This post is not about declaring the death of anything, but it’s also not a post to reassure you about the future of online business. Instead, I want to talk about the reality of online marketing and the big mistakes that come with too much optimism as well as too much pessimism about it.

A Step Back

There are many reasons to fear the end of various kinds of online business practices. Google algorithm changes are a favorite,but there’s also twitter banning tons of accounts, Amazon no longer allowing affiliates from certain states, rebill-scam offers being legislated out of existence, heavily funded “big fish” companies stomping all over your niche,… the list goes on.

However, it’s too easy to get caught up in self-pity and panic about whatever the latest change is that has affected or might somehow in the future affect online marketers. If you take a step back, you’ll quickly realize that there’s always something to complain about. And there have always been people complaining. When I first started with online marketing, there were already people whining about some Google update or other and there were already people declaring that it was all over for the “little guy”.

I’m sure this kind of thing has been going on since approximately the second day of the Internet’s existence.

The Arms Race

It’s getting harder every day. It used to be that you could buy 1-cent clicks on Google AdWords for super-valuable keywords and send the traffic directly to an affiliate offer. Those were the days! It used to be that if you created a blog promoting a ClickBank product, you’d immediately get top-listings in Google, because no one else was promoting those products, so your site ranked by default. At least, that’s what I’ve been told (I haven’t been around very long).

On the other hand, it used to be that you had to go through a lot of trouble just to register a domain, let alone build a website! It used to be that people were very cautious about buying anything online. It used to be that not many people were online to begin with. It used to be that you had to do everything yourself, when now you can use an enormous range of tools and services that make a marketer’s life easier (content management systems, shopping carts, affiliate systems, payment processors…).

It’s like an arms race. While the opportunities for making a quick buck are shrinking, the tools and systems that can help you build an online business are becoming better, easier to use and more affordable.

Distractions and Excuses

I’m not blindly optimistic about online marketing, even though I do think it’s still a great opportunity, even if you’re completely new to it all. I assume that online marketing and the Internet will keep changing rapidly and maybe everything we do now will no longer be useful or valid in five year’s time. I also believe it’s likely that a global crisis of some sort will thoroughly mess with us and our businesses, within my lifetime.

But that doesn’t stop me from keeping on working on my business. Here’s what you need to realize: while some are complaining, other’s are profiting. Some people are busy writing forum- and blog-posts about how Google has shut small players out of the search results and at the very same time, other people are getting their small sites ranked for lucrative keywords. I can guarantee you that right now, someone with little to no funding and no connections is working on a website, a service or an idea that will make him or her a billionaire in the near future. They aren’t complaining on forums. They’re too busy making stuff happen.

As an entrepreneur, you are constantly faced with a changing environment and there’s always a new challenge around the corner. And yes, sometimes changes happen that pull the rug from under your feet. It’s good to be cautious. But don’t ever buy into the panic and don’t ever let “the death of online marketing” become a distraction for you – a justification to complain and moan instead of work.

And if you do need a pinch of optimism, think about this: while we don’t know what the future holds, at least we know that people who declare the end of online/affiliate/niche marketing have historically been incorrect 100% of the time. Don’t listen to anyone with a track-record like that.

All the best,

Read on to see all the details of the new guidelines and learn why it probably won’t make a difference.

The New Guidelines

First, let’s go through the guidelines, accompanied by some comments from yours truly:

Most importantly, please do not significantly alter your Pitch Page after approval. We recognize that some changes are necessary for testing, but if you need to make significant changes to your page (such as earnings claims or images, sales messaging or video content), please notify your Account Manager so we can ensure the new page is also in compliance.

For Internet Marketing products: Per the new FTC information, sales material shouldn’t create the impression that customers can easily earn money without putting in much work, and should give specific ideas of how they’ll earn the money (e.g., content marketing, video marketing, social media, etc). Sales pages should also not overstate how much can realistically be made, or imply that earnings are guaranteed.

The FTC also strongly discourages false urgency/scarcity messaging (for example, “Only 3 copies left!”) when there is no actual scarcity. Closing the doors to new customers after a specified amount of time and reopening later is fine.

Any Pitch Page references to ClickBank sales stats need to be verifiable by ClickBank, and need to have been earned by the methods being promoted. For example, selling an affiliate training product using sales snapshots from a vendor-only account is not allowed.

For vendors using video Pitch Pages, if a Buy Now button appears during the course of the video, the price must appear as well. We also request that vendors provide transcripts of video sales letters when submitting a product for approval.

For upsells, the initial product purchased must be valuable and usable on its own, without requiring the purchase of the upsell offers. Customers must also be able to immediately access their original purchase upon completion of their order, before being presented with upsell offers. An access link may be placed on the first upsell offer page, but the link must be very clear and conspicuous (i.e., not hidden or in a small font). We highly recommend that vendors use ClickBank’s official upsell flows to present upsell offers to customers.

Please submit product approval requests at least several days before your launch, so that ClickBank has time to thoroughly review the offer and request changes if necessary. This is especially the case for products with video sales letters, since making changes to these can take time. We may not be able to accommodate last-minute requests.

To prevent customer complaints, vendors should not close refund request tickets or switch tickets from Refund to Tech Support more than once, and the latter should only be used when actually trying to help the customer and save the sale.

What Happens Next?

Does this mean there will finally be peace in the kingdom of IM? The rules laid out would mean that about 95% of all the current make-money-onlin offers on ClickBank would no longer be approved and most of them would have to drastically change their offer pages and entire sales-structures for a chance to pass.

Call me a pessimist, but here are some reasons why I doubt this will make any difference:

Saying vs. Doing

Even before this update, there were regulations in place that should prevent a lot of the bad things that were (and are still) going on on ClickBank. The first point in the new regulations addresses the practice of switching out the sales-pages, after ClickBank approval. This is something that “everyone” was doing and the people at ClickBank knew about it. They were absolutely aware of the terrible sales-pages and scammy offers in their marketplace and therefore they were also aware of the fact that vendors switched out sales-pages. They simply turned a blind eye.

Who’s to say that they won’t just keep turning a blind eye?

No Public Statement

Something that strikes me as peculiar about these new guidelines is that they are nowhere to be found on the ClickBank website. They were mailed out to all (or most?) of the CB vendors. I got the list from Jon Volk’s blog and apparently, the list is genuine. But it’s not published on the CB blog, or in the newsfeed or anywhere else on the site.

I don’t know about you, but that seems pretty strange to me. It’s almost like they want to scare the vendors into behaving, but not put themselves in a position where they’re publicly accountable for the new guidelines.

It may just be too early to tell, though and for all I know, the new guidelines will be published in the coming days.

Nobody Needs ClickBank

Even if CB are absolutely serious about these new regulations and even if they are adamant in enforcing them, that doesn’t mean the scammy offers will stop. There are other affiliate networks. In my opinion, almost all of them are better than ClickBank in every possible way except one: ClickBank has the best name recognition and largest user base.

And even if they all crack down on crappy offers, vendors can still just run their own affiliate programs. In fact, they may just discover how great that can be. Sure, there are benefits to having your offer on an affiliate marketplace. But let’s just say: I’m not exactly a huge vendor, but I’ve already saved five figures in fees by running my own affiliate program, instead of going with ClickBank.

The Bright Side

Whether or not we will see a big difference in the ClickBank marketplace anytime soon is uncertain. The mere fact that these new rules were drafted and sent out is already a good sign, though. It means that there is some kind of a response to scammy offers and some kind of movement against them. There’s hope that vendors who sell hopes and dreams instead of legitimate products will find find themselves in increasingly unpleasant circumstances and may even have to rething their position at some point.

Until then, my universal rule for purchasing IM products remains the same as always: buy from people who’ve given you reason to trust them, not from people making fancy promises.

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:

This video is definitely made for newbies, so if you're one of my seasoned readers, there's gonna be no news for you here. Hopefully, the video can help some beginners steer clear of a bad experience and help them not get scammed out of their money...

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,

Here’s how this works:

Step 1: You watch the video below, in which Gary Vaynerchuk says a lot of awesome things, then makes a huge blunder and then says some more awesome things.

Step 2: Watch the next video, below the first one, where I rant about how incredibly wrong Gary was with his statements about Internet marketing.

Step 3: Read the few paragraphs at the end, where I elaborate on some essential points.

GO

Video Interview: Dean Hunt, Ciaran Doyle and Gary Vee

My Response

Some Important Points

First of all, in my video it almost comes off as if I’m saying all offline businesses or all big corporate businesses are unethical. That wasn’t my intention, of course.

My point is simply that there are unethical businesses and ethical businesses, online as well as off. Likewise, there “good” marketing and marketing that “just isn’t right” as Gary puts it. And this is also true online as well as offline.

Note that I’m not saying all  Internet marketing is good and holy. There’s a lot of spammy and scammy marketing going on, online. And unfortunately, the spammiest marketers are usually the most prevalent, the ones you encounter most often and the ones that you get annoyed by the most frequently.

Internet marketing as a whole is no better and no worse than non-Internet marketing. However, a large portion of online marketing consists of individuals or small groups that are very busy producing great value for free and building lasting relationships with relatively small groups of customers. And if more people get involved in this type of marketing and the paradigm shifts ever further in that direction, then that’s clearly a blessing for everyone involved.

At least, that’s my take on this. What do you think?

Step 4: Tell me what you think in the comments below.

Cheers,

I have read so many posts on the subject of “Content is King” lately, that I feel I need to chime in on this. Now, don’t worry, RQR will never turn into a “blogging about blogging” blog. Stuff like this will remain the exception and I’ll usually leave it to the blogging-bloggers.

For today, though, I want to shed some much-needed light on the “Content is King” theme. And yes, I’ll also explain why the hell I have a picture of 50 cent up there.

NOTE: This is, once again, a text/video hybrid post, so if you don’t feel like reading, just head on down and watch the video.

Challenging the Crown

The whole “Content is King” thing advocates that the most important thing you need to do as a blogger is create good content and everything else will eventually follow. In other words, content is more important than SEO, more important than promotion/marketing, more important than community interaction, etc.

Different proponents of CiK go to different lengths in how much they value content over everything else, but no matter how you look at it, content and content alone simply is not king.

Fiddy Knows

Here’s where 50 cent comes in. I’m sure you’re aware of the fact that Fiddy is an amazingly successful guy. Right, so he’s definitely made it in terms of getting attention, being in the spotlight, being talked about as well as making craploads of cash.

But guess what? His music is not the best music on the planet.

And that’s his content, by the way. Music is a musician’s content, just like blog posts are a blogger’s content. Fiddy did not make it to his level of success merely by merit of the quality of his music. I’m not saying his music is bad, I’m simply pointing out that the quality of his content is not in direct relation to how much success and money he has.

And the same is true for blogs. How much more traffic does a post on Problogger get, compared to a post on your blog? I’m guessing it’s probably in the thousands or tens-of-thousands times more. Is the content on Problogger a thousand times better than the content on your blog? Unless you’re just banging your head against the keyboard, the answer is: hell no!

It may be better, but it’s not better in proportion to how much more successful it is.

Biased Preachers

The problem is that many of the most adamant preachers of the CiK creed are completely biased. If you are a so called “A-list” blogger with a hugely popular blog, then sure, you don’t have to do any promotion of your content. Your vast army of readers is going to do more promotion than you could ever do yourself, anyway. And yes, the better the content you produce as an A-lister, the greater the response from you readership will be and the more promotion of your content you will see your readers do.

So, for an A-list blogger, content may truly be king. But not the same is not true 99.9% of bloggers.

In fact, the closer you are to being an A-lister, the more over-ruling content becomes, because more and more promotion of your content is being done by the people who already know you and your blog. But especially if you are starting out with a blog, just producing top content will simply not cut it.

Apart from content-promotion, there is another very important factor to online success.

You vs. Gary Vaynerchuk

Let’s look at a practical example: Check out this post by Gary: Secret 2.0 (go ahead, it’ll only take a few seconds)

That post got 208 retweets, 90 comments and around 50 links to it. The video has been viewed almost 8’000 times on Viddler.

Let’s just pretend that Gary had never made that video and that instead, you had made it and posted it. How would the reaction to that have been?

Well, I don’t know, of course, because I don’t know who you are (you should introduce yourself in the comments), whether you have a blog (though you probably do) and where that blog can be found (again, comments).

But I can give you an estimate of what would have happened if that video had been made by me and posted on my blog instead of by Gary on his. I’m guessing it would have gotten around 20 views, maybe as much as 40, no more than one comment and certainly no retweets or links.

And that’s partially because RQR has not been around for very long. But it’s also because content alone doesn’t matter.

The fact that I’m using something by Gary Vaynerchuk as an example here is actually slightly ironic, because he’s a great believer in marketing content and “getting in the trenches” as he calls it. Still, due to the nature of that video, it’s the perfect example for what I want to illustrate, here.

So Who’s King?

A statement like “X is King” is very compelling because it’s so very simple. Unfortunately, in real life, things tend to be a bit more complex. You can’t narrow the reason for a blog’s or website’s success down to one factor alone, no matter how much you would like to believe that there’s one “secret” to making it big-time.

If you really want to simplify things, then narrow it down to at least these three factors:

1. Quality Content
2. Excellent Marketing
3. Perceived Value/Perceived Authority

In more detail:

Quality Content
Pretty self-explanatory, really. If your content sucks, then any promotion you do for it will be fruitless. Of course, good content is a necessary basis for a successful site, but it doesn’t end there.

Excellent Marketing
This is where Fiddy really shines. That guy is an amazing marketer. You have to get maximum, positive exposure for your material. You have to give people who have no idea who you are or what you might be offering a chance to find your content. Otherwise, it simply doesn’t matter how good that content is.
Excellent marketing can mean a thousand different things and can be done in countless different ways, but the objective is always to reach new audiences and remind existing customers/readers to come back and check out your new stuff.

Perceived Value or Authority
This is a factor I’ve never seen mentioned by anyone else. See, the main reason a video gets more attention if it’s made by Gary than if it’s made by me (assuming identical content) is because is because of perceived authority and value. When Gary says something, it’s automatically a hundred times more awesome than when I say the same thing. Why? Because of what he calls personal branding. Because you know and respect and like who Gary is, but you don’t really know who I am.
Personal branding is not the only way to increase perceived value, however. Other common methods include making use of high prices, high-end looking design, association with authority figures or institutions and exclusivity (“limited offer”). And there are many, many more techniques that can be used to increase the perceived value or authority of any product or website.

Ultimately, none of these three factors are “King”, because if any one factor is missing, you’ve got nothing.

If your content sucks, everything else doesn’t matter.
If you don’t do any promotion whatsoever, you’ll be stuck with those four accidental viewers per day for a very long time.
If people don’t perceive your content to be valuable in any way and don’t take you seriously at all, they will only visit to have a laugh (and even that won’t last).

Dude, I’m a Marketer, Not a Blogger

Ok, so let’s take this a bit closer to Internet marketing land: The same principle holds true for any kind of content you put online. It’s true for a squeeze page, a sales-page, an ad (written or graphical) and anything else you can think of.

Unless you work on the quality of the content, promote that content intelligently and make sure that you and/or your offer come across as authoritative and valuable respectively, you’ll never see many visitors, comments or sales.

Here’s me ranting about this on video:

Let me know about your thoughts on this much-discussed topic. Do you agree? Or did I get it all wrong?

Cheers,

Notice how almost every get-rich-quick product promises to be a complete, step-by-step guide to take you from wherever you are now to unimaginable riches within the next few days? Ok, sorry for exaggerating a bit, there. But it is quite striking, how many complete instructions and guides are on offer. What I’ve noticed is that many get-rich-quick programs don’t offer much in the way of instructions and guidance. I’m seeing a misconception that needs to be cleared up, here.

Tips Are Not Instructions

You can get rich by making your own ebook, placing affiliate links inside it and selling it via a joint venture with someone who has a large list.

The above statement is absolutely true. This piece of advice really can make you a ton of money. But all it is, is a tip. It’s a tiny bit of advice that I am giving you, leaving the execution of this idea up to your own devices.

The thing is, I’ve been encountering quite a few such tips in online marketing products that are supposed to be guides. I take a look at a product that clearly claims to contain instructions on how to make money and I find a collection of tips, plus some filler. That’s not good.

Instructions would include detailed advice on how to make that ebook, what to put in it, what to leave out, how to do the research, what software to use to make the e-book and so on. It would include instructions on where to find good affiliate programs to include in the book and how to contact a marketer and negotiate a JV. If all that is included, then we can talk about calling them instructions.

In short:

• Tips = “Do this, do that.”
• Instructions = “Here’s how to do this: [detailed explanation]”

It’s Not All Bad

I don’t mean to bash tips here. Not at all. A tip can be very valuable. A tip can spark that one brilliant idea that takes your business to the next level. A tip might help you write better sales-copy or become an important element in your web-design.

Note, however, that for a tip to be of any use, the receiver of the tip already needs a foundation. A tip can help me improve an existing business, but it’s useless to me when I’m starting from scratch.

What I am criticising here is when products are clearly targeted at newbies claim to be complete instructions and then contain mainly tips. Tips are useful for the advanced and can be invaluable for experts, but they are not what anyone needs when they are starting out. The newbies need solid instructions to be able to get to the point where a tip becomes something useful to them as well.

Consider this when making a product. Don’t label a bunch of tips as a “complete guide”.
Also consider this when reading my reviews. I will generally call out products that are too much tip and not enough instruction.