This is a guest post by Jeet, who has been using internet for more than 15 years on a daily basis and has seen many scams. He often wonders that some of these scammers could become highly successful internet marketers if they decided to use the right methods.
No one likes a web scammer. While the rest of us slave away to try and find web success through genuine methods and good, honest hard word, these guys sell rubbish products, spam the web and end up most likely living in mansion houses on their own private islands. And on top of all that they give the rest of us a bad name.
It’s frustrating yes, and it’s certainly not to be condoned, but the fact of the matter is that they’re probably doing something right. If they can be that successful with a rubbish product – or no product at all – then imagine how successful we could be applying some of the same principles and actually offering something good. It’s a marriage made in heaven, and it’s a one-way trip to Successville (incidentally the name I’m going to give to that mansion house when I’ve got mine), so here are some of the things we can learn from the scammers.
Tap Into People’s Desires
First and foremost, if you want to make money you should tap into the things that people want the most. And what are those things? They’re things like love, respect, friendship, wealth, success and rock hard abs – pretty much the top three sections of Maslow’s hierarchy of needs (look it up). By tapping into those things with an e-book, a diet plan or a dating site you can tap into people’s emotions – and when you do that common sense goes out the window and you’re into the realm of impulse purchasing.
The Right Language
The smart web scammers hook you in by offering you an answer to one of your biggest problems be that weightloss or romance, and then hit you with seductive language that tells you precisely what you want to hear. They are masters in the art of persuasion and their landing pages and e-mails refer to statistics and quotes, they use rhetorical questions, they answer your fears and they confirm your suspicions – so that by the end of it you are completely compelled to make a purchase.
Think Numbers
Web scammers work in volume. Huge volume. There are countless different scamming techniques out there, but all of them involve such vast quantities of people that the chances are someone is going to make a purchase or click on an ad.
Think about websites that sell useless e-books: these sites will normally have hundreds or even thousands of inbound links and that means that lots of people are going to see the landing pages. Meanwhile the web scammers that work by e-mail will send out billions of e-mails so that a 1% conversion rate equates to a lot of money. They don’t care if 99% of people are too savvy to fall for their garbage because they have so many chances to make up for it.
And once again just think – if you could get those same kinds of numbers to your landing pages but offer a genuinely good deal… then you might get a 2 or 3 percent conversion rate. Make that two mansions…
Smart Coding
To get these numbers many web scammers will use very smart coding to create spam bots and spiders and auto-generated mailing lists that enable them to do the work of a hundred men, or they will write their own spinners and content sifters to write blogs without so much as lifting a finger.
The sad irony of all this is that if these guys turned their talents to good rather than evil then they’d actually be much more successful, but it seems like some of these people actually enjoy being little pricks. But what this tells us nevertheless is that automation through programming is very powerful. If you dedicate your next year to learning to code in a few languages (PHP, Java and C) then I guarantee you’ll find ways you can increase your earnings exponentially.
It’s a good thing companies like Google, Twitter and Facebook are taking proactive steps to beat the scammers and slow down the relentless tide of spam that populates our inboxes and pollutes our search results. I know a lot of Internet marketers like to moan and complain about Google’s Panda and Penguin updates, but overall it’s a positive thing for everyone. These periodic updates to the search engine algorithm eliminates a lot of the loopholes exploited by spammers.