Open Discussion: What Do You Think of Internet Marketers? (aka the long sales page gurus)

First of all, notice that there are several types of Internet marketers, the questions I raise in this post regard specifically the ones that use long sales pages and several other questionable tactics to sell their products and services.

Brian Clark from Copyblogger is certainly an Internet marketer. He recently launched a program called Teaching Sells, where he managed to create an initial buzz around it, had affiliates on board and so on. Yet his tactics were down to earth, and I am pretty sure that no one had anything negative to say about his program.

The same cannot be said about people that resort to the long sales pages, though. If you navigate around the web you will notice that there is a great deal of controversy around these practices.

What do I think?

So what do I think about them? Firstly I know that for sure there are honest people selling legitimate products with long sales pages and hype marketing, but even in those cases I don’t like their approach.

It appears to me that these guys are just trying too hard. They use several persuasive (and sometimes even deceptive) techniques to sell, and I don’t like that.

For instance, they try to create a feeling of scarcity by saying that they product will stop selling after 24 hours, or that only x number will be available. Secondly, they also load their sales offering with thousands of dollars in bonuses. The product itself often costs less than $100, but if you buy you will get over $10,000 in bonuses. It makes me scratch my head.

Sometimes there are even pictures around with the guy using his laptop from a Caribbean beach, or images of the cars and houses that he bought making money with the secrets that he is about to reveal to you….

An example

There is a recent example that illustrates the case. Joel Comm is a very famous Internet marketer (apparently also a millionaire and New York Times best selling author). Recently he launched his AdSense Secrets book on the market for just $9.95. The book used to sell for $97 a couple of years ago, so you can imagine the amount of buzz that it raised.

A couple of days after the initial buzz, however, some people started to discover that once you bought the book you became automatically subscribed to a course with a monthly subscription of $30. That is, supposing you didn’t do anything about it, after 30 days you would be billed for another $30, and so forth every other month.

Truth be told, Joel did mention that on the sales page. The problem is that the sales page was HUGE, and out of 6500 words (I went there to count) only a single sentence was mentioning the subscription. Needless to say that dozens of people bought the ebook without realizing they were getting automatically subscribed to the monthly deal.

The deal was so big that many bloggers started calling him out, and he posted a public apology, saying that the problem was on his shopping cart….

Integrity in the first place

I am pretty sure that those Internet marketers are nice guys, the only problem with them is that sometimes they put their desire to make money above their principles and above integrity.

It is about the path you decide to follow. Personally I prefer to make a fraction of what they make, but to keep my principles and the respect from other people.

Returning to Joel Comm. The guy is a marketing genius, that is for sure. I really think he is much smarter than most of us (including myself), and he is light years ahead of most people in terms of Internet experience. Yet if you head to his blog you will notice that he has 2,300 RSS subscribers. Why is that? A guy with his brain and experience should have 50,000 RSS subscribers. I might be wrong, but I think it has something to do with the path he decided to follow.

Don’t get me wrong. I am not trying to preach anyone, and I also did several mistakes in the past and probably will still do them in the future. Regardless of that, I do try to put integrity above everything else on my life.

What do you think?

Those are my opinions, and I know they might not be correct. What do you think about marketers that use long sales page and other persuasive marketing techniques? Would you be willing to use them to make more money in the long run?

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