Have you noticed the Scary Sameness in the Online Network Marketing Market..?? I've been noticing something really sad, and disturbing over the past few months and it just seems to be getting a lot worse... I honestly felt that the transition from the old ways to marketing to the new ways of marketing online was going to fix those sad stories of... "I did everything my upline told me.. & I spent a bunch of money on leads" .. and for a lot of people it did.. but now it seems the trend is to COPY what hundreds, and even thousands of other people are doing online and follow what the "system" creator is saying. This trend is really affecting the market as a whole. Don't confuse duplication with replication. The same way those MLM company replicated sites did nothing for your business... these "System replicated sites" aren't going to be any good neither. ...and here's why In business, (no matter what business) there's something called an USP (Unique Selling Proposition). For all those people who are supposedly branding themselves by placing a picture, or a video on a replicated site... what makes you UNIQUE from every other marketer out there promoting the same thing, the same system, the same training. It's great if you want to stay and promote the team the system belongs to.. but if you ever want to introduce your business and yourself as an expert... it'll be close to impossible, think about that.. Tell me what you think about this new "trend".. talk soon.. Hector
Welcome Hector! Interesting topic... I think for the ones that truly understand what Internet Marketing is all about, any program will only enhance their Online Experience - but for the one that is trying to make a quick buck, then yeah, they will be enticed into all the bogus stuff out there... of "make a website like I did and you will make gazillions like I am lying to you about - lol"
I find there are too many people trying to do the same thing everyone else is doing and end up failing with it because there are so many other marketers doing the exact same thing. This is especially true with marketing on Youtube. Most people get the idea that it's a wonderful idea to use a blackhat marketing tactic on places like Youtube and put other company names within their titles, description and tags for their video in attempts to get more traffic by stealing traffic from other companies. When marketers end up resorting to blackhat tactics such as that, then you know the whole marketing area is in a bad area. The sad part is sponsors are telling their downline that it's "ok" to do such things to gain the upperhand in video marketing competition rather than tweaking their marketing strategy. It saddens me to see the lack of viral marketers these days. Most of the marketers I see these days will write a blog which is straight ad copy which is just people reading a large advertisement, or they end up posting a video which is essentially like watching an an ad as well. It's like slapping people with textual, audio and video infomercials all over the web. It just doesn't work. I also get tired of seeing sponsors telling their downline to pay for commercial safelisting which they have to opt in with another email address to receive emails with which end up costing them money for sending emails out that nobody will ever read. They're not going to read the ads sent to them, so honestly nobody else will be either. I know viral marketing itself can take a little while to build up the needed traffic to become viral and sometimes becomes difficult if you don't know the niche/genre of your marketing is. I've noticed a greater increase in blackhat video marketers these days which especially more apparent on Youtube. It seems most marketers are no longer trying to gain organic traffic and generate new marketers from the grounds of people in the general population, they're only after people already interested and searching to make money which is likely generated in the first place by a viral marketer somewhere. This is one of the many things that's bothering me being a viral marketing with viral blogging and viral video. I bust my hump writing a technical blog for Linux and Open Source Programming and entertaining music videos and humor on videos. I've had a few people come back later and telling me thanks that they didn't know they could make money online and they end up going to a company with an insane track record for blackhat video marketing. It really creates an itch in a place I can't quite scratch.
In anything you do in the business world, you have to differentiate yourself from your competitors. You have to do something that says "buy from me" - if you can offer something that your competitors are not offering, your changes of getting their business and keeping it increases significantly.
Doing something different than the others? All I can say is if you're not doing viral marketing then you'd want to sell yourself entirely. Heck even in Viral Marketing you're selling yourself as the affiliate recruit in the same instance still reads and see's content created by the marketer. It seems to me most of the marketers these days are trying to make the system sell itself. You can't do that, otherwise you're in the failure ratio for expecting the system to do all the work for you. Not going to happen. Hard work is needed in any system and this needs also taken part from sponsors that actually know what they're doing. I degress.
Hector, Welcome. You are dead on target with this. It is almost funny to see the exact same website with different peoples pictures on it. The problem is saturation of a hand full of courses that give you the same template to promote the same course you bought. There are two that come to mind. I think this needs to be a wake up call for the cult of attraction marketing. Cookie cutter doesn't cut it. Be unique, interesting & educational or be gone.
hecman104: ... but now it seems the trend is to COPY what hundreds, and even thousands of other people are doing online and follow what the "system" creator is saying. I agree entirely with your observation. The operative word in the above quote is trend. People are conditioned to accept that if the majority is doing it, then it must be OK. It's so easy for people to be trusting, to "go with the flow" and to "not make waves" as they trek towards their dreams. That's all well and good, if the system leader knows what she's doing. But very often it turns out that the leader of the pack has lost her way a long time ago, and is actually leading a bunch of starry-eyed, misinformed, lazy, gullible, trusting, desperate followers who are moving in lockstep, with fingers crossed, in hopeful expectation of finding the pot of gold at the end of the rainbow. Usually it's the handful of independent-thinking mavericks who aren't afraid to question the status quo and ask "why does it have to be done this way?" who eventually discover a better and more effective path for themselves. Great post, Hector! And, by the way, welcome to the forum! Hermas
Hi Hector, Great post. There are several "replicated" marketing sites doing the rounds right now, one notable one in Facebook to do with MLM. I have to say though some of the training provided by these guys is good. Having a weekly webinar or conference call for instance to handle Q&A etc. It's when you can tell they are using the same "script" with their videos that something seems a little odd. But in Network Marketing we use "scripts" when making prospecting calls, so in a sense we are repeating a process here to but it's not as public as the internet. Warm Regards Aaron Riddell
