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Why The Whole Lazy Guru Thing Just Doesn't Do It For Me |
By:
Colin Preston |
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Lazy gurus; is it just me or is there a sudden rush of marketers who say that they're totally idle, useless, wastes of space who expect you to fall over yourselves to hand over hard-earned money for their latest offerings? Has internet marketing really reduced itself to the level of trying to fool people that only the idle shall survive?
A case in point from just this last week. A guy who I've actually got a lot of time for sent out one of the usual pieces of breathless guru spam about his latest offering. At the very top of the sales letter was the most-used picture of him with his smiling wife and child. Right alongside that was a description of how he was so "shockingly lazy" that he had played a character in a video game for over 104 days in the last few years! I must admit to my jaw dropping somewhat as I was putting the elements together in my mind - lovely wife and child; vast part of life spent playing mindless video game. And this was a sales letter!
I'm obviously too simple a soul because I just couldn't work it out. What was I being told here? Make enough money and your wife won't mind being ignored? Playing video games for days on end makes you a good marketer? Trust me because I'm an idle geek? I was confused.
Which seems to be the case with too much internet marketing related output nowadays. Slap it up and get it out because the IM junkies will bite. They always do.
In fact, internet marketing junkies must be the easiest market to sell to in the world. Which comes as a real shock to most when they then have to go and sell to real people in real markets, because that's actually hard work, like a j-o-b, and the lazy guru approach just doesn't cut it I'm afraid. I've made hundreds of thousands of dollars on the internet over the years so I think I have some kind of a real take on what's needed and the lazy guru thing is just a load of hogwash, at least if you're trying to build a business that will last.
To take one example of how facts are twisted to make you buy, one of the phrases often used in marketing to the innocent and unaware is "passive income for ever". Give me a break. Most subscriptions last four to six months at best, particularly if you're not regularly putting up new stuff. Four to six months is not "for ever", it's for four to six months. That's it.
Then there's Adsense, the lazy gurus' mantra. Please, please, someone stop this nonsense. I have a sizeable number of Adsense funded sites out there and the best performer is one on mortgages. The rest just don't justify the time I spent on them, or at least the time that Google would like me to spend on them. Slapping up Adsense sites only becomes worthwhile when you just, literally, slap them up. In fact, with Adsense, ugly is good. Ugly works, because all the visitor wants to do is click away. Don't waste time making pretty Adsense sites.
Now, affiliate marketing is a whole different ball game. Here it's definitely worth putting in the effort because you can make some serious money from a good presentation. The best affiliate marketing involves you in making the product your own and treating it and writing about it as if you did own it. Decades ago I became the top selling technical rep for a very, very large chemical company because customers always came to ME first when they wanted to order or know something about one of our products. I was always their first port of call; in fact I WAS the company to them, and that should be you with your chosen range of affiliate products.
If we're talking serious money though, you have to follow the words of the decidedly unlazy and very intelligent marketer, Marlon Sanders. He's long said that to make the big money you have to have your own product and he's right. I can absolutely back up what he says because over 90% of my online income has come from sales of my own products. And that takes some work I'm afraid. That is, unless you want to put it up on elance but please, don't get me started on that...
To enter the poll on lazy gurus, or read our take on John Reese's BlogRush, try guru Click here for other unique 'guru' articles.
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Article Source: http://www.statssheet.com/articles/article55981.html |
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