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Internet Coaching Library > Website Design > Site Links
Obsolete Internet Marketing Tactics
By Enrique de Argaez, MBA, PE, webmaster
Things have changed a lot online. However, it is truly amazing the amount of useless, obsolete, and misleading marketing information and tactics that you find today in the Internet. New and more efficient marketing methods have appeared, but many of the old tactics employed many years ago, in the begining of the World Wide Web, are still being offered for sale by emarketers. These self proclaimed Internet marketing gurus persist in selling us the same old tactics that deliver poor results.
The enormous growth of the Web brings online everyday large amounts of new people with no experience and eager to learn, that easily become the victims of the "Internet Experts" that make a living out of reselling old recycled emarketing information and programs.
There are tons of Web sites, articles and books that still promote old fashioned and outdated online marketing tactics. Watch out for many of the following Internet marketing tactics that, in my humble opinion, are for the most part of very little value at this point in time as income generators for the new Internet entrepreneurs.1) Affiliate Programs - Only a few are productive.
2) MLM Progams - The guys on top are the ones that make money.
3) e-Commerce Sites - Similar Internet stores are too abundant.
4) Re-selling e-Books - The original text was written years ago.
5) Safelist Advertising - Posting is to group members only.
6) Posting To FFA's - FFA or 'Free For All' pages will post your ad in one of seven categories on their page.
7) Free Classifieds - As a general rule, on the web, as in any other advertising, you truly do get what you pay for!
8) Pop-up Ads - Pop-up Eliminators make them less effective each day.
9) Banners - People have become inmune and don´t click on them.
Let´s review each of them in more detail:1) Affiliate Programs - Everyone has them, and the competition has saturated the net. Everyone is promoting an affiliate program hoping someone would buy or join up, but the problem is that these affiliate programs are often advertising to someone who is already a member. Today there is very little product sales on Web sites that are not professionally designed and maintained.
As an example, for many years I have been an affiliate of ClickBank, Commission Junktion, SFI and several other old traditional affiliate network programs. Never got paid anything over sixteen dollars and twenty cents in a month. Frankly dissapointing.
2) MLM Programs - The premise is simple: buy something, then get someone else to buy something, and they do the same thing; and everybody makes an infinite amount of money. PROBLEM. Very few in those downlines will do anything, and the rest will eventually drop out leaving you with earning nothing. They'll move on to find another program and start over. Another problem is that the prices that apply in these MLM programs are "inflated" in order to allow everybody to make a profit.
3) e-Commerce Sites - Internet stores are too abundant and they sell the same goods as Amazon or Best Buy. Why should anyone search the internet to find you when they can go to the 'big guys'? Your e-commerce site is a waste of time and money unless you have unique products that can't be easily found somewhere else, and a large advertizing budget.
4) Re-selling e-Books - Most of those who sell ebooks offer you the right to resale them to others. PROBLEM: the internet market is over-saturated with those same e-books. With some sites giving them away-why would anyone buy them from you?
5) Safelist Advertising - Safelists are groups of members who have 'opt in' their email address to receive advertisement email from fellow safelist members. Although the members are safe from using spammed advertising, this form of marketing is not effective because everyone just simply mass-deletes their emails without reading them. Everyone wants others to read their ads, yet no one reads other people ads. Those safelists that claim to send 2-4 million emails per day are nothing but scams. Your email ad goes nowhere, and no one even reads it. If you were really sending over one million emails a day, then you would receive over one million emails in return. Your email account couldn't handle that much volume. A targeted safelist involves only those who are in your interested field.
6) Posting To FFA's - FFA or 'Free For All' pages will post your ad in one of seven categories on their page. The idea is that the 1000's of others that post to these FFA pages will see your ad and click through to your website. The problem is that everyone that goes to these FFA pages only posts ads and there is no one actually reading any of these. Furthermore, your ad will rotate off the page after those that come behind you to post their ads in the same category. On top of all that your email account gets flooded with 100's of emails trying to sell you something.
7) Free Classifieds - Free online classified ads a seem to be the magic pill to bringing in targeted visitors. These sites will let you post your ads for free so that all visitors to their website will see it and click through to your website. The problem is that new technology now enables one to blast their ads to 1000's of classified pages without having to visit any of them. In a nutshell, these free classified pages get 1000's of post and no visitors to read your ad.
8) Pop-up Ads - Whenever you visit a popular website you get a another window that pops up selling something or inviting you to sign up for a newsletter. These pop-up windows were a great marketing tool because websites can sell to the same visitor twice, or capture their email address to sell to them later. The problem now is that the web has become so saturated with these pop-up ads that they slow down page loading speeds, annoy the visitor trying to trying to search for something important and waste valuable bandwidth space. A website that has a lot of visitors with pop-up ads that appear every time each page is loaded will tie up their ISP's server causing more frequent maintenance shutdowns. The problem has become so bad that net surfers are rushing in droves to buy software that actually kills pop-up windows. Additionally, AOL has decided to stop using pop-up ads altogether and other major ISP's are soon to follow.
9) Banners - People have become inmune to them and don´t click on them, originating a very low conversion rate.
It is hard indeed for any newcomer coming into the Internet to be able to weed out the old, fake and cheaty from the effective and up-to-date tactics that really work.
There are several good places to get help, Some free, some paid.
Anyway, start by visiting these pages:
Perry Marshall for technical sales
The System Seminar by Ken McCarthy
Internet Marketing Research.And remember, the "secret" is that there is no "secret" in Internet marketing.
About the Author:
Enrique De Argaez is the webmaster of several multilingual web sites and author of four newsletters. Since 2000 he has been collecting Internet Usage Statistics, and publishing statistics for over 233 countries and regions of the world for free use by the academia, the global business community and the general public. For information on Internet World Usage, please visit: http://www.InternetWorldStats.com/stats.htm
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