Success September: Marketer vs. Snake Oil Salesman
September 3rd, 2010I’ve long felt that a marketer/salesperson performs a valuable service for society.
If you have a problem, they’ll connect you with a solution. Suffer from headaches? Here, take this and it’ll go away. Cat got fleas? Try this and the fleas will be gone! And so on.
When I was a kid, for a while my parents were distributors for a line of products. There was one product demonstration that I liked to do. It was for a stain remover. To demonstrate, you’d have a bowl with water. Then, you’d stain the water. You’d show how it was stained. It was a clear glass bowl or maybe just a glass jar. At any rate, you could clearly see that the water was stained. Then, you would stir in this stain remover, and the water turned clear.
It was like magic!
But, there were no tricks to the demonstration. I wasn’t sneaking anything else in or using sleight of hand to switch glasses or anything. It was a simple, straightforward demonstration.
And people would see how it works and buy the stuff.
You showed people how you had a solution to their problems which, in this case, was stains. Certainly, that’s a valuable service, no?
The problem is when you have a dishonest salesperson–someone who is simply after a sale without regard for whether they solve your problem or not. They just want to convince you they have the solution long enough to separate you from your money and be in the next town, conning the next group of prospects.
It’s people like that that give marketers a bad name.
I think this is true for online marketing–perhaps especially true. I’m on several online marketing forums and, in a couple of these, “marketers” will talk about how they quickly put a “product” together and offer it for sale. Sometimes in as little as an afternoon.
One of the tricks is to use PLR articles. For those of you unfamiliar with the term, PLR stands for Private Label Rights. These are typically articles (but sometimes also books, graphics, etc.) that you can resell as your own. Kind of like a store brand. Your local grocery store may have their own brand of canned green beans or whatever, but, in many cases, these are canned by someone else who simply brands the cans with the store’s brand name and packaging. That’s private labeling. And that’s what PLR is.
The problem is that sometimes these articles are thrown together with little editing and little cohesion. If writing styles between articles vary slightly, you can sometimes tell and it may break your concentration from the reading material. Also, some people put these together rather quickly, so they use whatever articles they can find, rather than creating an outline and an orderly plan for how the book should go together.
Sometimes, especially in cases where a whole book is offered as PLR, that can result in a buyer purchasing multiple eBooks, looking for a solution, only to discover that the book they just bought from Jane Smith is eerily similar to the book they bought from John Doe.
And that can leave a bad impression of “eBooks” in the buyer’s mind.
A couple years ago, I bought resale rights to an eBook. Something like only 10 packages were sold, so there would only be 9 other people selling the same eBook I was. Ultimately, I never put it up for sale. I never felt comfortable with the included sales letter. The sales letter talked about how I went to lunch with this group of experts and picked their brains in order to put the book together.
Well, that never happened. It may have happened to the original author of the book–the one who was selling the rights (hopefully!)–but it didn’t happen to me. So, it just didn’t feel right. I could have changed the sales letter, of course, but I never got around to it and moved on to other things.
A week or two ago, I was looking for some information on a certain thing. Then, I remembered that I had purchased resale rights to a book on that topic! So, I dug out that eBook from my electronic files and took a look.
Now, mind you, at this point I am basically coming at the book from a buyer’s perspective. That is, I am looking for information. I am turning to that book because I remembered the sales letter talking about how much information was packed into that book.
So, I look to the book. This great book. This book that had a suggested retail price of $27-$37 or something.
Guess what?
This book is next to useless. It just rehashes the basics, but never addresses the how which is what I’m really looking for. I know the other information, or at least some of it, but what I really want to know is the how of it. I don’t know that. The book doesn’t address that.
I’m glad I never tried to sell it, because people would not have found what they are looking for in the book.
It’s true that you can’t please everyone and you will have disappointed buyers no matter how good your book is, but at the very least, the book should cover what the book is supposed to be about. If I’m looking for how to do something, I want to know how to do it! I don’t want to buy a book telling me all about it, but leaving out the how that I am looking for.
The book also included free bonuses. You can probably guess how wonderful those bonuses were.
I have access to a number of books and materials I could resell. (I don’t resell them, in case you’re wondering.) I looked at one today. It looked promising. Again, I’m looking at this from a buyer perspective. I am looking at it from the perspective of wanting a solution. I’m not looking at the book thinking, hey, can I sell this? Rather, I am looking at it from the perspective of Will this solve this problem?
Again, I am disappointed.
There is another truth and that is that not everyone knows as much as you about a given topic. So, you might be disappointed in the content of a book, because you already know most of the content. As such, you might think it’s garbage whereas someone who knows less than you will think it’s gold. Thus, it is important that your sales copy reach the right audience.
But, at the same time, a book that doesn’t provide the information that you expect is not good. I mean, if the book says it’s about X, it should be about X. It shouldn’t merely introduce you to X and wish you good luck figuring out what X really is. It’s like paying thirty-seven bucks to go out on a blind date, only to discover that she’s not there. Instead, you’re eating alone at a table with a copy of her resume, and you’ll have to pay for another date at another place and time if you want to meet her.
That’s a bad date, and that’s a bad book.
Traditional book publishing has a number of gatekeepers. This doesn’t assure that every book is great, but it does help to cut back on the junk.
Now, some good works may get rejected. It’s not because they’re bad, but maybe because there is too few people interested in that niche to make it profitable for the publisher. Or, perhaps because it’s too similar to another book being released by the publisher. Or for any number of other reasons that aren’t related to the quality of the book itself.
So, that author could make an eBook and sell it himself. And it could be a very good eBook.
On the flip side, someone else who got rejected might think they have a pile of gold in their stack of papers when really what they have is a whole lot of dead trees killed for nothing because their content is garbage.
The sad thing is that there are too many people that don’t know good content from a whole in the wall and think that just because they can sucker a number of people into buying it that they actually have something good.
I can’t do that. I can’t sell something I think is bad, especially if it’s got my name on it. That doesn’t mean that everyone is going to agree with me. But, I just can’t take something that I think is a piece of garbage and try to pawn it off on someone as the greatest thing since sliced bacon.
Who knows? Maybe I’d be rich if I could bring myself to sell eCrud-on-a-Stick. But, I have a hard time trying to sell something I just don’t believe in.
If it doesn’t turn the water clear, I can’t stand there saying, Look! It’s not as dirty as it was before!





