Richelo Killian

The following is reprinted with permission from Martin Avis. Kickstart: Internet Marketing with Standards

I will be sending this to all Imnica Mail customers as well!

If the endless onslaught of pitch email after pitch email from the Internet marketers who I remain subscribed to is anything to go by, parts of the IM world are going through a really tough patch.

Why do I say that?

Because the daily, and in some cases even more frequent, emails are starting to sound really desperate. I can only surmise that for these people who have been bombarding their  lists with pitch after pitch for the last six months or so are seeing lower and lower volumes of sales. The more junk they peddle, the less they sell, so they respond by peddling even more junk, even more often.

Even if they have any readers left (apart from me), those readers surely are not still paying attention? There is only so much hard sell that anyone can take before losing faith in the seller.

So focused are these ‘marketers’ on getting their endless sales messages out there that they have stopped even trying to evaluate and review the products they are plugging. That may actually be a wise move for much of the trash because at least these same marketers can honestly say that they were not making a recommendation, just offering market awareness. But we all know that would be a weasel.

In fact, I’ve noticed a trend to simply sending out a single paragraph followed by a link to a sales video. No recommendation, no explanation of what the product is or why it is any good – nothing.

Does this blind marketing work? Obviously it works well enough to make it worthwhile for so many marketers to have jettisoned their reputations by dumping what once may have been informative newsletters to concentrate on product-pimping. But the fact that so many of them now feel the need to blast out their empty messages two or even three times a day suggests that maybe it doesn’t work as well as they would like.

I’ll be honest with you. Over the last six months or so I have struggled to find decent products to recommend to you.

I know that the economy is biting hard. I understand that money is tight for many people and I am all too aware that at the moment, buying Internet marketing products has to be something that many people need to think hard about. Even $17 is a lot of money if you can’t see an obvious return on your investment.

Kickstart has never been a pitch fest. I’ve always said that if I don’t have something good to recommend then I’ll send you a newsletter without a recommendation in it. It has always seemed to me to be the best policy, but now that money is tight, it seems to me to be the only ethical policy.

Coupled with the willingness of some marketers to pitch anything and everything is the other side of the coin: product producers are also desperate to make sales at any price and feel the need to release new product after new product at an ever increasing pace – just to try to keep up their overall sales volume.

They don’t care about their reputations – most of the time they use fake names.
They don’t care about their customers – check out any IM forum to see how many people complain about customer service.

They don’t care about returns and refunds – it is a numbers game. Who cares if 50% of their customers demand a refund – it is the 50% who don’t that matter.

Where will it all end?

It ends when enough people stand up and say “Enough!”. It ends when people wise up and stop buying from blind sales letters. It ends when we unsubscribe from mailing lists that see us as cash cows and offer nothing of value in return. They don’t even bother to warm their hands before milking us!

It ends when otherwise honest marketers understand that being tainted by the stench of the desperate creates a miasma around you that is very hard to shake off.

It ends when WE want it to.

Today’s Kickstart has no recommendations, nothing for you to buy.

Why not? Because since I last wrote to you I haven’t seen or reviewed anything new that I think represents a genuine investment opportunity. That’s not to say that there aren’t good products out there, but I haven’t seen them, I haven’t evaluated them and consequently, I cannot, hand on heart, recommend that you spend your money on them.

You didn’t subscribe to Kickstart to be treated like a mark.

The funny thing is that there are still plenty of people around who don’t treat their subscribers like dirt and I would bet that those of us who still respect our readership are doing far better than the average marketer. Nobody is immune to recession, but by their actions, some people are far better placed to ride it out.