“Trust me, I’m a liar.”
Internet marketing is a funny old game. There are certain marketers who seem intent on destroying their own credibility.
They love to launch new products all the time, but for me, that is the number one mark against their credibility. How can anyone launch a ‘fantastic’ new product every week? The truth is, they can’t.
What they can do is repackage some old crap and give it a shiny new suit of clothes.
Then they’ll get a copywriter-for-hire who specializes in dressing up dross by creating sales pages that don’t give you any idea what you are buying but still make you feel that your life will be in the toilet if you don’t buy.
Of course, they’ll tell you that this latest fools-gold nugget, that they have just expelled from where the sun doesn’t shine, is ‘worth’ a fortune.
Enter credibility gap #2
I just read the sales page for a product that is currently in the Warrior+ top ten.
The sales page lists all the elements you get and assigns a combined ‘value’ to them of $1,288. Crazy huh?
But scroll down a few lines to the buy button and suddenly the ‘usually’ price is just $197.
Credibile? I think not.
But wait! If you hurry, you can click the buy button today and get it for just $16.95.
But that price is going up in 57 minutes.
Then, as soon as you go to leave the page, the price suddenly drops again! This time to $9.95.
But now, the ‘usual’ price has dropped as well to $97.97.
We’ll leave the question of how a new launch can have a ‘usually’ price for another day!
So how much is this superb example of the product creator’s art really worth? $1,288? $197? $97.97? $9.95?
Oh wait, I just found another exit pop that cut the price down to $8.95 (with the claim that the ‘actual’ price is $197.97.)
If a vendor can’t decide how much his wonder product is worth, or how much it will cost me now, how can I trust the rest of the claims made on the page?
I’m no lawyer, but I wonder how the FTC would view such financial shenanigans?
Credibility? Zero.
I am NOT saying that this is a bad product. I don’t know because the lack of credibility on the sales page stopped me from wanting to buy it. That’s why I won’t name it.
But according to Warrior+, between 250 and 500 people have already bought it. A glance at the JV page shows that all the usual ‘promote for me and I’ll reciprocate’ suspects are busy promoting it in their usual ‘I don’t care if this helps you but I want my commission’ way.
The vendor has no credibility, for sure, but neither do the affiliates who mindlessly promote junk products without, it seems, bothering to check them out first.
We can’t stop it, but we can try to avoid it.
It is a sad fact that this kind of murky marketing does work. Perhaps people are so busy looking for the pot of gold at the end of the rainbow that they ignore the fact that they are standing in the rain.
Or maybe I’m getting too picky in my old age? What do you think?
