Recently there is a lot of talk about gurus and the way they market by means of super long sales pages. A lot of ideas have been going around about these sales pages. For example SCAM ALERT! Not a lot of people trust them. Is it because the people that know about marketing are marketers and know the benefits of a sales page? From an end user that does not know any better they may not think that.
I have several digital products and I promote by means of a sales letter method. Mine are not super long but it gets the idea straight to the point for the end user. There are also arguments that the gurus are all associated with sales pages, yet I am not one of them. There are assumptions these sales pages are all about deceptive marketing, which I do not think so. The reason I bring this up is because you may have read all around is Joel's Adsense book for 9.95. I won't go into detail about - but someone called him out and then he publicly apologized.
I have a question though - once you have a product how else can you really sell and talk about the product? How else can you grab users attention? How else can you show testimonials? There are other multiple ways, videos, blogging, podcasting, advertising, etc. But the main concept is how can you get the information about your product across to the end user?
I do agree though deceptive marketing via sales pages is wrong because I personally hate those. But I find benefits in sales pages. I do not directly dedicate a domain for every product but I think there are other benefits for bigger more exclusive products. Sales letters has proved to work and has proved to show a lot of power when selling, it is like having a sales person right there selling and grabbing the attention of the potential buyer.
Yes, a lot of the sales pages are incorporating digital interaction, video, and audio but the concept is still the same. The catchy headlines, introductions, problem, solution, testimonials, etc. When you look at a sales page a lot of people automatically think it is a scam, while others see it as a form of pre selling information.
How else would you describe a product without trying to add a selling technique to it? Gurus use this technique because it has proven to work. Again, I personally use it but I do not overload the sales letter with a lot of garbage. I tend to stay on topic and give the information straight forward.
There are a lot of sales letter that are pretty long for specific reasons, a lot of marketers call it deceptive marketing because a majority of people will probably not even see the specifics of an offer. For example a sales page with tons of testimonials and a looooooong description can cause the user to just scroll and scroll and scroll until they get to parts that stick out. That is one reason why highlighted text and bigger fonts stick out on specific parts of the sales page.
Are the guru marketers having morals when they create these super long pages or are they just using these techniques to make the income? A lot of marketers try to oversell the product than what it really is and when they do more affiliates try to promote it and then my inbox is filled with the same email for the same product. It is really just the hype that is being created around the product.
This brings back about an annoyance that killed me for several days, Pay Per Play Audio Ads. Everyone thought this idea was a very good idea. Everyone promoted it and then it died because it is obvious this form of advertising is just trash. The hype played a role and people just wanted to get a quick buck on a sign up. They really do not have any morals but just wanting to earn as much as possible. I personally do not think most of the internet marketers out there do not have any respect and just want to earn money online.
I was once there before and I did a lot of arbitrage websites to make a quick buck or so. As time passed and more experience I have learned the more I have respect for the internet marketing industry. Though I still believe some of the tactics are powerful used by the gurus does not mean all are scam. I think internet marketing is looked at from a newbie point of view and under estimate how marketing really is.
