By Stephen Bucaro

The Web is awash with bad marketing advice written by people who have never made any money on Web. This bad advice is repeated over and over again by pretend marketing experts. Are you following this dogma without thinking it through? Below are some misguided ideas you need to ignore.

1. Target your advertising - FALSE!

As an example, let’s say you are selling a business opportunity. Do you place your advertising in same place where everybody else is selling business opportunities? Would you fish from same pier where two hundred other fishermen have lines in water? Of course not!

Instead, let's say that you place your advertising in a newsletter about gardening. The readers of publication are exposed to many “targeted” ads about gardening products. Familiarity has trained them to ignore these ads. But your ad is only one promoting a business opportunity.

Do you think a gardener might be interested in starting a business? Gardeners are people with a variety of interests. They will be receptive to your ad because in gardening newsletter yours is only ad promoting a business opportunity.

I’ll tell you a secret: Almost all people reading publications related to business opportunities are selling a business opportunity. They read these publications to find out what competition is doing. They have absolutely no interest in buying a business opportunity.

Instead of targeting your advertising, place it where audience is not bombarded with similar offers. Where your offer is something unique and interesting.

2. Use testimonials - FALSE!

When people have problems with a product or service they may complain. But if a product or service performs good, they never take time to write a testimonial. Testimonials are only provided in return for money or other incentives. Do you believe testimonials you see on TV infomercials? I don’t think you’re that stupid.

Most testimonials are total fabrications. Who’s going to question them? If someone does question a testimonial, advertiser can say that they lost contact with individual who gave testimonial.

People know that testimonials are lies, and they view ads that use testimonials as dishonest and an insult to their intelligence.

Instead of using testimonials, provide complete information about your product or service. The more information you provide, less risk there is from customers prospective.

Of course, if your product or service is inferior, then don’t provide complete information about it - use testimonials.

3. Give an unconditional guarantee - FALSE!

There is a large group of people who make it a pursuit to scout out products sold with an unconditional guarantee. They use and enjoy products with full intention of returning them for their money back. This is especially prevalent in areas of software and information products, where they can make a copy and return original to get their money back.

If you want to support these freeloaders with your hard work, then offer an unconditional guarantee. Sure 90% of your customers are honest and won’t return product. But other 10% will not only demand their money back, they may also start selling copies of your product!

Instead of giving an unconditional guarantee, give a conditional guarantee. The purpose of a guarantee is to eliminate risk to purchaser of not receiving what they paid for. Carefully word your guarantee to protect honest people, while preventing freeloaders from stealing your work and destroying your business.

For example: “money back guaranteed if product does not perform as advertised.” Or “if CD is defective, return it within 90 days for a free replacement.”

If you have a product/service, you write a descriptive advertisement for it, listing all features, dynamics, exclusive properties, endorsements, testimonials, test results, and so on, and so forth. With all this information, you end up with volumes of written words and numerous pages for your visitors to go through. You have included just about every phrase that would pertain to your product/service and used a Thesaurus to find even more descriptive phrases. There isn’t an adjective around that you have not utilized and as for bullets and other fancy features, you’ve covered each and every one of them. So, what’s problem?

There you have it- A beautiful depiction of a forest filled with trees, and more trees. Well, this is what you have created. Right there on screen is a beautiful, growing forest of words, and information, with a couple of wildflowers and woodland animals in picture as well. The colorful phrases, highlighted items, quotation marks, and underlined features are all there. Read through it once again. How far down do you have to go or how far do you have to travel into your forest to find tree you are looking for? Namely, where is tree that tells us exactly what your product/service is, with a price tag attached? Many sites will refer to their market product as “it” and yet, they never really tell us what “it” is until we have gone through miles of words.