What it really comes down to is that I’m working on finding a way to bring good, solid marketing skills and authenticity, honesty and integrity together in my marketing messages.  Watch the video below to see exactly what I’m on about:

So, what are your thoughts on this? Of all the marketers you know, how many of them are closer to the “marketing machine” end of the scale and how many are more authentic?

And from which of those have you bought more?

I’d love to hear what you have to say, so leave a comment!

Cheers,

In this post, I explain a big problem I see with “Make Money Online” guides and what I want to change on RQR because of this. Also, in case you’re wondering why I didn’t post for a long time, I’ll briefly explain at the end of this post.

All Marketing and No Content a.k.a. The Newbie Trap

As I said, I had been looking to review several products lately, but ended up not reviewing them. Why? Basically, because I was disappointed in them. I was so disappointed, that I couldn’t even be bothered to go through all of the material and if I don’t do that, then I can’t write a proper review.

Now, on the one side, I feel almost obliged to write about bad products, so that some people might be saved from buying them. On the other hand, however, I have more important things to do with my time than going through sub-par training courses just to write a review.

The problem with many of the products I looked at is the same that Banner Ad Blueprint has: They are made by pure marketers – people who know everything about creating a great offer and nothing about teaching.

This type of product is usually set up as a “Newbie Trap”: Make huge promises to an audience that doesn’t really know much about marketing and then feed them some rehashed crap once they bought the product (and fought past half a dozen upsells).

–

Real Marketing Products

Instead of writing a ton of negative reviews about products like these, I want to make one general recommendation: Always think twice about a “how to make money online” guide. Most of them seem to be lacking in quality. There is a separate category of products that are much more often worth an investment and these are what I call “real” marketing products.

Real marketing products are tools and services that can leverage what you’re already doing to make money. For example, the recently reviewed WP Split Test plugin for WordPress is quite such a program. It’s quite simple and it serves to split-test your WordPress posts. It doesn’t claim to make you tons of money overnight, but it actually has more money-making potential than most of the guides I’ve read lately.

Further examples of “real” marketing products include keyword research tools, automation tools and services, programs like The Best Spinner, which helps leverage article marketing, programs like Web2Mayhem to help spread content around the web and things like rank tracking and analysis software.

–

No Love For Guides?

I won’t be seeking out guides and ebooks to review from now on. That doesn’t mean I’ll never review them again, just that I will be concentrating more on the “real” products mentioned above.

The question is, of course: What is a beginner to do? You have to learn the basics of Internet marketing somehow, after all. Well, for this purpose, I’ll be building a library of ebooks to cover all of the essentials. WordPress Websites Made Easy is the first in this series of guides and just like it, all of the following ones will be free.

I hope to be able to provide you with everything you need to know to make your first steps in online marketing and I want to provide all this for free. My motives aren’t entirely altruistic, either. I’ve been getting more and more questions in my inbox and I want to be able to point you to guides I’ve already written, so that I don’t have to type out long responses.

Also: Pretty soon you’ll have to sign up to my list in order to download the free stuff. Then, I’ll spam you with pre-written mails for every big Internet marketing product launch that comes along. And if you believe that last sentence, you must be new here. Welcome to RQR!

Anyway, that’s all for now and I’d love to get some feedback from you. Do you think this is a good plan? What kinds of products do you want to see reviewed the most? Let me know in the comments!

Cheers,

P.S.: About my hiatus: I took some time off to clean out my life. Cleaned out my apartment, sold a lot of junk I had lying around and cleaned up my mind in the process. That was really good, believe me. Then, I also caught some bloody virus and my camera stopped working, which also delayed further production of blog-posts. I hope you all missed me! (Yeah, I know, you didn’t even notice my absence, did you?)

See this weeks selection after the break.

• More on the Duplicate Content Myth – Jonathan Leger
  I recently posted my own thoughts about duplicate content. The linked article by Jonathan Leger actually has two parts (part 1, part 2), of which I especially enjoyed the second one. The posts are already a bit over one year old, but they are still relevant as ever and definitely worth a read.
  –
• Description of a CPA Scam – Harlan Kilstein
  A while back, I posted an article about the difference between a scam and a crappy product and stated how I often see the term “scam” being misused. The video linked above is an example of a real scam. It’s really disgusting that people do such a thing and the video is well worth watching.
  –
• Dennis Yu – Shoemoney
  Speaking of scammers, this is an in-depth post by Jeremy Shoemaker about the, by now notorious, Dennis Yu, a guy who managed to piss off a lot of high-profile Internet marketers in a very short time. It’s interesting and sometimes baffling to read his story. There’s more in this follow-up post.
  –
• 3 Symptoms of a Marketer Who’s Destined to Fail – Chris Rempel
  Finally, here is an incredibly good post about where most IM’ers that fail to make money go wrong. I’ve seen many a post with this type of “Top Mistakes to Avoid” theme, but this one just left me speechless. It’s really well written and contains priceless information. Go read it now!

And that concludes today’s roundup.

Have a great weekend!

Cheers,

An upsell is when you offer extensions, expansions, “gold-memberships” or related products to your customers. Often this is done right after the initial purchase (instant upsell) and the reason upsells are so popular is that they often work. A customer who has just agreed to buy your initial offer is quite likely to be willing to shell out a little more cash for the next offer as well. In my reviews, I rate upsells and especially instant upsells as scammy. In this article, I explain why.

What Gives?

If you are an experienced internet marketer yourself, your first reaction might be to think that it’s very unfair of me to rate upsells as scammy. Am I against selling? What’s wrong with offering products? It’s not like you’re forcing anyone to buy them, right? Let me clearly state that I am not opposing selling itself in any way. I run online businesses myself, so I also sell to people. More importantly, I am also a customer and I don’t mind being sold to, as long as what you’re selling are products that interest me.

So why do I rate instant upsells as scammy? Because it’s an indication that you are not getting what you just paid for, that you aren’t getting what you signed up for. Take a look at the sales-pages of any number of get-rich-quick programs. They always give you the impression, or even explicitly state that this program is going to teach you everything you need to know to make tons of money online. Some of them even claim that their system is fully automatic and will practically start spitting out money at the click of a button. Now, when you decide to buy the product and immediately after the purchase, you are led to the backend where one or several upsells await, what does that say about the program you just bought? To me, it clearly says that the program I just bought is incomplete. On the sales-page, I was told that this program would solve all my problems and now I’m being told I should also get program X to really boost my traffic and program Y to make website-building a breeze.

Now, it’s one thing if these upsell products are affiliate-offers, but it’s even worse when they are from the same author who made the program I just bought. Why weren’t they included in the base product?

In short, the immediate upsell indicates that the product you just bought is actually incomplete. This is scammy, particularly if the initial sales-page explicitly stated that the program on offer is a complete solution.

Is a Non-Scammy Upsell Possible?

I think it would be absolutely possible to offer upsells that are non-scammy or at least less scammy. On the one hand, the upsell product could be integrated into the base product and the combination could be offered at a higher price, right off the bat. In this case, the sales-page would make it clear that there are two or three different packages to purchase, e.g. the “Get-Rich-Quick Basic”, “Get-Rich-Quick Silver” and “Get-Rich-Quick Gold” packages. Of course, this might mean less sales, as many customers are put off by having to make a choice.

Another possibility would be to be more honest about the product on the sales-page. Don’t pitch it as the ultimate money-making solution if it will be followed by upsells. Be honest.
Again, the downside of this is that it could lead to fewer sales made.

I do recognize the marketer’s predicament here: Being more honest and less hypey will probably hurt your bottom line. I know that the upsell is as effective as it is precisely because it is unannounced, unexpected and comes in right after the first purchase. I know this stuff works really well. But you gotta admit: It’s scammy.

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Photo by nutmeg

Get-rich-quick products are almost synonymous with scams. Many people believe that this entire market is one big scam and that the only way to make money in it is by ripping off poor, gullible victims that believe you will show them how to get rich. Whether this is true or not is not the subject of today’s post. What I will focus on in this article is the fact that the word “scam” is very often misused and why it’s important to distinguish scams from bad products.

What is a Scam?

A scam is a swindle, a fraud, a trick being played on you. The scammer is essentially a thief. He is not the type of thief who breaks into your house at night and steals your stuff. Instead, he cheats you out of your money in some way. When you fall victim to a scam, you do not get what you signed up for, but you did sign up for it.

For example, you may find a good offer for a TV listed on eBay. You check out the vendor’s rating – 99.9% positive – read some of the comments and decide to go for it. You win the auction, get in touch with the vendor, wire the money and, at first, everything seems to be going fine. You excitedly anticipate the delivery of your new TV, but it never happens. After a while, you contact the vendor again. No answer. You try to call them. No signal. You try to find their address and maybe call their landlord. He tells you they moved out a while ago and he doesn’t know their new address. You contact eBay and maybe get some of your money back (they have a buyer’s protection policy), but whatever the outcome you did pay for a TV and you didn’t get one. This is a scam.

When you get suckered into betting on a three-card monte by a stooge and lose money (which you inevitably will), that’s a scam.

If you are on holidays and someone tells you they know someone who can get you really cheap tickets to an awesome concert and you later find out that the regular over-the-counter tickets to that concert cost half as much, that’s a scam.

You get the idea. When you are being scammed, you are being cheated, tricked and stolen from.

What isn’t a Scam?

Many things are are being called scams aren’t actually scams at all. Let’s go back to the TV-from-eBay example: If you buy the TV, it arrives and it turns out that it has terrible contrast, lame colors and an annoying flicker, that’s not a scam. You bought a crappy TV, that’s all. Sure, the product description didn’t say that the TV was crappy, but advertisement is never honest, is it? Even if the ad clearly stated that it was a high-quality TV with great colors, it’s still not a scam. The vendors standards of quality might just be different from yours and the colors are fantastic (compared to a black-and-white TV).
The point is: You paid for a TV and you received a TV.

The reason I make this distinction is because I believe many get-rich-quick products are in fact not scams. A product that promises to teach you how to make thousands of dollars and then contains only vague and impractical advice on how to do so is not a scam. It’s just a crappy product. Just like you can go to the cinema (hoping for a fun evening), only to find out the story is boring and the actors are terrible, you can buy a get-rich-quick program only to find out it doesn’t really help you get rich. In this case, you have not been scammed, you’ve just made a bad buying decision.

With information-products, there’s the additional problem of follow-through. For example, it’s perfectly simple to create a guide for “guaranteed weight-loss”:

Step 1: Exercise every day.
Step 2: Eat only fruits and vegetables.
Step 3: Repeat steps one and two indefinitely.

This really is guaranteed to make you lose weight. If you follow through and actually do what the guide tells you to. Of course you could say: “Hey, this guide didn’t help me lose weight at all! What a scam!” But I’d have to correct you and say that I didn’t scam you and it’s your own fault you didn’t lose weight because you didn’t follow my handy guide.

So…?

The reason I’m writing this is not to defend any get-rich-quick products (particularly not the bad ones) and it certainly isn’t to defend actual scammers. It’s simply helpful to understand the difference between scams and bad products. It’s also important for understanding my review-process and the Scam-Scale as well as Spam-Factor ratings.

Apart from that, I hope to help you avoid both scams and bad products with my extensive reviews.

And that’s it for now.