I personally love doing webinars and it’s my favourite way of keeping in touch with my subscribers and customers. There’s nothing wrong with webinars. What I don’t like are Fakeinars and blatant pitchfests… (warning, ranty post ahead)

Live Online Training Session?

It’s been suggested to me that I don’t call webinars webinars, because of the bad rap they tend to get. It was a well-meant suggestion and one that makes a lot of sense. I could say “live online training” or something like that, to avoid the negative connotations that “webinar” has for many people. But it’s still a webinar, in the end.

My suggestion is that we re-name those things that turn people off of webinars in the first place, namely pitchfests (Pitchinar?) and, even worse, Fakeinars.

Pitchfest: The Common Crime

Most commonly, when a marketer invites you to a webinar, it’s because they want you to buy something. While the invitation will invariably speak of “valuable content” and probably also some “secrets revealed”, just for good measure, the actual event will be nothing but one big, long sales-pitch.

Now, there’s nothing wrong with a sales-pitch. We all like to buy stuff and a webinar is as good a way as any to learn about a new product (if the product is interesting/relevant to us, all the better). What I can’t stand is when the webinar content is a classic newbie trap sales-letter, simply converted into a different format. In case you don’t know what I mean, it goes like this:

A webinar is such a cool, interactive platform, just jamming a long-form sales-letter into the format is a total waste. What’s even worse: when they don’t make any use of interaction features. They don’t do polls, they don’t open the mic for anyone and they ignore questions. This puts them close to the league of an even greater sin than just a standard pitch-orgy…

The Fakeinar: Disrespect, Streamed Straight to Your Browser

The following actually happened to me. I got on a “reputable” marketer’s list…

You know what? This isn’t the Warrior Forum, so I might as well be explicit: I got on Rich Shefren’s list, because I’d heard good things about him. He calls himself the “guru to the gurus” as apparently, he coached many of the big IM gurus, at some point.

So, sometime after signing up, I get a webinar invitation. The premise was that is was going to be about mindset and about being strategic in your online business. Sounded interesting enough.

I could rant about the “event” for pages on end, but let me just keep it to the main annoyances: Once the webinar comes around, you go to a page and “sign up”. A clearly fake loading bar appears and then a pretty bare-bone HTML-page appears, with a streaming video in the middle. Right from the outset, it’s clear that this is everything but a live event. Even though everything’s clearly scripted and edited, they sloppily tried to make it seem like a live event, starting with an announcer saying something like “people are still pouring in and we’re about to get started…”

The announcer then goes on to talk about how great Rich Shefren is, followed by recordings of several other people talking about how great Rich Shefren is, followed by Rich Shefren talking about how great Rich Shefren is. This went on for a good quarter of an hour…

And then followed the typical rags-to-riches story as outlined above.

So, they really got everything wrong. What’s worse, they had a silly “on air” text flashing in red and a questions box below the video. So people who thought it was actually live could submit their questions and be ignored! What a glorious idea!

My point is: it’s incredibly disrespectful to stage  fake webinar like this. Just call it a “video” or, if you insist on being at least somewhat dishonest, a “webinar recording”. It’s not that hard.

Something Relevant

This rant does actually have a relevant purpose. If you, as a marketer, do any kind of personal branding, I highly encourage you do a few webinars. But if you do, use the features that make webinars unique, namely those that let you interact with the attendees. Do Q&A sessions, put up some polls, etc. That’s where the true value of webinars lies – for both parties involved.

And whatever you do, don’t insult your subscriber’s intelligence by sending them to a streaming video that pretends to be a webinar.

What are your thoughts on webinars? Do you attend them, or avoid them? Have you been burnt with fakeinars and pitch-orgies? Let me know in the comments!

Cheers,

It had all the signs of being one among many, doubtless making someone a couple 100K and doubtless being a more or less useless product, under close scrutiny.

But something about Traffic Siphon is different…

Anger Siphon

Something about it seems to be pissing people off to a larger degree than I’ve ever seen before. I don’t spend that much time in forums or reading blogs, but even I came across thread after thread and post after post complaining about Traffic Siphon. And I’ve been getting e-mails. Not spammy “buy-this-now” e-mails (I have a separate address for those, that I rarely check), but e-mails from my readers and subscribers. All of them telling me what a piece of crap this product is and how rage-inducing the sales-page is.

Traffic Siphon is either especially annoying and scammy or it’s the staw that broke the camel’s back and an increasingly large number of people just can’t stand this type of thing anymore.

"Dark, Unheard-Of Corners of the Web" a.k.a. Google.

Hype, Lies and Fluff

If you look at the sales-page for Traffic Siphon, you’ll simply see all of the usual elements for hypey products: Huge earnings claims, lots of “proof” in the form of ClickBank earnings screenshots, promises of how incredible the technique is but never a single detail about what the technique actually is etc. etc. Basically, everything I talked about in my video on how to avoid newbie traps.

If you’ve been in IM for more than a week, you’ve probably seen a dozen sales-letters like this.

So, what’s the problem?

For one thing, I suspect the “us vs. the Gurus” approach has been grossly overdone, lately. Every hypey sales-letter I’ve looked at in recent memory had the premise that “those dastardly gurus” are all out to screw you over and that this one product is the big exception. It’s always “I’m the only honest guy in the industry”. And ironically, it’s exactly the guys doing this who are screwing you over (and they know it). That, I imagine, is another anger-inducing factor. It’s one thing to make claims that aren’t true, but to accuse other’s of things that you are actually guilty of yourself and to be so blatantly hypocritical is something else altogether.

Another factor is the clearly fake scarcity. They claim that they are only going to sell 250 copies, but they’re obviously trying to flog as many copies as they possibly can. You only have to look at the price and then look at the fact that they are recruiting affiliates for the product to know it’s not limited in any way.

Step 1: List everything other than your technique. Step 2: Claim none of it works. Step 3: Blame "Gurus".

In this specific case, the “secret” technique that’s revealed in the product itself is, apparently, SEO. Yeah, totally mind-blowing. The disconnect between the promise of something new and revolutionary and the actual product being pretty much the first thing most online marketers learn about might be a bit too harsh. As for the methods themselves? I haven’t bought this product, but from the mails I’ve been getting, it’s basically a collection of the oldest tricks in the book when it comes to SEO and traffic generation (build links, yahoo answers, article marketing…). In other words, the gap between what the sales-page talks about and what’s inside the product is just too large. The two have practically nothing to do with each other.

And that’s no coincidence.

100% Marketer, 0% Teacher

What I mentioned above is making people angry (along with a dozen exit-popups and endless upsells, bad customer support,…). And that’s understandable, because the consumers of the product are obviously looking at Traffic Siphon from a consumer perspective.

The product creators behind all this are not looking at it from that perspective and never intended to.

You see, a product like this is not made for the customers. A product like this is primarily made for affiliates.

Affiliates, especially those with the skills to drive lots of traffic and those with huge mailing lists, are quite difficult to get on board for promotions. They are usually booked solid with launches they’re going to promote, they owe each other favours (“I promoted for you, so now you have to promote for me.”) and they are, more often than not, looking to make the maximum amount of profit for every promotion they do.

Sad but true, many affiliates will pick the second offer in this scenario, simply because it will put more money in their pockets. That’s their number one concern: The bottom line. The actual product quality is a distant second, if that. Many affiliates and “marketers” are even proud of the fact that they put money first and everything else second. “It’s business” is the common justification for this (apparently business and ethics are mutually exclusive – I didn’t get that memo, though).

Because of this, many product creators tailor their product entirely to affiliates: Making them appear as attractive as possible in terms of earnings potential. In fact, these product creators aren’t really product creators at all. They are 100% marketers and what they do is simply a “trick” to exctract a lot of money from the Internet. The product itself, the thing you actually get once you’ve waded through the swamp of upsells, is only there as an after-thought. It’s basically fluff, there to fill out the bit of empty space that’s left after the marketing strategy is set up.

Why do you think that everyone released mobile marketing products in the past few months? Is it really the new big thing? Have all these guys suddenly turned into mobile marketing experts?

No. They looked at the marketplace, saw that this was a trend, off of which money could be made, created a marketing plan to exploit it and then tacked an excuse of a product to the end of all that.

A Storm is Coming (Probably Not)

Some suggest that there’s a shift happening in the IM market. That people are starting to get wise to these marketing tricks and the typical hypey sales pitch will no longer work.

It would be nice, wouldn’t it? As far as I can tell, though, the ClickBank boys have been using these tactics for a long time and aren’t showing any signs of stopping. In fact, they’ve created something of a niche for themselves. Since they are all producing crap that leaves people frustrated, they are basically setting their customers up for each other’s products (remember: all of the sales-pitches are made for frustrated newbies who’ve been burnt by so-called “gurus”).

What are your thoughts on this? Do you think things will change or do you dobt the ClickBank boys will ever run out of a fresh supply of quick-riches seeking newbies?

Cheers,

P.S.: Here’s a bonus video of me ranting about a different product, in a similar vein:

What Google Instant does is display search results as you are typing your query. It’s basically the next step up from the auto-suggestions box. Now, instead of only auto-suggesting possible keywords, it actually displays the full search results for the top listed auto-suggest keyword, even before you hit “enter”.

And with a change such as this, there is, of course, lots of wailing about how this is the end of SEO and how Google hates affiliates and so on and so forth.

Is there really a reason to panic? Is this the end of SEO or will it at least mean significant changes in the way we do SEO? Well, I don’t know, but below are some things you need to consider…

The End of Long-Tail Keywords?

The primary concern for many online marketers is that this change might kill the traffic that long-tail searches are getting. On a side-note, Google Instant might have something to do with the recent drop in search volume numbers, although I believe we haven’t seen the last of that.

Concerning long-tail keywords, here’s what has people worried: When you start typing a query, Instant tends to start displaying authority sites, which are ranking for single-word keywords, in the results. There’s really no other option, when you think about it. For most queries, it’s impossible for Google to make an intelligent guess as to what multi-word query you’re looking for, when it only has the first few letters to go by. It can make something of a guess about what single word you’re in the process of typing, but beyond that, results would be completely random.

This means that as you start typing, it’s likely you’ll see sites such as Amazon, Wikipedia and Wal-mart show up in the results. And most likely, for some one-word term which is not the keyword you’re actually looking for.

But does this mean that we can no longer build small sites, optimized for specific long-tail keywords, because everyone will end up clicking through to these authority sites before finishing their search?

It all comes down to user behaviour and user adaptation to this new search feature.

Actual Search Behaviour

A question few people seem to be asking is: How many people will actually be interrupted in their search and pick one of the early results displayed by instant?

I think there are two distinct scenarios we need to consider: Some searchers know exactly what they are looking for and know how to search for it effectively (i.e. they know how to ask Google a question in such a way that they will get a good answer) and on the other hand there are searchers who either don’t have a very specific search in mind or don’t know how to use search properly. Let’s just call them “Search Savvy” and “Search Ignorant”.

In this example, Instant is likely not to make a real difference for the searchers. Certainly, the search savvy user will not change their mind and click on a result for “windows media player” or “window cleaners” instead of completing the query.

The search ignorant user might find a slightly more relevant result in the auto-suggestions while they’re typing and go for that one instead of the originally intended query. They are still unlikely to find a very suitable result for their problem, though.

Let’s look at a different (also hypothetical) example:

Once again, the search savvy user is unlikely to get distracted by Instant, since the suggestions are almost certainly going to be less specific than the intended query.

However, the search ignorant user might find the Instant suggestions useful. Since they only have a vague idea of what they’re looking for or how to “ask” a search engine for it, they may get sidetracked by the Instant results. In this scenario, they may actually end up going for a longer-tail search than they originally intended. For example, if they start typing and results for “build muscle fast” start showing, they might go for that (building muscles fast is better than just building muscles, after all).

This could go either way, though. Someone intending to search for “build muscle fast” may get sidetracked and click on a result for “build muscle” before they’re done with typing.

Am I confusing you yet? What I want to emphasize here is that it all depends on the user, the intended search query and the type of search query. Certainly, there are certain keywords where the searcher is more likely to get distracted and others where they’re very unlikely to get distracted.

Utilization of Auto-Suggest

Another important question is: Will more users make use of the auto-suggestions with Instant Search?

Auto-suggest has been around for a while now and it certainly had some kind of impact on search behaviour and SEO (not one that many of us felt, I wager). But now that the results appear instantly, will this lead to more people making use of the feature?

If it does, that might have a significant impact on search volumes and SEO.

What we need to realize is that the vast majority of search engine users are basically clueless as to how a search engine works and are very bad at using one. Auto-suggest is an attempt to help people make more useful searches, by making them more specific. Before you disagree, think about this: When you have a specific query in mind, will you pick a less-specific one, just because it gets displayed? Of course not! If you have a vague query in mind, will you pick a more relevant one, if it gets displayed and seems more relevant to your situation? Yes, probably.

So, auto-suggestions will tend to produce longer-tail searches, not shorter ones. Perhaps Instant is an attempt to condition users to utilize the auto-suggestions. If this is the case, we might see more three to four word searches and fewer single-word searches, which is good. We’ll also have to look into scraping and analyzing the auto-suggestions for our keyword research.

Finally, we might need to start considering demographics and geo-targeting for keyword research, since the auto-suggest features are personalized to a certain extent.

But What About Those Single Word Searches?

Not that many of us are likely to be pursuing rankings for single-word terms, but there’s a significance for Google Instant in this. Many people use Google to navigate to their favorite websites. In fact, many people aren’t all that clear about the difference between the three available boxes in a standard browser view (URL box at the top, quick-search box in the top right and search box on the Google homepage). They’ll type “facebook” to get to the facebook homepage, for instance.

Here, Google Instant could be a curse or a blessing, depending on where you want to go. Judging by this thread, it seems to be a problem for most people. This could impact search if it proves annoying many people (which would change their search behaviour).

Too Slow/Too Fast?

Here are some more “real world” implications that could make or break Google Instant:

• Think about your family and friends. How many among them are very slow typers and need to look at the keyboard while they’re typing? Probably quite a few, right? While this hardly applies to younger generations, there are currently still a lot of users who are not accustomed to computers and are super-slow typers. Some of them might not even notice Google Instant…
• What about the other extreme: In the thread linked above, there are also several people complaining about the lag created when Google tries to display a ton of different results as they are quickly typing their queries.
• For that matter, what’s this like for people with slow connections? Especially when maps, images and videos populate the search results, I imagine Google Instant isn’t much fun on a slow connection.

At least one of the above issues could be addressed if Google held back with the results if it detects that someone is typing fast (high probability that they know what they want, anyway).

Targeting Partial Words?

One idea that popped up very quickly in SEO circles is that of targeting unfinished words or even single letters.

Is it possible to get a top ranking for “lose weight” by targeting “lose wei” and getting listed in Instant, as searchers are typing? The advantage would be that there’d be practically no competition for these unfinished words (at least, for the time being).

This is very unlikely to work, though. Google Instant displays the results for the top-listed auto-suggested keyword, not the unfinished keyword that the user is typing.

Conclusion

For now, it’s no use fearing that the sky is falling. Keep doing what you’ve been doing so far, in terms of creating website content and promoting that content.

Keep an eye on your traffic and particularly on what keywords you’re getting Google traffic from.

Is this the end of SEO? Nope.

Will we need to adapt and change a few things about our approach? Probably.

What do you think about the recent changes? Let me know in the comments below!

What it really comes down to is that I’m working on finding a way to bring good, solid marketing skills and authenticity, honesty and integrity together in my marketing messages.  Watch the video below to see exactly what I’m on about:

So, what are your thoughts on this? Of all the marketers you know, how many of them are closer to the "marketing machine" end of the scale and how many are more authentic?

And from which of those have you bought more?

I'd love to hear what you have to say, so leave a comment!

Cheers,

This post is about those two methods and how you can implement them in your own marketing.

Eben Pagan’s Massive Free Content

The expression “free line” was coined by Eben Pagan. He is an advocate of “pushing back the free line”. In other words: Give away tons of value for free, then charge a premium for your higher-end content.

Pagan definitely lives this philosophy. The most recent example of this can (still) be seen on the pre-launch blog for his latest product, Guru Blueprint. Not only did he give away massive value in about half a dozen videos before the product launch, he even continued updating the blog after the launch with some extras like an interview.

I recommend you go take a look at that blog. It shows the kind of free line content that most people are scared to give away, because it seems like “too much”. His product is about creating and selling information products and on the pre-launch blog, you can easily find enough information to start a successful info products business, if you apply the methods in the videos and use some initiative. This begs the question: Why would anyone buy the product if they’re already getting so much stuff for free? Since Guru Blueprint sold out in a few days, I’d say that for whatever reasons, Eben’s approach to the free line works.

Further Examples

Search for “Eben Pagan” or “David DeAngelo” (that’s his pen-name) on YouTube and you’ll find no shortage of further free-line content that Eben has produced. For example, here’s a channel where he’s giving away lots of great productivity advice in 14 videos.

Pros and Cons

This kind of free line content is one of the best ways to build a reputation, get lots of exposure (through sites like YouTube) and grow a mailing-list (if you put some of the free content “behind” an opt-in form). For long-term, large business projects, I reckon nothing beats Eben-style free content.

The problem with this method is that you need to have wide and deep knowledge of your subject matter, otherwise it’s impossible to apply. After all, the kind of content you’re giving away is equal to or more than many people put into their premium products. If you only know a little about a subject, that might be enough to put together a $7 ebook, but it won’t be nearly enough to create this kind of free line content.

In other words: You need to be an expert to make this happen.

Ryan Deiss/Perry Belcher’s Really Hot Tip

Ryan Deiss and Perry Belcher are both extremely successful and well-known marketers who have partnered on many projects. I mention them both here, because I really don’t know where the “hot tip” comes from, but I’m pretty sure it’s one (or both) of those two guys.

The “hot tip” concept works like this: People have a very short attention span and are looking for instant gratification. So, don’t offer an entire ebook or complex training program for free. Offer one simple, really hot tip instead.

A good example of this is the million dollar napkin by Ryan Deiss. As you can see, the free tip you get for signing up fits on a napkin. You get a simple squeeze page that tells you what you’re about to get (and it’s clear that what you’re about to get is short and sweet) and you need to opt in to get to the next page and see the goodies.

Strangely enough, there are now multiple bonuses and downloads once you opt-in for the million dollar napkin, so it might not be the perfect example anymore. But the concept is clear: You don’t offer something huge and complex; you offer something short and cool.

Further Example

Ironically, the best example of the “hot tip” was created by none other than Eben Pagan and was called the “Kiss Test”. Unfortunately, it seems that it no longer exists in it’s original form.

Here’s how it worked: You arrive at the squeeze page and see that you can learn one simple technique that will help you tell with 100% certainty whether your date is ready to be kissed. Enter your name and e-mail to learn this simple technique.

That’s it.

If you opt-in, you arrive on the next page, where you read about the Kiss Test (which is only a few paragraphs).

Very simple and very powerful. Think about it: If you’re a guy in the dating market, you’ll instantly give your e-mail address to learn something like the Kiss Test!

Pros and Cons

The big advantage of this approach is that your freebie is relatively easy to create. Sure, you need to do some good research to find one tip that really has enough pulling power as a “hot tip”. The hot tip you’re giving away is like the first impression you make on your prospect, so if it’s a half-assed piece of advice or something that’s practically common knowledge, you’re losing your credibility and basically ruining any further efforts you make to market to your list.

Bottom Line

Essential for both free line approaches is that you build a backend that you can make money off of. The most basic form of a backend is simply your mailing list. You can use your free content to get people on your list and then market to them down the line. As an affiliate, using the “Hot Tip” method and then promoting affiliate offers is probably one of the easiest ways to start building a solid income-basis (did I just give away a big “secret”?).

If you do Pagan-style free content, then it’s almost a given that you need to have your own products to sell. However, in both cases, it’s ideal if you also build a simple funnel after the opt-in, i.e. you add “bonuses” or upsells to the thank-you page, maybe a downsell via exit-script etc. You get the idea.

How do you utilise free content? What do you need to know to get started with either of the above methods? Let me know in the comments!

Anyway, on to the actual topic. About once a month, something or other happens, that gets a lot of people all worried about the “end of online marketing”! Be it a new feature Google introduces (personalized search, anybody?), some rules changing (e.g. new Facebook advertisement rules), marketer’s accounts getting banned (AdWords, Blogger,…) or anything else along those lines. Whenever something like that happens, you can count on a lot of wailing about how the days of making easy money online are finally counted etc. etc.

Well, here’s an interesting counter-argument:

Is this thing accurate? I don’t know.

Is it a good illustration of the fact that the Internet is simply far too vast for the human mind to comprehend and that opportunities for businesses and growth are mind-bogglingly numerous? Hell yes!

Cheers,

Sounds like a great plan, right? I made a video in which I’m being a total spoil-sport talking about some of the real-life implications of starting a web design and optimization service like this. I also offer some useful advice for anyone who wants to give this method a try.

What are your thoughts on this? What do you think about the local-business marketing fad? I’d love to hear your opinion, so feel free to leave a cooment below!

Cheers,

Omission From Search Listings

There is something that frequently happens in Google search results, that perhaps could be misinterpreted as some sort of penalty. As an example, I just did a quick search on Google for the name of this blog and “Best Spinner”. The reason I did this is because I know that I have referenced to the program called The Best Spinner in several posts already, so there’s bound to be a whole bunch of listings – some of them from posts, at least one of them on the homepage (at the time of this writing) and so on.

Here is what Google returned:

As you can see, there’s a double listing of results on this domain. After that, however, results from other places around the web are displayed. As I’ve marked with the arrow, there’s a “Show more results from richquickreview.com” option. Let’s see what happens when I click it:

Now, I get seven listings and there’s a new option at the bottom for showing all of the listings on richquickreview, for this search term.

Oh no! All of my Best Spinner posts, save for two, have been penalized by Google and they aren’t showing up in the search results! Time to PANIC!

Of course, what’s going on here is not a penalty of any kind. Google generally don’t show more than two results for one and the same domain. And they generally don’t show more than two results from different domains, if the content is identical.

If you write an article and submit it to a dozen different article directories, unchanged, you’ll get a similar result when you do a search for it: The results will typically list your article on one or two directories, followed by the option to show more of the results that are hidden, because they are identical.

The important point here is that this is not a penalty. The omitted pages are all indexed by Google, they are all flowing pagerank and no one is getting their sites “sandboxed” because of duplicate content.

Obviously, the pages won’t all get listed in the results, because who would want to find several pages of the same article as a result for a search query?

Chasing (Long) Tail

This is where article spinning comes in. The point of spinning articles is not to “avoid the duplicate content penalty” as way too many sales-pitches for spinning tools would have you believe, the point is to grab more long-tail traffic. If you write an article, spin it’s content and then distribute it to a few dozen or even a few hundred online properties, it’s a bit like casting a wide net out into unknown waters: You don’t know where the fish are, but by pure chance you’re bound to catch a few.

All of your spun articles will consist of different sequences of words and every time someone “out there” on the Internet happens to search for a string of words that are present in one of your article variations, it’s likely that that variation will show up in the search results. And thus, you catch another fish.

I hope this clarifies the whole dupe-content subject a bit. If you have any further questions, please leave a comment and I’ll get back to you as soon as possible.

Cheers,

In this post, I explain a big problem I see with “Make Money Online” guides and what I want to change on RQR because of this. Also, in case you’re wondering why I didn’t post for a long time, I’ll briefly explain at the end of this post.

All Marketing and No Content a.k.a. The Newbie Trap

As I said, I had been looking to review several products lately, but ended up not reviewing them. Why? Basically, because I was disappointed in them. I was so disappointed, that I couldn’t even be bothered to go through all of the material and if I don’t do that, then I can’t write a proper review.

Now, on the one side, I feel almost obliged to write about bad products, so that some people might be saved from buying them. On the other hand, however, I have more important things to do with my time than going through sub-par training courses just to write a review.

The problem with many of the products I looked at is the same that Banner Ad Blueprint has: They are made by pure marketers – people who know everything about creating a great offer and nothing about teaching.

This type of product is usually set up as a “Newbie Trap”: Make huge promises to an audience that doesn’t really know much about marketing and then feed them some rehashed crap once they bought the product (and fought past half a dozen upsells).

Real Marketing Products

Instead of writing a ton of negative reviews about products like these, I want to make one general recommendation: Always think twice about a “how to make money online” guide. Most of them seem to be lacking in quality. There is a separate category of products that are much more often worth an investment and these are what I call “real” marketing products.

Real marketing products are tools and services that can leverage what you’re already doing to make money. For example, the recently reviewed WP Split Test plugin for WordPress is quite such a program. It’s quite simple and it serves to split-test your WordPress posts. It doesn’t claim to make you tons of money overnight, but it actually has more money-making potential than most of the guides I’ve read lately.

Further examples of “real” marketing products include keyword research tools, automation tools and services, programs like The Best Spinner, which helps leverage article marketing, programs like Web2Mayhem to help spread content around the web and things like rank tracking and analysis software.

No Love For Info Products?

I won’t be seeking out info products and ebooks to review from now on. That doesn’t mean I’ll never review them again, just that I will be concentrating more on the “real” products mentioned above.

The question is, of course: What is a beginner to do? You have to learn the basics of Internet marketing somehow, after all. Well, for this purpose, I’ll be building a library of ebooks to cover all of the essentials. WordPress Websites Made Easy is the first in this series of guides and just like it, all of the following ones will be free.

I hope to be able to provide you with everything you need to know to make your first steps in online marketing and I want to provide all this for free. My motives aren’t entirely altruistic, either. I’ve been getting more and more questions in my inbox and I want to be able to point you to guides I’ve already written, so that I don’t have to type out long responses. ;)

Also: Pretty soon you’ll have to sign up to my list in order to download the free stuff. Then, I’ll spam you with pre-written mails for every big Internet marketing product launch that comes along. And if you believe that last sentence, you must be new here. Welcome to IM Impact!

Anyway, that’s all for now and I’d love to get some feedback from you. Do you think this is a good plan? What kinds of products do you want to see reviewed the most? Let me know in the comments!

Cheers,

A few days ago, Darren Rowse (Pro Blogger), Chris Brogan (Trust Agents), Sonia Simone and Brian Clark (both Copyblogger) launched a new membership site called “The Third Tribe”. You’ve probably heard of it, since it made something of a splash.

This post is not another Third Tribe rant. Others have already done that better than I ever could. If you take just one thing from this post, let it be this: Go to Griz’s Third Tribe review and read it. It makes a more than excellent case and is very much worth reading.

If you take another thing from this post, then it’s a clearer and less biased overview of Internet marketing “tribes” that follows below:

Third Tribe

First, here’s the skinny on the Third Tribe:

This product is marketed using a common marketing technique: You establish a scenario in which there is a very apparent need and then you fill that need. This is often described as “creating the market for your product”. As I’m sure you are aware, every product should have some kind of a unique selling proposition (USP) that answers the modern consumers ever-present question: “Why should I buy this instead of one of the other, similar products on offer?”

It’s not always easy to create a USP for your product, especially in saturated markets such as “make money online”. What the Third Tribe says, is: “So far, there were two tribes in Internet marketing: Slimey, dishonest and obnoxious sales-types and hippy social media types who want to be everyone’s friend and are all broke. Now, there’s the third option: Real, honest, non-obnoxious marketing that will still fill your pockets with cash!”

It’s a pretty clever setup, in my opinion. Of course, it’s dead wrong, but what can you expect from something you see on a sales-page?

Tribe or No Tribe?

As I’ve confessed previously, I’m a bit of an information junky and I spend more time than is reasonable on different forums, reading blogs, ebooks, books etc. about Internet marketing. It seems to me that there really are certain types or tribes of Internet marketers, all coming at this same subject from a different angle.

Below, I list the groups and types of marketers I’ve encountered online. What can you get from reading about this? You might be surprised at how many different online marketing philosophies and methods exist and you might get some new ideas and a fresh perspective.

The Bums

As far as I know, Travis Sago is the guy who coined the term Bum Marketing. The term simply comes from the fact that bum marketing methods all rely on free traffic sources (i.e. a bum could afford it). Many beginners in Internet marketing start out with some variation of bum marketing, relying on article directories, Squidoo/Hubpages, free blogs and classifieds to make their first few dollars.

Bum marketers also seem to have a certain affinity towards Clickbank and the Amazon affiliate program and the most successful among them tend to produce a very large volume of articles every day, often making use of article spinning to get more mileage out of their work.

The SEO’s

The SEO’s are all about getting free traffic via search engines (primarily Google). There’s quite a bit of overlap between the SEO and the Bum tribes, since both swear by free traffic.

While the bum marketer mostly drives traffic to articles on article directories, the SEO drives traffic to self-hosted websites. Articles may or may not be a means towards this end. SEO’s often make use of social bookmarking, profile-links, article and video distribution, three-way link-swaps (not as kinky as it sounds) and other methods to get more and better backlinks to their highly optimized pages. They are also often engaged in heated debates among each other, since no one really knows how the Google algorithm works, but everyone has their theories.

The Involved Marketers/Product Creators

Involved marketing (I got this term from the Smart Passive Income blog) is all about being transparent, open and honest, getting out there, getting in touch with people and building a “personal brand”. Think Gary Vaynerchuk.

Involved marketers spend a lot of time building relationships with their potential customers and are often heavily involved in social media platforms like facebook, twitter and Digg. They also tend to make more use of video than marketers of other tribes.

Since involved marketing is all about personal branding and transparency, these marketers are often also product creators. After all, once you’ve built real trust and you become recognizable and liked by the crowd in your niche, selling something made by yourself makes the most sense.

The Traffic-Arbitrage Crowd

Why work your butt off to get pages and articles ranked in search engines and to get people to notice and like you when all you need to do is give a search engine or CPV company some money to get floods of traffic almost instantly? That’s the question that describes the Traffic Arbitrager’s take on online marketing.

These marketers have an affinity towards CPA offers and a bit of a love/hate relationship with Google, since AdWords has enormous traffic-potential but also strict rules and a twitchy trigger-finger when it comes to banning accounts.

Paying for traffic is something of a daring gamble and for everyone who hits it big-time and starts making unspeakable amounts of money in a short time, using PPC or CPV, there are hundreds who lose a lot of money and give up before they ever see a dime in return.

Marketers in the traffic-arbitrage tribe are perhaps the most technical and tend to spend more time and effort with testing, tracking and tweaking than marketers in any of the other crowds.

The Bloggers

Blogging is another thing many beginners in online marketing get into. One hears stories about people making fortunes with blogs and there are many “blogging for money” related products and, of course, blogs.

Bloggers, like involved marketers, are all about building a community and connecting with others. They leave comments on other blogs, write guest posts and do the social media thing.

Blogs can be monetized using ad-space, AdSense, promoting affiliate products in posts or as platforms for selling self-made products.

Since blogging is as public as it is, in this tribe, the vast discrepancy between the few who make it big and the thousands who struggle to make a dime is very apparent. This doesn’t necessarily mean that making money from a blog is more difficult than making money with “real” marketing, but as I’m sure you’ve gathered, I happen to believe so.

Conclusion

People have a strong tendency to form groups and identify with them. They also have a very strong tendency to think of themselves and their own group as superior to others.

You will see that in each of the above mentioned online marketing tribes, there are people who are very firm in their belief that their way of doing things is the only “right” way or the only “real” way of making money online and that all the others are just scammers, time-wasters and/or idiots.

For this reason alone I encourage anyone to become familiar with more than one method and more than one crowd. Wherever you are involved, if you get in too deep and follow just one direction, you’re always blinding yourself to many opportunities and ideas that can be found outside of your particular tribe.

What tribe do you belong to? Or do you think this entire concept is rubbish? What about the Third Tribe, do you have a rant about that you need to get off your chest? The comments are all yours!

Cheers,