your visitors
while building trust and integrity. Once you accomplish that,
there is nothing on earth that can prevent your
self-employment dreams. Until next article, be good to one
another. Give your visitors the safety and protection they
need, and you will benefit in the end.
About the Author:
James R. Sanders is the owner of
Sanders Consultation Group Plus. He has been a webmaster
and web site designer since 1997, and involved in
self-employment ventures since 1992. He is presently a
contributing author of
NewbieHangout, and has been published through
WebProNews. His goal is to provide practical information
based upon his years of experience to help webmasters, web
site designers, and self-employed people achieve their goals
in today's competitive global market. You can email him at
webmaster@sanders-consultation-group-plus.com. |