Shady Marketing Tactics – What they will Cost you and your Business or Learning to Market Responsibly.Written by James R. Sanders
Don’t you just hate writers, or at least ones that write up articles identifying a problem then pitching you information to help you solve your problems for $49.95? The writing industry has taken a turn where everyone who has something to sell can write an article, submit it to an online venue, and wait for us to read it or download it and see if we’ll buy their products or services. Don’t you just hate it when you spend your time looking for information only to find that you have to make a further investment before you can get actual answers to your problem? You’ve already spent countless hours looking for it, and now you have to make a monetary investment to boot. Is it a practice you’ve come to accept, expect, and chalk it up to costs of running a business, or are you forever turned away from that writer because of their approach? Would you rather have information up-front telling you that you’ll need to make a purchase to actually get your questions answered or do you just expect you’ll have to make a purchase as norm? Don’t get me wrong, even in such material; there is still valuable information to be found. These articles work great for readers looking for a paid solution or a quick fix, but they do little for “do it yourselfers” who are looking for "hows" to answer question and fix problem themselves. Then there is time investment problem where you have to sometimes spend large amounts of time digging for valuable information, sorting out hype, and tossing away chaff. The bottom line is that marketing has gotten harder on internet because of ways that marketers have conditioned surfers over time. Think back to earlier days when banner ads were affective. Today, banner ads have taken a downward spiral where effectiveness has dwindled to point of almost zero. Think about your own surfing habits. What do you usually tend to do when you come across a banner ad? Do you even notice them on web site pages anymore? Full Page Ads and Time Limited Offers.The latest craze seems to be building long page advertisement pitches engaging visitor’s emotions and providing them with mountains of testimonials to convince them to purchase product or service. Isn’t it ironic how most of them started out in debt, no money in bank, house in foreclosure, and after finding this secret suddenly bought their dream home, quit their day job, and drive their favorite expensive sports or luxury car, and accomplished this amazing feat in just a couple months? These stories have variations, but theme is always same. Although I have no SOLID proof to offer, I’d tend to believe that many of these “guru’s” found a way to prey on people’s dreams. They put together some information that sounded good, figured out how to market it, and since almost everyone always dreams of more money, they pitched their idea to people and made armored carloads of money. The point here is that they made their fortunes off SELLING idea and NOT actually by DOING idea. They all use idea of a time-limited offer too. The problem with time limited offers on internet is that if they do not use a tracking cookie, or if they don’t require you to sign up to site for a membership, there is no way for them to track that time sensitive offer. To prove my point, take any particular pitch you see, bookmark page, and then go back in a couple days. You’ll more than likely find that you get same time sensitive offer and you didn’t miss anything. If that doesn’t work, then clear your internet cache in your browser and repeat same process. You’ll then understand what I’m talking about. You’re being duped, and they play on that emotion to entice you to make a purchase. When I see one of these anymore, if product or service appeals to me, I IMMEDIATELY scroll to bottom to see how much it costs. If it’s within my budget, then I MIGHT scroll back up and read page, but if not, then I close window. Don’t get me wrong, I am sure that at least SOME of them have been broke, in foreclosure, no bank account, etc, but ALL of them? There are literally THOUSANDS of them out there. What about ones that were just broke and had no bank accounts? Nevertheless, just about every one of those full-page articles tells same story. Just switch around job they used to do, style of home they bought, and type of car they now drive, and they are all variations on a theme. I am also sure that SOME of them are legitimate, but try to pick out legitimate from fakes and you’ll have a tough time of it. Then there are those that tell half-truths. When I speak of half-truths, I am talking about either those that had credit to take out a rather large loan to market their business idea, or those that had friends to borrow money from or relatives to give it to them. They never seem to tell you about investments they needed to make in order to make idea work, just fact that they make thousands of dollars a month and have everything they want in life. They also fail to tell you how much they were making when they started out. Kind of convenient isn’t it. What sense does it make to purchase that information when you don’t know if you have extra funds needed to make it work? Sure, I could sell you an information article on how to make millions waxing turtles. But if it required you to live in Hawaii and was going to cost you $5,000.00 in advertisements to get it going to make those thousands of dollars a month, then what good would that information do you if you didn’t live in Hawaii and didn’t have $5,000.00 in bank? If you didn’t know that extra information, then you might buy information, waste money, and never do anything with information. That’s exactly what hundreds of thousands and possibly millions of people are doing. They’re buying this information that they might never be able to use, and are loosing hard earned money in process. Are you getting idea yet? Where Past Marketing Practices Effect Present and Future Marketing Results. You see, thanks to other marketers that have come before you, just as those to come will look back at you in future, we pave road for marketers tomorrow. Using shady promotion tactics will continue to make future of marketing harder and harder. It’s conditioning, and just like Pavlov’s dog’s were made to salivate through ringing of a bell, internet surfers are getting fed up with shady marketing tactics and learning to IGNORE them. Take for instance value of contextual links used to promote an affiliate program. When marketers first started using this tactic, their affiliate program owners received allot of traffic, and marketer made a tidy sum of cash. The problem was that most marketers, in their greed for almighty dollar, failed to do proper research into a company before they chose to promote it. They were so hurried to post program links to make money that they just didn’t bother with research. Just making sure program pays it’s promoters promptly and on time is only ensuring half battle. It’s just great that you make sure you are paid, but what about visitor that trusted you to click that link. You know visitor that was DEPENDING on you to give them reputable information. What happens when they have a bad experience with affiliate program owners or are ripped off? I’ll tell you what happens. Marketing gets even harder for YOU because your visitors loose their faith and trust in you. Sure, you can make a thousand dollars a month for a while, but if your visitors have problems with links you send them to, then eventually you are going to loose income. Not only will you loose income, but you will also loose reputation and traffic to point that there will no longer be visitors to send off to those links you promote.
| | Publish a web album using Adobe Photoshop or Macromedia Dreamweaver- Part 3Written by Robert Kennedy
So now we have you pile of images looken real good, nicely organized in directories with an index.htm file, nice. Are we ready to publish this on net? Well, yes…but. There always is a but. Here are a couple of suggestions that will help you enhance your online photo album.1)Make sure your album (folders and all) are in correct location with website contents that you publish from, usually it is best to create a new folder in root of domain that will display photo album online. 2)Fire up your favorite web editing program. In my case it is Dreamweaver so I will use this program as an example. If you are using GoLive, Front Page or any other web editing program you have to equate it to Dreamweaver’s examples. 3)Open index file. Have a look. If there are any cosmetic changes you want to make do it now. Here is an example of an Adobe Photo album; http://www.weprintcolors.com/screens/screen_ps_photo_album_sample.htm . Here is an example of a Dreamweaver Photo album http://www.weprintcolors.com/screens/screen_dw_photo_album_sample.htm . 4)Open one html page from ‘pages’ directory. Have a look. This time what you are looking for is ‘Global’ changes that you would like to make. By global changes I mean changes that can be implemented using ‘find and replace’ feature. Remember that each one of auto generated webpages is still basic html. The great part about this is code is consistent, so find and replace is easy. The first find and place is for ‘text’ only. What we are looking for is improper grammaticism such as .gif or .jpeg appearing in body. Often Photoshop and Dreamweaver will create this automatically unless you turn it off. If not, no biggy we’ll do a find and replace. ‘Find’ word .gif and replace it with nothing (no value).
|