What You Don’t Know about Internet Marketing – The Massively Detailed FAQ

When you’re totally new to internet marketing, you have questions about pervasive practices which everyone “in the know” takes for granted, but which you find baffling.

I realized this when I got into a conversation with an attorney on twitter over the weekend. He asked me questions that I found hard to explain in only 140 characters! But my eyes were opened to how people perceive internet marketing when they’re not already involved in it. “Because that’s how it’s done” isn’t a very good answer, so I wanted to write an “internet marketing FAQ.” Below, you’ll find some questions and extensive answers. If you have your own questions, I invite you to ask them in the comments and I’ll update the post with some of them.

The Internet Marketing FAQ

Does anyone really read those long sales letters?

You’ve seen them: sales letters that go on forever. I’ve written a few myself. In the name of All That Is Holy, why? Does anyone really read all that?

Internet marketer Eben Pagan says, “No–buyers read them.”

Get the difference? If it’s something that solves your problem, you are going to be very interested in what it says. A purchase is often an important decision, one which requires enough information for the buyer to feel comfortable.

The late Gary Halbert used this analogy to explain: Say you’re looking for a mate, and the only way you get to choose one is by the letters they write you telling you about themselves. Now, which do you think you would prefer: a short letter, or a long one that describes in great detail everything you would ever possibly want to know about your potential mate?

If you’re not looking for a mate, a long and detail-packed “why you should pick me” letter is going to seem way too long, because you’re not in the market for a mate. Or if it’s clear at the start that the type of mate isn’t right for you, you’ll skip that particular letter without reading it and look at the letter from a different suitor. If the second one seems much more of a good match for you, are you going to continue reading it? Something tells me you are. In fact, not only will you read the whole thing, you might even reread it just to make sure this mate is right for you.

There is, however, another reason why even buyers wouldn’t read a long sales letter: they already trust the marketer and have no need to be convinced all over again–they’re already sold. These folks hit the sales page and head down to the bottom as fast as they can to click the buy button. 

How is this possible? The marketer has spent a lot of time and effort establishing a relationship with the buyers and building trust with them. This what blogs and email marketing are good for (and why you should be reading blogs like Copyblogger and Remarkable Communication). This is often called content marketing or relationship marketing.

Why don’t internet marketers show their actual sites? 

One of the maddening things you see everywhere is a particular byproduct of marketing to marketers: you don’t see the actual sites the marketer used to make his supposed millions. This kind of internet marketing is only a tiny fraction of all internet marketing. Most marketers are too busy making money with their sites and don’t even want to enter the “guru” business.

But the reason why you don’t see the marketer’s actual sites is not because there aren’t any and the marketer is a big liar. It isn’t because what they’re doing is evil.

The reason is simple and obvious once you understand it: they hide their sites because to reveal them would cause the marketers to lose their advantage in that market.

Marketing and business is an awkward dance between secrets and imitation. For example, Microsoft rips off Lotus and (formerly) Macromedia, then outsells them, while protecting their own intellectual property from the same.

That’s business.

There are thousands of sites selling in any kind of product category you can imagine, and they all rip each other off. It is human nature for you to follow someone else’s example and do what already works so that it will work for you, too. And if you now do a better job than the other guy, don’t you deserve your earnings? 

Not only is this natural and common, it’s smart. If you were going to create an ecommerce site now, and you didn’t look to Amazon for example and inspiration for how to do it right, you’d be an idiot.

But often an internet marketer’s success comes from figuring out the best keywords to target for paid search advertising (if not organic search). It’s all about search.

If you know the “magic words” and you get all the traffic, do you think you’re going to reveal what those words are?

Oh, hell no.

Because if you did, then others will target those keywords as well. This will instigate a pay-per-click advertising bidding war and drive up the cost of your marketing (thus reducing your profit). You want to keep your competitive lead, thank you very much.

So, when you’re in the “guru business,” you don’t reveal your magic words, because all your marketing product customers will then immediately turn on their mentor and begin competing with you (often through laziness and a lack of imagination to find their own niches). When feeding pihranas, it’s wise to not stick your arm out too much.

There is an exception to this secrecy, and that is when your position is so unassailable that nobody else has any hope at all of even touching you. For example, Brad Fallon of StomperNet uses his site WeddingFavors.com as an example all the time in StomperNet training materials. He has no reservations about this, because he is so well-entrenched that you will never, ever supplant him. You have no hope of ever competing against his juggernaut wedding favors site.

But like I said, that’s an exception. Most internet marketers aren’t going to reveal their sites, because to do so would mean they would reveal their keywords, too, which would weaken their position by inviting a flood of competition from their own internet marketer customers.

Are those testimonials and case studies for real? How do we know they’re not fake?

If you wanted to run a business and make good money over the long haul, do you think you’d survive long and prosper if you had fake testimonials and case studies? I’m sure that somewhere, someone has faked it, but it’s been my experience that every testimonial is real. Most people don’t bother to ask for them (to their detriment).

There are two reasons why there are no URLs (or at least live ones) for the people who give a testimonial:

1. On a sales page, the only link that should be there is the buy button. There should not be any possible means for a reader to get distracted and leave.
2. If marketers are the customers (as when marketers are marketing to marketers), then the whole “protecting the magic words” thing I mentioned above applies.

In internet marketing, the term case study has a pretty loose definition. These are not medical or scientific case studies. They are often nothing more than interviews with customers who have succeeded with the product being sold.

In these interviews, the purpose is to show that it’s possible to succeed with the product (whatever that means for that particular product and market). Because if others have succeeded, you can, too. But you probably won’t see the domain or website or keywords revealed. ”Protecting the magic words” also applies to case studies. 

You may see screenshots of money earned, or, in a different market, other kinds of unverifiable evidence. For example, if I were selling an ebook on how to grow strawberries, I’d have pictures of huge, lucious red strawberries grown by my ebook’s customers. Is there any way to prove undeniably this evidence is real? In most cases, no. Does that mean the evidence is fake? In most cases, no, it’s real.

I wouldn’t be in business very long if I put up faked screenshots or pictures that could easily be found elsewhere online that weren’t the strawberries grown by my customers (I don’t have such a book, by the way, that’s totally just a made-up example).

We’re all familiar with the “before-and-after” images used by miracle diet marketers. In some photos, you can tell it’s the same person, but in others they look like two different people. Or they look “photoshopped” (digitally edited). It’s possible to do the same thing with screenshots and totally lie about earnings and numbers. But if thousands of people bought a product that didn’t work, the marketer wouldn’t be in business very long.

Why do internet marketers send out a flood of emails whenever they launch a product?

So you’ll buy it, of course!

They’re not interested in having you on their list if you’re not going to buy something. So if you don’t want to buy, unsubscribe from the list. The unsubscribe links will work: one click is all you need. The only people the marketer wants on an email list are those who are likely to buy. If that’s not you, then why did you sign up? Is it because you were promised free information? The “free sample” is one of the oldest and most effective selling methods on the planet. If the free sample is good, imagine what you’d get if you bought the product.

If you are interested in possibly purchasing the product, then each new email only serves to whet your appetite and make you hungry for the product. You wish you could buy the damn thing RIGHT NOW. All of us have, at one time or another, waited eagerly for a product to become available so we can spend our money on it as fast as we possibly can.

Movie premieres are a good example of this: the studio releases trailers (free content) and engages in marketing to whip up the buying audience into a frenzy, so that the premiere of the film is a bockbuster record-breaking sales event. Do you even for a moment resent being marketed to? No, because you want to see that movie so badly you eagerly devour anything related to it. There can’t possibly be too many trailers, too many “leaked” set photos, too many juicy pieces of gossip or information about the stars or the plot.

If the emails you’re receiving aren’t appealing to you, it’s because you’re just not in the market for the product (or the marketer’s doing a terrible job marketing). Right now, for example, Clay Collins is releasing free content to whet your appetite for Project Mojave. If you have no interest in being able to quit your day job and earn a living from running an online information product business in less than four months, then Project Mojave is not for you. As a faculty member for Project Mojave, I’m also an affiliate, so if you join through my link, I’ll make a commission. So I’m sending out emails fairly frequently as new Project Mojave content is released. When the launch is done and over with, the emails about it will cease.

When I’m not promoting a product I created, believe in, or work with, I’m sending my list lots of free information which I hope they find helpful (the feedback I’ve received is that it has been very helpful). When another product comes along (mine or someone else’s) that I’d like to promote, then the emails will increase as part of the campaign.

A good marketer will do his best to make sure that what he promotes is relevant to his customers. During a promotion, you’re naturally going to receive more emails than usual.

How You Can Help This FAQ Be More Useful

If you have questions of your own about internet marketing that you don’t see here, ask them in the comments below. I’ll add them to the post above.