Warriors Chime In: Whats The Biggest Lie In Internet Marketing?

It's not really a "lie" IF it REALLY happens...

Of course, we all know, more times than not, that it's not true.

It's also meant to build a sense of urgency.

Yup. I see this all the time on Safelists and on landing pages galore. If you aren't actually selling a real, live product or service...it's a scam. And even then, you aren't going to make "X AMOUNT of DOLLARS GUARANTEED."

100% agree with this. I think the majority of Internet Marketers operate with integrity. There is dishonesty everywhere, online and offline, you can't blame it all on Internet Marketers. Some buyers are dishonest too.

Keith

Amen to that Michael.

It actually might not be a lie. It's not so much "dishonest", but the sneaky crap that gets me. For example,

1. FREE Trial offers that never end. You get automatically signed up to a continuity program.
2. You buy a Clickbank program, but require 100 upsell products to actually make it work.
3. The numbers in the headlines like "make $230,000 in 48 hours" - yeah it's possible, but get real, how many of us can do million dollar launches
4. Promises of riches and when you don't succeed, it's blamed on your lack of effort and poor converting offer, when in reality the product is CRAP!
5. too many to list.....

Yeah. That's what I meant!

Thanks, Suzanne.



All the best,
Michael

LOL

I am glad someone said it...

When I said it... My post got nuked... :p

The earning potential of most GRQ with 3 clicks software!!!

All those guys that get involved with each other in a JV deal give the industry a really bad name. I mean, they get a product that they allegedly had made and are allegedly earning a fortune from....... they promote it with a video with photos of "one of their click bank accounts", add a few testimonials, don't actually tell you what the product is and then expect you to pay 3 times the cost of the original product for an upsell.

Ok, then. Please answer me this. If your product is sooooo good, why are you now, 3 days later, via your list that im on, promoting another GRQ scheme, rather than supporting the product you put out in the first place?

I have a rule which i think has saved me a lot of money. If ive ever bought one piece of software from an Internet Marketer and they they have promoted to me another software in an email, i go and get a refund for the software i bought in the first place.

Anyway, have learnt lots of lessons from some great people and soon i shall be repaying the community for their help.

All the best

GW

Geez
You are a grouchy old gal...

The Velvet Sledgehammer strikes again!

Love it!

Perhaps the biggest lie is that you need to buy this eBook or that eBook, or this video series, or that system, or whatever in order to make money online.

The biggest LIE in Internet Marketing is that "you can
get big results, very quickly with little or no effort."

Take a look at Clickbank, the WSO section etc., to find a
large number of people willing to sell products that make
that outrageous claim - and no shortage of fools willing to
believe and buy into it too.

The REALITY is that to succeed at ANYTHING, you need
to sow before you can reap (and sometimes that means
a LOT of sowing before you can reap anything - let alone
a BIG harvest).

All of the successful Internet Marketers that I know have
worked their arses off - and many continue to do so.

As the saying goes, the only place where success comes
BEFORE work is in the dictionary.

Dedicated to mutual success,

Shaun

"Anyone can do it"

Put 100 random folks in a room and choose who can build a profitable business online. Gov't stats say 4 of the 100 will. Sure, any of the 100 could be among the four. But the reality is . . . the 4 that will emerge won't be those that:

- do nothing, or
- study, study, study, study, study, or
- buy a money-making course and never take action, or
- jump from one strategy to the next without focus, or
- fall for the push-button without work promise, or
- try to be all things to all consumers, or
- continuously buy IM products without applying IM strategies, or
- succumb to the "shiney object" syndrome, or
- fail to pay attention to customer service, or
- figure "good enough" is good enough, or
- trust in the business owner is not important,
- employ "if you build it, they will come," or
- countless other self-defeating behaviors that Warrior Forum members have been cautioning you about for years and years.

Steve

Spot on my friend I will make sure to always remember this!

That one of Saddam's nephew's cousins needs my help getting $154,723,276.38 out of Iraq...

Take it from someone who has spent hundreds on WSO "bumps", eventually it is important...essential...to begin developing and cultivating your own means of driving traffic to your WSOs. Unfortunately, it's really quite unreasonable, with all the competition, to expect to make tons and tons of sales off of the back of "bumps" alone.

The truth is, it WILL slip...and, sometimes, it'll slip really quite quickly. The real winners in the WSO game know when to bump, but they also have cultivated other means of driving high quality, targeted, traffic to those WSOs.

Of course, everything requires work...but, it requires "smart" work.

I'm a longtime successful internet marketer, fulltime since the 90s.

The biggest misrepresentation out there is from the pitchfest IM seminars and "big" $1997 product launches and other content out there, about applicability of techniques shown to "anyone's" list.

A guru saying "I made $50,000 with this new listbuilding technique" or whatever is completely misleading, because the LISTS are completely different across merchants, and as my colleague the late Corey Rudl used to teach, the list IS your business.

So some guru talking about making a lot from their launches, (because they have big lists and affiliate-incentivize their colleagues to cross-promote to their lists) does NOT translate into, you can also be successful with your (sub 10k size) list.

And techniques taught by a lot of 'gurus' are not even directly scalable to smaller size, for a variety of reasons (like long-term publicity value of the guru, vs "you and your list, and you're not famous") makes a huge difference.

The biggest lie is that the techniques taught to you guys are replicable largely across lists. The RELATIONSHIP you have and Market POSITIONING and branding and LIST SIZE WITH QUALIFIED PEOPLE WHO KNOW YOU (not Just list size, I routinely delete thousands of leads from India etc who don't buy, from my email accounts) are all much more important than specific techniques or WP themes or whatever you're using. Seems a lot of IMers, especially newbies, focus way too much energy on "technique-y" stuff (like a shiney WP theme or video player) vs your positioning as expert and long term relationship for multiple sales, credibility, expertise and positioning (that can THEN be leveraged via product/service launches that are aff driven).

-k

Bonus tip: your wealth is not so much in your list (only), it's MORE about the 2nd, 3rd, 4th sale you make to your best customers whom you've EARNED the TRUST of over time, who buy repeatedly from you because you've worked very hard to genuinely help them. If you "get" that, you have a shot at becoming successful. That's why I'm against affiliate-only marketing etc, as it's becoming an undifferentiated sales rep, vs personal positioning and trust-building.

I gets easy when you get going and enjoy it. Now I think it is really easy.

you mean ?

Oh, getting listed in Google in less than 10 minutes is easy - simply buy the company.

I think I wrote a humor post about that years ago...

I think the biggest lie are people that are "Making 30K / Month" and are willing to share their secrets in their WSO for only $10... In most cases the info is either crap or they are trying to upsell on their OTO (which I can't stand OTO's)

''get rich over night''

I agree. I think the biggest lie in Internet Marketing is believing that you are going to make money without first offering value. With as lot of people, it's all ME, ME, ME. I don't believe it's really possible to make money in IM until you change that mindset from ME to YOU.

Offer great value up front and the money will come. Keep on with that ME, ME, ME and you'll still be chasing your tail for years to come. It took me six months to realise this, that's when I started to make money online.

Keith

How about "I have given you everything you need to succeed".

That Internet marketers are aliens sent to take over the planet.

Biggest lie that I've seen so far today apart from the regular lottery scams was in my inbox subject line 'Re: Your $595 check!‏'. As if I'm going to spend money with those who send emails out to their list with that sort of subject line. The unsubscribe button was hit fast, good way to lose your list I suppose.

PS I don't get checks I get cheques

Did you mean to say...

Money For Nothing and Clicks For Free?

I'll probably get zinged for my post but I'll still give you my honest opinion.

I think a lot of new people make the mistake of not thinking of online marketing as an online BUSINESS.

They don't realize that they will need to develop business skills like budgeting (cashflow and future expenses), accounting (for tax purposes), marketing, interviewing (for hiring potential outsourcing help, support desk, or virtual assistants), and countless more skills.

Lacking or refusing to develop these needed skills means they are a strong candidate to fail at their business... unless they PAY someone else to do handle those parts of the business for them.

Lacking any skills early on doesn't mean you can't succeed. You can fill that void using either time or money... time to learn the skill so you can do it yourself or money to pay someone else to do it for you.

But the biggest skill to develop in any type of business (both offline and online) is a B.S. detector. There's countless things pitched to you everyday and not all of them work as advertised.

Quick sidebar: Before anyone zings me and professional copywriters as a collective bunch (which includes me), please realize that 99.9% of copywriters are very wary of writing copy for anything that could rip the general public and will NOT do it. The other point many don't realize is that copywriters, along with their clients, became liable in the eyes of the FTC if they DO write something that defrauds the general public. So I always turn down any "risky" projects and so do every other copywriter that I personally know.

Okay, back to countless things to buy.

Great example... when I owned my massage therapy center, a guy came in to sell me advertising on gas pump handles. Of course, once you were actually HOLDING the gas pump handle to fill your fuel tank, you couldn't see the ad but he still thought I needed to buy it (I didn't).

Most people don't use everything they buy. Doesn't matter if it's ebooks, shoes, DVDs, physical books... everybody has something sitting on their hard drive or house that is untouched and they've been meaning to "get to sometime real soon"... even me.

I have stacks of books in my office that are future reading and even more digital ones on my hard drive that are gathering "digital dust".

Since my primary business is professional copywriting, the majority of the materials I read & review are client-related which is a major time filler.

Because I don't need to add more "stuff" to my "getting to sometime real soon" piles, I rarely buy any new educational stuff unless I'm going to use it right away. Buying only what training materials I'm going to use right away has made my businesses more profitable and increased my productivity even more because I'm more focused on what I need to be focused on.

The reality is owning a business is rarely easy. If it was, then everyone would own their own business and no one would be an employee or work for someone else. Of course, if you have customers or clients, then you are still working for someone else.

Anyways, to borrow a line from Dennis Miller... "That's my opinion... I could be wrong."

Take care,

Mike

P.S. Probably 50-60% of the successful online business owners I know started out offering a service online like graphic design, copywriting, programming, etc. They took some of the monies they earned from their service business and used it to help build their own online business. Another 20% or so, worked a "day job" while building their online business. The day job took care of their monthly living expenses, the online business was their after-hours passion. Day job or freelancing... either way, it's a proven path to success but it still takes a lot of time to build a business in size and scale.

I can assure you that real gurus don't make those sorts of claims.

Not a lie as such but I think suggestions of CPA towards people who are desperate, are beyond silly.