The more you look at the emails coming into your inbox, the more you are toyed with. They tantalize you with the big carrot (no not the viagra ads) promising you that you can make $49,239.45 per month just like the guy that they allowed to use their software did.
Isn’t it time that the BS stop?
I bought 3 of these hype barfing products just so I could show my followers and readers that the concept behind the products are sound, even if the hype makes the product larger than life. And as marketers, we really have to start to take a good long look at what we are peddling.
For a while, I was getting access to the products for free, mainly because of my friendship with many of the marketers who are selling products. I would use the product, and I would figure out whether my subscribers were going to be able to figure it out.
Then came the series of launches where products were scarce before the launch, the price tag was ridiculously high and the hype began on the JV Blog with huge prizes just for mailing during the prelaunch. I won a few cool prizes for mailing: an iPod, a Flip Mino, a Flip HD and a really cool Snowball Condenser Microphone that I use to this day all came from mailing for people that I trusted.
But I began to get cocky. I figured that I had managed to win prizes on a few launches, I would start mailing on other offers from people I did not know very well, who did not give me access to their product and who basically flung a pile of crap into a digital format and sold it for too much money. I lost the trust and credibility that I had worked so hard to gain from my subscribers. I was not getting the sales I needed, not getting enough leads to win any prizes, and finding myself irritating my subscribers.
At that point, I was about ready to give up.
I did the occasional adswap with other marketers, in an attempt to liven up my list. The numbers (open rate and click throughs) kept going down instead of rising, and I was really beginning to wonder what I was doing wrong.
Then I shifted focus.
I went from trying to get a reaction out of my list to just teaching again. I have the experience in almost all things technical, WordPress and Video. So I decided that when products came out for those niches, I could test them out and let people see them from my point of view.
The first of the recently hyped products I purchased and was highly disappointed by was Auto Traffic Avalanche. I was disappointed not by the product, but the fact that the advertising for it sucked! “A glitch” that allowed a marketer to make thousands of dollars on autopilot turned out to be Facebook ads using a software program that does some pretty cool tricks to make sure your ads get approved. I mean, they hyped this up to no end. Watch the video that they have on the sales page and see if you can guess what other site you will be advertising on if you purchase the software. I will bet that unless you bought the product you would never guess…
I advertised it after I purchased it, because the product itself was sound and worked. I told people that the sales page does nothing to help you decide, but that the product does help you with niche marketing, and it included a pretty good training video series to help you get started. I warned people away from the upsell.
Next came Stealth Profit Machines, which is one of the most useful tools I have ever used. But the hype monsters had completely obliterated all trace of what the software does in the ads. The hype grabs you from the first paragraph and keeps you in suspense until the very end of the buying process… The main tool is the blog installed program, which is basically a front end for Fantastico, but with a couple of security tricks installed to make the blog a lot more secure than your standard Fantastico Installation. But the very coolest part of SPM is the fact that it can help you set up your blog with targeted content for at least six months at the push of a button. A specially designed WordPress Plugin ads affiliate links to your content based on the keywords you specify, and this is done without costing you ANY link juice!
I reviewed Gsneak next, and it really took me by surprise, mainly because the software was so much like the SPM software, like the same Russian programmer wrote this one for Andrew Fox. But the whole Gsneak package is much more than a simple blog installer. Gsneak has a lot of software; so much so that I am still experimenting with it. You have the blog installer that loads a really cool theme called flexsqueeze. I really enjoyed the ease of use and how quickly you can make the blog look totally different, all without having to work with graphics if you don’t want to.
The prime piece of Gsneak’s arsenal of tools, however, is a program that I had already purchased from Joe Clayton called Videos Without Cameras that is very powerful for creating videos using text, images and audio. In a few minutes you can take your content and create a video out of it to upload to YouTube and many other sites. If you are using Ross Goldberg’s Traffic Magnet, you can submit these videos painlessly to lots of video sites to get even more exposure.
Now I am looking over the latest acquisition, Easy Video Player (EVP), the latest version of a suite of tools to help you use videos for marketing. Imagine having optin boxes, buy now buttons all embedded right into your videos. This software promises to do just that. But unfortunately, they are claiming alien abductions are the reason that they now have this technology… I think it is the Russian programmers, personally.
I am in the process of working with EVP so I cannot give you my complete opinion on the product, but by next week, I will be able to give a full review on my Blogging With Micheal Show Tuesday at 11AM.
Hype is the reason so many people refund products within a week of purchasing. They buy because they saw on the salespage that someone used the product and made $49,259.45 in 72 hours while in solitary confinement. Then a few days later, they are struggling with a product that is nothing like what they really needed. They are already reading the hype in someone else’s email and they figure, “what the heck, I’ll use the refund from this one to pay for that one…”
The answer appears to be more of the truth. We need to tell people what the tools are, not hide them behind a veil of secrecy. After all, the sales pages are getting out of hand with the crazy story lines. If you can’t tell me the truth about what the product is, don’t give me a long story about men from Mars and Russian mobsters. That is about as far fetched as my dog winning the Kentucky Derby (without a jockey)!
Of course, the product owners would get less sales. That seems to be the problem. Their products have been selling less when the truth is told, so they resort to making up a bunch of far fetched movie screenplays to get you into the copy. The buy button is the only thing that these sales pages are engineered to get you to head to – so if you start voting with your dollar bills, those who write the crap will do what gets them the most sales. You might as well polish off the BS detector, because that is what appears to be making the sales.
Let me know what you think.
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