Lies, Statistics, And Other Myths About Internet Marketing

An old saying goes: “There are lies, damned lies, and then there are statistics” which, summed up, pretty much means sellers can turn any set of figures to their advantage and have people rushing to buy whatever they are promoting.

So you’ll have marketers tell you they surveyed people who’d tested their product and discovered 100 per cent of people consider the product the best they’ve ever bought. Only the seller doesn’t tell you they surveyed just a handful of people, all family and friends!

There’s no doubt about it, millions of sellers will distort the truth, exaggerate, tell downright lies, say anything at all as long as it gets you to buy their product.

When inaccuracies are bandied about by well-intentioned and otherwise credible individuals, they become generally accepted truths. But they are not truths, they’re myths, and myths are among the most dangerous of all marketing ploys.

Many myths are passed on, sometimes innocently, by well known Internet gurus, people who really ought to know better or else who don’t care how their actions affect other people.

Let me explain further with two very common myths: ‘The Money’s in the List’ and ‘You can Do Anything You Like with Public Domain and PLR Products’.

Let’s dig deeper:

MYTH #1: THE MONEY’S IN THE LIST

Actually the money really is in the list, though not in the list per se, but rather in how you manage and use that list. With exceptions, mentioned later, immense fortunes can be made by people having responsive mailing lists of potential buyers for their products.

There’s nothing difficult about growing a list, even a huge list of potential buyers, anyone can do it, without experience or capital investment. You can do it writing articles, for example, or placing classified ads, you can do it by posting comments in forums or sending compliments slips with products ordered on eBay which invite people to join your mailing list.

But if you abuse the list, by promoting poor quality products or ‘pyramid’ type schemes, you’re looking for trouble, especially if PayPal is your main merchant service provider.

In fact it’s PayPal where some of your biggest problems lie because it’s by no means uncommon to find a person’s account suspended simply because they’ve copied the big boys and broken the rules. One such case is the excellent $7 Script products, which usually mean once you buy the product you are allowed to promote it and earn 100% commissions into your PayPal account. I’ve promoted those items successfully myself, several times, but little did I realise how close I was to losing my PayPal account.

Worked properly, PayPal likes those $7 reports just as much as you and your customers, but what most people don’t know, myself included until a friend told me his account had been suspended, is that 100% commission promise, mentioned in the sales letter, is viewed by PayPal as a pyramid scheme.

One main sign of a pyramid scheme is having no real product to promote! A friend told me his account was suspended because the eBook he promoted was viewed by PayPal as ‘not a substantial product’ and as such the promise of making money from the product must not be included in a sales letter. Cut the resell profits promise, he was told, and the sales letter should be okay. No, I don’t agree that eBooks are not substantial products, but I wholeheartedly believe that ‘beggars can’t be choosers’ so what PayPal says is fine by me.

These are other reasons why the money might not always be in the list:

* You can lose profits by constantly bombarding your list with sales letters. It works for some people; it also works incredibly well if you don’t mind having your email delivery program closed for spamming your contacts; it works extremely well if you don’t mind watching your list deplete quickly as people grow sick of constant messages about ‘the best product on earth’, ‘get rich quick tonight’, ‘the Number One product’, and so on.

About the only time the money really is in the list is where you add quality content alongside marketing promotions in the traditional sales funnel process. So rather than sending promotional emails every few days, try sending one sales letter a week, on a Saturday perhaps, then on Tuesday send a free gift, on Thursday invite members of your list to view a new article at your site, on Friday tell them tomorrow you have something very special planned just for them. Your sales letter no less.

MYTH #2: YOU CAN DO WHATEVER YOU LIKE WITH PUBLIC DOMAIN AND PLR PRODUCTS

Most people have a good understanding of the Public Domain as, generally, creative works which have no legal owner and are not copyright protected, and as such they are available for anyone to copy or edit, add their own name as author or editor, and give away or sell for a profit. Private Label Rights items are not quite so easy for most people to define.

Private Label Rights items are generally eBooks and reports that you can use in any way you like, add your name as author, turn the text into an eBook, or an audio program, and so on. They bear close resemblance to public domain works and much of the time the only discernible difference is that public domain items are usually older than private label rights and may once have held copyright protection. Many public domain items are strictly physical products. As such they may have to be rescanned or retyped from their original hard copy with sometimes out-of-date language and facts updated for modern day users. Most private label rights are newly created and rarely if ever have copyright protection. They often come as basic ‘Word’ text which you open on your computer screen, add your name as author, create a new title, save it to pdf, and minutes later you’re off on your journey towards a multi-million pound business based on one book alone. I Wish!

These are the reasons you’ll be told that PLR (and Public Domain) products are the answer to every marketer’s dream:

(i) You can turn them into eBooks, literally in minutes, and begin selling them right away.

(ii) You can use them as content on your site and force lots of lovely search engine traffic to your site to buy your products.

(iii) You can use them as articles and get thousands of webmasters to publish your articles on their sites and create many thousands or millions of backlinks to your web site.

(i) and (ii) are essentially true, you can very quickly create eBooks and web site content from Public Domain and Private Label Rights items, but so can every man and his dog. And people generally being lazy you’ll usually find every man and his dog will use those products completely unchanged, on their web sites, in books, in articles, which will result in several major problems.

Firstly, because so many web sites contain similar content, many search engines, especially Google, will consider similar works less valuable than ‘genuine’ first hand researched content, and may remove duplicate content sites from search returns.

Secondly, products derived from Public Domain and PLR items usually contain the exact same text as the originals. Very few marketers make changes, they want to make money fast, they don’t want to waste time making their products stand out from the crowd. Which means regular buyers of specific information product types will be more than a little upset to find those ten books they bought this week, all with different titles, all with different authors, are 100% identical inside their digital covers.

As to sub-myth (iii) ‘you can use them (Public Domain and PLR texts) as articles and get thousands of webmasters to publish your articles on their sites and create many thousands of backlinks to your web site’. Are you kidding?

The theory is you can spend a day, probably less, chopping a 100,000 PLR (or Public Domain) text into 200 or more articles, add your resource box, upload them to article directories and generate potentially millions of backlinks to your web site.

But they’re forgetting the fact that using articles created substantially from PLR and Public Domain products is against the rules of many top article directories, including industry leader Ezine Articles.

At Ezine Articles, not only are you prohibited from offering articles cobbled from PLR items and public domain products, you are also not even allowed to write unique articles promoting the benefits of using PLR items (and public domain also where you promote benefits of using the original text unchanged).

That said, PLR and Public Domain items really do have many major benefits, especially used:

* As free giveaways to attract people to join your mailing list.

* As free giveaways or low price eBooks aimed at generating sales of affiliate products mentioned inside those eBooks.

* As part of a compendium of similar or unrelated products where the chance is millions to one that any one person’s compilation will exactly resemble someone else’s compilation. Imagine, for example, that 100 public domain or PLR articles are released on the subject of Boston Terriers. Let’s say two or three or more people, including myself, are writing about Boston Terriers and we each have 100 public domain or PLR texts to choose from. We each want five books in our Boston Terrier compendium. Statistically there is one in 100 chances that a rival will choose the exact same first item that I choose from the 100 items at my disposal. Having chosen that first item, we each have 99 items left to choose from, which gives one in 99 chances of my rival and myself choosing the exact same title. There is one chance in 98 that we’ll choose the same title as our third component. And so it continues.

Long story cut short, let’s work out the statistical probability of any other person choosing the exact same five products in the same sequence as myself from one hundred roughly equal quality products from the Public Domain or PLR rights. The figure is: 100 x 99 x 98 x 97 x 96 = close to one billion chances my package will ever coincide with another person’s choice. Good enough for me!