Tag Archives: annoying customers

10 Webinar Pitfalls for Marketers and How to Avoid Them

Webinars are the current darling of Internet Marketers. There is a lot of hoopla out there right now about how easy webinars are and what big sales they make.

Courses encourage marketers to just get on line and blather—and record the webinar blather to sell as a product. It just is not that simple.

Some people should not do webinars. They just are not good at them and never will be. You have to be a reasonably good speaker with a decent voice and presentation to make webinars work for you.

Remember, so-called free webinars are not totally free. They still cost attendees time, and time is money. Respect your listeners by being prepared.

If done wrong, webinars can really tick off customers. I experienced one today that was classically bad.

To save you from annoying your customers, here are some pitfalls and guidelines:

1. Be prepared. I just attended the worst webinar ever—for a product I’ve already bought. The presenter did not really know how to use the product! Continue reading


Tired of Being Urged to Make Crappy Products?

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?


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

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.


Check Your Links, Please!

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.


I Bought it. Now Where Is it?

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.


Why Snark About Marketing?

Why snark about marketing, you may ask? Well, as a customer, I find that the little annoyances (as well as the big ones) add up. Some of these marketing gaffes are so annoying that I carefully avoid certain marketers and their products. Who needs the aggravation?

I kept wondering why so many marketers, on line and off, cannot see how annoying some of their practices are and how much they alienate customers. Sometimes I contact vendors directly. I figure I’m doing them a favor. Other times, I just let it go. After all, there are plenty of other vendors to buy from. 

Remember, success is not measured how much traffic you get. Success is measured by net profit. And that is mainly determined by how many people you get to buy your products and by how many customers you get to return and buy more

Repeat customers are much more profitable. Needless to say, ticking off your buyers (or potential buyers) not a good way to create loyal customers. And I found so many little things ticking me off as a customer that I finally decided to blog about it. 

Not that you would do make of those annoying marketing gaffes… But it seems sometimes that people are so close to their own business, especially Internet marketers, that they just don’t see how annoying some of their practices are to customers.

So here they are: Pet peeves of buyers (or potential buyers) and things to avoid to keep from losing customers you could have otherwise kept.