Aminology

So there I was, chilling for a bit on Facebook, when I noticed a ‘tooth whitening’ advert on the usual Facebook ad spot.

Being the curious marketer that I am, I clicked on it to see how exactly the blog was being monetised. The link took me to a blog, which although looked fine, had a strange post on viagra. And literally a second after I noticed this, the page automatically redirected to medsmaster.com, a viagra site.

What’s interesting is the way in which this advert passed Facebook’s manual ad review. It seems like the marketer first waited until their innocent teeth whitening help blog was approved by the Facebook mods, and then inserted a redirect script into the main index page taking visitors to the viagra site.

Shady.

Content can be produced relatively cheaply these days. Articles are charged per word, and are priced not on the originality and value of the article as a whole, but on the uniqueness of the content. For online marketers, any content which contains a good distribution of their targeted keywords and doesn’t get flagged by the big G as ’spam’ or ‘duplicate’ is good enough.

This approach is pretty standard for content that is published on the web for free in order to generate CPC or CPS revenue for the online marketer. I’m sure many online marketers still continue to buy cheap content, monetise it with adsense ads or affiliate links, and earn peanuts for their efforts. And if you are one of those guys and already pay for low quality content, you might as well go all the way and start churning out bot generated scraper content on a massive scale.

The point is this: if you’re going to have real, unique content produced by a real writer, then make sure it’s quality and don’t just give it away for free. Don’t hire any content writer to write you generic, keyword rich articles on a topic simply because you want to post it on your content site to help it rank higher in the SEs for the purpose of generating more money from ad revenue. If your site sells an actual product and receives affiliate traffic, then SEO articles help. But otherwise, don’t publish cheap content for free.

Instead of spending $100 on 20 cheap articles written by a cheap, foreign content writer, spend $100 on one long article written by a certified professional on your topic and turn it into paid content to be added as an addition to a bigger project you may have started working on. Invest money on content not so you can drive traffic to the page you post it on for the purpose of making affiliate sales, but to create something which has a much greater perceived value and as a result is appreciated and valued much more for the simple reason that it’s paid and therefore quality as opposed to free and therefore cheap.

There is far too much ‘free’ content on the web, free content which has been written for the sole purpose of having the site it is published on ranking in the search engines and generating ad / affiliate revenue. And believe it or not, the average web user isn’t looking for generic content or even better, bot generated content. They want real content to provide them with real value. And while more and more online marketers focus on churning out as much cheap or bot generated content as possible, there will be an even greater demand for high qualiy information – which is why online publishing will continue to thrive and web users will be more than willing to pay for access to high quality information.

If the niche is good enough for you to make money from ads or affiliate links, then it’s good enough for you to start charging for the actual content. More on this later.

Kudos to ‘the Cakes‘ for this reminder. I actually received an email from my Affiliate Manager about the offer (Instant Action Games), but needed a good kick up the backside to actually do something about it.

I started promoting CPA offers on Facebook back when they had just launched their CPC model. At the time the mods were acting like schmuks and banning pretty much every campaign which involved zip/email submits, which just happened to be the best converting offers. Anyway, I got tired of having my ads rejected so I left it there, until now.

I’ve been running this offer for an hour now and not only is it converting decently (7:1 click to conversion rate at the moment), but I’ve actually had the ads manually reviewed and approved. If you want more specifics on running the offer check out this post.

The information marketing industry is strange. You’ve got the ‘get rich quick’ scam marketer types that (financially) excel in the industry by exploiting the foolish, gullible and poor through tasteless yet rather insanely effective sales gimmicks, and then you have an angry super affiliate from the other side of the online marketing industry waving his fist in the air, denouncing all eBook publishers and peddlers and calling for a crusade to end the insanity of it all.

While it makes for good entertainment, I like to distance myself from both the phony marketer and anti-eBook crusader types. I am also an information marketer, but my approach is serious and reputable. I understand the necessity of good sales copy, but I don’t like over-hyped, everything-is-highlighted-and-underlined sales letters.

Publishing information as a product for sale is a business. And like all business models, there are the good, the bad and the ugly.

The Good

The good informational products offer long-term value to the buyer and long-term profitability to the publisher. High quality informational products are usually niche targeted and are written and produced by real experts. They provide the customer or member with the knowledge they were looking for, without asking them for an obscene amount of money. They are typically sold on a professional, non-scammy website with a simple, elegant design and a relaxed sales copy. Good information products thus rely on credibility, positive reviews and a general public approval within its respective niche. As opposed to poor quality products, they don’t rely on an over hyped sales copy to bring in the sales. Good examples of informational products are Seth Godin’s IdeaVirus and Brian and Tony Clark’s TeachingSells program, the latter of which actually offers multiple products through a variety of formats.

The Bad

Unfortunately, there is an abundance of bad informational products. These usually come in the form of an eBook, where the time spent on the actual product is a small fraction compared to the time and effort put into marketing the product. These products rely on positive reviews by unethical affiliate marketers that only care about making a good ROI. What seperates the bad from the ugly is the niche. No matter how bad the information product is, it will never truly be ugly unless it’s a ‘get rich quick’ product.

and The Ugly

The lowest of the low. These products are ‘get rich quick’ guides. They are usually not only of a poor quality, but they have the sole purpose of making the product publisher rich through the poor mans pennies. These products claim to teach noobs how to make millions, yet the authors of these products depend on selling the dream so they can pay their own bills. And what’s even more ugly are the affiliates that promote these products – most of these affiliate fully understand the underlying scam behind it all. A crap informational product can be identified by a heavily hyped sales letter with excessive use of punctuation, highlighting, underlining, and other cheap copy tactics. As a rule of thumb, the more overhyped a sales letter is, the more it is trying to compensate for the sheer garbage that is to await the fool that decides to invest in the product. Certain ‘internet marketers’ take pride in this and come public with their products under the illusion that they are real marketers or entrepreneurs. Alex Goad, author of Google Payload and Project Black Mask, immediately comes to mind.

I will talk a lot more about how I approach information marketing later on, from the basic concepts behind creating and publishing a quality informational product to different marketing tactics you can use to bank even harder from your product. I’ll also talk about why I totally recommend marketing your own goods rather than marketing someone else’s product or offer as an affiliate, so affiliate marketers reading this may want to stay tuned to read my alternative method of making money online. I’m speaking as an internet marketer who happens to be both an affiliate marketer and information marketer.