Resist the Hype on the Internet by Recognizing the Commonly Used Marketing Techniques (By Luthando)

It doesn’t take much searching for ways to earn money online to encounter the many and varied money scams on the Internet. Even the opportunities that aren’t exactly scams are hyped up and marketed using high pressure tactics. Picking out the truly legitimate opportunities and valuable information from the hype and noise can be a daunting task if you’re new to online marketing.

While I can’t make the money scams on the Internet go away or get rid of the excess hype, I can help make you aware of some of the tactics that you are sure to encounter that are designed to make you spend money that you are likely to regret. You can save yourself lots of money and regret by understanding some commonly used marketing techniques.

The One Time Offer

Also knows as OTO, it’s pretty much assumed that anyone who puts out any kind of product on the Internet will have an irresistible one time offer. Here’s a common scenario. You register for the free membership option on a site that provides you with free tools or insider information. Before you complete the registration, you are shown a screen that goes on forever about the benefits of a paid upgrade membership, the price you will pay should you choose to upgrade later and the much reduced price you can get now if you just buy now. You will be told in no uncertain terms that you will never see that offer again.

I’ve seen many of these one time offers and fallen for a few of them. No matter what the highly optimized page or video tells you, there is a way to access that one time offer again should you later realize you actually want it. The marketer wants you to buy it and if you want it he will sell it to you. It will be offered again in an email message, as a seasonal special or a repackaged one time offer. If that doesn’t happen, you can always try registering for the same site using different log in credentials and a different email address, and odds are, you’ll see the offer again and can take advantage of it should you choose. But the marketer understands that the odds are you won’t think about it and you won’t want to come back. If you don’t buy right then, he knows you won’t buy later, which is why he gives you all kinds of extreme reasons to buy in that moment.

The Limited Time Offer

This is the offer that will only be around for a few minutes, hours or days and will also be gone forever if you don’t act quickly. Just like with the one time offer, these offers with few exceptions have a way of coming back around. Even if you can’t get the exact same offer again, you can count on the product being repackaged in some way and finding you again–either as an unexpected email or when you look for it again. I recently listened to a webinar where a high priced product was offered for a limited time. A quick search on Google showed me a few other places where the same offer had been made and those payment pages were still up. I didn’t try to buy the product but if I did a month after its expiration date I’m sure they’d be more than happy to sell it to me. Why else would they keep the payment page online? Again, all the pressure comes from the documented fact that most people will not return to a website to make a purchase once they leave, so they want to make sure you feel you’ve missed out big time if you do leave.

Retail Value vs. What You Will Pay

If you’ve watched a few sales videos, you will recognize this pattern. The seller goes on at great length about how great the product is and what it will do for you. Then he starts going through everything that will be included in the package he hopes you will buy and its retail price. He’ll even throw in some comments about how he’s being conservative in his valuation–really it’s probably worth twice that amount. Regardless of what numbers he actually uses, they will all add up to some astronomically high number that no one in their right mind would pay for. The latest one I saw totalled up over $24,000. After the total comes the actual price for the entire package, and it’s always a fraction of the total retail value. The point of the exercise is to make you believe you are getting an incredible deal, which you may very well be. The retail value of each piece of the package may very well be genuine, and it could be easily verified. But just about everyone does that, which in my book makes it a marketing technique. Don’t fall for it. The product may very well be worth buying, but make sure it’s completely your informed decision.

Once you can see through some of the commonly used marketing techniques, you will be better able to evaluate a product based on its own merits. This will make it much easier for you to avoid falling for the money scams on the Internet as well as a great many products that are legitimate but not as useful as you might hope.

Source: www.askpaccosi.com