Mind Tricking Sales Letters
SCAMS SPECIAL INVESTIGATION SERIES

By Pavel Lenshin
Friday, November 26, 2004; 3:00pm EST

Hype is everywhere. There are no ebooks on internet marketing, there are ebooks that change your life, bring you wealth and happiness. Guess what happens when these ebooks don't change their owners' lives? Right, buyers lose their belief!

Today's sales letters copy writing provokes inevitable harm to customers and create a fertile ground for scams.

Marketing hype continues to grow decreasing the truthful part accordingly. The line dividing the true business marketing and marketing hype is difficult to catch due to the increasing number of tricks and techniques used by online marketers.

We ruin people's belief, we decrease the credibility of the internet as a business place, we support online scams and spammers with our own hands, sometimes even without noticing it.

I've spent months exploring so-called "Free" traffic or promotion opportunities and after all discovered that all they want is to put my money into their pocket only for my right to advertise and promote their offers. I bet you have been caught with this "Free" trick also.

Programming language in 3 hours? Web-design skills in 2 hours? What next? Millionaire in 1 hour? You can buy product with web-sites provided, which you could set-up and start running within 2 hours, but you will never be able to understand the methods and techniques of writing your own ebook or creating personal web-site during that blatantly advertised period of time.

Guess what happens with a true "inventor", who, say, developed his own system of completely learning Perl language in a month. We all know that it is a true system, but due to well-advertised marketing hype, no one will pay any attention to him, unless he states something similar to "Become a programming guru in two hours!". But he couldn't do that simply because his system designed to learn the languages in a month, not in an hour or two.

So ask yourself who wins under such conditions at the end? The answer is obvious - scams, who advertise marketing hype and play on people's laziness! Who will lose? The developers of true fundamental systems that can truly teach people a new knowledge, considering people's learning abilities, spare time etc.

I will share my simple rule with you. If I see on someone's web-site statement proclaiming I will get any knowledge in several hours others take months to learn, I immediately close down the browser window, sometimes stop my online session in order to forget the path to this site forever.

Solicited testimonials? Are they objective and true? Are they informative for the visitor? Could you find a natural or negative testimonial in someone's sales letter? Maybe one or two in the entire internet just because of unprofessional author. So why everyone tells you, that testimonials are so important? Simply it is another psychological trigger to the mind. Want to build credibility? Great! Publish unsolicited clients' feedback. If there is no any, think about improving your offer rather than bribing your customers to write a testimonial for you.

I see strong tendency towards hype, tricks and nonsense only to force a visitor to buy. It will not be a big surprise if I soon encounter an ad with 20 supporting testimonials telling me that if I buy particular book today, then tomorrow I will construct a jet-plain. That's why there is an army of disappointed people who have bought 150 ebooks and simply don't know what to do and what they need them for.

The roots of that marketing garbage lie at the bottom of the competition. When hundreds of sellers try to promote the same product using the same web-page, the competition becomes so fierce that it is almost impossible to market without advertising fraud.

In order to profit you should make your offer as unique as possible. No more, no less.

Make your offer to be addressed to the buyers' side, don't force them (using marketing hype) to buy product that you know is not good enough or fake at all. To my mind, the best way is to inform your customer about his/her benefits along with the features, not instead. Let the customer choose what features are really beneficial, and what aren't. Only that way can be fully objective in relation to your customer. Given you're having great offer, full customer satisfaction is what will make your business literally explode.

Be honest. The result of selling one more hype product is temporal, integrity and honesty with people you are dealing with is for entire life. Decide what is more important to you.

Internet is our home. Let's make it clean and shining.

About the Author
Pavel Lenshin is a publisher of NET Business Magazine, professional web-developer and CEO of:
http://ASBONE.com/ - informational portal and provider of discounted internet services for entrepreneurs, including internet access, web-design and hosting; http://InfoAlchemist.com/ - a must-have business library.