Marketing Myths: How web marketing really works

Most people who try to make money online by publishing web sites or blogs fail.

But so many do make part time income or even support themselves entirely online that we know it CAN be done. And it can be done with very little money invested. But you have to work hard, smart and honest.

The basic idea of OLM is to use online services to help the right people (your ideal prospects) find your web site, blog or Squidoo lens among the billions of others which are already online.

Yes, the Wikipedia says, "As of March 2009, the indexable web contains at least 25.21 billion pages". "On July 25, 2008, Google software engineers Jesse Alpert and Nissan Hajaj announced that Google Search had discovered one trillion unique URLs." "As of May 2009, over 109.5 million websites operated." "Of these 74% were commercial or other sites operating in the .com generic top-level domain"

This is supposed to work because most people who use the web to solve some need or problem (not just for fun "web surfing") will attempt to find a solution through an online search engine - usually the Google search engine. People also look for online reviews of the products/services they want. And they get advice from others on the social networks - like Squidoo.

In theory, if your web site, blog or lens has the right qualities and if you make all the right moves, your web content will show up in the first 3 pages of the Search Return Pages (SERPS) of the most popular search engines and get lots of "Likes" and other referrals on the social networks.

Then you'll get lots of well-qualified traffic and your carefully designed and optimized site, blog or lens will convert a few percent of those visiting prospects into customers. Ideally, those sold prospects will also become long-term business relationships - leading to them trusting you, giving you multiple sales over time and even spreading the word about your stuff to their friends and relations.

This theory has a huge number of "IFs" attached. And how to cover all those IFs is what this lens is all about.

I've been working at online publishing and online marketing (off and on) for several years now and have learned a lot. Here are a few tips from what I've learned:

1. There are no "Get-Rich-Quick" schemes that actually work - except publishing get rich-quick schemes.

2. You have to be willing to work hard and to expect income to take months to develop.

3. You won't succeed by doing what everyone else is doing (by being a "me too"). You have to find your own market niches - where you are an expert and have real value to contribute.

4. You have to stay with it through the inevitably depressing startup period, when it may look impossible and when little or no money comes in. Far too many people quite too soon - when they don't see immediate results. Never expect immediate results - those are extremely rare, unless you're already an expert.

5. Avoid those "Marketing Gurus" and their expensive ebooks, workshops, get rich kits and webinars. Trust the experts who are willing to give you real, solid advice for free, instead of giving you only constant enticements to buy their stuff.

6. Learn honest online marketing. Don't be pushy and try to "sell" people - everyone hates that (don't you?). Instead, provide real value and treat people the way you like to be treated yourself. You'll be way ahead if you provide serious value. For example, you won't have to spend your days and dollars "driving traffic" to your blog or web site (what? Are they cattle?). If you actually offer something people really want, they'll probably find you and spread the word for you - with some help from your end.

7. Use science, like understanding web site metrics and analytics and doing constant A/B Split tests to keep improving.

8. You must really, really understand the folks in your market. Web sales do not happen on web page. They happen in the mind of your prospect. To help your prospect along toward taking the action you want, you have to know, in detail, just what they are thinking.

For example the first thing they will all be thinking is "Where Am I?" If they can't figure that out easily in a few seconds - off they go! Then they'll want to know "What can I do here?" and "Why should I?" Again, if you don't present your offer in a few seconds, with extreme clarity and credibility - off they go! So, your visual and text communication skills have got to be top notch.

9. Don't look like an amateur. Have a high quality design and great ad copy.

10. Read and study online. Everything you need to know is available from a few good books and online sites.

OK, so how do you MONETIZE?
1. Become a sales affiliate and use your site or blog (or both) to market to your visitors and to send them to the sites of people with products to sell. The prospects you send will take a cookie along with them, which has your name on it. If they buy, you'll get a commission. Everybody from NewEgg.com to those get-rich-quick quacks use sales affiliates.

2. Create and sell your own product, usually an information or "how-to" product. You can write ebooks from scratch (like me) and sell them, or pull together information from all over the web and consolidate it into a useful package and sell that.

3. Or figure out how to get massive amounts of traffic and tart your site up with advertisements, like Google AdSense ads. You'll get a small commission for any resulting sales.

4. Build an online course and charge tuition (I'm building an online art course).

Below are my comments on some wrong ideas about online marketing, and what really works...

Myth: "You can make a killing by selling online!"
There are many hidden premises in OLM (Online Marketing) - That is, many beginning assumptions. If those are missing or wrong, everything else you do will be a waste. It would be best if you don't even try (don't waste your time and money, keep your day job) - if you don't have those assumptions well covered before you start. For instance, before you can even start to market, we assume that:

Your product or service is:

• Excellent
• At least as good as your competitor's and better than theirs in at least one aspect.

You must understand your market niche:

• What are your prospects thinking?
• Who are your competitors?
• What are your potential profits?

Essentially, this boils down to:

• Understanding your own business
• Understanding your market niche
• What is you Unique Value Proposition?
• How can you quickly and clearly express your UVP?

At the risk of offending some of you, I'll quote a 'proverb' which has served me well.
I overheard this long ago, on the road as head soundman for the Jefferson Starship band:
Some other band's tour manager (in the next restaurant booth) says to his soundman:
"You did a pretty good job on the sound for that opening act, all things considered!"
Soundman:
"Well, you can't polish a turd."

If your product or service is at the defecant level - don't waste time and money marketing it. First improve it or get a new business model going. Contrary to what some people say, putting lipstick on your pig will not convince prospects that's it's actually a beautiful person.

Avoid "Million Dollar Marketing Gurus" and their expensive ebooks, workshops, Get Rich Quick kits and webinars/seminars.

There exists online an unholy cabal of these con artists, who incestuously cross-promote their sucker lists, oops "email lists", to each other.

Don't be fooled. For one thing you won't succeed as just another member of the herd of "me too" copy cats. Your Unique Value Proposition has to be unique.

For another, many of these promoters don't really offer truthful, useful information. They are a waste of your valuable time and money.

Instead, look for true authorities (see my resource list) who are willing to give away honest information, or who sell professional ebooks or books in a professional manner. They won't string you on with an endless stream of come-ons that have no end and no payoff, or black hat methods that can backfire as soon as the search engines block them.

Red flags should go up when you start hearing words like "millionaire". There are such online millionaires, but ask yourself if they made their millions by doing normal ecommerce or by selling their get rich schemes.

But you might want to wait a bit before you run away. Many of these schemes do contain some valuable methods or ideas. And they all start out with more or less informative free tutorials, webinars or guru interviews. Sometimes you can learn useful things for free by studying the ones with the most informative free material - but then not signing up to buy anything.

According to this bit of basic online marketing ignorance, at least 75% of web users get to web sites through the search engines, especially Google, (true) and you can either submit your site to them (mostly not true) or the search engines will find it on their own (true). Once your site, blog or lens is "indexed" (added to the search engine's database) people will find you.

Sure, it's practically impossible to keep a site, blog or lens out of the search engines. I once built a web site for a client who does private classes. He didn't want to be found online because the site was meant only for his students and staff, and his prospective new students had to be introduced and sponsored by his existing students. We had quite a struggle keeping his site out of the search engines.

The real problem has a few parts:
First, people rarely look past the first 3 pages of SERPs (the search engine's Search Engine Results Pages). That is, they don't bother looking beyond what are called "positions 1 to 30" on Google's 10 items per page SERPs. Without marketing, your site is lucky to end up at a position above 100. Almost nobody will see your listing there.

Second, for most people's online business goals, they want "qualified" traffic to their content. Which means people who have "self-selected" themselves, by the search terms they used, as members of your niche market. "Your goal is to get as much traffic as possible." - that's just another marketing myth.

Traffic usually costs you effort and money. If there is no payoff, because you attract people who are unlikely to take the actions you desire, your efforts and money are a waste. If you happen to be using PPC (Pay-Per-Click) marketing, you are also donating handsomely to your search engine of choice while robbing yourself. The search engine gets paid (sometimes A LOT) for every click, while you get paid little or nothing. What a bad business plan!

Third, people sometimes forget what their online marketing goals are. Let's take a theoretical case: "Joe Blow's Web Services" builds a web site. They don't market it because when they type "Joe Blow" into Google, there they are, right on the first page of the SERPS. But what does this mean? It means that only those people already familiar with Joe's service will be able to find him! If his online marketing goal was to get new clients, he has doomed himself to failure.

Of course, if he bought the domain names "joe-blows-web-services.com" and "joe-blow's-web-services.com" (apostrophes are probably a bad idea) and redirected those to his other domain, "joeblowswebservices.com", then at least the search engines could parse out the key phrase "web services" from his web addresses. The point being that "joeblowswebservices" might be how many visitors would actually type his URL, but has no existence in an English dictionary and therefore is meaningless to search engines trying to determine what his content is all about.

Last, but hardly least, this shows just how vital market research in your market niche and understanding what the members of your niche are actually thinking really is.

For your content to drive the visitor actions you want them to take, you have to rank in the search engines for the exact phrases in their minds when they search for content.

The myth:
The myth here is that in today's busy world, you can succeed only by "selling people', in that old-fashioned "used car/vacuum cleaner salesman" style. There are well established "rules" in this myth for starting a sales call, persuading a customer, defeating their objections, wearing them done and "closing" the sale. Did you see that great movie "Tin Men"? That's a good example.

The Truth:
First off, this is no longer the 1800's. People no longer believe whatever they read in advertisements - if they read them at all anymore. Today's consumer is smart, wary and cynical. They have been bombarded by hundreds of ads every day all their lives. They've learned to ignore all this hype, noise and visual pollution.

Second, people actually actively hate aggressive advertising. Think about it. Do you yourself actually ENJOY television, radio and Internet advertising? Do you look forward to the breaks in the programs and content you enjoy - so that you can experience the wonderful ads? If you dislike aggressive ads, like most of us, then why in the world would you want to inflict them on your web site visitors?

Third, your new visitors don't believe you. They don't know you. They don't trust you. They don't care about you. They have zero confidence in you. They have no loyalty toward you and your brand (if not already well-established) at all. They are at most a few seconds from clicking away from your site to the next one on their list - never to return.

You have a very few seconds to get their attention and get them to commit their precious time and energy to further involvement with your site. Piss them off and they're gone. Throw hype at them and they're gone. Confuse them and they're gone. Ask them to choose between different options too soon and they're gone. Bore them and they're gone. I expect you;re getting the picture here.

You have to interest your prospects by being EXACTLY what they are searching for - by resonating with their thoughts. By triggering in their minds some thought process like, "Whew! I can stop all this tiresome searching now. THIS is what I was looking for!"

In other words, you're doing thought control. That means you have to understand what your prospect is thinking - "were their coming from". You won't get into their heads without an invite. Or if you look suspicious or you look dangerous, or untrustworthy, or like a salesperson.

Your sales page must start to establish you as an honest person who is offering something valuable enough to be worth the prospect's time and attention to investigate further. As they do investigate your page, you must turn them from a cynic into a believer. This is just the opposite of what will happen if you lie to them, throw marketese words at them, brag at them or hype them in any way.

Instead of hype, you must present facts - and also the proof of those facts. And not your version of the proof in you own words - but facts from 3rd parties. When your prospect sees that you're backing up your claims with substantial evidence, they will gradually start to trust you.

All through your site or blog you increase and improve that trust. You give them valuable info for free. You help them in various ways - like making it easy for them to locate things which help them make the right choices (e.g. a good catalog database). You gently help them to take the actions you want them to take.

You use 3rd party credibility symbols to give them confidence in you and ease their anxiety. You don't ask them to take action too soon or too late. ..And so forth.

I'll go into all these things in detail in later topics.

The take home lesson here:
As they teach over at Marketing Experiments.com: "Sales do not happen on web pages." "They happen in the mind of your prospect." So show them via your page that you're the kind of person they can safely invite into their minds.

Cheers All!
    _jim coe

In the post above this one, I wrote about dishonest marketing. But how does one actually go about honest marketing?

The experts on this topic are at MarketingExperiments.com. I'm really just repeating and embellishing their excellent advice. Check them out.

Above, I wrote about how cynical (and for good reason) today's online visitor really is. That means your only hope is to gradually build a bridge of trust with them. And that in turn means several things:

It means absolutely zero hype in your content. No "marketese" language, no wild claims, no exaggerations.

It means that every claim you do make, and after all making a claim is what an ecommerce site does, must be backed up nearby with REAL proof. And that can't be just your own say-so (remember, they don't believe you). It should be 3rd party proof.

It means you do things on your page that directly and immediately benefit your visitors and you don't ask for anything in return. In other words, you demonstrate your value to them by actually being of value. By actually helping them. They experience your value. And they do so in a way which is not just a come-on.

Just as today's visitors are quick to harshly judge obvious charlatans - so will they usually recognize, respect and reward good behavior, by loaning you their precious time and attention long enough to recognize and receive your Unique Value Proposition.

It's a kind of trade, exchange or deal. You give them some free value and a pleasant online experience and they reciprocate by giving you their valuable time and attention. If you understand your market niche and do everything correctly, that exchange can represent the opening of a dialog that leads to a long-term business relationship.

To repeat an obvious fact of business: A return sale costs you a lot less time and money than a sale to a new customer. Therefore your goal is always "Long-term business relationships", not "Sales". Most people like a marketplace. They enjoy trading and dealing, if they don't feel threatened.

It means that you carefully sequence what you ask of your visitors. You'd never ask someone to marry you on the first date. You know very well that doing that would probably end a relationship before it gets properly started. But many people ask their site, blog or lens visitors to buy something, or to sign up to something, before they even show the visitor where they have landed on the web, what they can do there and why they should.

It's obvious when you think about it:
   1. Orient your visitor
   2. Give them value
   3. Clearly present your Unique Value Proposition
   4. Then you can ask for their action.

Don't fall for those "We submit your web site to thousands of search engines" scams.
There are only 3 top search engines in existence. Concentrate on them, using known "best practices" methods. If you ever get really top ranks in Google, THEN work on the others.

Google     68%*
Bing         14%*
Yahoo      14%*
    Total  96%*

Ask           3%*
AOL          1%*

*Hitwise Search Engine Popularity Stats

These "services" would like your $20 and probably also want to sell your email address. They do no good and may harm your reputation, by spamming people with your site address.

Here's how to do it yourself - using Google as an example. First, understand that Google does not encourage web site submittals directly on their search pages. They would rather that Googlebot (their software robot "Spider", "Crawler" or "Bot") find your site, so they can better see how it links into the rest of the WWW.

So if you have other sites on the same or similar topics, by all means link from them to your new site.

1. Go to www.google.com and click on the "Business Solutions" link near the page bottom.
2. Then find the "Webmaster Central" link and click on that.
3. Next, open a "Google Webmaster Tools" account (or login to your existing account).
4. Once your account is setup, click on "Add a Site" and follow the instructions.

5. You'll need to do 2 things next:
A. Prove that you own your site or blog, using one of the two methods they provide.
B. Make and submit a site map in XML format. This site map shows Google all your pages, so Googlebot won't not miss anything.

To make your site map, just do a Google search on "google site map" and use one of the free services that you find. These free services will make you a site map file, called "sitemap.xml" for you to download to your computer. I use the "uncompressed" version, since none of my sites are huge.

6. Then upload your "sitemap.xml" site map file to Google, using Google Webmaster Tools. Google Webmaster Tools will tell you if your site map was successfully uploaded. Soon, your site or blog will be in Google's index.

7. Learn the other tools in Google Webmaster Tools - here are many useful tools there.

You should also check out Google Analytics for free traffic metrics and Google Website Optimizer for free split tests. Use those two great tools after you learn more about online marketing.

Hope this helped...
    _jim coe

Not only will other people's marketing methods not necessarily work for you, even your own expert opinions may not be best.

You won't get the best marketing results by guesswork - instead, use that scientific method. The Oxford English Dictionary says that scientific method is: "a method of procedure that has characterized natural science since the 17th century, consisting in systematic observation, measurement, and experiment, and the formulation, testing, and modification of hypotheses.

Observation and Measurement
You observe your web marketing results by gathering and studying "Marketing Metrics" over a period of time. Marketing metrics measure things like site traffic numbers Vs completed action numbers, search terms used to find your pages, how long visitors stayed on your pages, visitor entrance and exit pages, visitor interactions (like what visitors clicked on) and much more. But don't stop there. Also observe how your metrics affect your business goals. Don't obsess about metrics but forget about your ROI (Return On [your marketing] Investment).

Scientists know they have to work hard to control their own biases during observations - or risk fooling themselves. Marketers must do the same.

There are a bewildering number of marketing metrics available in your web server logs and in SEO software or online SEO services. Therefore you should definitely study up on properly using marketing metrics - especially on which metrics are most important and on avoiding "sampling errors". You really must learn the elementary basics of statistics too (for our purposes, you don't need the math, just the basic idea). A great place to learn this material is Tim Ash's excellent book, 'Landing Page Optimization'.

Experiment
One of the best ways to experiment with your marketing is called a "Split Test". Split testing software used to be difficult and expensive. But for the last few years Google has offered a great free tool for split testing, called "Google Website Optimizer".

The idea behind split testing is that you build two (or more) web pages: a "default" page version and a "challenger" page version. Your default page version is the page you started with and which you think is as good as you can make it. The challenger is a duplicate of the default, except that it contains some new or modified element that you think is probably an improvement over your default version. You then paste some code, that the Google Website Optimizer generates for you, into your pages and you publish them to the web. 50% of your visitors will now get one version of your page and the other 50% will get the other version. And Google keeps track of the results for you. After Google receives a large enough number of results to provide sufficient confidence in the results, a Google report shows you which page worked best.

If your challenger page does better marketing that your default page does, you remove your default page and start using the more successful challenger page in its place. But you don't stop there - you'll want to build another challenger page and never stop split testing. Thus your marketing pages evolve in a way that makes them more effective over time. If your challenger page doesn't do better than your default page, you abandon it and try another challenger.

Split testing sounds like a marketer's dream come true. But every tool has its limitations and the limitations of web split testing can be tough. For example, if your pages are new and you don't have the deep pockets to buy a lot of traffic via a PPC (Pay-Per-Click) advertising program, such as Google AdWords, then you won't yet have many visitors to the page you're trying to improve.

That means your A/B split test will have to run a long time before Google can get enough samples to give you a reliable statistical analysis. Lets say you're comparing two page headlines, to see which one best expresses your UVP (Unique Value Proposition) to your visitors. Now suppose that one simple test takes 2 months, because of low traffic. How long will it take to test all the major marketing elements on just one of your pages?

Split testing makes more sense for web sites and blogs which are already getting lots of traffic. You can partially buy your way out of this dilemma by running a short-term PPC campaign, designed to be as economical as possible by optimizing it for split testing purposes only.

This kind of "two factor" split test, trying a challenger page against your current default page, is called an "A/B Split Test". But you can also run various "multi-factorial" tests. However "A/B/C Split Tests", or those with even more factors, require even more traffic and even longer test times. And multi-factorial results can be harder to understand.

hypotheses
There's little point in testing unless your testing proves or disproves something. You'll want to optimize your 'decreases in ignorance' by stepping back from the details of your metrics and tests too think carefully about meanings. It's all too easy to get caught up in gathering and saving data about your pages but then not drawing meaningful conclusions or taking the best follow-up actions.

A successful detective can't only discover clues. They have to come up with suspects and scenarios and then test those against the facts and the clues - they have to make and test hypotheses. It's the same for the marketer. What do your test results really mean? What are they saying about your approach? How do they change or refine your hypothesis? Are you testing the right elements? Are your changes bold enough to actually prove anything? And so forth...

Just as marketing myths and misinformation can damage your marketing efforts, so too can your own unscientific guesswork. Aren't we all good at fooling ourselves?

Hope this helps...
    _jim coe

According to this marketing myth, the power of the World Wide Web lets even a one-person business go up against the corporations.

This is another of those over-simplified partial truths. Certainly you do not want to go up against a competitor who is more powerful, is more well-established than you and probably has deeper pockets.

This is all about "Niche Marketing" - how you can locate one or more small ponds, where you can be the big frog and become the well-established and successful business that others fear to compete with. Naturally, you accomplish this by doing market research - the flavor of market research called "Competitive Market Research". Researching your competitors (or establishing the lack of them) is a part of Niche Marketing, of discovering the segment of a larger market which is just right for your business.

The goals of niche marketing competitive research are:
   1. Help judge how well your business might fit a niche
   2. Discover your competitors
   3. Gauge your ability to compete with them
   4. Reconnoiter their methods and adopt the best, while avoiding the worst.

To make niche market research easier, use your best SEO tools. An inexpensive tool like Traffic Travis Pro will help with your niche market research. Of course you can do it all manually and with a collection of certain free tools, perhaps Google's.

But I like a program that tracks things for me and keeps the data centralized in one place, not forcing me to get data from various different free programs and then store it in my own Excel spreadsheets or such. A well-designed SEO program just makes the tasks faster and easier. I find that when things are too scattered and complex, important tasks just don't get done.

For example, Traffic Travis Pro shows you who is already in your prospective niche, gives you clues about how well they are doing, lets you see their ads, "adopt" their best key words and so forth.

For example, for my market niche selling my 'Art Head Start' ebook of visual communication, design and art skills for artist and art students, I used the Traffic Travis Pro "Research" tab to look at my market niche from the point of view of key phrases which define my niche. Traffic Travis Pro returns this chart (I can also "drill down" in this list to get much more detail):


Sorry for the relatively small image. Traffic Travis Pro (or "TT4") has showed me the first 50 (that's how many I asked for) Google SERPs (search results) for my niche-defining key phrase "art instruction ebooks". I set it to display only exact matches and to show if the key phrase appears in the competitor's hyperlinks and titles - as it should. If it doesn't, those are ways I can try to out perform them.

The columns shown are:
    Key Words
   Global Count (general popularity all over the web. I can sort the list on any column)
   Count (results only for Google US)
   Competition % (how difficult TT4 Pro estimates each listing would be to compete against)
   Average PPC (average cost per click each listed return is probably paying Google)
   SERPs (how many Google search returns there were)
   InAnchor (did they use the key phrase in their link?)
   InTitle (did they use the key phrase in their title?)

Hope this helps. ...more coming soon.
   _jim coe

People's tendency is to cut the marketing budget and efforts during bad times. It's only natural - you're extra busy dealing with financial problems, you need the money elsewhere, etc., etc. [insert rationalizations].

But stop and think about it...
Not only do you need to do more marketing during hard times to keep your projects and customers coming, but there are advantages to be had when your competitors stupidly cut their marketing.

Bad financial times are temporary. If you do more and better marketing than your competitors during the hard times, you'll still be ahead of them when the good times are back - and it could be impossible for them to ever catch up to you again.

So financial bad times can be good times to get a toehold in a market niche that's normally too competitive for you. Or [to mix metaphors] to become the alpha bullfrog in your own favorite pond.

Is that opportunity I hear knocking?
    _jim coe

...More myths soon...

Since World War II, when mass propaganda was used effectively, social scientists have been doing research on how to persuade people. Wikipedia has an overview of Persuasion.

I've culled some info on persuasion from Robert B. Cialdini's article, "The Science of Persuasion" in the February 2001 issue of Scientific American magazine, (c) 2001, Scientific American, Inc.. A PDF of that issue is available for U$7.95 from Scientific American magazine (the "Buy Back Issues" link at page bottom). See my books section for more information from Robert B. Cialdini. His web site is Influence at Work. I recommend buying one or more of his books, or at least the Scientific American PDF, since they have interesting and valuable examples of the many research projects that lead to these conclusions about persuasion.

Quotes:
Six basic tendencies of human behavior come into play in generating a positive response:
   1. Reciprocation
   2. Consistency
   3. Social validation
   4. Liking
   5. Authority
   6. Scarcity

Reciprocity
All societies subscribe to a norm that obligates individuals to repay in kind what they have received. (jc - This is why you should give something valuable away for free on your web site or blog).

It also applies to concessions that people make to one another. For example, assume that you reject my large request, and I then make a concession to you by retreating to a smaller request. You may very well then reciprocate with a concession of your own: agreement with my lesser request.

Consistency
Public commitments, even seemingly minor ones, direct future action.

Social Validation
One planted man stared upwards on a busy Manhattan sidewalk. Then 4% of the public joined him by also looking up. When they changed it to 5 men looking upwards, 18% of passersby did the same. With 15 men looking up, 40% responded by also looking up.

Less obvious, however, are the circumstances under which social validation can backfire to produce the opposite of what a requester intends. An example is the understandable but potentially misguided tendency of health educators to call attention to a problem by depicting it as regrettably frequent. Information campaigns stress that alcohol and drug use is intolerably high, that adolescent suicide rates are alarming and that polluters are spoiling the environment.

Although the claims are both true and well intentioned, the creators of these campaigns have missed something basic about the compliance process. Within the statement "Look at all the people who are doing this undesirable thing" lurks the powerful and
undercutting message "Look at all the people who are doing this undesirable thing." Research shows that, as a consequence, many such programs boomerang, generating even more of the undesirable behavior.

Liking
"Affinity," "rapport" and "affection" all describe a feeling of connection between people. But the simple word "liking" most faithfully captures the concept and has become the standard designation in the social science literature. People prefer to say yes to those they like. (jc - note the current use of "Like" to recommend web pages to others online)

Liking Factors:
   Physical attractiveness (jc - About a 2X increase)
   Similarity (jc - Campus charity collectors added "I'm a student too!" to their spiel for 2X gain)
   Praise (jc - He notes that even inaccurate praise or compliments work)
   Cooperation (jc - like "Good guy/Bad guy" police routine)

Authority
"Babies are our business, our only business,"
"Four out of five doctors recommend..."
The author's biography at the end of this article in part serves such a purpose.

Scarcity
Items and opportunities become more desirable to us as they become less available.

Scarcity Factors:
   Unique
   Limited Time
   Limited Supply

Scarcity affects the value not only of commodities but of information as well. Information that is exclusive is more persuasive.

From an evolutionary point of view, each of the behaviors presented would appear to have been selected for in animals, such as ourselves, that must find the best ways to survive while living in social groups. And in the vast majority of cases, these principles counsel us correctly.

Cialdini's book, "Influence", which was the result of a three-year study of the reasons why people comply with requests in everyday settings, has appeared in numerous editions and been published in nine languages.

End of Quotes.

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* 4 Tables
* Step-by-step Photo Enhancement lesson
* Much more...
$29.95



'Visual Marketing Online - Better Visual Communication boosts profit'

Check out this video introduction to Traffic Travis.

Get Serious - Under $100 'Traffic Travis Pro' ver 4
Or try this first: Free 'Traffic Travis' ver 3

I recommend comparing the two versions. I find version 4 more powerful and easier/faster to use. Do be aware that Traffic Travis is not a high-end professional online marketer's tool. Those do somewhat more, but cost much more. Traffic Travis is a very good value though and it does a lot. For example, one of my high-end tools costs me $37 per month ($444 per year) just to use it, and I can never actually own a copy. In addition, with that tool I have to pay Google a fee each time I get certain data.

Disclosure:
   I'm a Traffic Travis affiliate - because it's good.
   I get a small commission if you buy a Pro version.

It's now July 16, 2011. The developers of Traffic Travis released version 4 to the public full of bugs around May 9, 2011.

I installed version 4 of Traffic Travis right away and experienced many lockups and crashes, which I reported immediately to the developers. Although they were overwhelmed for a couple of days, I was soon in the loop for semi-automatic patched versions and improvements.

Not only did the Traffic Travis folks immediately apologize and take full responsibility for their failure, they also took on a level of support and improvement like I've seldom seen. Such as new improved versions automatically available with one mouse click 2-3 times a week. Like immediate, personal, individual email support (no boilerplate generic responses) with serious technical suggestions, when I would report errors. And a very professional clear desire to have me supply all technical details I could to help them spot and quash bugs. I have extensive experience being a software application beta tester and this was almost that level of end user personal interaction - in spite of the fact that they didn't know me at all and were swamped with work.

I'm very impressed by the way Traffic Travis immediately took charge of this problem, hired extra staff, put themselves on an emergency footing and rapidly brought their flagship product up to (and beyond) the standard they had originally promised. Traffic Travis 4 has been working flawlessly for me (Windows 7 "Home Premium" 64 bit) for several weeks now. But they didn't stop with the constant improvements - they keep on rolling in every few days!

If you'd like to follow the whole event, it's in their blog at: Traffic Travis Blog

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