There are sooo many programs out there, sooo many promises. Especially in the search engine game. It’s overwhelming. BTW, search engine traffic should be treated as a bonus, design your website for the search engines, play the game, but don’t get to caught up in it. It changes all the time. Yes, you do need to pay for sales and traffic. Nothing is free. PPC can be hard, you need to have the right keywords, and a good tracking system in place. You’ll lose money at first. We found that using print newsletters work great for customer retention, you can do a trifold flier in word, featuring a few top selling items, upload it to your mailer of choice, and mail it to your current customers (this cost money). Have a customer of the month reward program (this cost money) Referral program (this cost money). Buy mailing list of buyer of your type of products, and mail them post cards (this cost money). Have an affiliate program (this cost money) Even email (cost money). And for us, email does not work as well as printed newsletters. We send emails once or twice per week, and mail monthly print newsletters. Get a blog or forum. (cost money and or time and can be a pain deleting all the spam post) Run space ads (well you know what I’m going to say)

Just my 2 cents

Thanks, Phil

Great article. Scammers will go anywhere they think they can make big bucks.

I have a question. When you run an ad in a newspaper or magazine, print fliers, or send salesletters you have fixed costs which you can determine upfront. The problem with gimmicks like pay-per-click is that you have a variable cost that you can’t predict ahead of time. If you pay $1.00 per click and you get 10,000 clicks it costs $10,000. Not a problem if you have deep pockets, but a monstrous problem if you’re starting from broke. Some competitors or people who hate you will run up clicks just to cost you money. So, how do you market on the Internet in a way you can control and know your costs?

Thank you,
Dale

Yes, I have a consumerism blog where I report on the Internet scams and you are so right. You can’t believe that every thing these so called gurus push through their endless launches will work except for lightening one’s pocketbook! Most of the time our investigations find that they hire some Indian or Romanian programmer for some crazy software app that they don’t test and would NEVER use themselves.

Or like the lady I helped with a scam operation in Utah that sells online stores sells stuff that is totally out of date or one could find for free as we explained to her. However there is a good ending to this story has we helped get back almost all of her $15,000 investment. And she was a paralegal!

Send us the good stuff, Julie!

Hugh
Franklin, North Carolina

Great post!

Thankfully, I’m not one of those poor souls,
who got ‘taken,’ by a snake oil salesman … but so many
have been.

Like you, it makes me sick. It preys on one of the MOST
fundamental desire of human nature, though, doesn’t it?

Freedom.

Yep. You, too, can be like me. Whup up a site,
slap some products on it and you’re offnrunnin’!

Right.

There are quite a few of these hypsters still getting
away with it, apparently.

And, did you say "pay" for traffic?? Let’s see, that’s
analogous to paid advertising in the brick and mortor
world, yes?

How novel.

Thanks again,

Carolyn
http://www.blog.kickasscopywriter.com

Ken Varga
http://www.kenvarga.com