The Ethics Of Sales Letters
I received a guru email the other day, hyping a new product. The email sounded like he knew him, and touted words like "truly this is the American Dream." When I went to the sales page, I saw that the guru, was from MY Homtown & State. I was happy to read this, so I proceeded to look the guy up & do some due diligence, cause it would be great to "potentially" meet a guru in my hometown & state rather than have to dish out thousands of dollars for hotels & plane flights for some long-winded seminar. But more importantly, it would just feel good that someone in my own state can make it in Internet Marketing.
HOWEVER, , I could not find any details of this guy living in my state, no additional websites or nothing. According to the sales page, now the guy is a millionaire, not only because of his other products, but also because of this one (ie: teaching his secrets I guess). So, I wondered, why this guy had no info about himself. So I took another undercover look at the site by examining the source code, and I see a Location Script, which spits out your City & State on the page. So, if you were in Miami, Florida, you would see that or if you were in Sandusky, Ohio, it would see as the guru would be from that city & state. I was so disgusted after seeing this.
It has prompted me to do deeper research into who & what is hawking these online dreams & supposed gold mines.
This is the results of what I have found:
1. Salespages not matching up to the product delivered.
2. Salespages with location scripts preying on people as if the guru was living in their hometown.
3. Internet Products that have been sold to other gurus, but the guru hasn't changed the name of existing company that owned it, and has no disclosure to the fact.
4. Joint Venture or Partnerships between 3 or 4 internet marketers, but no disclosure to the fact.
5. Internet Marketers sending out Emails in OTHER Internet Marketers names. (ie: Using the NAME of a guru in the Email Address).
6. The Salesletters states a Revenue or Income figure, but does not disclose if its Theory or Actual Proven Results. --This is been happening a lot lately -- After a grandiose sales pitch, you have to do 20 questions to find out that the $100,000 per month they were pitching, they are NOT even generating that themselves.
7. When confronting with support questions, the guru is not answering questions themselves, they have some outsourced chieftan answering questions that beat around the bush. You ask for specifics & details, and it takes you days to get a half-way & beat-around-the bush answer.
Every point I've made can be verified. I had qualms about doing an actual product review of these products & seeing what people thought, but maybe it's a real discussion we should have. This is why I believe in either a Buyers Bill of Rights or demand that marketers place a Verifiable Disclosure page on the site (not the heavy duty legal mumbo jumbo), but at least something that states & discloses specific Partnerships or Joint Ventures (noting that affiliates is seperate from a true joint venture), discloses if they own the business they are actually running, discloses a statement about each revenue figure that is stated. I don't know, something universal needs to be done, because it's seriously getting out of hand.
What have you all experienced in terms of Sales Letters & finding out a product is not what it really is? What do you think should be done, if anything?
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Ragnar.
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