Internet Marketing Turnoffs
A little bit of a rant today. I’ve spent the last couple of days trying to clear out my email accounts, and I’m getting really annoyed with some marketers.
I susbscribe to a lot of lists. Some of them I should get rid of, but I think it’s important to pay attention to the bad ones as well as the good. I do unsubscribe when it’s clear the marketer only sends me mail about stuff to buy. I already know that’s not an effective way to use a list. If you can’t offer your subscribers anything more than a link to a sales page, and that’s the only mail you ever send, you’re not going to have me, or anyone else, on your list for very long.
All the big names write again and again about the need to offer value and information to your subscribers. It’s the only way to maintain a good list, and it’s the only way to really build your business. If all you do is try to sell stuff, you probably will make a few sales here and there, but you won’t have a sustained relationship with your folks. You’ll have to spend most of your time trying to attract new subscribers. That time is better spent taking care of the folks you already have, giving them good value so they tell their friends what a good list this is to be on.
Of course that’s not to say that you can’t tell your list about products being offered, and make money when they buy from or through you. After all, this is your business. But the sale recommendation should be in the context of the kind of training and information that helps your subscribers.
Because I’m on so many lists, when there’s a big product release, I get a lot of offers for that product. Since some marketers just use the headline and text supplied to them by the seller, I can eliminate a bunch of mails without looking. However, the really good marketers change things around and write their own sales material for their emails. This is where I’m having a problem.
A couple of big launches recently lead to sales pages with a lot of video. Now I know all the gurus have their stats that say adding video to your squeeze page will add loads of orders (they all keep massive statistics about how things work). Problem is, these tech heads don’t understand that some of us may be online with something less than the latest in big memory, quick loading machines. Case in point: I’m working on a circa 2000 lap top. I do have cable, and I have an external hard drive to keep the memory as free as possible, but my machine simply won’t handle some of those videos. My machine freezes. I can’t even access the stop button for the video. So, it’s control/alt/delete. Shut down. Restart. Now I’ve lost 10 or 15 minutes going through this process. (I told you my machine is slow!)
It’s bad enough when you open a squeeze page and forget to turn down your volume. Can’t tell you how many times I’ve jumped out of my chair!
I know this might seem a strange complaint, but I can’t help wondering what life would be if I combined this with a dial-up access. I’d never get anywhere! Don’t know that there’s a way around this. Video selling seems here to stay. I just wish the marketers would set their videos to require an action on my part to start the darn thing, rather than starting as soon as the page starts loading.
Oh, that reminds me of another product being touted out there. I haven’t looked closely at it, so the information I have comes from the emails I’ve received about it.
I’m hearing about a new way for folks to make money from running ads on their sites. Apparently, you can sign up to have little videos run on your web page, like TV ads, as soon as someone gets to your page. They’re saying the big advertisers like car and soft drink companies will pay big bucks if you allow their ad to run on your page. Maybe I’m too dim to understand, but I can’t see that it would do anything more than drive me to click away from the web page. I mean, if I’m looking for information about selling stuff on eBay, do I really want to see and hear about the new Ford truck line? Don’t think so. Even if they were able to make it load without problems on my machine!
That’s it for now. I’m still cleaning out my emails. Can’t seem to get back into my eBay groove - the list seems really daunting right now. I will get this under control and report back.
