Free...sorta...
Has anyone else noticed that the definition of the word “free” seems to be undergoing some reshaping lately? I got an email today proudly presenting me “free” software. The software sounded interesting, so being the geek that I am I went to check it out.
I suppose I shouldn’t have been surprised that the software is a “free 15-day trial” of an application. Once the 15 days are up, of course, they’re going to make me a heck of a deal to buy the full version. Wow, how lucky can a geek get?!?
At least this one is a single payment after the 15 days are up. I recently received a “free” marketing book from a big-time marketer who shall remain nameless. The “free” book only cost me $7.95 for shipping and handling. What “free” means in this case is that the marketer only made a couple bucks’ profit on each book.
That wasn’t what I found annoying. That particular ploy has been going on for years. “I’ll send you this valuable CD/book/whatever FREE! You just pay a nominal fee to cover shipping and handling!” Okay, we all know that game and we go along with it because, hey, $7.95 for an actual printed book isn’t such a bad deal and we’ll overlook the “free” thing.
I got the book and saw the “BONUS! Money-making software included free!” alert on the cover. “Cool, free software!” thought I. So, I looked in the back of the book to see what the free software was and where to download it.
I guess I shouldn’t have been surprised that the “free software” is actually a 30-day trial of an online service run by said big time marketer that features all kinds of marketing advice and wisdom. That’s apparently the money-making part of the equation. I pay to access all this great content and the marketer makes money.
“So, what happens after the 30 days are up?” I hear you asking.
Good question. If I decide to continue accessing the service, it’s a mere $39.95 per month! And I didn’t think it could get any better than the “free” book!
For the record, I’ve actually used this service during its beta stage and there is software involved. There’s a little application that you download to your machine that puts a streaming bar across the top of your screen. You click on things you see that look interesting and it opens your web browser and takes you to the site where you can access the article or whatever.
Is it worth $39.95 per month? Not to me, but others apparently think so.
My issue is not with the service. However, I find it disingenuous at best to trumpet something as “free” when it’s going to end up costing me 40 bucks a month. Call it what it is: a “free 30-day trial.” Don’t tell me it’s “free software” when it’s clearly not.
Marketers have a bad enough reputation as it is. We don’t need further fuel for that fire. I have no problem with enthusiasm for a product, but let’s not be reinventing the language to suit our own agendas.
John The Geek
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I recently launched a new online business technical training site after a pre-launch period of about three weeks. During that period I did some promotion of the site and had a form on the landing page to collect names and email addresses of those interested in knowing when the site went live.
A total of 78 people opted in and when the site went live, of course, I emailed those folks to let them know. One of those people turned out to be a fellow marketer living about 40 minutes from me. She emailed me to let me know that a few days prior to the site launch.
Launch day came and I got another email from her saying how she was sorry, but she “couldn’t afford [my] prices” and she wouldn’t be signing up for the site. She then went into a long dissertation about how she had to be very careful how she spent her money and how there are lots of scam artists out there and that she had the perfect plan for making her fortune on the Internet.
You ready? Here’s the plan:
- Put up a squeeze page and collect a bunch of names and emails
- Get those people to trust her
- Join an affiliate program and sell the product to her list
Here I’d been working my tail off for almost two years to get this Internet marketing thing figured out and she had it down to three simple steps! Who knew?!?
Obviously, she left out a few details in the master plan, like how she was going to get people to visit her squeeze page and leave their contact info so that she could then convince them she was trustworthy. I wrote back to her and told her that if she already knew how to put up a squeeze page and drive traffic to it she didn’t need my training anyway. I wondered what had prompted her to sign up for my prenotification list in the first place, but decided not to ask.
I had previously asked her what she felt was a reasonable price for online business technical training, but never got an answer. I felt (and still do) the charter membership rate was very reasonable, maybe even too reasonable, but it’s all in the eye of the beholder. I restrained myself from asking her how she expected to build an online business with a mindset that was afraid to spend a few dollars a month for training, but since she apparently doesn’t need training, the point is moot anyway.
The point of this is that I can recall when I first started out and the idea of committing to spending more than a few bucks a month was a little scary. The reason it was scary was that I didn’t know if I was going to generate enough revenue to cover it.
That can be a big hurdle for people to get over. It often entails being willing to go ahead and commit to the monthly expense and trusting that the investment will help the business generate the necessary revenue. It also requires some patience as the cash flow may not increase dramatically, but slowly over time.
The key is to make the commitment and put in the required effort. If it doesn’t pay off, you’ll have learned something and you can go on to the next thing. Chances are, however, if you give it sufficient time to work, the results will be well worth the investment.
John The Geek
The following are the results of promoting a new membership site I’ve created over a 21-day period prior to the official launch. The site is called Marketing Tech Secrets and you can get all the details about it here, if you’re interested.
The purpose of this post is not to promote MTS so much as to demonstrate some of the things you can learn by tracking the results of your promotional efforts. In my previous post on this subject, I laid out the results of the first 12 days of promoting the site. The landing page for the promo was an abbreviated version of the current sales page with a form at the bottom for people to sign up for the pre-notification list, if they chose to.
This post details the results after 21 days. The site has now gone live and the prelaunch page is no longer visible.
As I said earlier, I currently use a total of 9 advertising sites each of which offers one or more of the following ad methods: text ads, banner ads, exit ads, or solo email ads. I have upgraded memberships in all but one of them.
The tracking system I’m using is very simple right now. Each link I use has a code appended to it which gets read by the landing page. The system simply counts the number of times a given code is seen and stores the counts in a database table.
Eventually, I’ll make it more sophisticated, but for now, it’s already giving me some interesting information. Primarily, it’s showing me how effective these ad sites are (or not) in terms of driving traffic to my site. Pretty important thing to know, right?
Here are the results from the 21 days of the prelaunch:
Text and Banner Ads
Solo Email Ads
* List Joe is a special case. The number looks really good compared to the other sites until you recall that List Joe is a credit-based safelist. That means that people click a link in the email they receive which displays my site for 20 seconds while the credit counter counts down to zero and the user gets credit for viewing my site. A very high percentage of those people probably never even look at the site, but the fact is that they’re at least opening it and it’s up to me to have something on there that grabs their attention.
Conclusions
Basically, except for the differences in total numbers, the conclusions from the first 12 days have held up through the entire three-week period. I’ve repeated them below for those who haven’t seen the preliminary results post.
Leads Leap is far and away the best deal for the money it costs me. I’m a Pro member of Leads Leap for which I pay them $27 per month. My text ads are seen in their newsletters and on their blog and they’re obviously effective as there were nearly five times the number of hits on my page as the next most effective site.
Target Ads Depot was a distant second to Leads Leap, but still much better than most of the rest of the sites. I’m a lifetime Pro member of Target Ads Depot meaning that I paid once and I have a text ad, a banner ad, and an exit ad for life. The above results only reflect the text ad. So far, there haven’t been any hits on the banner or the exit ads.
Croc Ads did reasonably well in the text ads category. I’m a lifetime Pro member of Croc Ads which means I paid them once and I have two text ads free for life on their system. The results are improved over the initial numbers because I used both text ads for MTS over the last week or so.
Aside from List Joe, in the email category only ViralURL scored impressive results. I think that speaks volumes to the responsiveness of ViralURL members. Whereas List Joe‘s members are surfing for points, ViralURL members are actually opening up the emails and clicking on the links to visit the advertised site with no artificial incentive to do so.
I think this was the most interesting statistic of all of them. Where most of the email sites were very lame in terms of response, and List Joe‘s curve is skewed, it could be argued that my headlines or emails weren’t compelling enough to get people to open them. I think the ViralURL results refute that. The identical emails were sent to ViralURL as to the rest of the sites and obviously were interesting enough to get them to open them many times more often than the other sites. The only variable was the site and its members.
The message should be obvious: test, test, and test again. You can’t have too much information about where your ad results are coming from. The more you know about how your various ad providers are performing, the better you will be able to allocate your advertising resources.
John The Geek
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I’m in the process of promoting a new membership site I’ve created. For the curious, it’s called Marketing Tech Secrets and you can get all the details about it here.
The purpose of this post is not to promote MTS (I did that already in an earlier post), but to demonstrate some of the things you can learn by tracking the results of your promotional efforts.
I currently use a total of 9 advertising sites each of which offers one or more of the following ad methods: text ads, banner ads, exit ads, or solo email ads. I have upgraded memberships in all but one of them.
I’ve been using these sites for months now to send out promotional emails and advertise affiliate products. I’ve been meaning to implement some kind of tracking mechanism and never got around to it. Now that I have my own product, it got pushed to the top of the priority list.
The system I’m using is very simple right now. Each link I use has a code appended to it which gets read by the landing page. The system simply counts the number of times a given code is seen and stores the counts in a database table.
Eventually, I’ll make it more sophisticated, but for now, it’s already giving me some interesting information. Primarily, it’s showing me how effective these ad sites are (or not) in terms of driving traffic to my site. Pretty important thing to know, right?
Here are the results from the past 12 days:
Text and Banner Ads
Solo Email Ads
* List Joe is a special case. The number looks really good compared to the other sites until you recall that List Joe is a credit-based safelist. That means that people click a link in the email they receive which displays my site for 20 seconds while the credit counter counts down to zero and the user gets credit for viewing my site. A very high percentage of those people probably never even look at the site, but the fact is that they’re at least opening it and it’s up to me to have something on there that grabs their attention.
Conclusions
Leads Leap is far and away the best deal for the money it costs me. I’m a Pro member of Leads Leap for which I pay them $27 per month. My text ads are seen in their newsletters and on their blog and they’re obviously effective as there were about two and a half times the number of hits on my page as the next most effective site.
Target Ads Depot was a distant second to Leads Leap, but still much better than most of the rest of the sites. I’m a lifetime Pro member of Target Ads Depot meaning that I paid once and I have a text ad, a banner ad, and an exit ad for life. The above results only reflect the text ad. So far, there haven’t been any hits on the banner or the exit ads.
Croc Ads did reasonably well in the text ads category. I’m a lifetime Pro member of Croc Ads which means I paid them once and I have two text ads free for life on their system. The results weren’t as impressive as Leads Leap, but only one of my two ads was for MTS.
Aside from List Joe, in the email category only ViralURL scored impressive results. I think that speaks volumes to the responsiveness of ViralURL members. Whereas List Joe‘s members are surfing for points, ViralURL members are actually opening up the emails and clicking on the links to visit the advertised site with no artificial incentive to do so.
I think this was the most interesting statistic of all of them. Where most of the email sites were pretty lame in terms of response, and List Joe‘s curve is skewed, it could be argued that my headlines or emails weren’t compelling enough to get people to open them. I think the ViralURL results refute that. The identical emails were sent to ViralURL as to the rest of the sites and obviously were interesting enough to get them to open them many times more often than the other sites. The only variable was the site and its members.
I hope the importance of doing at least minimal tracking of your promotional efforts is obvious. From these results I can see that only a few of the sites I use are giving me any kind of decent return on the effort I’m expending to use them. In most cases, I’m a paid up lifetime member so it’s not costing me additional money to use them. I’ll continue to use them, but the best performing sites will be the priority when I need to decide which sites I have time for in any given day.
John The Geek
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Yes, this is a blatant plug for my new training site called Marketing Tech Secrets. Hey, if I don’t think it’s worth promoting, who will, right?
Seriously, I’ve made every effort to make Marketing Tech Secrets a valuable resource for Internet business owners and others who want to learn the technical skills necessary to run a web site. There’s nothing secret about any of this stuff, of course, but if you don’t know something, it’s a secret to you!
I’ve noticed in my experience in Internet marketing that a large percentage of people have difficulty with the technical aspects of their web sites. That’s understandable because if you’re not used to dealing with computers and networks and servers and the various services needed to run a business on the Web, it can be daunting.
My intention is to bring my nearly 30 years of professional computer expertise to bear on this problem and help people learn what they need to know to run their web-based business effectively. Whether you’re starting from scratch, or you’ve put up a site or two and want to learn about autoresponders and other tools of the trade, or you’re ready to dive into dynamic pages written in PHP, Marketing Tech Secrets has something for you.
I’ve divided the course into three levels so that you may join at the level closest to your current skill level and not have to sit through all that stuff you already know. You’ll be able to join at Square One if you’re just starting out, Level Two if you’ve got the basics down already, or Advanced if you’re ready to write scripts and dynamic pages to take your sites to another level.
What makes Marketing Tech Secrets unique is that it’s not simply a weekly lesson emailed to you to figure out on your own. Each level of Marketing Tech Secrets will have its own private discussion group where members may ask questions and get the answers they need from their fellow members or me. In short, you have access to my professional experience as much as you want while you’re an active member of Marketing Tech Secrets.
Get all the details and subscribe to our pre-notification list here:
http://MarketingTechSecrets.com
John The Geek
Davine asked:
Can you refer me to the best Blog site where I can set up a good & responsive community to share my telecommunications product offering online?
You can set up a free blog on WordPress.com or Blogger.com, however, you have a limited amount of control over what you can do to those blogs to customize them. Either one will have good search engine traffic after your blog has been established for a while and you’ve added lots of good quality content.
If you wish to set up your own WordPress blog and have complete control over themes, plugins, etc., you can do so on any web host that runs PHP. Most Linux-based hosts have CPanel for administering your hosting account and Fantastico, a utility that will let you install a WordPress blog in a few mouse clicks.
No matter which way you go, the key to blogging effectively is to provide your readers with content that is good enough that they want to keep coming back. If you can accomplish that, you’ll be able to use the site as a platform for your telecommunications offering.
John The Geek
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If you’ve been involved with Internet marketing for any length of time, you’ve gotten at least one email that starts out with a glaring error, like:
Hi, {!fristname_fix}!
There are any number of variations on this fundamental error, but the point is we’ve all seen them. I don’t know about you, but my first impression when I see something like that is: “Whoever sent this email is clueless!”
I may be dating myself, but I remember when it was a big deal to find a spelling or grammatical error in a book or newspaper. It was pretty much unheard of. Nowadays, you see them all the time. Either people use the wrong word (spelled correctly, mind you) in the context of the sentence, or commit some egregious grammatical error that won’t get caught by the computer’s spellcheck software. It’s become pretty well accepted that “stuff happens” and as long as the reader gets the meaning of the sentence, it apparently doesn’t matter much any more whether it’s correct or not.
Cultural shifts notwithstanding, such errors are the result of people trying to get too much done in too little time. With writing, no big deal, but with marketing, it’s a very big deal.
Why do people buy from you? Or a better question: why do they buy again and again from you? It’s about trust. People will buy from someone once if they feel it’s worth a shot, but they won’t buy again unless their first impression is borne out and they have a good experience.
Getting that first sale is important because without that first sale, you’re not going to get a second. If I get offers from several different marketers, if it’s a product that I think I can use which marketer am I most likely to buy from? Assuming the price is the same, I’m going to go with the one that I trust the most. If it’s somebody I’ve bought from previously, they’ve got an advantage, but let’s assume this is a new product and I’m hearing from several marketers I’ve never bought from before.
How do I determine which one gets my business? By going with my impression of whether they can deliver the product with a minimum of hassle. If the sales letter or email is loaded with typos and grammatical errors, I’m going to move on to the next one. Why? Because I figure if someone doesn’t take the time to create a professional-looking sales piece, they’re not going to care much if I have a problem downloading their product, or using it after I’ve bought it.
Looking professional is important! If I get an email from johnsmarketing@yahoo.com and another from john@johnthegeek.com, which one am I most likely to buy from? It should be pretty obvious. Here’s a little by-the-way tip for you to make an email address look even more professional: John@JohnTheGeek.com not only stands out better, but looks like I made the effort to make it look good.
Yes, “stuff happens”, but you can prevent most of the “stuff” from making you look like an amateur. I use AWeber for my autoresponder and they have a little link that reads “Test” on every broadcast and followup message I create. The first thing I do after I save a message is click the Test link and send myself a copy of it. You’d be surprised how many little glitches you can catch that way.
You’ll know right away if you mistyped the code to insert the recipient’s first name, for example. If you don’t use the Insert Code function to be safe, chances are pretty good you’re going to get it wrong a certain percentage of the time. Your test email will show you that immediately.
Another thing to test is any links you insert into the message, like those affiliate links that are making you the big bucks. If the potential customer clicks on a link and gets a 404 Error page, they’re moving on to the next marketer’s offer. Click the links in the email! It takes a couple of minutes to test the obvious stuff like that and can save you hundreds or thousands in lost commissions.
Never assume your email is correct as it stands. Having to send out a correction because you fat-fingered a URL just makes you look careless and sloppy. I’ve had to do it twice myself and it’s no fun, not to mention damaging to your reputation. Do what you have to do to test it until you’re *sure* it’s right.
I once saw a sign in a machine shop that read:
“Why is there never enough time to do it right, but there’s always time to do it over?”
The fact is that there *isn’t* time to do it over, but you end up having to spend that time anyway. It’s just bad business to save a couple of minutes only to cost yourself time and/or money later on. We all have a tendency to run out of day before we run out of things we “have” to do. Don’t compound the problem by having to do things over if you can prevent it.
John The Geek
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I’m a big fan of ViralURL. I use it for many of my marketing promotions and have been very happy with it. However, I’ve recently discovered a problem with it that could very well be affecting many marketers, including myself.
If you’ve been an Internet marketer for any length of time, you’re probably familiar with the $7 Script. The $7 Script makes it possible to promote a product by giving the affiliate promoting the product 100% commissions paid directly to their PayPal account. This is obviously very appealing to affiliates as they get paid immediately when a sale occurs rather than waiting for monthly commission payments. I promote a number of products that use the $7 Script and have had good success with it.
A customer of mine recently emailed me to say that he was trying to purchase a product I’d recommended, but when he clicked the PayPal order button, an error occurred and he wasn’t able to proceed further. After some back and forth with him we determined that the problem was only happening in Internet Explorer. It worked fine in Firefox when I tried it.
That particular promotion used a ViralURL redirection link, so on a hunch I tried accessing the site by using the actual affiliate URL instead of the ViralURL link. It worked fine in both Firefox and IE. So, we had isolated the problem to Internet Explorer through the ViralURL link. I reported the problem to the site owner and ViralURL.
To make a long story short, the site owner tried a change suggested by ViralURL and it didn’t resolve the problem. At this point it was a toss-up as to whether it was a problem with the site or with ViralURL. What bugged me about it was that it only happened in IE, not Firefox.
Last night, I found another site that uses the $7 Script and doesn’t work correctly in IE through a ViralURL link. When clicking the PayPal order button, there is no blatant error as in the first site, but the PayPal page comes up mostly blank with a Retry link instead of the login page that should appear. I’ve reported the problem to ViralURL and we’ll see where it goes from there.
The bottom line is: if you promote sites that use the $7 Script and you use ViralURL to cloak your links I recommend you use a different redirection method for those sites until ViralURL gets the problem resolved. Even if you test the site successfully on your machine, there’s no guarantee that it won’t fail on someone else’s machine. We ran into this while troubleshooting the problem. It was not a 100% failure rate. Sometimes it worked fine in IE6 and not IE7, sometimes neither one, and sometimes it worked fine on a different computer.
I’m going to identify all the links I have that use the $7 Script and use a different redirection method until ViralURL gets the problem fixed. I have no way of knowing how many people encountered the problem before the person kindly emailed me to tell me about it. I have to assume I’ve lost sales as a result.
Be careful out there!
I wasn’t planning on taking a look at Optin Accelerator because I’m not currently in a buying mode. I’m focusing my energies on a couple of specific tasks that I want to accomplish, so I’m not involved with the current frenzy of affiliates pushing this latest be-all-end-all marketing tool.
Well, I got an email from Mike Filsaime which had to do with his Viral Friend Generator software (which I use) and how Optin Accelerator is not only better, but will soon have a plugin that lets the two applications work together. So, I figured I’d go watch the video and see what OA is all about.
OA is a pretty cool idea on the surface of it. Basically, you install it on your web site, point your prospects to it and they are expected to dump their entire contact list into your database. Still a nice idea (for you) because people tend to have lots of contacts and you get maybe a couple hundred potential contacts instead of 3 or 5 or whatever you’ve set up your Tell-A-Friend page to ask for.
So, what’s wrong with this picture? First of all, this idea isn’t new, it’s been around at least 6 months in the form of another very similar application called UltraRefer. Obviously, this dude has done a much better job of public relations/marketing than the UltraRefer folks. More power to him and too bad for them.
I have a lot more problem with the basic concept of somebody coming to my web site and giving up their entire contact list to plug my site. Why? Because they have to give me their email user ID and password so my site, via Optin Accelerator, can go download all their contacts! Are you kidding me? People are really that naive and/or stupid?
Maybe I’m just getting to be a cranky old computer geek, but it just amazes me that somebody would give up their ID and password to a site the owner of which they don’t know from Adam. Not only that, they’re going to spam their entire contact base with news of my site/product? Even the most naive can’t believe that everybody on their contact list will be as excited about it as they are. At least with Viral Friend Generator, and similar applications, the user has to actually decide whether the people she’s referring will give a rat’s keister about what she’s referring.
It’s one thing when a site like MySpace is doing it, although there’s certainly the potential for abuse there, too, but when anybody can pay $97, grab a copy of OA, put it up on a web page, tweak the page a tad to save off the ID and password, not to mention all those email addresses, and use them for whatever purpose they wish, it’s enough to give even a modestly paranoid computer pro like myself heart palpitations. This is exactly the kind of thing amateurs do in their blithe ignorance of black hat thinking. Just because it doesn’t occur to the authors of these applications that it might be used for less than honorable purposes doesn’t mean someone else won’t think of it.
I hope the authors and promoters of OA make a ton of money. They’re going to need it to defend the lawsuits that are sure to occur when someone does take their product and use it with malice.
John The Geek
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