Staying the Course

Where are those rose colored glasses when you need them the most?

Mark this day as the moment in history when Laura was officially let down by one of her favorite gurus. It’s not his fault, he’s just doing his job after all…

Regular readers will wonder if Joe Vitale let me down. Be still, it wasn’t Joe. Joe remains a gentleman always who gives good value for the product offering and isn’t out to rob people of their hard earned money…

Old-timers online with sharper minds would have seen this coming.

One marketer, who I secretly adored and followed for many years, has been whipping his list into a frenzy this past month over an upcoming, closed door, secret-session (at over $8k per pop) had me looking at every piece of jewelry I own, every unnecessary vehicle parked in the driveway, (dare I say it even my horses!), wondering how I could come up with that ‘extra’ this month to afford the training…

That is, until I watched the ‘amazing’ video…

The video was actually released a few months ago but I still had the rose colored glasses on so I didn’t notice the discrepancies. This time I watched carefully as this ‘new-to-the-internet, just-learned-this-secret-trick, made-$6k-my-first-month, long lost cousin’ revealed his payment screenshots.

They were impressive.

$89 sales by the handful in just a few weeks of learning this new technique.

Imagine what a half-experienced marketer could rake in…

But when your eyes aren’t so glossed over by all those extra $x,000 in sales, and you start to look closely, you notice a number of “RFND” by the handfuls in the screenshots as well. It all goes so fast that I couldn’t count them, but at a quick glance it sure looks like at least 1/3 of those sales were refunded!

I don’t know about you, but I don’t want to sell my horse to learn to run a business where 20-30% of my customers are dissatisfied…

And there’s no mistaking that this ‘guru’ (with his list of thousands) knows precisely what a RFND is in a clickbank screenshot and couldn’t possibly have missed it in the video.

Do the gurus think we’re all a bunch of slathering morons?

Does one of my favorite mentors of all time live by the addage that it’s okay if a ‘fool and his money are soon parted’ – as long as it’s his pocket the money comes to when it leaves the fool?

“It’s not often you’ll see me go ‘off’ like this. It’s true I need a vacation and tomorrow we leave for Florida.”

I’m just so let down right now that I can think of nothing other than to remind my readers to be extra careful whom they follow and where they spend their hard earned money.

By no means am I saying that my advice and recommendations are sound either…

Usually they are. More often than not I’ve fully investigated and reviewed an item before I promote it. When I haven’t tested fully I am careful to disclose that information. And, if the product is ’sketchy’ but has seen good results, I’ll tell you that too. (Hey, sometimes I get caught up in the hype just like you.)

One last note to you before I head off to the sunny south with family and these extra kids…

While I’ve been assessing my own desire to follow success I’ve had a few other realizations…

Most of the ‘famous’ search engine experts are no longer in the business of driving traffic, getting higher ranks, or lauching new and successful websites. Sure, that’s what they teach, but that’s not what they work at. They’re working at self-promotion, marketing, capitalizing on the success of last year’s hard work. And that’s what they’re passing on to us. Techniques that worked last year.

So how do you find someone you can trust?

Someone to go to for advice? Someone to believe in this business?

You go to the trenches.

Find someone who is consisitently working at traffic and optimization and not at self-promotion and marketing.

Someone who is launching new sites and testing on a consistent and continual basis.

Why? Because in the search engine game what worked last year to put a site to the top isn’t going to work as well this year.

If someone’s asking for your money, ask for current results. Look at all the angles (site registration date, unique visitors – not just hits, conversions, etc.) Get down to the meat of it – the hard facts.

Remember this isn’t just about your money, it’s also about your time spent employing year-old techniques.

I’ll point these people out from time to time, and I welcome your referrals.

Let’s start getting real here.

More collaboration, more truth, less robbery.

I’ve been saying this from the start and somehow we all get sidetracked from time to time: “We’re here to help each other.”

You know, I spend at least an hour per day in email answering people’s questions about marketing and promotion. From now on, I’m going to start posting the best of them here so that all of us can grow with each other. I assure you that confidentiality will be upheld.

Finally I want to introduce you to Matt Cutts. (see Matt Cutts)

Never heard of him? Of course you haven’t because he’s not working to take your money and promise you the world. He’s working at explaining SEO (as it relates to Google). Oddly enough, even though his name isn’t touted in the highest circles, he enjoys a page rank of 7 on his home page and gets an average 70 comments per blog post.

There’s too much content for the average website owner so don’t get distracted by the depth and size of the site. Use the search button to find answers to your google questions…but most importantly spend some time reading about BigDaddy.

BigDaddy – It’s the upcoming face of the new Google.

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This entry was posted on Thursday, February 9th, 2006 at 3:19 pm and is filed under Marketing Mentors, Website Traffic. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed.