The other day a friend of mine wrote a post about a certain “Internet Marketing Big Shot” who is apparently part of the 2% who make huge amounts of money with Internet marketing.

Now, nothing wrong with people making a lot of money, I firmly believe there is enough to go round for people who are willing to do what it takes to become successful and I can only applaud those who really do.

However, I do have a problem with people selling stuff that is not up to scratch, which got me to think about the following.

In order to be a success online nowadays, it seems more important than anything else that your sales techniques are up to scratch and that even worthless products can generate a huge income as long as you know how to sell “air” (or freezers to Eskimo’s).

A few months ago, when starting this blog, I made a serious decision to not buy any more ebooks since most all of them only ended up crowding my hard disk and gather dust. Besides, if you are willing to spend some time, all information found in ebooks is readily available for free, and I have come to the believe there really is no secret to internet marketing, although so many guru’s are trying their hardest to make you believe there is.

Going back to the product my friend wrote about, it kind of did sound interesting enough to have another closer look and in the end I did sign up through his affiliate link, because after all, in his post he said the product looked good so far.

It is actually a real product instead of another ebook and all I needed to pay was $11.99 postage to get the book delivered to my door, and with summer offering plenty of time reading books while sunbathing a bit, I decided to go ahead and order.

Now, here is where things get tricky.

First of all I made sure to directly cancel a monthly subscription for a magazine about Internet marketing. I will receive the first copy for free along with the manual, but knowing myself, I better cancel straight away otherwise I forget and end up paying a monthly subscription without realising it (sorry pal!).

I did expect to see another offer page after ordering the initial book, after all, it seems to have become common practice to offer a “deal you will never see again” once signing up for a free product. This marketing guru however went a step too far in my opinion.

First he offered me another product for what he said “the best deal online” but after declining and wanting to go to the member area in order to download something that came along with the initial paper manual, he showed me another sales page for the same product, this time with a huge discount.

Yeah right, I thought, let’s skip straight to the member area, so again I optioned out of this “exceptional one time offer”.

Much to my surprise however, I landed on another sales page for the same product that had already been offered twice, but this time the price had actually gone down at least 75%! And as I was told on the sales page, I really could not live without this product if I were serious about making money online. And who would not believe this Guru, after all, he was showing his houses and cars and huge affiliate cheques and I could be just like him.

It was late though and I just wanted to get to the member area, so again I opted out of this offer, bad luck on me, now I will never make millions, but hey, I am pretty happy with what I do so far!

Guess what… apparently I had reached bottom price on product number one, because now I was lead to a sales page for product number 2, a marketing course that would normally go for thousands of dollars and wow it must have been my lucky day because now I could get full and exclusive access for only $997!

And even though I am like any other affiliate marketer and have thousands of dollars of cash saved under my pillow, I decided to pass up on this absolutely extraordinary offer, because I was sure I would see at least another few sales pages again lowering the price.

“No thanks (fill in name of IM Guru), I just want to go to the member area and I realise I will never ever see this great offer” and all of a sudden I had made 300 bucks!!!

That is right, by not taking up the offer; price had gone down to $697!  Needless to say I was very annoyed at this point and thought that I would finally reach the member area by passing up again, but this time I was lead to a sales page saying that maybe I did not have enough money to pay at once, so a convenient payment plan was offered and I could make 3 easy instalments, (because after all, if I couldn’t just dish out the initial big bucks, I really needed access to his exclusive program).

In a desperate attempt to finally go to the member area, although I really started thinking, “why would I even want to go to a member area?” and was about to just close the window, I again opted out of all these offers and free bonuses, “obviously” throwing away thousands of dollars, and clicked “go to the member area” button for the last time.

So why am I writing all this you might think, well there is a clue to this whole story.

The day after I received an email from my friend, saying that he had noticed I had signed up through his link and warning me to opt out of the subscription if I did not want the monthly magazine sent to my house. (Thank you for that!)

He said he had already received the paper manual which was supposedly filled with IM secrets and even though it was a pleasant read and nice to finally get something in print instead of all those e-books, he also said most information in the book is stuff we already now and he was yet to reach to the part were the real secrets were going to be revealed.

One comment he made though set off the trigger for me to write this long post, and it was down the line of “a lot to be learned from this guru’s sales techniques”.

Now, I am sure this guru is making a lot of money and I am sure not all he is selling is absolutely crap, but his sales page sequence and seeing just how much he was trying to sell his products for, and more importantly, see how much he was willing to drop his price, made me wonder.

Just how much can a product really be worth if there is a 75% drop in price within a few pages?

Plus…

If the free product he is giving out and obviously using in order to convince people to buy his (I believe well overpriced) program, does not really offer new information, will his program be any good to start with?

Maybe there is a lot to learn from this guru’s selling technique, but would I really be comfortable using this kind of stuff on people who just like me are trying to make a good living online?

The answer for me really is NO. I don’t want to trick people into signing up for monthly subscriptions along with a free offer, nor do I want to make money selling MMO products.

I still keep believing that the true secret of making money online can be put together in a few lines, no 100 page manual needed, no expensive exclusive programs needed, just common sense and a lot of hard work and dedication.

Plus, I am a bigger believer of Karma. What goes around comes around so I really don’t want to make money over the back of others.

And guess what? In order to be successful as an Internet marketer, there is no need to sell stuff you would not be caught dead buying yourself.

So what do YOU think is more important…. The product or the sales technique?

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Isn’t that just one of the problems most Internet marketers are struggling with on a daily base? So at times we need to take decisions we aren’t all that happy about but feel they are necessary in the “bigger picture”, like for example me not posting here as often as I should or better said, would like to.

There are of course also times that we just have to step back and see the bigger picture more clearly, and I have found a few months ago that having a break really ups my spirit and energy levels again, ready for more action.

Last week I took another break and went to visit my family and take part in the annual family reunion, had a complete blast seeing all of them again, and even though Saturday wasn’t the highlight of the minibreak I had hoped for (the Dutch team lost in the quarter finals of the European championship) it was still a well needed and productive break.

So now I am back to business, once again I realize just how thankful I am to have found Internet marketing on my path. Before leaving, I had set up a distribution of articles on set dates so even though I wasn’t “holding the fort” myself, my work did continue.

One thing I have learned finally is not to sweat the small stuff and have patience.

Before I could get really discouraged if a site didn’t start making money the minute it was set up but now I am really focusing on the long run. Building up a site, adding content after doing my research, and getting it to an acceptable level.

Once at the point of having a site completed to a certain standard it goes into my schedule of promotion and link building and I go on to the next site to get it to the point where I can start promoting it as well.

I wrote a few weeks ago about More Niche and so far I can only say I am still impressed with the program. I am actually following all the steps and even though I haven’t had a sale coming in from the sites I build for that program, I am starting to become a lot more productive in matter of my overall work level and focus.

Following the right steps is actually showing me an increase in organic traffic and I am confident sales will start to get in sooner or later, so I am not too bothered about that part right now because I am confident about the outcome.

A really cool thing though is that I won a 40% commission lock in for life on one of the products, instead of the 30% this product gives normally, by winning in their competition in the category of best copy/layout.

A little cheer for me there!

That was a really nice surprise to see, that the site I entered for this competition got this feedback and I have to say that I am really pleased with that result. Funny thing is that when looking at my stats for that winning site, it has an average visited number of pages per visitor of 4.8, average time spent is nearing 9 minutes, so hopefully sales will start coming in once promotional efforts are really starting to hit in.

I’ll keep you guys posted!

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