Lies, damn lies, Statistics and Internet Marketing
Looking to make your fortune online?
Keep buying ‘shiny new products’ that promise to deliver?
Believe the testimonials provided on the sales pages?
Many internet marketing guru’s have raised the well known phrase ‘lies, damn lies and statistics’ to the next level.
How? Well last time I stayed at the Tropicana hotel in Las Vegas it was pretty easy to understand why punters believe others were winning ‘all the time’.
Why? Because the hotel had hundreds of machines returning a percentage of bets using quarters or dimes. Very cleverly each machine took a long time making a lot of noise repaying coins one at a time.
With so many machines and punters using them 24 hours a day – it gave the impression people were constantly winning.
Sure enough if you fed a machine with $100 of quarters a few people got more than $100 back.
But most got less – and the hotel was happy pocketing say 10% or 20% of the bets.
That’s exactly the way most Internet Marketing products ‘win’
A well known guru may well have 100,000 people on their own list.
So it’s not difficult for them to ‘test market’ their latest and greatest new product to a small number by offering free trials or other incentives.
If just 1% of their list = 1000 people try the product a few are likely to be successful and willing to provide a testimonial confirming how great the product is – and what fantastic results they have had.
The reality may well be that 99% of people on the trial found the product made them little or no money at all
No problem, the shiny new Internet Marketing product will have everything it needs to launch with glowing testimonials on the sales page.
So plenty of justification to encourage other marketers with lists to help swell the numbers mailed into the millions. Guaranteeing another successful product launch with yet another 6 figure income for a deserving guru.
If you just starting out online as an affiliate marketer, things don’t look so good.
Maybe you are happy to promote such products to benefit from a few sales.
If you have to first buy the product to test yourself – that’s tough. Because you may need to buy 10 products to find one good one you are happy to promote.
Then you will need to sell 20 just to break even and cover the costs of your test purchases.
Starting out, what should you do?
Create your own unique products.
Start with a market in your area of expertise.
Find what’s selling – for example using the Clickbank marketplace.
Buy some PLR that you can edit to add your own unique content and style.