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Saturday, 06 Sep 2008
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Do
You Set Up A Stall Like That?
by
Nelson Tan
Imagine
this perfect scenario:
1) A man sees an opportunity on a plot of vacant land that has
no limits in size. He claims the land to become
the landowner.
2) He gathers a number of business owners he knows and tells them
he's going to run a permanent bazaar on this land every 365 days,
year after year.
3)
Since he only knows so many business owners (and that's a limit),
he wants them to be a part of this opportunity and also help to
spread the word of mouth to people they know, to nearby
communities and to every other places they can reach,
telling them of a new physical location where they can do their
business in a bazaar.
4)
To increase the take-up rate for land space, the landowner states
2 conditions whereby he will forgo rent once each business owner
can fulfill them.
5)
The first condition is this: every business owner MUST
visit the 10 stalls of the 10 owners who first came to become
bazaar participants BEFORE him.
6)
These 10 owners plus the 11th guy share a 'lineage' in
the sense that one is directly referred into the bazaar opportunity
by the other who came BEFORE him. The logic conclusion
is that this condition does not apply to all business owners down
to the 10th level. It starts at the 11th level (however this is
not an important point pertaining to the article).
7)
The second condition is: once an owner fulfills the first condition,
he must successfully refer 5 friends (business owners,
that is) into the bazaar opportunity, and only then,
rent is waived, and he breaks even.
8)
We can tell you, there is not a single rejection at all from every
person who hears about this bazaar. Everybody is excited. Everybody
says, "GREAT!" And everybody sets up stalls and fulfills
the 2 conditions very easily. The perpetual cycle between 5) and
7) goes on in its ideal form forever!
Then
again, a perfect scenario is only a hypothesis. Let's suppose
in 6 months the bazaar contains one million stalls, but upon a
sudden realization, everyone becomes unhappy, from the newcomers
all the way up to No. 001!
You
want to know why? Answer: There is not a single soul of
a genuine BUYER around!
And
the landowner opens his eyes wide too and says, "Yah...tell
you what guys. I'm going to set up a new company which specializes
in bringing a constant stream of genuine buyers into the bazaar.
I'm also imposing a new credit system whereby the more
stalls you can visit and the more friends you can refer, the more
credit points you earn according to prevailing rates,
with which you can exchange for a certain number of genuine
buyers, or you can immediately purchase a certain
number of genuine buyers with cash."
End
of 'perfect' scenario.
Friends,
would you set up a stall like that? You are literally beating
around the bush too hard and too long before reaching
the ultimate endpoint, which is actually meeting genuine visitors
whom you can convert into possible buyers!
This
is the inherent problem with a significant number
of traffic/web promotion programs out there. To put it in clarity:
these problematic programs create a certain system, culture and
environment in which all participants are told to do things which
do not involve:
1)
getting them directly and immediately in constant contact
with people who have 'buyer' intention.
2)
an opportunity to do direct selling.
If
there is no presence of 'buyer' intention, what is the main intention
of traffic program participants? To get listed, that's
all. A business owner can be told to browse through 10,000
stalls and he did just that, but he won't buy a thing, because
in his heart, all he cares and all he wants IS TO GET LISTED!
Where is the heart to buy things?
And
even if the landowner does provide a source of traffic to cater
for 1 million stalls,
1)
how much traffic can he bring in to satisfy all that 1 million
business owners?
2)
how much of the traffic's attention can an owner get when he has
to fight for it along with 999,999 other owners? (This is a question
of segmenting target markets.)
3)
how much less traffic still can he convert to actual sales?
These
are challenging questions, but the root of the problem
is a psychological one.
As
some of you might know, traffic exchange programs come
in many flavours (or methods): FFAs, safelists, pyramid clickthroughs,
credit systems etc. If the program (or bazaar) is not
an opportunity but THE business itself, it becomes an MLM program!
You should know for certain the facts dug out from investigation
before you sign up for anything at all. It's no secret that FFAs
and safelists are condemned for precisely the fact that everybody
is just pumping ads into your Inbox (and as a free member,
you pump one to yourself!) but who's genuinely
reading and taking interest in them?
Thousands
of ads sent out by autoresponders only to be deleted by auto-deleters...
The
same with pyramid clickthroughs: "Visit 8 sites and fill
in the sponsor codes of every site before you can list your own
and refer to people you know." Refer to people I know! Good
grief, I want fresh traffic. I want people I don't know
first thing in the morning!
In
the ideal scenario, these programs may bring you more traffic
than you can ever imagine but I can always say they don't
since I cannot verify the performance claim for lack
of testimonies. Second, a huge traffic without the slightest intention
to patronize your site is pointless since everybody is
'touch and go'. Third: therefore it makes the whole point
of getting involved in such programs a time-waster.
As
a business owner, all you would really care is to work ON the
business, instead of IN the business. Set up the stall, look for
buyers and get the sales while reserving a healthy dose
of slight pessimism for 'middleman' programs that claim to find
more visitors than you can all by yourself!
The moral of the story is: you can bear good judgment and keep
a lookout for good programs that can:
1)
blur the line between 'buyers' and 'stall owners'.
2)
cultivate and promote a buyers' environment.
3)
show your ads in some corners of the Internet which you
just can't imagine...
4)
...such that it brings you a surge of targeted traffic
you just don't know comes from where!
There is an 'inconspicuous' quality to such programs that
makes them ideal, and also makes tracking your ads a
lower priority as they shoots out into virtual space far and wide,
so long as they do what they are supposed to do: bringing
in a good amount of genuine visitors who actually come in to take
interest in what your site has to offer.
To
see what are the programs we recommend, check back to the Web
Promotion Articles section of Internet Mastery Center. If
you know of a good program that fits our criteria, send
us a note. Please have an enjoyable time being a traffic exchange
participant!
Justin
Koh & Nelson Tan are the architects behind Internet
Mastery Center. Create Your Online Profits with the RIGHT
Products, Environment and Mindset!
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