Never, Ever Sell Products In Your Blog Posts!

Have you heard that one?

It comes from the “age old” Blogging Proverbs that the old-school blogging geeks continue to press upon the new bloggers. Especially with references to how “us marketers” have screwed up blogging on the web.

Well, I’d first like to go on record by saying “those marketers” ain’t with me! I have nothing to do with the perpetuation of scum blogs, splogs, or crap content on the web.

I have a clear record right here in the FTRrchives of constantly urging marketers to blog a certain way. And that way is to provide great content, be white-hat (with a peppering of gray from time to time) and absolutely live and die by the needs of their readers.

Secondly, who started this whole “thou shalt not create a post simply to sell something” bull crap anyway? And why would anyone listen to such an eHippy in the first place? Yet the mantra is repeated without being spoken on blog after blog around the web.

I’d like to at least propose a caveat to the “rule” of blogging as the altruistic purpose of helping our fellow man. If you are looking out for your visitors, and I mean really looking out and not just pretending to be their buddy, then you have to mention things that cost money if those things are truly going to help your readers solve a problem.

Doing so without monetary gain is stupid considering that each and every person who can afford a computer and an internet connection has to have income from somewhere. And there is no way to make money living on planet Earth without whoring yourself out to someone, which is what you are doing, at a job.

Don’t like the word whore? How about slave? That better? Because I can’t candy coat this fact and still tell the truth. Take your pick.

To come online and say “hey man, like, information is free and I’m, like, a giver man!” is such a hypocritical bunch of B.S. that it I puked in my mouth a little bit just writing it. We’re all marketers. We all have to make a freakin’ living, keep the lights on, put gas in the car, put clothes on the kids.

If you don’t have those responsibilities then you are obviously 13 and I don’t even want to hear from a 13 year old living with his parents about “giving” and “marketing is evil.” Go buy some Proactiv and shut the hell up squirt!

(Oops, I just marketed! Sorry about that.)

I have something of true value to talk about that costs money. But if that product could get you thousands of “things” you desperately need for the price of just a handful of those “things” on the open market, wouldn’t that be something to bring to you since you are here to learn about traffic?

I sure as heck think so. Information is free, but free information is usually crap, so you gotta drink the kool aid sometime.

Complete and Utter Myth of Marketing Online

“Everything you need to know about internet marketing is free in the forums and on blogs. I don’t pay for nuthin’!”

As Dr. Phil would say, “How’s that workin’ out for ya?”

Did you pay your web hosting bill last month? Then you, my friend, are a liar!

I see people on forums I have frequented for literally a decade who are still touting this philosophy. There are like 15,000 things wrong with that scenario.

If it were true that everything you need to know about marketing and being a success with an online business was freely available on forums and blogs, then why is “Millionaire55″ still lurking on marketing forums 10 years later with no shred of success to speak of?

That’s always bothered me. Glad I got that out.

So here’s the deal…

The product I am talking about is a site where you can learn to get valuable links, higher rankings for far more keywords than you currently have, and plain old high-quality traffic to your site from hundreds and thousands of places.

What’s a valuable link?

• It is a link that Google freakin’ thinks is valuable.
• It’s a link that actual human beings who might be interested in buying what you’re selling think is valuable.
• A valuable link is something you’d pay a link broker $5-$1000+ per month for depending on the traffic of the site you want the link from.

And I am talking about showing you how to get hundreds or thousands of these links for pretty much the cost of a pizza and a $1 movie.

Let’s do math!

Say you could actually buy 1000 of such quality links in one fell swoop. And let’s take the least you’d pay for them; $5 per month. Check my work yourself and go to text link merchants and check their prices. You will find the average price for a quality link (not hidden in the dungeon of a site) goes for much more than $5.

But hey, we’re just talkin’ right?

So 1000 real quality links for $5 per month is…. dun Dun DUN! $5000 per month. And if you stop paying, you stop getting linked to.

A sucky, sucky way to make a living online unless you are the guy getting paid for these links. The only one who profits.

And since we’re just talkin’ and I’m not really selling anything in my blog post (because that would be wrong and I’d never do that) let me just tell you there is a far, far better way to go.

Though you gain much more than links, and what this product provides is far more than just link building tactics, let’s just leave the analysis at 1000 links for a “you’d be the luckiest son of a ___ if you ever paid this little” price of $5000 a month.

Nevermind that if you are currently spending anything on Adwords or other paid advertising you could wipe that expense out completely.

Nevermind that you’d never be duped into hiring an “SEO” firm (usually that pimple faced kid in his mom’s basement) for $10k to get you 3 measly keyword rankings in the top ten for your best LONGtail keywords.

Let’s just stick with the plan.

$5k a month or…30 bucks a month? In our scenario above this equals the cost of 5 of your paid links. And you will learn to get literally hundreds, and in all cases if you do it for a year, thousands and thousands of such links in this yet-to-be-named magical place which may or may not exist depending on whether you took the blue or red pill.

Now it might sound like a total Ebay product here, put together by some 30-something DnD slob in his Trekkie Command Center (Mother’s garage) in Spokane, Washington. Hell, reading what I just wrote I’m starting to wonder myself!

Impossible that such a place would exist that also was put together by an expert’s expert, right? After all, everyone knows that the gurus charge $500-$1200 a month for such things! Not to mention you can find about 10 guys right now on Google with good reps charging $5k a month to get you links, though the number of links “depends on your niche.”

(Gotta hand it to them though. They are doing it the hard way and that takes a lot of “link monkeys” typing on computers to get links the old fashioned way. Those monkeys gotta eat!)

Ok, so the site is reasonably priced to say the least. Except it has to be run by a no-name. Certainly not anyone we know.

What if I told you (and please be sitting down when you read this next part) that it was I, Jack Humphrey, who put this site together? I know. If you need a moment to clean yourself, I’ll wait. There’s no shame in adult incontinence. None whatsoever.

Yes, the site is mine and you’ve even heard of it already, unless you are new here. But then I’d have serious questions about your state of mind for reading this far without even knowing me. In fact, that scares me a little. Please go away.

Anyhoo, the site is Social Power Linking.

Yes it was put together by the guy who wrote the book on linking (Power Linking, 20,000 copies sold, $97 per, first edition 2002) and also the book on Authority (Authority Black Book, 2007, 40,000 copies downloaded, free) and co-authored the book of Bending (Bending the Web, who knows how many downloads?, with Howie Schwartz).

Now, back to the price of this “supposed” product…

If it can do only what the scenario above claims, why isn’t it $197 a month? Or even $47 a month? There are sites for $47 a month that exist for no other purpose than to puke out content written in the 1950s for heaven’s sake!

There are gurus charging more and more and more for memberships. Not less and less and less! Yes, that’s the trend. It’s a pendulum. Hey, it’ a “trendulum!” And the trendulum is starting, with Social Power Linking, to swing back to center.

It’s a Numbers Game

There are quite literally tens of thousands of very warm prospects who own websites who’s total readership includes their mom, their best friend, and some whack job named “crucifier” who continually spams their comments.

Social Power Linking isn’t $29.95 because I’m a Birkenstock-wearing daisy sniffer working solely for the benefit of mankind.

I have a kid to put through college. It is priced the way it is because I want out of the “internet marketing” world where there are so few customers that you have to sell stuff for $3000 to buy that third home in Columbia.

My partners and me look at it this way: There are so darn many people who need this information and there are so few ways to get it for less than thousands of dollars (in fact there is no other way to get it, even for thousands of dollars) that $29.95 is the move of the century for a marketing product like this.

It is a turning point, at least for us.

We have a $97-$197 member site by the way. We aren’t slouches and we know how to charge quite a large chunk of change for our skills (NetSmartMedia.com service starts at $2500 per month if you’re counting) – but most people can’t afford that kind of monthly burden. Most people are working up to having those kinds of bills. Heck, MOST people just want to make a few hundred bucks a month online with a fairly moderately visited site, if you want the truth.

We know. We surveyed.

Luckily we figured out you have to survey “normal” people and not “internet marketers” if you want real data on what the average online surfer wants. You should have seen the stats from the IM survey. Hilarious how many people actually believe they can be millionaires next week.

So, to wrap up.

Save a massive load of cash on SEO firms, buying links, buying clicks, and buying every god awful marketing ebook and service there is out there with no results, and check out Social Power Linking.

To say you’ll be glad you did is an understatement. If you were one of the folks above who “lost control” after my mind-bending revelation that it was me behind this, be sure you have your adult diaper of choice firmly in place when you enter the site and start seeing traffic and rankings like you’ve never experienced before.

And remember: Never, ever let them see you marketing on your blog!

Social Power Linking!
Now with twice the whitening power of chlorine with bonus odor eliminators!

(But seriously…you’re going to get a metric butt load of traffic…)

Tagged as: Blog Marketing, social power linking