Web 2.0 Marketing – The Age of Authenticity
They’re coming out of the woodwork now.
People who want their own online business – whether for pocket change or to change their lives – and they’re buying up all the old $5 master rights ebooks on eBay. The ones that teach how to run an online business in your underwear and make a million dollars this year.
Five to ten a week. That’s how many end up on my virtual door, and make a personal contact with me via phone, or email, or both.
Now this isn’t a problem for me. There’s a reason why I put contact forms and publish email addresses, leave my home phone number in plain view on most of my websites, and tell my subscribers (in 40% of my emails) to write back if they have any questions…it’s a pleasure to give back to the world which has blessed me so much by helping another on their journey into internet business.
Actually, it’s more than a pleasure – it’s a virtual blessing.
But there’s something a little wrong with some of the wanna be entrepreneurs landing on my doorstep this month. More wrong than just believing the lie that a million can be made overnight. More wrong than thinking a $5 ebook written 5 years ago is going to teach the strategy that is required to make a business flourish today.
Let me give you an example.
Last month a pleasant gentleman from Hawaii called. (He’s actually spent more than his rent money a few months over on outdated materials.) He’d learned how to get traffic, he’d learned about squeeze pages, and he’d built a list of over a thousand subscribers in a few short months. The only trouble was he didn’t know what to sell them! And, when trying to sell them a product or two that he had resale rights to, not one of his follow up emails made a sale!
Now this new online entrepreneur is savvy enough to know that he needed to learn a thing or two about conversion. A thing or two about building a relationship with his subscriber list. But one thing he didn’t consider was that he really needed to learn about the nature of the 2007 website visitor and authenticity.
Yes, 2007’s website visitor is a little different than 2006’s – very different from 2005’s, in more ways than you can shake a stick at.
But today I just want to talk about authenticity…
This gentleman, his website URL, and his advertising to match, had to do with WAHMs (work at home moms). And when people arrive on his site they’re hit with an audio recording (man’s voice) and a very blah looking page asking the visitor “What’s your most burning question about working from home?”.
Now if you were a work at home mom what’s the first thing you’d do after landing on that site? Buy something? Sign up for the newsletter? Ask a question? Or click the big red X in the top right of your browser window – not believing for a moment that any work at home woman put this resource together for other WAHMs?
It Gets Worse
The part that is so terribly wrong about this new entrepreneur is that his mission is to teach women how to make money from home – without ever having made more than he’s spent learning the business!
Okay, here’s another example of a new entrepreneur and lack of authenticity…
This one’s new this week from a customer at my Web 2.0 traffic strategy site.
I’ll give it to you verbatim.
hi laura,
i’ve read the the stampede secret 4 times and im still having a hard time understanding what im suppose to do with the rss feed. i have a sales letter website that i want to direct traffic to i dont want to blog right now i just want to use the rss feed. in the ebook you had mentioned the rss submit would this software help me get the traffic i need? the website that i want to put on the web is an ebook on becoming an affiliate earning a monthly residual income. the wesite is not on the web yet but will be soon. right now im very frustrated in trying to understand whats going on . could you please help? thank you
Of course I am more than thrilled to help him out. I work with a few entrepreneurs already co-designing their Web 2.0 marketing strategy – but this entrepreneur didn’t know that he had to have an RSS feed in order to do something with it – so I knew I was in for a long session.
Leaving the Blog/RSS Feed connection conversation aside for a moment I returned an email to him on authenticity and the Web 2.0 surfer’s mindset. Here’s my response…
Tony, I’d be honored to help you.
Let’s put the RSS Feed aspect of a website to the back burner for a moment – especially since you don’t have a site, a blog, or content to put in a feed yet.
Besides that, using ‘feeds’ on social sites is only one component of Web 2.0 marketing strategy.
Web 2.0 – the big picture – is what you want to grasp first. As you’ve read if you’re not active in your marketplace you’re going to really struggle getting sales in this day and age. The age of slapping up a mini-site with a product for sale and sending traffic to it without any further involvement is, sadly, practically over. Ask any of the ’straight-shooter’ marketers (who aren’t trying to sell you a product on how to create or sell products with a mini-site) for the truth and they’ll tell you the exact same thing.
So what does it mean to be involved in your marketplace?
There’s a lot to this – depending on your website, your product, and the strategy you design – but in your case we’ll carry on with the assumption that you’re selling an ebook on how to make money every month by being an affiliate…
First of all, I hope you’re actually accomplishing this because if you’re not, online surfers today will either demand proof or at the very least expect your Web 2.0 social marketing persona to be knowledgable and genuine. You’ll need to create a presence with an air of authority, ‘give to get’ (give good advice and techniques to gain their trust for a sale), and be seen by the customers you’re trying to win over.
I’ll assume that you ARE accomplishing earning money every month as an affiliate for the rest of this email…
And that you want to do nothing more (for now at least) than host a mini-site with a salesletter and an order button.
You don’t want to blog on your own site (you said so, although I would encourage you to rethink your strategy as blogging gives you both credibility and an automatic RSS Feed of your content, which you would then use on social websites) so the ALTERNATIVE is to expend that energy on a Web 2.0 social site.
You need to put yourself in the path of your customer, you need to put your URL in the path of your customers. The best way to do this (without blogging on your own site and using the feed generated by the blog) is to DEFINE your market, DETERMINE where those people are spending their time online (trust me they’re all on Web 2.0 sites as you read in the Stampede Secret’s research), then DEVELOP your presence on that Web 2.0 site.
To sum up, Web 2.0 Marketing is all about building trust, helping out, positioning yourself as a friend or an authority and doing all that in the right places on the right sites.
I’m going to leave you with that for a moment. This is only the beginning of our conversation. I will carry you right through to making the decisions necessary for your most effective Web 2.0 marketing strategy and see you get started. But first I wanted to make sure the ‘basics’ of Web 2.0 make sense to you and that you remain dedicated to your initial plan on selling an ebook on affiliate marketing without blogging on site.
Write back your thoughts – your questions – a change in plans if you make them and we’ll move onto the next steps in my next email…
Thankfully Tony bowed out of his online business idea – to sell a product on a mini-site with no further effort and no experience on the topic. Hopefully he will re-write his business plan to something that suits him, understanding that any business requires risk and effort and most especially in 2007, authenticity.
For my readers today, let Tony’s email above be a warning! Thousands of sellers are selling products on topics they don’t have a clue about – although it may be okay to buy a product from them, you’d never want to ask their advice in followup as it may not be of the highest caliber.
Could you imagine buying a book from Tony (in the example above) on making money every month with affiliate programs and then going to him for advice on which products to promote (given that he’s got no experience doing it)? For that matter how about asking him how to get traffic to your affiliate website (given that he thinks a $19 piece of software could deliver the traffic)?
It’s no wonder that social marketing has taken over the internet – it’s the only ‘game-free’ system (for the most part) that buries the fakers of online business.
Be true to your interests, allow your personality to show online, and by all means be authentic!
Laura Childs
Dear Laura:
I am a ‘newbie’ starting out. Ideally, I am looking for a online business with clear instructions and opportunity to make some money.
I need an easy place to start where I can learn and earn.
Your site has a wealth of information and lot I do not understand at this stage.
I am also a fulltime caretaker for my wife who is ill. This has hit us hard financially. I need to develop additional income quickly as possible and am able to spend 2-3 hours each day on the computor.
Would appreciate your advice and help as to the best way for me to start.
Thank you, Richard
Dear Richard:
The internet has changed dramatically in the last 1.5 to 2 years. Back then it was very easy to spend a few hours per day creating and marketing an online business.
However this is no longer the case – it can still be done, but not in so few hours a day.
An online business that generates income is becoming more and more like an offline business – you have to work it hard to establish it, then put systems in place to keep it going. Very much like a brick and mortar business.
The least time consuming way I know of right now to generate an income online with just a few hours a day available is to partner with eBay, on your own website, using a script that builds the site for you (your two hours a day would be spent initially adding content and alternating with marketing the site).
However this takes time in the beginning to do it right and make it successful (research 2-5 hours, learning to research 5-6 hours), putting systems in place on your site (5-6 hours), learning about and acquiring website visitors (2-5 hours and ongoing).
The good news is that once you start making money and the site is established (perhaps 6 months) you can create a new online business and double your income (more or less) in far less time.
Costs are minimal (especially when you consider the cost of a real business) – $9 yr for website domain registration, $8/month for hosting, and $97 for the script that builds the website for you – your second business would only require a new domain registration (you quickly see the value of lather-rinse-repeat once you have a system down for making money).
I understand your dilemna but don’t want to pull any wool over your eyes at a crucial time like this – so I’m telling it to you straight.
Please be careful online – there are a lot of unscrupulous marketers who will sell you a ‘dream’ of easy money overnight just to earn themselves a fat commission check. A person in dire straights or in serious need of a second income could go very broke, very quick when following the wrong advice.
Laura Childs
p.s. Be sure to note that the advice above is only geared to Richard and others like him. If you know what you’re doing when you start a business (online or off) and you have time or resources to spare (more than 2-3 hours a day’s worth) then you’d be better off working towards a more lucrative business model.
[...] Two of the best marketing trainers online ever (and since the early days of marketing online) also published some tough love this week (just like my rant a few days back): “…there’s something a little wrong with some of the wanna be entrepreneurs landing on my doorstep this month. More wrong than just believing the lie that a million can be made overnight. More wrong than thinking a $5 ebook written 5 years ago is going to teach the strategy that is required to make a business flourish today…full text – Laura Childs [...]
[...] of a resource is one of the few honest marketers on the Internet. You will not go wrong with Laura Childs and The Stampede Secret for marketing [...]