Slow & Steady vs Hype, Crash & Burn
HOPE is perhaps the single most lucrative thing to sell.
There are so many people in need of direction, while so few actually want to do the work required to achieve the end goal. Thus many scammers sell the end result up front while glossing over the hard work required to get there.
I was over at a friend's house in the bathroom and saw a copy of "Your Infinite Power to be Rich" sitting on the floor & flipped open to a random page...page 102
THE UNIVERSAL BANK
A salesman needed an automobile for his new job, but he had no money with which to purchase one. However, he knew how to draw a check on his mental bank.
He told me that after he got the job, he went back to his room and formed the mental image of the car he wanted, with the positive certainty that it would be given him.
...
He struck up an acquaintance with another man in his apartment house who was going to Europe for six months and who said to him, "use my car until I return, and by that time you will be able to buy a car of your own."
If you ever read crap like the above please make sure to burn it, as it is useless.
Anything that requires you to close your eyes while listening to a marketer should make you assume they are preparing to work on another one of your orifices.
Many people who become rich are still unsatisfied by material possessions. And they often let the important things around them fall apart because they are too singularly focused.
Irrational Tweet From a Rich Man
A couple years ago a somewhat well known VC wanted to invest in us, but we had a bad gut feeling right from the get go.
Fast forward to December of 2009 and the guy who did that was Tweeting about a hate site he made for his wife, who he is now going through the divorce process with. Not once, but something crazy like a half dozen times. And in between these Tweets he is Tweeting...
- asking if anyone knows a bulldog divorce lawyer
- about his new self published book which contains the word Peace in its title
- how he needs some new executives for some projects
Who is the desired audience there? I mean after a person knows you will put up a hate site for your own wife, that you would be the type to sick bulldog lawyers on them, and that while you are doing so you are talking about Peace and are trying to recruit business partners ***in the same channel***
Crazy irrational.
But that is what happens when people are emotionally charged and lack balance.
Greed is justified by more greed and nothing else matters.
But what is the end goal?
You can't take money to your grave*
*Even the king of pop's gold plated casket only cost $25,000.
The Caustic Effects of Get Rich Quick Marketers
Ryan Healy recently pulled back the curtains on many internet marketing gurus, the lawsuits amongst them, and the general damage they inflict onto the market. Fake retirements used to cloak legal restraining orders against certain business practices, not paying affiliates, credit cards shutting down payment processors, etc etc etc.
The people who sell the image of the perfect lifestyle to suckers are the exact same people doing business deals with "partners" in the court room and going through divorce...something so scary sounding that I couldn't imagine it.
If you are already drowning in cash, but can't be honest with yourself and your loved ones, then why the need for a few more Dollars? What will they buy? Some hookers and a few STDs?
The Big Banks Are Just as Bad
This sort of crap happens at all levels though. It is so ingrained that many people just assume that if you make a lot of money you must be criminal or doing something morally reprehensible.
And from an affiliate perspective, when you look at the market segments that pay the most it is often the seediest ones (or the ones that are propped up by systemic fraud). A few years ago the mortgage market would pay a lot for leads because that is where the systemic fraud was.
Exhibit A:
2004, CNN.com - FBI warns of mortgage fraud 'epidemic'
Exhibit B:
Imagine if you had key market insights and could trade on unreleased government information. A guaranteed source of easy profit exploited by some (especially when those people in government used to work for your company). And yet it is not enough. They need to steal more. There is a sickness in society that stems from our broken model of capitalism & materialism...where the central bankers flat out lie/cheat/steal to make even more money.
Despite the housing bust and financial crisis, very many of the people whose poor choices generated the housing bubble would make the same choices over again if circumstances repeat. Many industry participants, even those whose firms eventually went bust, were very well remunerated for their poor practices and, whatever their regrets, they kept the money. No one wants to create a catastrophe. But financial professionals want to remain free to make money in the ways that they know, and those are not good ways.
In July of 2007 former Citi CEO Charles Prince said, "As long as the music is playing, you’ve got to get up and dance. We’re still dancing."
And now that those people crashed the economy, the opportunity is to sell get rich quick at home doing nothing in your underwear overnight guaranteed. And there is money to be made in helping you fix your credit (since the above mentioned criminal elite class got a free pass while stealing your money and devaluing your savings while robbing the country blind).
Time vs Character
In an environment where such bubbles are core to the economy there is a lot of uncertainty. What is the best strategy? Who should I trust?
One of the best strategies I have found is simply time. Give a shady person enough time and they will reveal their character (divorcing their wife over money, etc). Granted I haven't always been perfect (and especially not when I was in the military), but you can't find many (any?) blog posts about me ripping someone off. Likewise with the people I look up to. Where is it shown that Seth Godin or Eric Janszen or Danny Sullivan took someone for a ride? Nowhere. In spite of a a decade+ of experience.
Every day there is an opportunity to max short term revenues or long term staying power. Each choice and each interaction is somewhere on a continuum. Focus too much on short term revenues and a lot of the things that set you apart disappear.
One of the things Google does with their relevancy algorithms is to trust older and more established websites. You can fake a lot of things, but it is a bit harder (or more expensive) to fake age. And age is what sets apart a lot of the legitimate businesses from the above listed "entrepreneurs" who only need time to reveal their character.
Business vs Base Jumping?
Starting a business is a lot like more like base jumping than it is just following a hope map. Most the stuff you do won't work, but you only need to stay in one piece until you safely reach the ground. Sure you must have hope to get through the bad patches, but you also are forced to constantly improve to keep up with the market. Which is why a site called SEOBook.com sells an SEO training program (rather than an ebook) in 2010. ;)
Here is one of the secrets in plain sight that the opportunistic types rarely show you.
That was the growth of search volume last year. STILL over 20%!
Years ago my mentor told me that SEO is a marathon, not a sprint.
In the longrun thin won't win, but (so long as you care) you can start off bad on low volume and get somewhere pretty quick when your field is growing at a 20%+ rate. And if you are new to the field you should be able to grow faster than the market because many business inputs have multiplier effects. You increase your growth geometrically as you
- learn to optimize your traffic flow
- increase your knowledge
- increase the value of your knowledge
- refine your strategy
- refine your product or service
- improve your conversion rates
Slow and steady isn't sexy. And it doesn't sell well.
But it works. :)
A further benefit to slow incremental growth is that as you grow your tribe and focus on their needs your customers become salesmen...helping attract more people just like them. And these are people who are pre-sold on what you have to offer, and why it is valuable. To a jaded audience testimonials from friends are far more valuable than sales copy. And almost everyone gets screwed into buying junk at least once before they find you.
Sales copy will likely push the quick returns no matter what (because that is what people want), but pay special attention to if someone is trying to use an aura of mystique on a brand new discovery as a marketing angle, while having little history. If they don't have much history the odds of buying a bag of smoke are much greater.
And if the recommendation comes with a big loud launch sequence then the chance of it being crap are even greater. And even if it starts out pure, the aim to "optimize" revenues at any cost often causes many partnerships to dissolve. Starting off slow and steady keeps things balanced and prepares you for growth.
Why Heavily Hyped Launches Are Often a Bad Idea
Wealth that comes quickly and easily often disappears the same way. Everyone has their hands in the cookie jar of success until the cookies are all gone.
When you are new to a market there are so many things to learn, refine and improve. Typically customers driven by hype are the most demanding (because an affiliate often oversells the product to get the commission) and the least qualified to succeed (since they want to rule the world in a day). The customers sold on a whole lot of hype and a whole lot of hope are basically set up to fail, trying to go too far too fast. They tend to buy on impulse, lack follow through, have a far higher rate of churn, a far higher rate of refund requests, and a far higher rate of chargebacks.
Further, every piece of a business can be optimized - from choosing who you want your customer to be, to who you don't want it to be, to what types of interactions to build, to what prices to charge, to balancing time spent on servicing customers vs growth, etc etc etc ... right on through to managing your personal load and fixing programming bugs (when we first launched our membership site the programmer made it such that if a person canceled they couldn't rejoin (even if the cancelation was due to an expired or stolen credit card))! But if you keep accepting feedback and incrementally improving you prepare yourself for heavy load by the time you build it.
Whereas a pull the cord and hope this works approach with lots of hype will almost always lead to disappointment and frustration. You probably want to test the equipment before jumping off the mountain :D
Even if the claims about non-payment in this lawsuit are NOT correct, it doesn't make a business look professional if they have publicly accessible lawsuits claiming that the fulfillment partner of choice is incompetent.
Long after the launches details leak out and experiences are shared. And that is what builds your reputation...good or bad. The slow and steady growth model offers time to fix errors and refine strategy. The launch and hope model doesn't.
Comments
Was lucky enough to catch this before bed - insightful and meaningful posts are hard to come by. Really sounds like this one is from the heart.
Aaron,
You really must have a ton of (difficult) business experience to bring such a broad perspective to this issue. You are very correct in your points about the hazards of listening to sales people. I'd like to add that you should be especially careful when doing business with a company where the CEO is a sales person. In my experience this usually taints the entire company.
However, I get the feeling that lots of today's business gurus like the 4 hour work week guy also fall into these categories. Some of these people get Oprah's blessings and the acclaim of business leaders etc and it's almost impossible to know who to trust.
And even though there are honest people out there, sometimes their business associates are less than scrupulous so it seems that you can't even rely on a known 'good' person.
Sounds a lot like the Wild West. How have you survived this long without scars?
I don't think my business experience is difficult (relative to what a lot of people do)...I just think that I tend to work longer than most people. Also I was not as sales and cash focused as some people, and that in the short run that didn't win as a revenue maximization strategy but it does lend staying power.
Incidentally I wrote about our business path thusfar on this site, because our site was used as a case study at a digital book fair
As always Aaron your post is honest. I am a bit embarrassed to say that I own "Your Infinite Power to be Rich", "The Secret","Think and Grow Rich" and maybe 30+ books with variations of the same vomit. The funny thing is I believed almost like gospel and guess what I was none the richer.
One day a client recommended I read a book by an obscure author Aaron Wall. This little ebook "SEO Book" started me thinking. It also started me changing what I read and I can say with all honesty that there is an absolute correlation in reading materials and income.
I now read about traffic patterns, keywords, trends, SEO, SEM and on and on and my income is slowly increasing. Maybe it's because I am not being suckered out of $15 bucks for snake oil and an extra 20 minutes in the bathroom. Instead I spend $9 on a URL and 10 hours online.
I have to admit I still have the urge to sit at the computer and visualize top rankings in Google for all my sites, but have I learned anything?
Back in the first quarter of 2004 I only made like $900 or so in the whole quarter. My income kept growing at a decent clip and I was doing pretty well, but it took my wife teaching me to value my time to really make it zoom. :)
You can always push harder on whatever is working. Part of the approach I take is not to assume I have all the answers, but to use an iterative strategy.
If something isn't working cut the losses. If something is working well then keep re-investing and growing it. Over time if you put in enough effort and provide enough value and do enough networking then eventually the results should show. (Though picking the right markets certainly helps as well)!
But I start off with small goals...get a site up, and then get it a few links, then get in the game and try to get close to page 1, get on the first page, get up to a top 5 ranking, etc. ... I don't just go "oh I want to rank #1 for keyword x"
"Instead I spend $9 on a URL and 10 hours online."
This is the part so many people miss - I applaud you for cutting thru the BS, and getting the point. You win.
I used to wonder who bought into all this stuff, but have had run-ins lately that show me thick people are everywhere, and can turn up in the oddest of places.
It's nothing new though - I was dying while watching the parking space visualization in that video clip, because in the 70s, some shyster was selling this same crap to my hippy parents - see the parking space, and it'll be there waiting. My parents wanted so much to believe in it too, they had a hard time letting reality balance the scale. And that's the hook - they, like everyone, wanted to believe that life is easy. They want to believe that everyone has the same chances in life. But it simply isn't true. My parents got there as hippies coming from a place of everyone being equal, where today, I see people arriving at this because they feel they should be equal to the millionaires and celebrities they read about. It is a weird sort of anger at other people's success I see today - like people are angry that other people do well and have focus.
But it ain't easy...a good life is never easy, and all is not equal out there in the land of chances. So you make your commitment, you become the change you want to see in the future.
Then you work, tirelessly, to achieve that goal.
If you don't get that, you need to believe in secrets and dreams because obviously reality does not hold enough punch.
As always, thanks for the good read sir.
That your summary of the fate of StomperNet makes me smile? I respect one or two people who were associated with them, but their emails and video pitches used to make the hairs on my next stand up.
On the other hand, Martypants, don't knock visualizing parking spaces. Everyone needs a personal parking space deity.
I knew Brad and Andy before the SN stuff took off (and even did some link building stuff for them way back when) and they seemed like they cared a lot about the success of their customers way back then. And I even stated that their first CD product was pretty good...because at the time it was.
But I think when you get into doing launches you (typically) attract the wrong kinds of customers (feeble-minded, easily distracted, desperate, weak on follow through, etc.) AND you put way too much load on yourself all at once (because x hundred or x thousand people sign up all at once).
Due to the heavy all-at-once customer load and the *type* of customer that hyped up launches attract, even if you care, it is next to impossible to deliver a remarkable experience of great value.
As far as delivering a great service (service, not product) the whole model of launches basically makes it near impossible to deliver on. How do I know this? Well when I was going to increase our price from $100 to $150 per month I sent out a message to our list letting them know. And I got bombarded with 100+ new customers in a day and I simply found it so hard to keep up that I was getting burned out beyond belief.
That is why I had to close to new members for about 3 months...just so I could let the load lighten back up a bit. And of course, this was only from 1 soft sell email to our own list back when it was half of its current size. If I was doing a long sequence of emails AND had a bunch of affiliates hyping me to the moon *for a limited time only* launch date with secret once in a lifetime bonuses the problem would have been 50x or 100x as extreme.
I also found the price sensitive people who joined from that email tended not to have as long of a stay type as our typical customers do. So given the higher churn rate the stress was even harder to justify. And, once again, it would have been far more extreme if it was driven by a bunch of joint venture / affiliate hype.
And to some degree I also noticed the above effect when we were testing using a pop up for a while. It is hard to put your finger on what is happening or why it is happening if you just look at the numbers...but if you personally provide direct 1:1 customer service to all your customers you can *feel* the not-so-subtle differences changes in strategy can have on building your community. What first looks like success (in the numbers) can turn out to be a resounding failure.
If you are selling a product (or if your site is monetized via ads) then absolutely hype can work wonders (though expect a fairly high return rate on the products for sale).
But if you are selling a service it just doesn't work very well to do heavily hyped launches. The lawsuits associated with StomperNet that came out after the fact (partner vs partner, husband vs wife, company vs fulfillment house) certainly attest to that!
Nobody wants to use the courts as a primary business tool on "partners" because it is expensive while you are doing it AND it looks bad after the fact.
This post gave me hope. I'm just a newbie in internet marketing. I've been exposed to a lot of hype. I find this post truthful and sincere. Thanks for sharing this. I'll just ignore all the "buy me now" stuff from now on.
Nothing wrong with paying for access to good information...it is just that most information products *which are actually worth buying* are available both today and tomorrow. So if you see something that is *buy now or forever lose out* and it is promoted on a bunch of email lists...well the odds of it being broken (due to the format and pitch strategy) are quite high.
I have bought some "launch" stuff before...but it takes a lot of discipline to go through it, and one of the big problems is that if you buy once you just get pounded with more and more and more launch emails. It is a circuit or a racket or whatever you want to call it...but the good stuff typically tends to be available *outside* of launch events.
Scarcity and pricing discount benefits are powerful motivators and we may use them from time to time as well...but there is a difference between legitimate market scarcity and a sequence of launch events with slightly modified hyped up products pitched each time.
The tip about following someone for a long time...or checking back through what they have done over the years...is I think somewhat critical. Yes some new people will have some great ideas...but if you see hyped up emails mentioning someone who you have only seen in hyped up emails that isn't good.
Had no intention of paying anyone for anything.
But I noticed I kept digging deeper thru the stuff I was learning here - this approach was really closely aligned to how my own mind worked. So I bit the bullet, and started paying in late 08...and I will continue paying gladly.
What changed me was not a call to action, or testimonial or anything beyond my ability to kind of dip my toes in first (on the blog, and in a couple emails) and the direct response you offered Aaron, mattered. Never once have you EVER promised me anything. So I keep coming back.
I still freetard all the other places I used to, and only some have occasionally come close to earning me as a paying customer. But I cancelled my other memberships - they weren'y paying for themselves.
In today's market, you have to earn your customers - and filling their head full of shit is not going to earn them for the long haul.
I knew Fallon before he optimized anything - when I was a freelance copywriting, he tried to shaft me into a weekly pay deal where I was producing tons of finished product every week for a flat fee. We lasted one week. I was glad to be rid of him then - it was a year or two before he got married and jumped on Jennifer's bandwagon.
I have another good story about him, but enough. Fact is, I am sure many people got something out of it...but when I saw him go from legal guy trying to make web advertising pop-up windows take off to internet super-genius who made millions and tours everywhere showering brilliance, I was pretty impressed by the hype in the two years since I saw him last. Go Brad, go. He made his bed. I have been waiting for the curtain call on that rags-to-riches story.
Come to think of it, he is one of very few customers I ever did not click with - go figure.
(and that salty droid link below showed me that Brad has been much naughterier than I ever thought! Hope it hurts him as he gets reamed.)
Great post Aaron, I love to read your 'rants' as some call them. I call it the truth.
This post made me think of the Salty Droid.
http://saltydroid.info/
This guy's blog is a riot and he really blows the doors off these get rich quick clowns.
This is a great post for just about anyone involved in (online) marketing, thanks Aaron!
I always resolve to the same old saying that's been standing for ages..
'if something is too good to be true.. it is'
Unfortunately this is the case for about 90% of all the products that are being hyped by online.
I'm becoming very fond of these blog posts that rip into the the scumbag web marketing out there. What you say is true.
I do the same thing. As much as I try to stay on topic on my blog, I often gravitate to telling the truth about the scammer mentality out there.
I often ram the hype marketing back in these guys faces.
So if the salesletter is excellent (which it usually is) but the product doesn't live up to the insane hype (which it usually doesn't) then I ask for my money back and tell them exactly why.
The tricky part with that is some launch type products don't actually provide any customer service, hoping that if they make it seem hard to get your money back that lots of people will give up.
I know this for certain because products other people sell lead to me getting hate emails asking for refunds. The people are finding it so difficult to get their money back from persons x and y that they are coming to z begging for a refund!
"Slow and steady isn't sexy. And it doesn't sell well. "
One of my favorite quotes (and I dont really have many favorite quotes :P) is by warren buffet saying
"there seems to be some perverse human characteristic that likes to make easy things difficult."
And it's so true..the need for something "sexy" or call it "fancy" seems to be hard-wired into human brains.
typical seo forum post: "yeah, yeah..keyword researhc, link building all of that is nice. But I need to learn advanced SEO - 301 redirects, LSI, etc. etc."
No wonder slow and steady / the basics dont sell well, with people naturally(?) believing that something needs to be overly fancy to be good.
I had a lot of respect for StomperNet and always assumed their content was top notch but it was weird when Jerry West, Leslie Rohde, Dan Theis, and Andy Jenkins left.
I appreciate the differentiation you make between launching a product and launching a service. I've done software development and SEO for clients for a while and have learned that managing clients is hard. Managing expectations is probably the biggest challenge. The avalanche of business that a hyped-up launch can bring is a actually curse.
Anyway, I'm a part of Dan Theis and Leslie Rohde's new seo training program and I have tons of good things to say about them.
Still, I admire the SEOBook community from afar.
Raza
I wouldn't hesitate to recommend stuff that guys like Dan Thies and Leslie Rohde put out...both know their stuff, work hard, and care about the success of their customers.
I was only stating why I thought the hyped up affiliate driven launch business model was a bad one. If you ask Dan I bet he will tell you the same thing...that he would prefer to have a constant stream of relevant promotion rather than bursts of it. The only upsides to bursts is that you get a lot of people starting at the same point (which makes it easier to teach fixed courses from A to Z), but it means one month you are dealing with x people and toward the end maybe only 1/5x (or something like that).
Also one other thing I forgot to mention in the above post which is non-trivial...even if you manage to get over all the hurdles associated with the launch model (more demand than you can handle followed by high churn, affiliates who promise the moon, etc etc etc), there is still one major flaw which makes the model ugly. When the hucksters promote your product or service you end up owing them a favor. And that means you have to promote their product or service (even if they have a track record of poor customer service & a general lack of concern for the success of their customers).
The one thing I like about this blog is that you're raw and it sometimes gets uncomfortable when I read your posts. To say you're brutally honest is probably an understatement.
Still, I keep coming back to this blog because no matter what, you're honest and you speak straight. I don't many "seo tips", but I get plenty of food for thought. And I appreciate it.
Raza
Honestly Aaron, I had a big issue, being stuck in between the Frank Kern's and the Brian Clark's, the WarriorForum's and the Authority Blogger Forum, the SEOBook and the StomperNet. And that's why the 3rd Tribe is so appealing to me. Both camps have a lot of value and its tough to choose which one to be a part of so I'm grateful to Brian and Sonia for creating the 3rd Tribe so we don't have to choose sides.
Funny enough, they all have the same mentors: Dan Kennedy, Bill Glazer, Ken McCarthy, and John Carlton. It's kind of funny how their students ended up on two different sides of the IM world.
One guy who IS the real deal (and possibly an entire tribe unto himself) is Perry Marshall. I've been on his email list for 4 years and probably will be for life. Every one of his emails, every one, is an amazing read. I have most of them saved and starred in my Gmail account. What's funny is that I don't see him cross-promoting most of the stuff I see in the IM world. He isn't promoting any of Kern, Amish Shah, StomperNet, Jeff Walker, etc stuff, even though he could (and make a killing).
Additionally, he's pretty rooted in religion and (as far as I can tell) has a strong moral compass. I would see him as a part of Brian Clark's tribe, but he's conspicuously absent from there as well.
Anyway, you've been writing a lot of insightful posts recently. I'm not sure I agree with everything, but I DO appreciate it.
Raza
I generally prefer substance over hype, but indeed both do work :D
I was fortunate enough to join an SEO company and learn internet marketing while working in the company. I neither had the money nor the need/intention to buy any ebook on "getting rich" or "make money online".
7 years later...
I have my own business online and doing well ;-) ... However I was trapped by an Ad, and you know what, ended up buying a "online marketing ebook". Later I realized what a fool I was reading the same stuff I already knew. Luckily it cost me $29 only and I don’t regret it anymore.
Hope (you are damn right) is THE single most lucrative thing to sell.
Point is... when a well educated and experienced man like me got trapped, then see how easy its for a lay man to get trapped. Therefore these things sell, and probably will keep selling till there is HOPE!
Aaron,
My Dear Lord, I laughed at that video so hard I had a visualization that I peed my pantaloons! Actually, I laughed just as hard at the actual footage of the video as I did the two characters commenting on it.
ROFL!!!!
This is the same type of crap companies like Shamway make you listen to in order to sell their "opportunity". As a matter of fact, it is all hypnosis designed to keep your brain in a sedated fantasy state so they can sell you the next stupid thing or idea.
Kinda like politics.
No matter what business you are into, you have to really put your back into it and deliver the highest quality possible. That's what I love about this site it has become a valid, reliable source of information for me. Obviously, you have taken great care and time in writing these articles and conducting the research that you do.
During the Gold rush of 1849 in America, we had thousands of people leave the security of the East coast and risk their lives to find gold in the west. Many, many people died in their quest to get there and find their fortunes in the nuggets that they believed to be there. However, most of the people that made the real money from the gold rush
were the people that sold the tools, supplies and DREAMS. They sold plans, guides and a host of other products fueled by the chances of quick money.
I believe in the future, people on the Internet will catch on to the snake oil salesmen and selling the DREAM will become incrementally harder for them to sell without a track record of proven results.
Awesome article as always!
God Bless,
Mark "ELMO" Ellis
The only place in the world where success comes before work is in the dictionary. ---Thomas Edison
I would like to hope and think you are right Mark. But there is also the situation where as competition becomes more fierce it will be easy for people to find negative comments about anyone, even the legit people. (For instance, Traffic Power tried to run me out of business with a bogus lawsuit AND defame me on dozens of fake web forums they created.)
I think sell a dream business models will last for at least another thousand years, because they exploit some of the very concepts that capitalism exploit and schools sell to us.
Add new comment