Any newcomers to Internet Marketing who would like to gather a little field
intelligence on the landscape and competition need only to surf "Traffic
Swarm," which bills itself as "the fastest and easiest way to instantly
increase traffic, visitors and sales to any website, product or service."
Well, that claim is certainly debatable as there are more than a hundred
offers on the Internet today that make the same claim with a straight face.
Be that as it may, Traffic Swarm also lets you know instantly that its
service is automated, targeted, cheat-proof, proven and "viral marketing" (a
heady term that makes one think that he might now indeed be in possession of
cyberspace), all five of these claims are Internet Marketing buzz words more
common than a thousand bees making small talk at the entrance to their hive.
The uninitiated would learn that you can join Traffic Swarm free, post an
advertisement of your own, and then surf (look at) other marketer's ads to
earn credits, which you can in turn spend to draw traffic and visitors to
your own offer. It is a very nice little package for beginners which, even
if it does not bring you sales of your product or service, does give your
website or offer page exposure and presence on the Internet.
Traffic Swarm is where I surf to find out what is going on in the world of
Internet Marketing offers. There are dozens of other sites that could
provide me with the same fodder, but Traffic Swarm has, in my experience,
proven to be as good as any other at what it does.
My message has nothing directly to do with Traffic Swarm; it has to do with
the users of Traffic Swarm, who hawk their goods like any merchant in a
loud, noisy marketplace with vicious, unrelenting competition for your
hard-earned dollar.
All of which brings us to the Latin phrase "caveat emptor,"
which means let the buyer beware. The New Oxford American Dictionary (we bow
to the King's English) says this about caveat emptor: the principle that the
buyer alone is responsible for checking the quality and suitability of goods
before a purchase is made. Herein lies the problem with online purchasing:
we cannot examine the goods before we commit to buying whatever it is a
person may be selling.
This fact of purchasing works in the seller's interest, and the seller, not
the buyer, will do anything to keep it that way, including, but not limited
to, exaggerating claims, playing upon your emotions, using psychological
ploys to move you to the action they want you to take, pressuring you into
making buying decisions with no opportunity to see what it is you are
purchasing, and being disingenuous in an attempt to relieve you of your
money.
I have begun to examine Internet Marketing ads online very closely, not to
determine the legitimacy of any particular offer, but rather to determine
the quality of language used in supporting the legitimacy of the claims made
in any particular offer.
An e-mail that came to me this morning offers an example.
It uses this opening sentence to hook you into linking to their sales page:
"As incredible as it may sound you're about to discover a system how you can
drive 1000s of potential customers to any website or affiliate website at $0
cost to you!"
(The hoped for reader reaction might be: My God, this is an answer to
prayer, a system that can finally drive traffic and business to my website
so I can make my first sale in
24 months as an Internet Marketer after indiscriminately spending hundreds
of dollars on useless offers.)
As I analyze this opening sentence, remember the use of the words
"incredible" (as in I am so lucky to find this offer, today, on the
Internet), "discover" (my god, this is totally new and I could be the first
one in and make a
killing) and "$0 cost to you" (and to think, all of this without any expense
to me).
As a newcomer to Internet Marketing I hit the link to the promised land, and
the sales page greets me with this: "I'm Revealing My Secrets I Personally
Use To Drive Thousands Of Potential Customers To My Websites!" This is
coupled with the reassuring phrase "you can drive 1000s of potential
customers to any website or affiliate website and $0 cost you!" Again,
remember the reference to "$0 cost to you."
The most powerful word in this opening is "secret" (as in only this very
successful person and I are going to learn the secret). The word "secret"
and "guru" in Internet Marketing go together like matching bookends.
There is, really, no big secret; there really is just one-upmanship in
thinking there is. Literally hundreds of other marketers are successfully
using the same secret. The inexperienced buyer simply has not yet apparently
acquired the knowledge, applied the knowledge and profited from the
experience. The reader is then reassured that "This works for any product,
website or affiliate website" (as in it can work for you too).
Then there is an invitation to "Join my Marketing Tips Newsletter and I will
show you free marketing tips - worth $500" (wow, what I deal for me). Once
signed up, you will in most cases be immediately put into an autoresponder,
which bombards you with e-mail messages on a timed basis (like every other
day for the next 400 days). You can opt-out of these messages at any point
in most cases, but most newcomers do not figure this out until they become
very annoyed with the process.
This entire sales page takes a sharp left turn here, the idea being to get
the person on a mailing list in case they are not buying into the for real
paid offer that follows (remember, we started with "discover a system how
you can drive 1000s of potential customers to any website or affiliate
website at $0 cost to you!" (as in free).
Prior to learning the actual price point that is coming (as sure as there is
handwriting on the wall) is this claim: "I absolutely guarantee that if you
use these tactics, you will get substantially higher rankings" (in search
engines).
This, of course, is an asinine statement to make as the author of the
statement controls neither the search engines or their ranking of websites.
At best, the author could only guarantee to return the buyer's purchase
price should he or she feel dissatisfied with their particular results in
using the tactics offered.
The bottom line is if you really want the advertised information the
discounted price ends up at $49.97, with the admonition that it will be
raised to $79.97 on December
1 (so it is a Limited Time Offer and you better act now or be left out).
These ads invariably pressure for immediate action.
One could argue that the statement "discover a system how you can drive
1000s of potential customers to any website or affiliate website at $0 cost
to you!" is literally true, what is not being said up front, however, is
that it is going to cost you $49.97 to get the "secret information package"
that would allow you to do so.
Given a more than cursory view of the offer, you must now decide how
credible the offer is, and whether you will act immediately in your own best
interest, because there is no doubt that the author of this ad is acting in
his own best interest.
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Ed Bagley is the author of Ed Bagley's Blog, which he publishes daily with
fresh, original writing intended to delight, inform, educate and motivate
readers. Visit Ed at . . .
http://www.edbagleyblog.com
