April is never a good month for sales for almost any online profession. Folk in the US are preparing to pay their taxes and then recovering from the ordeal. The UK is pretty much the same for the self-employed (only a little earlier) and, in any case, people in the UK are still recovering from the 'January and February big bill' syndrome. Mainland Europe has its own tax collection times, according to country, but let's face it, many prospective European customers never make it past the 'payment gateway' anyhow.
So April is the month when smart webmasters tend to search for 'out of the box' ways to sell their products. This happened to me recently and it was not helped by 'the Google force'.
One of my 'best blogs' (in turns of hits and returning readers) had been on the first page of Google for months. It had been joined more recently by two more of my blogs from the same niche. Between them, these blogs were good sellers (not the best, thank goodness, but good enough). That is, until Google decided to pull the plug on all of them. (I have my suspicions as to why this occurred, but a public blog [or any online communication device] is not the place to discuss them).
Smart webmasters have strategies in place for just such an occurrence. I consider myself smart. However, I was still annoyed and this annoyance led me to something which could have interested me if I was not such a cynic.
I follow a mixture of different blogs and news sites for my daily reading. Most of these are not adult. Within this general list are a very small number of 'make money online' blogs. They are often repetitive (how often can you tell people the same thing?) and they tend to copy one another, rephrasing what has already been written. Nevertheless, there are a small number of writers in this niche who command my attention, if only for their style of presentation and their personality. Recently, a very well-written and prominent advert on one of these blogs intrigued me. I clicked and signed up for the Email subscription.
As I had suspected, the emails contained the usual formula which goes a bit like this:
'Hook yourself into what they think they need, make them believe they need it even more, empathise with them with a tale of your own and then show them what worked for you ... then plunge in for the hard sell, enforcing the idea that they simply cannot do without this product.'
No problem. I have seen this so many times before that, like many surfers, I scroll down to the bottom of the page first to check out the bottom line - the point of sale. It wasn't a pleasant one. It went something like this:
'Sign up for (this product) now and get it at a knock down price which is only available until (fill in a date a few days ahead). This is what you will get: (long list ) and then you may want to go on and stay within our community and help take part in the next step....'
That last part is where the 'small print' came in. Your initial payment included the product you 'needed so badly' ... and a monthly subscription payable by direct debit. That 'product' would probably be another piece of bait, to move you on to what the advert was really all about - getting you to sign up indefinitely. In the online sales business, unless you cancel that direct debit pretty quickly (and it is often not that easy to do), your bank account will be billed continuously month by month.
Okay, that is recognised practice in the adult industry and most porn surfers know that when they sign up for a '1 Dollar Trial', unless they are pretty quick in cancelling the direct debit which they had to sign to get their 'trial', they will be stuck with regular payments. But so-called 'respectable blogs' have, until recently anyway, kept away from this practice, relying instead on a massive reader base, Google Adsense and other textual advertising, and affiliate programs enabled by banners and written product-based 'reports'.
So, if I knew all of this (and by this time had lost a great deal of respect for the blogger in question), why did I continue to read the sales blurb? Because, like all good sales text, it hit a nerve with me. It promised to show me how I could make a living online without relying on the 'good nature' of Google (the article was phrased differently to this of course). To someone still smarting a little from a 'Google bashing' (which all online sales people get from time to time), the 'promise' acted like a wriggling worm on the end of a line to a starving fish.... except that I didn't sign up. I thought about the 'promise' and what it could possibly entail.
When my blogs lost out in Google, I made more effort to promote them via Yahoo, MSN, other smaller search engines, social bookmarking networks, new blogs in the same niche, promoting them hard in my directories, etc. They are now beginning to convert for me again. They are still nowhere to be seen in Google, but they are doing ok. In fact, what I was forced to do to promote those blogs was something I have been telling others to do in the first place, but these, being older blogs, had somehow managed to slip through the net.
If I had been selling my own product when Google pulled the plug, this could have been a disaster (especially if this was my only product). What I would have done then would have been to sign up affiliates to sell my product for me. Okay, the affiliates would receive a proportion of the sale, but the product would be moving again, and back in Google, on another person's blog or site.
Suspicion and experience tells me that these are the kind of 'techniques' being sold under the 'escape the force' (or similar :) ) catchphrase. So I will not be signing up for a paid-for, never-ending session of the same 'advice' being thrown at me monthly from different angles.
This blog post began as a question on 'can we really escape the force' of Google. Well I'm sorry, but no we cannot. We can do some pretty good things to get around it though, just by standing back and asking ourselves what else we could be doing and then acting upon this.
But we do not need to pay out exhorbitant amounts of our hard earned cash to find out that we knew these tactics already.
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