Thursday, May 04, 2006

Do You Know Which Way "Up" Is?

I guess I am just getting too old for all this new internet marketing technology because now I don't even know the difference between "up" and "down".

Maybe you can help me out.

Over the last couple of days I've been getting a lot of sales pitches telling me about a product where the starting price was only $.10 and was raised by a dime every time someone bought it.

Well I finally got curious enough to check it out and discovered I had to give them my mailing info to read about this product.

Did that and then read the sales page with the "it's never going to be lower than it is right now" price of $6.80.

Now I didn't want the product for reasons I'll explain in a minute but left the page open while I went off to do some other things.

A couple of hours later I went back to the sales page and did a refresh. (They said not to do that because my locked in price would be gone and I'd have to pay the new "it's never going to be lower than it is right now" amount of $7.10.

Well, they weren't making a ton of money but they did earn 30 cents in 2 hours.

Now here's where I started getting confused about up and down ...

This morning I got an email thanking me for checking out the product and reminding me that if I hadn't purchased the product yet, "The price is going up by the sale, and it's never goingto be lower than it is right now ..."

Being curious about how sales were going, I clicked the link and found the new price of ...$4.80.

Now I have a BA in math and thought I knew how to add. So someone please tell me - did they change the rules of addition when I wasn't looking?

No?

Then how come $4.80 is higher than $7.10?

Figuring there's a good reason $4.80 is higher than $7.10 I assumed it had to do with how I got to the page with the price. (like different sellers) So I went back to last night's page, re-entered my mailing info and saw that page's new "it's never going to be lower than it is right now" amount of $4.80.

I guess I am just too old to understand which way "up" is but if you do - please help me out.

I hope you got a chuckle out of the above true story and learned something but even if you didn't there's a lesson to be learned in why I didn't buy the above product.

The product was for some pre-built web pages that were already earning the owner an income. And the sales page asked if you wanted to learn how to earn money while doing nothing.
There was proof of income and the owner was selling exact copies of 3 of these income producing sites.

Imagine, not having to pick a niche, not having to select keywords, not having to get content, not having to optimize for the search engines and not having to build the page and being able to earn income just by putting a copy of his pages on your site.

Sound too good to be true?

Well it is.

Sure his pages may be making him some money and he's getting his traffic from the search engines but what's going to happen when there are 68, 71 or 48 exact copies of his pages? They can't all be in the top 10, 20, 30 or even 40 sites listed for a search.

The truth is, we're all lazy and would like to make money without working and there are a lot of places that offer you the opportunity to do just that.

But remember, when something sounds to good to be true - it probably is. And whether the price is going up, down or staying constant, buying into a false promise at any price is too expensive.

To Your Success,
Susan