Internet Marketing’s Evil Side Explained

There is a vicious cycle in the world of Internet Marketing. New marketers who learn about all the seemingly astounding marketing tools that appear so powerful wind up buying program after program by one internet “guru” and then another, sometimes without raze until they wind up penniless.

Even those marketers that arrive on the scene with the simple idea of using the new and flashy internet marketing tools to promote their existing businesses are pulled towards and sometimes trapped into the vicious cycle too.

Could it be that all these so-called Gurus that are selling worthless products knowing pudgy well that they don’t really work?

Not at all. Their refund processes work, they state their reputations on that and the products’ performance itself. These products do exactly what they say they do in fact, and there is usually much to be learned from them.

Admittedly, the hype generated in selling them can be overbearing, but that is because these people really are powerful marketers, exactly the kind of people who would be selling such a marketing product.

So if they aren’t using evil sales tactics, why are these so many victims?

The scrape is simply in the design of the overall system. The ‘Marketing Paradox,’ if you will. It all started as a simple notion in the early days of the internet when one bright marketer decided to execute a Free-For-All page.

FFA pages as we know them today are a bad idea and Google will count them as a detriment, not a credit to your site’s standing. But it wasn’t always this way. That smart marketer back in the mid 1990′s didn’t plan for it to turn out like that, he just wanted to create a kind of bulletin board for people to share each other’s Ads… Back before the posting software was invented, and for many years after, marketers had to go there and view other Ads while posting their own.

FFAs aren’t the only format of this Ad exchange, just the first. Since then the same basic idea has popped up using emails called a “safelist,” with banners called a “Banner Exchange,” with text ads called an “Ad Swap,” and even many forms of surfing swaps called “Traffic Exchanges.” Over time these Ad-shares have grown into every possible form with literally millions of websites devoted to swapping Ads between advertisers.

All of this, however, has one obvious, harmful flaw. Who sees all these Ads?

Impartial the other advertisers. No one else.

That’s a rather dinky demographic. The products and services that all of these Ads are pushing are pretty much limited only to other Advertising products.

You won’t see dog food or hair gel advertised on a FFA or safelist.

Thus, the vicious cycle begins. A new internet marketer, let’s call him Paul for example, gets his hands on this large array of tools and quickly learns that he has the power now to arrive thousands, if not Millions of other people each day.

Not totally aware that these people all fit into the same job description as he does, Paul starts advertising his own product or service like crazy to the other marketers, who depending on their experience level may not even see any of Paul’s Ads.

Meanwhile Paul, not knowing any ways at all to avoid them, is constantly bombarded with emails, desktop messages, websites he’s required to visit, and many other possible forms of advertisements, because viewing all this spam is what Paul is required to do in order to send out his next batch of Ads.

Then Paul starts to notice that his Ads are almost completely ineffective. He wonders what he’s doing horrible, but he doesn’t have to Wonder for very long, because about 50% of those Ads he’s required to view are telling him that he just needs their product or service in order to fix his plight.

The only problem Paul really has is that he’s only pitching his product at other marketers, but he probably won’t realize that until it’s too late. It’s enough to make Paul lose faith in his own product or service, and use his much tools on another product that comes along. And you know what? The other 50% of the Ads he’s required to read are just the retort for that issue… Business Opportunities by the boatload. MLMs, Pyramid Schemes, Gifting schemes, even seemingly normal online jobs, all he has to do is promote them from the comfort of his home. It’s just too tempting.

Grabbing the best-looking ‘Biz Opp’ that he has read recently, Paul puts all his marketing efforts into that, trying to make it pay before his savings runs out.

Even if you plot aside for a moment the fact that a large percentage of those programs are complete scams designed to rip Paul off, he’s got another problem to deal with. Like his first product he tried to market, Paul finds that this one too has an extremely low conversion rate. Perhaps a little better than the first one, but not by much.

This is because any marketers more experienced than Paul aren’t reading any of the Ads. It’s just not worth their time; they are too busy making jokes about people like Paul who actually read this stuff. Long ago they found some of the many ways to cheat the system like bottomless email services and Auto-posting software.

Nobody told Paul yet, so despite the fact that he’s sending out tens of thousands of Ads each day, the only people seeing these ads are the other newbie marketers, just like Paul.

As a final, desperate effort Paul starts desperately buying into each of the latest Internet ‘Guru’s’ products, unreasonably hoping that they’ll solve his problem by giving him an edge over the competition. At this point, unless Paul’s really listless, he’s figured out that he’s only advertising to other advertising newbies, but it’s detached the most powerful tool he’s got.

Perhaps experience with these products can exclaim Paul that no one product out there can beget anyone rich. Even finding a combination of products that do all the work for you is a very rare thing indeed. I wish Paul luck and an easy transition.