Monthly Archives: February 2009

7 Drawbacks of Self-Playing Audio

Posted on February 18, 2009 by | Leave a comment

I can’t tell you how many times I have quickly closed a site because of self-playing audio or video. (And I have never gone back). Here’s what the owners of those sites need to understand:

1. Many people check out web sites at the office. In a cubicle you cannot afford to have some sound blaring out. It annoys coworkers. And it looks bad. It sounds like you’re just aimlessly surfing—even if you are looking for something for work!

2. Those who visit your site from home may be surfing late, late at night. Nobody wants to wake up their kids or partner with your stupid web site. You have plenty of competitors that don’t do that.

3. Many of us do not use earphones, or may not have them plugged in at all times. Music or voices blaring out suddenly can be infuriating for many reasons.

4. If your site visitor is already listening to music or a video, the self-playing audio cuts across it, so they can’t really understand either one. So that’s waste of time. And guess which browser window they are going to close. That’s right: yours!

5. As a site visitor, I have a right to listen to what I want to, not what you want me to. So I get really annoyed. If I want to hear what you have to say, I’ll click the Start button and listen. If not, I have a right not to listen.

6. You’re just not that cute. Some marketers have voices like fingernails on a chalkboard. Others just sound stupid. How can you be sure that the impression you are creating is actually helping your business? At least, if the site visitor has the option to not listen, then if they do listen, it is because they are interested in what you have to say. If they choose to listen, they will forgive much more if your presentation is less than professional.

7. It’s just plain rude. On some level everyone knows that, and it makes you look bad. It suggests that you don’t respect your potential customers. It makes site visitors subliminally wonder what your customer services would be like. In short, it turns people off, even if they don’t leave right away—and many will leave right away.

So think twice before you put yourself out there. If you offer an audio presentation, fine. If you force it on site visitors, that’s counterproductive. Either way, audio is no substitute for a good visual presentation with good content. 

So give your site visitors a choice, and they will be much more receptive.

Just in case you think this does not apply to you, consider this. There is a professional TV presenter with whom I will not do business ever, because he (being so sure that he is so professional and so cute), forces his self-playing video on all visitors to his sites.

Consequently I cannot stand the man. And I often unsubscribe from the list of any marketer who sends me one of his offers. 

Yes, self-playing audio and video are that annoying. Let’s face it, you’re just not that cute. But even if you are that cute, bad manners make a bad impression.

Visitors deserve to have a choice of whether to listen to you or not. And we reserve the option to listen, or not, on our own schedule, not yours.


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When Marketing Turns Deadly

Posted on February 16, 2009 by | Leave a comment

A few years ago some marketer came up with the idea to take dead bodies, skin them, arrange them in lifelike positions, infuse them with plastic, and make a whole lot of money displaying them in public. 

So now there are two companies touring the ghastly exhibitions around the U.S., spending millions on prime time TV ads in each locality where they set up shop. Their real customers are museums with whom they split the cash.

Apparently a lot of people want to see these ghoulish displays, because they keep on touring, so somebody must be buying a lot of tickets.

Now, besides the hideous TV ads, here is the problem: Most of those bodies were bought from prisons in China, a country with one of the worst human rights records in the world.

In China you can be put in jail and executed for the “crime” of being a Christian, Buddhist, or Muslim or for belonging to the indigenous population of one of China’s occupied territories, such as Tibet, Mongolia, Turkistan. Get the picture?

Investigative reporters got to wondering where a corporation could get so many bodies. Few people donate their bodies to science. Nobody donates them to traveling exhibits.

So reporters asked the two companies where they got the bodies. One claims to have documentation showing that most of the bodies were donated—but, get this, there is nothing that correlates the actual bodies with the documentation. So, trust them, because they are good guys. Uh-huh. Sure.

What motive could they possibly have for unethically obtaining bodies? How about money, lots of it? They do admit that they buy some bodies from Chinese prisons but assure us that the families gave permission. Do you believe that? Wanna buy a bridge?

As I understand it, even in the United States, most Chinese families refuse to donate organs of deceased family members. It is strongly against their beliefs. Do you truly think the families of dead people in China would give permission for the bodies of loved ones to be exhibited in public? 

The other exhibition company simply says they buy the bodies from Chinese prisons. They do not offer any proof of the origins of the bodies.

China is very cavalier with human life at best. But when money is involved, do you think they do not at least speed up the rate of executions so that the supply of bodies meets the demand for them?  

As if the exhibitions themselves were not perverted enough, the origins of the bodies they use to make their money are somewhat dubious at best—and truly hideous to contemplate at worst. How many young Tibetan monks and nuns are we seeing in those exhibitions, for example?

It reminds me of the perverted and decadent entertainment in last years of the Roman Empire. This is marketing gone way to far!

Just because you can do something, that does not mean that you should.

“I would never do anything like that,” you may say. But many marketing practices these days cause suffering or death of humans, animals, and whole ecosystems.

Pay attention to the origins of the products you sell. Who made them? Under what conditions? Who suffers because of them?

In an Internet world, “I didn’t know” is no longer an excuse. Think about it.


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Tired of Being Urged to Make Crappy Products?

Posted on February 12, 2009 by | Leave a comment

I am sick of Internet marketing “gurus” teaching people to make and sell crappy products—such as ebooks on topics they know nothing about—by simply relabeling and reselling the same old, tired private label rights products everyone already has.

Does this Constitute Fraud?

Just last night I listened to a guy urging people to do those things. 

On the webinar the guy used as an example a niche that he *clearly* (and admittedly) knew nothing about. Yet part of his sales copy was a *guarantee* that the processes he made up or swiped and cobbled together were not only effective (How on *earth* would he know?) but also safe. In a field that is extremely active and known to be physically quite dangerous.

Can you say “lawsuit waiting to happen when someone is injured or killed”? And rightly so. In effect, the guy is urging us to commit fraud.

Can you imagine that he is going to do more than refund the purchase price when his product (and his *guarantee*) result in someone being crippled and confined to a wheelchair for life? Yeah. Right.

Abusing Private Label Rights (PLR) Products

I recently feel for a sales ploy and bought another “brand new” super duper, highly touted “complete step-by-step system”. It not only led to the kind of OTO bait-and-switch process I described in a recent post, it also turned out to be a barely relabeled PLR product. It was so bad that parts of the OTO still had the title of the original ebook in the header. 

Fair enough, you may say, if it was a good product. But it was crap. It was fluff. Generalities. Nothing useful.

Not only might I already have owned it. (Who wants to pay twice for the same ebook with a different title and cover?) It was useless to anyone. So far from being a complete, step-by-step process, it was actually just several “modules” of…well, nothing much. And old, vague, useless nothing much at that—but with important-sounding titles.

So if anyone tells you to create products on topics you know nothing about, don’t do it. At the very least, you will be unmasked and laughed out of your chosen niche. At worst, you could end up sued for everything you own—or, in some jurisdictions, even end up in jail. 

If you are going to repackage private label rights products, start with *good* ones. Then really do something to improve them. Combine two or three to make one much better product. Add information. Update instructions. Contribute some useful ideas.

In other words, create a new product. Make the product actually worth the money for your customers. 

That is how you develop a good reputation and a loyal following. Come on, take the pledge: “No more crappy products!” There now, don’t you feel better?


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Has a Bait-and-Switch OTO Bitten You?

Posted on February 7, 2009 by | 1 Comment

I am buying hardly any Internet marketing information on line anymore. The more exciting the offer, the more cynical I have become—and  this is a sudden change.

Why? Lately I have been burned by too many bait-and-switch one-time offers.

The scam goes like this. Marketer X (or Y, or Z, or whoever) creates a great sales page offering the secrets of some “highly profitable” marketing ploy for what is (in Internet Marketing terms) a reasonable price. Not suspiciously cheap, not too expensive. It sounds like a pretty fair deal. 

Mind you, Marketer X assures us that we will receive a complete step-by-step plan, including all the secrets of this particular type of marketing strategy (not just the first few steps or a vague, general outline).

So you pay, and then PayPal transfers you to a page where (instead of what you purchased) you are offered the real steps, the rest of the steps, the absolutely essential rest of the plan. It’s a one-time offer at this (ridiculously inflated) price, so you better grab it right now if you want to really know how to use the system that you already paid for.

Oh, and, of course, the rest of the system, the crucial stops needed for success, costs a whole lot more than the original “everything” you have already paid for.

Plus, if you fall for that, and pay the extra money, often what you get is just a little bit of vague nothing. Not only were you scammed into paying twice for what you were offered in the first sale, but what you get is not worth anything like what you paid for it. 

Either way, though, it’s wrong. Whether they hold back most of the information, or just scam you into thinking that they have, this is an extremely unethical process.

And I don’t care who does it. Don’t tell me that some of the big, respected names are doing it. Yes, it’s a fad. That still does not make it right.

To my mind, it’s fraud. Either you are selling me everything, as promised, or you are not. Clearly these people are lying on their sales page. Oh, sure, you can get a refund. Usually. But that still does not make it right. 

What’s worse, I think these guys are poisoning the well for all of us. When newbies get burned, they tend not to trust the next few offers they see. Some of them may never buy Internet information products again. That is a shame, and it costs all marketers business, not just the scammers.

So what about you? Have you been taken by this scam? What did you do about it? Did you confront the scammer?

Or do you think this is an OK business practice? Come on. Tell us. Inquiring snarks want to know.


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Don’t Bribe Me to Sign a List I’m Already On!

Posted on February 6, 2009 by | Leave a comment

OK, marketers, what are you trying to do? You send me an email, saying “Here’s a gift to thank you for being a loyal subscriber. Click this link to download your gift.”

So I click the link and arrive at a subscription form. If I’m already on your list, why do I have to resubscribe? That’s annoying, for obvious reasons.

But I do it. And what do I get? An error message, saying that I am already subscribed to that list.

What’s wrong with this picture? Several things, but from the marketer’s point of view, besides the obvious annoyance to the customers, there’s this: The smarter customers will simply a different email address to resubscribe—planning to unsub later.

So your list is artificially expanded—with duplicate subscriptions—which cost you extra money of you use aweber.com or a similar premium-quality autoresponder service. 

In case you are wondering, not all marketers do it that way. Surely you’ve noticed. If not, you need to pay more attention to details. 

Unless you like wasting money and annoying potential customers.


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Check Your Links, Please!

Posted on February 5, 2009 by | Leave a comment

It is amazing how many marketers put up web sites with broken links. Don’t they care how much that hurts their credibility and annoys their customers?

Please do not expect me to agree to your terms of service if I cannot read them because the link does not work. I won’t do it.

And if you think it is all right to have a product download link that does not work, think again! It makes you look incompetent or lazy at best. At worst, to a tired (Remember how you promised I could download your product at 3 AM?) customer who may have been ripped off in the past, it looks shady.

A couple of my first purchases of Internet marketing products were botched. I never got the product or my money. I’m sure others have experienced the same ripoffs. It makes us suspicious and cranky!

And no, I do not think I should have to track down your support department and put in a ticket to receive my purchase. In some cases, support departments have no link from a main web page. You just have to know what to type in as a URL. That is unacceptable—and also a separate snark topic.

So if your links are faulty, and your customers are cranky about it, you have no one to blame but yourself.

Test everything. Often. And make it easy for customers to find you when (not if) a link does not work.

Because word does get around. Customers do remember who is nice to do business with—and who isn’t. And we tell our friends.


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I Bought it. Now Where Is it?

Posted on February 5, 2009 by | Leave a comment

I buy a lot of products on line, so my hard drives fill up fast. But they need not fill up as fast as they do. Why? 

The problem is that online marketers often give downloadable files names that do not match the download links or the name of the product. I buy a product called New Masters of the Universe but download a file called 123Xamu. 

But, of course, I don’t know the name of the file unless I happen to be watching it download. So I can’t find it.

So I download it it again. Sometimes I have as many as three copies of the same file, and some of them are quite large—well over 100 MB.

Why should a marketer care about my problem? Here’s why: Besides having a very irritated customer (me), the marketer has the cost of the extra bandwidth that was needlessly used. 

Multiply that wasted bandwidth by dozens, hundreds, or thousands of customers, and you start to see the problem.

During a product rollout, your server could crash just because of duplicate downloads. And that is entirely preventable. Most of those duplicate downloads are caused by naming files thoughtlessly or for the marketer’s convenience, not for the convenience of customers.

Think about it.


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