I got a great offer yesterday via an affiliate promotion by a real scumbag marketer.
Why do I stay on his list when I don’t like or trust him?
Easy – he shows me what is crap.
If he promotes it then 9 out of 10 times it’s junk.
On this one occasion though, I liked what he promoted and bought it.
Of course, I didn’t buy through his link. I went straight to the sales page on purpose through a different browser so I knew he wouldn’t get any credit.
The offer is for a DVD from the two PPC experts who released PPC Classroom and it’s basically a “pay the postage and you can have all these goodies (but you’ll be enrolled on our forced continuity monthly membership)”
So for $10 ($7 if you are in the US/Canada) I get the DVD mailed to me and I also get full access to PPC Classroom (which used to sell for a lot more than $10 in its own right) and I also get 30 days trial to this special new membership they have.
To be quite honest I didn’t read much about the new membership site as I was more interested in the DVD.
They’ve got 30 days to convince me to stay a member which is what they are aiming for I guess.
The sales process was a long one with the compulsory 3 OTOs (that’s “One Time Offers” for the uninitiated) and as I was going through them all and clicking “No Thanks” on each page I had one thought in my mind;
“How is the little guy supposed to compete with this?“
These marketers – and I’ll give them a free plug here – Anik Singal and Amit Mehta – have really put some work into this offer and it looks great.
The graphics are superb, the sales pages are inviting to read and great to look at, and everything flows smoothly from initial sales page through all the various steps to finally end up at the “thank you” page.
No glitches or errors, payment was accepted immediately and I was eventually led to a confirmation page asking me to check my email.
I checked my inbox and my account for PPCClassroom.com was already activated and the details sitting in a new message – all done within a couple of minutes of the order going through.
Faultless.
So how is a one man operation, working out of a spare bedroom in the family home, supposed to compete with this kind of professionalism?
If you’ve been around the information business for even a small amount of time, you’ll know that this business is always touted as a simple way to make money but I imagine that a LOT of work went into this new promotion. Work that a one-man-band-in-a-spare-room just couldn’t get done in a reasonable amount of time.
OK, you say, maybe they couldn’t make such an elaborate offer but anyone can write an ebook and sell it on.
Of course they can. Just download OpenOffice.org, write your ebook and export to PDF.
Simple.
But even if you create that ebook, and write a wonderful sales page, and price it at a paltry $7 – are you going to be able to compete?
Anik and Amit will have lots of JV partners with big customer lists full of proven buyers.
And these JV partners aren’t just getting commission on the $7/$10 – they’ll be getting commission on each and every OTO (3, count them!) PLUS they’ll be getting commission on the monthly recurring charges – $97 per month.
In short, no big marketer is going to promote your ebook for $7 a time when they can push their list through an affiliate link to an offer like Anik and Amit have created and potentially get 100s of dollars per sale.
At the same time, why would anybody buy your little ebook when they can get access to a proven system for just a few dollars?
It seems that it is getting harder and harder for the little guy to compete with these marketers who, although they say that the business can be run from home, have large offices as well as interns, paid members of staff and teams of programmers in Eastern Europe.
I guess the only way to consider competing is to change niches.
Go elsewhere, away from the “make money online” niche.
Or I suppose you could try and target potential customers who are brand new to internet marketing. You could make them outlandish promises of instant wealth if they just buy your Clickbank product.
That method must work as I see lots of marketers doing it over and over.
Either way, it’ll be tough to target people who are a little more aware of the industry unless you have some real meat to your offer – like the one made at PPCClassroom.com.
I’m betting on the big guys – and it really doesn’t surprise me that there is such a huge failure rate in info publishing.
It would be nice to be proved wrong though.