The Marketing Viking

If you’re signed up to the email lists of a lot of online marketers, you’ll know what a “product launch” is.

It’s when all these marketers send you emails about the same marketing course/coaching group and tell you it’s “essential” and a “breakthrough”.

Is it honest? Or are they just saying what they need to say to earn an affiliate commission?

Perry Marshall, who doesn’t tend to join in these launches, recently wrote:

Maybe a pragmatic marketing pro like me shouldn’t
knock something that is often so effective, but I basically
hate big product launches.

You know, the ones where you get hammered on the
same day by 10 or 20 different people who are all
affiliates of the same ‘deal.’

It’s just obnoxious.

Plus there’s all the made-up theatrics.

“Oh no! The stampede took our servers down and we
can’t take any more orders now! So…. we’re extending
the deadline another 24 hours so everyone who wants
to can take advantage of this absolutely unique,
once-in-a-lifetime offer. But act now because after
that we’re taking this off the market and it will never
ever be seen again…”

Surely you know the schtick by now: ‘Buy this from
my link and I’ll give you all these extra-special bonuses’
and all that.

Perhaps you could buy a Time Share to go with that as well?

I rarely participate in these. The occasions I do, only with
limited portions of my email list. I think the whole giant
push just commoditizes the people who are promoting
said offer. After all, what use is being on 10 different
email lists if they’re all trying to sell you the same thing?

Erodes trust too, because of all the ‘fake scarcity.’ They’re
selling 1’s and 0’s and they’re trying to sound as though
there’s this very very limited supply.

Yeah, dude, like… sure I believe your server went down.
A good web server sure is hard to find in 2008, isn’t it?
Remember the good ol’ days when you could type
“dedicated server” into a search engine and buy some
extra capacity?

A relationship that starts with a lie usually ends with one, too.

 
I agree 100%.

I find these endorsements tedious and, when every product gets a five star review, the endorsements become meaningless… and the endorsor ends up looking like a whore.

Steve

P.S. What saddens me about the “product launch affiliate frenzy” is that two of the world’s best copywriters have recently jumped on the bandwagon.

Surely no good copywriter is hurting for money? So, that begs the question: if the money isn’t that important, why is it more important than your reputation?

There’s a lot of talk these days about “web2.0″ and “web2.0 marketing”.

There’s some substance (i.e. adding value) to some of the techniques involved … and there’s a lot of “lets spam these sites while we can get away with it”.

 I’ve been looking into some of the sites you can market with and one of them has gotten me hooked!

It’s www.stumbleupon.com and it works like this: you list your interests and hit the “stumble” button.

You’ll then be shown a site that fits your criteria based on the recommendations of other “stumblers”.

For example, I’ve just been taken to this site:

http://www.jdbshow.com/badsign.html 

which has photos of ”unfortunate” shop signs and billboards.

(and a stained glass window that’s beyond belief!)

Stumbleupon is a great idea and I hope it can stay on top of the spammers as it’s a fun way of wasting a half-hour. 

Steve

(1)Why Adwords Is So Special

Let’s compare Adwords to direct mail:

A customer acquisition mailing costs around £700 per 1,000 letters.

On average of 22% your letters will get binned without being opened and, if you’re writing to businesses, many letters will never be seen by the key decision maker.

But the biggest problem is that, even with a good mailing list, most of the recipients just aren’t interested in what you’re selling

Now, compare that with Google Adwords:

With Adwords, clicks can be as low as 2p (my Adwords clients, who are in a wide variety of industries, average around 75p a click) and you can target your ads so they’re only seen by hungry prospects at the very moment they’re actively seeking what you’re selling.

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From today, I’m receiving coaching from an SEO coach called Rob Schweitzer.

This may surprise some of you as I’ve made a number of scathing remarks about the SEO industry.

 However, I’ve always made a point to say I think there are two groups of SEOs:

(1) Those who are exploiting short-term loopholes and weaknesses in the Google algorithm to boost sites by artificial and underhand means (usually link manipulation to make the site look “popular”).

(2) The white-hat guys who’ve figured out what content google wants and know how to make their content look “high quality”.

IMO, the first group of SEOs are headed for disaster (and taking their clients over the cliff with them), the second group are the ones whose work is going to ride the algo changes and stay around a long time.

In this group, I’d include people like Dan Thies and, from what I’ve seen so far, Rob Schweitzer.

I plan to write more about my progress and the results I get with the site I’m going to be optimising.

However, if you’d like to learn about Rob’s approach, feel free to visit his site. When you’re there, make a point of downloading Charles Heflin’s ‘The Master Plan Primer’. It’s a free PDF that describes the ethical approach to SEO that I’ll be learning over the next few months.

Steve 

In the summer of 2006, many people who were using Google Adwords found their ads had been disabled and Google was telling them they needed to bid more to re-instate their ads.

This was christened the “Googleslap” and, since then, there have been a number of additional “slaps” where Google have targetted another group of advertisers.

So, what’s going on?

Google, as usual, haven’t been too explicit about their intentions but, reading between the lines, here’s what I think is going on:

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