19 Common Marketing Terms and Definitions
We all know there’s a lot of hype when it comes to selling online. Many of these catch phrases and one liners have reached household term status. The same is true for many common marketing methods and offerings. Today I wanted to point out the real definitions of these terms and phrases as I see them.
1. MLM – One person at the top makes a bunch of money from shallow promises made to his downline.
2. Turnkey - Sales method used to play on the greed and laziness factor of the human race. Understand, there is NEVER going to be an opportunity where you can invest $50 and become a millionaire while you sleep. No system, no website, no ’system’, no software. If it sounds too good to be true people….
3. Spinning or Rewriting - Software designed to use other peoples hard work (read-copyrighted material) in order to gain search engine traffic.
4. Completely Automated – Shallow promises designed to play on the emotions of people who really want to do business online, but don’t want to do the work behind it.
5. Internet Guru – Those who can’t, teach.
6. Web Entrepreneur – E-book author.
7. Statistical Proof and Screenshots – Graphics primarily used for sales and promotion of e-books.
8. Free Websites – Nothing is free. Period. Free use of web space comes at a cost of your time and your promotion efforts. Companies make money when you promote their products. If you should leave their program or stop promoting the free page, that company owns it forever.
9. Infomercials - No one is ever going to sell you a real method that works when it comes to making money online. Not for $19.95 and not for $300. Infomercials are designed to sell you something. Making money online takes work. These companies did not make their fortunes online, they made their money from the infomercials.
10. Pro Affiliate – real professional affiliates do not share their secrets. Ever. Not with their friends, not with their mother. They make millions and guard their niches with their lives. See web entrepreneur.
11. Autoblogging – Software used to add automated content for spam blogs. No business should ever consider using this method. The key is content, but that content needs to be unique and relevant. That means it needs to be written by hand each day.
12. Autosurf and Traffic Swarms – Websites and software programs that promise a truckload of visitors to your website for a fee. That fee can vary greatly. From an investment of your time, viewing thousands of websites in an autobrowser, to buying impressions outright. This traffic is worthless. Period. Autosurf programs do only one thing well. That is burn bandwidth. None of these autosurfers are ever going to buy anything. Their goal is to view as many pages as possible in one sitting. Earning money from the payment you made to get those impressions.
13. Premium Domains – Domain names deemed by the person registering them as premium does not mean that they are. Simply because there are some real words strung together does not mean that the domain name is a good one. At this writing, www.soupydonutoil.com is available… It can be registered at Godaddy for less than ten bucks…. See what I mean?
14. Cheap Mailing Lists – Anyone offering to sell you millions of ‘targeted’ emails for pennies is selling you junk. These are not legal in most countries and the emails they contain were likely scraped on the Internet using a crawling bot. This means that these people do not have any interest in the products you are selling and did not opt to receive your offers. The canned spam act makes this action illegal. Real opt in mailing lists that are targeted to a specific industry and demographic are not cheap at all. Big companies do offer to sell them from time to time, but these lists are expensive.
15. Unsolicited SEO Company Spam - Email Spam sent out by wannabe SEO firms that know little or nothing about search engine optimization. Think about it for a second. If they knew how to do SEO, would they need to send out millions of spams in order to get a little business?
16. Marketing Secrets – Just like pro affiliates, marketers making millions do not sell their secrets. Ever. They don’t feel ‘guilty’ for making all that money, nor do they feel philanthropic and a need to help everyone else do what they’ve done. Websites promising marketing secrets make their money by playing on the greed and laziness of others. See E-books for further reference.
17. One Time Investment – No business can be run with a one time investment. Doing business, online or off, requires a long term commitment and long term investment. Your business is going to take money to run today and it will take money to run it tomorrow. It will also require a further investment of time and effort. For as long as you own that business.
18. Act Now, this offer will be limited to X number of users… - Sales pitch folks. Do you really think they are going to start turning away people with money in their hands wishing to buy their products once they have reached a hundred, or even a thousand customers? There are not ever only 3 positions left nor are they going to ‘close this opportunity’ to the public. It’s a call to action and an ancient sales technique.
19. Pictures of happy customers and testimonials – when is the last time you sent in a picture to ANY company? Were your Corn Flakes so tasty that you sat down right after breakfast and wrote Kellogg’s to tell them how much you loved them? Were you sure to include a photo of you smiling and munching? Probably not. Graphic design folks. 99% of these pictures and testimonials are fake. Real testimonials and real customer pictures do exist, but most of them were solicited by the site owners. Real customer testimonials are rare.
We say it here often, but I’ll say it again. There is no magic when it comes to success. It all comes down to sales and emotions. If the terms and methods work and you pull out your credit card to buy their offering, the sales pitch has done it’s job. But that doesn’t mean that the promises made will ever come true.
My grandfather told me to always look the easy road over before using it. Because it is rarely the path to get you where you need to go.
Tags: Call to Action, Definitions, Emotion, Marketing, Sensationalism
October 15th, 2008 at 8:45 am
Your post is pretty cynical. Which I have never found is helpful especially with respect to something like affiliate marketing. I am commenting because the part that was the most helpful was the statement by your grandfather. I get your point. Your definitions are a little over the top.
Most of the big time affiliate marketers out there making millions are guarding their secrets because they probably have skirted the edge of what is considered proper and unproper.
I believe the trick with being succesful is being able to look over the edge without falling over. That takes trying things other wouldn’t. Going places others won’t. The key is what your grandfather said with with one added caveat. Look EVERY road over before using it, but the easy one twice as hard.
One other thing, to me autoblogging is like a gun. It is not autoblogging itself that is bad it is the people who use it improperly. I have heard people call affiliate marketing itself, bad. I even heard a keynote speaker say it at an affiliate summit conference, but when I went to the summit. These were some of the nicest friendliest people I had ever met. And I am a deacon at a church. What’s my point. Autoblogging can be beneficial to you audience if you do a couple of things:
1. Don’t autoblog and walk off. That is SPAM. Autoblogging can give you create ideas and information that might be beneficial to your audience, but you have to post also.
2. Don’t use feeds that you haven’t either paid for or given you consent to use. Some people want their articles on you blog if for nothing other than incoming links (Ezine has a publishing element, as well as other niche feeds)
Your article had some good stuff, but if I wasn’t a determined individual I would have been discouraged by it.
October 20th, 2008 at 4:31 pm
Hi Patrick.
The post was written to by cynical and a parody of sorts. However, I do believe that many of these cynical definitions do hit the mark.
As far as your argument for autoblogging, your point is taken. Unlike gun control, there are no real boundaries in place for responsible autoblog software. Unfortunately a few bad apples always ruin the bunch. So I do stand by my autoblogger opinion and definition. I am glad to see that there are a few responsible users out there though.
Blogging is what I do, so of course I’m going to defend the totally unique content written each day stance. It does make a difference and it does impact how a business blog performs.
So I guess we’ll have to agree to disagree. I do thank you for reading our blog and the conversation.
January 17th, 2009 at 9:55 am
Your article is very interesting, i bookmarked your blog for future referrence