subject: Affiliate Marketing Are You As Angry As Me? [print this page] There is a worrying trend in affiliate marketing online which I'm sure makes you as angry as me and it has crept in over the past couple of years, slowly building until today and it has reached pest proportions.
When you go to your inbox you will find at least 10 so-called gurus fighting each other to offer more bonuses than their competitor to buy one useless scheme or piece of software after the other. The thing all these schemes have in common is that they are made up on the run and presented, often far from complete, to the unwary internet marketing newbie as a must have thing without which you are destined to failure.
I don't know about you but, as a professional marketer, I become very suspicious when somebody offers bonuses valued at $1,500 if I buy a $295 program. As an ex navy man I see it as a fleet of destroyers making smoke to protect a crippled battleship or carrier from close enemy scrutiny. The only difference in this case is that the smoke takes the form of weirdly priced bonuses and the capital vessel being protected from scrutiny is the offer they wish you to buy.
Another thing I have noticed about these campaigns is that they are carried out by the same band of brothers all of the time. It seems to work like this:
-Guru "A" overhears somebody talking about something to do with buying traffic and thinks: "Hey, I know this is a load of hookie but I think this will be easy to sell to newbie internet marketers as a great idea. This is the only criterion that guides him.
-Guru "A" phones his programmer in India explains what he wants and says "let's put this into a package."
-Guru "A" then contacts all of his buddies, let's call them gurus "B thru Z", and offers them an 80% commission to sell this "new product" to their subscribers list. He will also ask a few of them to give his "untried" product a favorable review which they will do happily to ensure Guru "A" will return the favor next week when they release their new untried product.
-The total cost of producing the product is a couple of hundred dollars paying Indian rates of pay - the income he plans to derive from this product will be hundreds of thousands.
Now we come back to us, the people that are getting our inboxes jammed by the same crowd of so-called gurus fighting each other to offer more "bonuses" to buy through their affiliate link. Don't get carried away by the bonuses because most of them are cyber junk anyway and the value placed on them is from the mind of the person offering them.
The next thing we should look at is screen shots of how much they are making using this new "must have" product. Let me assure you that many of these screen shots are phoney and do not relate to the product they are selling because at this stage of the process the product has not had sufficient market exposure to have generated such sales.
A year or so back we collected screenshots of PayPal and Clickbank earnings claimed by gurus when releasing a product and was amazed at how many times the same screen shots appeared, often being used by different gurus.
The one thing all new internet marketers should be aware of is that if a system is good, or a piece of software does the job it claims to do, it will be around in six months or a year or two from now. There is no need to rush and successful marketers build their success on the back of systems that work, not on this week's fad.
Those that are new to internet marketing will do well to concentrate on the tried and trusted software and tools rather than spending endless cash on overpriced unproven garbage.
