Success Stories and
Mooch Marketing
 By
Ken Evoy,
CEO SiteSell Copyright © 2007
I've been thinking a lot about Mooch Marketing lately.
What is it? It's when online marketers take advantage of people trying to
"get rich quick" ... Mooches.
Mooches want to take the easy road. They would rather pay for the "quick
and easy" rather than doing the work and investing the time.
And Mooch Marketers are dying to sell them something. One of their favorite
techniques is "the success story." These success stories/testimonials are
either "false impressions" or "true but tricky."
Let's talk about the latter in some detail after a quick review of the former...
False Impression Success Stories
Most "testimonials" are either... " untraceable ("A.K. from Phoenix, Arizona"),
or " part of an unscrupulous cross-selling group ("you do mine and I'll do
yours"), or " success stories that are failures.
"Success stories that are failures?"
Yes, this is a favorite ploy of the large Web hosting companies. They show
you a pretty site, with well-written stories. Pretty home but the lights
are out.
Here's how to do some proper due diligence...
Take the time to examine the so-called "success stories" of Yahoo!'s or
1&1's (or any large Web host's) small business section. Check the traffic
ranking by entering the domain into Alexa.com. A ranking over 1 million,
and certainly over 2 million, is not getting much traffic.
Once you check the Alexa traffic ranking, cross-check with Quantcast.com.
You'll be amazed at how poorly these sites are doing. They generally rank
over 1,000,000 at Alexa, often over 2,000,000 and are even unknown to Alexa
(which means not a single toolbar-user has visited in 90 days!). Quantcast
ranking? Also often dismal.
But who has time to check these things? These companies are betting (bluffing
really) that the answer to that question is... not you! Instead, though,
small business people are wowed by the brand, by the insulting offer of a
free domain or even free hosting (so limited as to be useless).
And so... They rush to purchase, apparently eager to join the 99% of small
businesses doomed to pay Google for advertising if they ever want to have
any traffic. That "free domain/hosting" starts looking awfully expensive
one year later... a year of life wasted, Webmaster fees, Google ads. And
it all added up to failure.
The second form of the so-called success story...
Ah, this is a tool of the the Master Mooch Marketer ("MMM"), the "True But
Tricky Success Story"... The MMM ususally features its own excellent success
story as part of "the marketing story."
The sizzle is all about this incredibly successful company selling this red-hot
new software, or expensive coaching, or system/strategy (from mini-sites
to co-registration to automated-content-creators to link-building-networks,
etc.). You get so caught up in the sizzle of their success story that you
forget to actually check out the product itself. And don't get me wrong.
Their success story is all true -- these folks are enormously successful...
at fooling people.
Thank goodness they don't sell a "how to fool people" product, revealing
how they manage to fool thousands of people into parting with thousands of
dollars. Make no mistake about it -- THEY are the success story. Not you.
In a year, you'll only be poorer. But they are incredibly talented... brilliant
at orchestrating a Web-sizzling launch. They write copy that could not only
sell ice to the proverbial Eskimo, but that could then upsell the freezer
to keep it in.... and the solar panel to power the freezer. They've mastered
the high-skilled, high-pressured art-and-science that gets folks to their
sites, gets them drooling, and gets their credit cards.
There is just one problem
They are not teaching you to be as successful as they are. What they sell
does not work, or is a trick that has stopped working for them. The "customer
success stories," upon due diligence, are shoddy, short-termed, and only
show any activity due to the intense promotion itself.
The "system" doesn't work. The "coaching" turns out to be a huge letdown.
The product turns out to be bogus. And what do most good folks do? They chalk
it up to experience.
I hope this article keeps you from having to pay for that lesson. When you
do come across one of these hot-button, hot-buzz promotions, remember...
It's not relevant how much buzz they create, nor how successful they are.
These master manipulators really are brilliant -- brilliant at taking your
money. They create the false impression that they can make YOU just like
THEM, and then they seriously underdeliver.
The only answer... don't be a Mooch.
Ken Evoy's
Blog
About the Author:
Ken Evoy is the CEO of SiteSell Inc. He is the author of many FREE E-books
about online marketing including
Make
Your Site Sell,
The
Affiliate Masters Course, and
Make
Your Content PREsell and many others. SiteSell's flagship product
Site
Build It! has been used by over 100,000 customers to not only build
Web sites but to build successful online businesses.
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