What to consider when deciding to buy
Hello everyone. Today instead of reviewing a product I decided to give everyone some tips on when to check for when considering a product on their own. Since I can only ever review a small percentage of products I wanted everyone to have some way to spot the poor quality products themselves.
1) Watch out for the income claims: This is one so many people fall for. People want to believe the wild income claims because they want to believe that they can also make thousands of dollars with 10 minutes of effort all before breakfast. Listen I’m going to tell you flat out how it is. I have been making my full time living online for the last several years. It bought my house (paid for it with cash). It bought both of my motorcycles (and a couple of other toys), it pays all my bills, and it but a decent little nest egg in my savings account. There for sure is lots of money to make. However it is 100% impossible to make gobs of money without doing any work. I don’t care what product your using, what program your following or what 5 figure training you purchased. Its not going to happen. Period. So stop looking for it.
Now I have seen lots of people send out an email and make a few hundred dollars. I have done it myself. In fact I have sent out a single email and made thousands of dollars. However even though it only took me 10 minutes to write and send the email that was not all of the work I did and its not all of the work other marketers did.
You see IM is like painting a room in your house. Ever hear that the key to quality painting is all in the prep work? Well that’s how IM is. You do lots of prep work, with little or no reward, and then you cash in on it later (hopefully over and over). So even though it looks like someone made $300 just by sending an email when you consider all of the other work they did to get to that point, like building a list, creating a product, etc. you begin to realize that they didn’t just work for 10 minutes, they actually worked much much more.
When you see a product that claims its going to bring you in tons of fast cash with little or no work then that should be a big red flag.
2) Watch out for the unsubstantiated claims: I see these a lot. Claims like “will get you on the first page of Google” or “will increase your opt ins by 100%”. These are claims that the seller simply can’t make with any honesty. How can anyone know that some arbitrary website can rank for some arbitrary keyword on Google? Simple they can’t. How can anyone know that any method is going to increase some unknown squeeze pages opt ins by 100%? Simple they just can’t know.
Now its perfectly acceptable for a sales page to site a case study or a test. For example they could say something like “One of our testers increased his opt ins by 100%” .. or “Our testers got between a 40 and 80% increase in opt ins”. This is fine because its honest and it still conveys the value of the product. But when the sales copy says it “will” happen then thats a problem. You see its all in the wording.
While it might sound trivial by taking into consideration the wording of the claims that a sales page makes you can get valuable insight on the character of the product seller. Are they ok with being a little misleading to get a sale? If they are is that the kind of seller you want to buy from anyway?
3) Check out the product: This is one that almost no one does I’m sure, but its something that a lot of people should do. You can do it with anyone who uses JVZoo or W+ for their payment processor. Ill give you an example of one of my products using JVZoo.
First thing you do is sign up for JVZoo as an affiliate as if you where a person who wants to promote products. Its quick, easy and its free. Then you go to the sales page of the product you are interested in and click the purchase button. I will use one of my old products as an example:
In the JVZoo checkout you are going to see the product name as it is entered in JVZoo. I circled it in the image above. Now dont purchase this product. Instead go to JVZoo.com and click the affiliates tab. Select “Find Products”.
From there you are given a search section where you can enter the name of a product. Once you do this you will see the products sales stats as an affiliate would. The thing you are looking for it the refund rate. 2-6% is totally normal, under that is very good and anything over 8% is a big red flag.
Also you can click on the sellers name. This will give you a list of all of this sellers non archived products. You can then look at the other products by this seller and see the refund rates of his last products. This will give you good insight on the quality of products that this seller provides.
4) Watch out for shady tactics: One of the most common shady tactics is the false scarcity tactic. People put up a countdown timer on their sales page and say that the price will increase or the offer will end when the time reaches zero. Sometimes they are doing this because the price really will increase. But a lot of time they are doing it because they want you to buy quickly without giving it any thought. That is they want you to purchase with your emotions and not your brain, something that is almost always bad for the buyer and good for the seller.
So how do you know if the timer is real or fake? Simple open another browser. So if your using Chrome for example open up the sales page in Firefox. Look at the countdown times. If they are the same its a real countdown timer. If they are different (more than a few seconds) then its probably a fake timer.
For me personally I would never buy a product that has a fake timer. Lying to me from the door is not a good way to earn my trust or my business.
5) Ask questions: This is one for everyone who gets emails from marketers about products. Respond to the email and ask the promoter any questions you have. If he does not answer dont buy. Anyone promoting a product should know it well enough to answer some normal questions. If its a unusual question he should find out the answer for you. If not you should probably not only pass on the purchase but also unsubscribe from this marketers list.
While these things might seem like a bit of work keep in mind its your money and your business. You owe it to yourself to make informed and well thought out purchases that will benefit your business. A little bit of leg work can save you thousands of wasted dollars over the lifetime of your online carrier.
A quick note about the reviews I do on this site. The product vendors give me access to their products for free in order for me to do my review. However I make no promises to them regarding the results of my tests or what I will write in my review. Should you click a link that takes you to a sales page for a paid product for sale this link will be an affiliate link and I will be paid a percentage of the sales price should you decide to invest in it.
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Brett,
Very good advice, and advice I will definitely use in the future. The JVZoo information was very enlightening and something I never knew how to do till you wrote this post.
I do have one question for clarification. As you go through the explanation of the scarcity timers and tell us how to use the two browser method to check out the timers, you speak of a “fake” timer. What exactly do you mean by “fake” timers? Is there a possibility the timer is an evergreen timer, or would evergreen timers not work that way? The term “fake” has me thrown as I do not have a clue what you mean by “fake.” Any clarification you can give would be greatly appreciated.
Thank you for an excellent post, as always…!
An evergreen timer is a fake timer. By fake timer I mean any countdown timer that does not really trigger the event that the sales copy says will happen when the countdown expires. For example: If the seller says “The price will go up in 24 hours” and then you see a countdown timer. If the price does not really go up its a fake timer. Its meant to do nothing buy get you to buy quickly without doing any real thinking about if you actually need this.
Brett,
Your example make very good sense, is it all about the timer matching up to the sales copy in your example?
If we take the example away from the pure IM niche, with all the email offers we receive daily, and consider a sales page outside the IM niche, how would you see the use of timers? I ask because I am trying to learn as much as I can how to use timers in an appropriate way to best serve both customer and seller. Any thoughts you have would be appreciated.
Something that goes right along with the inappropriate use of timers is in fake customer allowances. We have all seen the sales email that announces a new product that will only be open to the next 100 buyers, and most of the time the limitation is described as making sure the server is not overloaded. Just to find when you get in the private FB group for the product that several hundred folks are in the group. I can’t tell you how many times I have received multiple emails on the same day for the same product by different marketeers telling me there are only going to be 100 spots open. This kinda smacks of the same wrong process as your timer explanation,
Thanks…
Awesome post today Brett, there’s a lot value here I never thought about emailing the promoter back with questions, I usually just unsubscribe when I see all of the crazy claims which I know for a fact not to be true. One of the biggest ones you hit on was make a ton of money without any work and I know like you know everything we do is work and then some.
Good information Brett.
I also use JV Notify to check out new products – useful information can be found there.
Sometimes I search the net with the product name and add stuff like “OTO” and “JV” to find out more about the product sales funnel and whether it’s been published before.
Thanks again.
Excellent advice Brett. As a person that has fallen for many of these tactics it is refreshing to have a successful internet marketer share such valuable advice with the masses. I especially like the details regarding JVZoo.
That is good advice. Any time a “too good to be true” opportunity comes up, it actually is, too good to be true. Don’t fall for it. **Edited to remove link**