They just go round and round… (or life in the IM game)

“There it is! There it is! There’s that dented beetle! Yes! Whooooooooooo! Ha-ha! Ha…Don’t you wanna know how I did that? I’ll tell ya’. They’re on a loop. They go around the block. They come back. They go around again. They just go ’round and ’round! Round and round!”  – Truman Burbank, The Truman Show

As I write this it is about 8:23 am and I admit, I am feeling a bit jaded with the IM game as of late.

Hell, if you’re a person like me who is part of the internet marketing space and you check your email inbox like I do then I imagine you’re feeling a little like a goldfish trapped in a bowl.  Or maybe worse, maybe you’re feeling like that scene in the Truman show where the same cars keep on circling the same street over and over again.  They are all on a loop and you cannot escape the circus.

Maybe that’s you…

A couple weeks ago I had this special bonus that I was giving away as an extra incentive for people to buy something through my affiliate link.  This is pretty standard for an affiliate marketer.

However…

It was an interesting thing, because I didn’t announce my bonus on launch day.  In fact I waited until there was only a few days left in the promotion before I announced it.

Why?

I figured that most of the big guys would have done mailed for the launch and moved on to another promotion.  That’s one of the caveats of the reciprocation model style of affiliate marketing.  You can’t stay in one place too long.

Me, on the other hand, I just do what I want (one of the advantages of having a little bit of an audience that wasn’t built on straight affiliate traffic).

So I launched my bonus towards the end of the launch cycle and something really funny happened.

I had people coming up to me and saying that they already bought the product through someone else but they bought it again through my link just to get the bonus I offered.

At first I was like, “hey awesome, guess I put out a good bonus, I’ll make a note of that (lol).”

But then I thought about it.  Why the hell would I want someone to RE-BUY something that they have already bought JUST to get my bonus?

I never got into the IM game to inspire people to do that.  The idea of it sounds stupid to me.  And as the week went on it was a thorn in my side that grew and grew.  I actually hit 4^th place in that promotion and that was great but something bugged me about the whole idea…

When you buy an information product…it should be enough.  That should be the thing.  But it’s not.  People are buying products 2, 3 and even 4 times over just to get the bonuses.

Who needs all those bonuses?

How do you win collecting bonuses?  You don’t.  You just get a bunch of stuff you’re not going to use.

What are you searching for?  I guarantee you it’s probably not in those bonuses.

It’s like that lady that I used to see shopping at the local CVS.  Every time they had a sale on something, I would go to try and get it and they were completely wiped out.

Eventually I said to this sales clerk, “Why are you guys always out of whatever is on sale?  I feel like you’re just trying to get me here under false pretense.”  And he said to me, “Sorry sir, there’s this lady who always comes in the morning the sale starts and wipes us out with her coupons.

I was like…”oh.”

Then I figured out that was a thing.  The couponers.  The lady who has 2 shopping aisles in her garage full of toothpaste and toilet paper, that she paid like a dollar for.

And when you ask her why she needs all that stuff she is just says, “I don’t know…so I never run out, I guess.”

But the real answer is, because she can.

She did it for the pure thrill of doing something that not everybody thinks to do or CAN do.

So with bonuses are we creating IM couponers?

[thrive_text_block color=”blue” headline=”AND ANOTHER THING…”] [/thrive_text_block]

Another thing that really stood out to me was that there was a high degree of lead exposure.  What I mean by that is a lot of the people on my email list are also on a lot of the other affiliate marketer’s lists and they are highly exposed to the market.

Now that in itself is not too bad, except when you have a bunch of affiliate marketers who get together for the same launch and then ALL these exposed leads get nailed in their inbox by all these marketers for the SAME product.

The leads know exactly what product everyone is promoting, because the marketers are promoting like monkeys, trying to support each other’s launches at the same time.  It’s like a carousel going round and round.

SO what happens?  Your list is overexposed.  They get jaded and overwhelmed with the market.  They came looking for help and what they got was about 20 marketers promoting the same product once a week with about 20 different angles and 20 different bonuses.

For a while your people might try to take advantage of the situation and collect bonuses.  But eventually, they see it for the mad circus it is, they see that they are not experiencing results, but instead being showed the same thing from multiple angles.  That gets frustrating and does not seem genuine at all.

It’s frustrating for me as a marketer as well.

I offered a bonus on a product that I thought you would appreciate, and be helped by.  But you have already been offered this product by every other marketer in your inbox.  It’s not new, or interesting.  It’s par for the course.  It’s just the latest movie that’s playing…

For me, moving forward I want to create more market disruption.  When other marketers zig, I want to zag.  I want to be promoting different things than my peers.  I don’t want to be one of the cars in “The Truman Show that are on a loop, just going ‘round and ‘round.”

God knows I promote more for others than they ever have or ever will for me.  And I’m fine with that.  I never really subscribed to the recip game anyway.  I subscribe to the “do whatever the hell you want to do and figure out how to do it without much help” game.  Because as soon as you start relying on others…

Anyways, this post is meandering and slightly negative and I acknowledge that.  But you know what…it’s my blog, I pay for it, so I’ll just keep doing whatever the hell I want to do.

If you’re a person out there who is trying to make money online, let me give you some advice.  Buying information products to help you is good.  It’s cool.  You are getting an education in what I believe to be the future of how most people will make money.

Just don’t buy products more than once for a bonus.  That’s a joke.  No matter how awesome we marketers try to make our bonuses seem…don’t do it on general principal.  Be like that damn old bastard from Gran Torino who doesn’t want to change for the world…

I know I try to be like him.  I might just hang a picture of him on my wall above the computer.  Something big and in my face that says…

[pullquote align=”normal”]“Ever notice how you come across somebody once in a while you shouldn’t have fucked with? That’s me.” – Walt Kowalski, Gran Torino [/pullquote]

If you’re another marketer out there trying to make your moves to get to 6 or 7 figures.  Stay the fuck out of my inbox.  I’m done lifting up your subpar products with my bad ass bonuses and wizard like email copy.  I know who my friends are.

On that note I’m dropping the mic.

Like Jay Z said, “You’ll either love me or leave me alone.”

Peace.

Kam (aka ZeroFatz)

P.S.  Yeah I cuss too much.  Only God can judge me though so worry about yourself.