About a month and a half ago I received a phone call from a guy asking me if I had enjoyed Mike Filsaime’s products? Like a true Brit I was polite on the phone and told the guy yes, but I wasn’t willing to speak because “my curry is getting cold.”
The caller than asked me if I was interested in Mike’s coaching program. Again, I calmly told him I wasn’t interested (the curry which I had just lovingly prepared was getting cold remember).
For the next two minutes this too and froed until I ashamedly used an expletive to tell the guy where I wanted him to go. After sales service makes good business sense. We all know about how annoying telemarketers can be. But this was different. There’s a horrible trend coming that I want you to be aware of…
After sales service hell – Internet marketing and telemarketing should not go together!
How often have you just sat down to eat dinner when the phone rings? You answer and someone is trying to sell you something over the phone. You try to be polite but they’re persistent… I mean it is their job after all. Problem is they’re invading your time and privacy. So you end up telling them to… ahem “buzz” off.
We’ve all been there at some point haven’t we? Well prepare yourself. Because Internet marketing has just merged with telemarketing.
You may recall that about two months ago I spoke in this eletter about receiving a phone call from Mike Filsaime’s company asking me if I liked their products and if everything was ok. That was nice of them I thought.
Fast forward to a couple of months later and I have received a number of different phone calls from Mike’s company trying to sell me something AND other companies who’s Internet marketing related products I have signed up for. I’ve got to be honest, to me this isn’t on. And I’m going to explain why, and how to avoid it, in this eletter.
Have you noticed lately how a lot of products in the make money online market are asking for your phone number once you’ve bought their products? They claim it’s because “We need it in case there is a problem with shipping your product”. Unfortunately they’re not telling you the whole truth.
Because now the gurus are getting people to actually ring you up and try to sell you more products. Ok, I get that that’s good business, but for me I find this a little invasive. Don’t ask me why, but I do. I think it’s because I think about online business for the majority of the day and try to switch off in the evening, then I get a phone call offering me “Mike Filsaime’s Inner Circle Program”. I just don’t need that.
The problem is that a certain marketer, Tellman Knudson, appears to be selling your details to other marketers. People are getting as many as six phone calls a week from different companies selling Internet marketing products. Six!
Now to be fair, these big marketers all do have words in their privacy policy that state “your information may be shared with third parties”. But still there are a lot of people, more than you’d expect, who are “midnight marketers” and don’t want their spouses knowing they are interested in making money online. So to get a lot of phone calls about this may cause problems for people.
So how do you stop this?
Simple. Give a wrong phone number. Maybe even give them a phone number of your greatest enemy. Just don’t give them yours.
If you don’t want to be bombarded with very persuasive calls from the guru’s telemarketers just don’t give them your real home number. This is just going to get worse and if your number starts getting shared around it might just become unbearable.
Another way is to tell the telemarketer that you’re busy at the moment, but that if they give you THEIR home phone number you’ll ring them back.
“I’m afraid I can’t give you my home phone number sir”
“How come? Don’t want to be disturbed at home?”
“Not really”
“Neither do I. Now sod off”
Cringeworthy as well as awful – I bring you Eric Rockaffeler
You’ve probably received a whole host of emails from the ClickBank Brady Bunch about “E-Rocks”, the new software which promises to help you pillage money from Google. Personally I find the whole Eric Rockafeller “rock star” thing a tad cringe-worthy.
Now I have to admit, I haven’t had a chance to look at this firsthand because I was busy writing this month’s Digital Upstart Printed Newsletter (if you’re a member, this months blueprint is crazily good. Profiting from domain names in a very unique and new way is revealed – if you’re not a member sign up at http://www.internetincomedetective.co.uk) but I’ve heard the software is somewhat flawed and is not living up to the hype in the sales letter.
Regardless of that you shouldn’t get this software anyway in my eyes.
Eric Rockafeller is very much like Andrew Fox (reviewed in the coming IID issue) in that he bangs on about list building and how it can make you money. He makes out as if he has found a unique way of building a list – using his software.
Let me tell you something. Eric makes good money online because he has built an email list by creating a product, selling it via ClickBank and getting other people to promote his web site. When people land on his site a percentage will give him their email address. THAT’S how he built the email list. Not “pillaging Google”.
That’s how Andrew Fox built his email list. Not “dominating adwords”
That’s how pretty much every ClickBank marketer (not all, most) built their email list.
I’m starting to get ever so slightly annoyed with these hypey sales letters that say one thing, when really the creator is doing another. I’ve been exposed to this type of rubbish for three and a half years and it’s getting worse with regards to the promises people are making. In the new IID issue I review one particular course which is marketed heavily but is shockingly bad, yet everyone’s promoting it. Why?
Firstly for commissions. Obviously.
Secondly the only way people promote your product on ClickBank (in the make money markets) is if you promote theirs. Thus begins a viscous circle of everyone promoting rubbish – regardless of the quality of the product.
When it comes, the kind of black hat software “Erock” is selling it might, and I do mean might, work for a little while. But Google is clever. The second they notice you doing something a little strange, which this software will do, they’ll blacklist you from their engine. Your site won’t rank anywhere and it will never be allowed back in.
I’ve said this so many times before but people still get sucked in. When it comes to search engine optimization you need to do it right or not at all. So do it right! Ignore these blackhat type offers, more often than not they’re just harmful tactics that will take a lot of work and get poor results.
You may have seen this advertised on TV of late. Go To My PC is possibly the coolest web site I have heard of in a long, long time. The idea behind it is simple. For a monthly fee of £11.99, or an annual fee of £107.99 (at time of going to print), you can use their service to access your PC from anywhere in the world. In other words if you’re on a PC in America whilst on holiday you can access your PC in your study here in the UK. You can access all of the files as if you were just sitting in front of your PC at home.
That is really, really useful.
I’ve lost count of the amount of times I have been travelling or away from home and realised that my laptop hasn’t got a certain file on it but my desktop PC at home has. It is so, so frustrating. Now this never need be a problem again because I’ll be able to access all my files from my desktop using my laptop and the ‘Go to My PC’ service.
This is going to revolutionise a lot peoples lives. That sounds a bit drastic but think about it. If you work in an office, get home and realise you need an important file from your work computer you’d be in the do da. If you had Go To My PC though you’d be able to access the file from any other computer.
By now you’ll know whether or not this is for you. For many entrepreneurs I know this is becoming a must have and if you need it and think you’ll use it a lot I’d get in now whilst the price is still low. You can be sure they’ll hike it up as more and more people find out about this.