You probably understand the history behind the headline of this post but how much thought have you put into how it affects you as a purchaser or seller/affiliate of internet marketing products?

Now, from what I can tell products sold through Clickbank etc that include any screenshots of earnings go through a vetting process to ensure they are real, but my issue is not with whether or not the screenshot is real, my question is do they have anything to do with the product you are being enticed to buy (or in the case of an affiliate marketer, to sell)?

On more than one occasion I have browsed a sales page with Clickbank or PayPal screenshots in it and thought “hey, these look pretty good” only to stumble across someone using the EXACT SAME screenshot on a completely different salesletter.

Granted it’s not like this is an everyday occurance, but it does make me sit back and wonder about whether or not these ‘statistics’ are showing me income generated by using the techniques the marketer is selling me, or simply the sales of their last product launch in which they promised to give away the secrets to the last big idea they had.

Of course at some point this person must be making money, or surely they wouldn’t be allowed to show us this information, but it’s got to the point these days where the cynic in me finds it hard to believe the hype anymore.

It’s also made more dubious by the fact that in a lot of cases the sales letter does a great job of ‘twisting’ the screenshot to make it seem more impressive, usually through a big bold headline underneath saying “$1,605.34 per day!”, when in actual fact they made this 1 day out of 30 and the rest of the days probably average out at about $100 per day (or less) – no tiny amount over the course of a month, but why screw around with reality like this?

And it’s not only the salesletters for buyers that gets the treatment either. The other day I was browsing an affiliate resources page where the product developer got all excited about how much could be made as an affiliate, and it was demonstrated by saying “…just get 1 buyer per day at $97 and you’ll make $2910 every 30 days…” or words to that effect.

But hang on, I’ll only make 50%-75% of the selling price, minus Clickbank/PayPal fees, so in reality my take home off of one buyer a day is going to be somewhere in the region of half that figure, but in itself it’s nothing to sneeze at so why the distortion?

I don’t really know if there is a point to this post, it’s more of a ‘buyer beware’ type of thing along with a little bit of a ‘letting off of steam’ after a day browsing various sites looking for products to promote. And I’ll be totally honest, some of the products I link to use this type of information as a means of ‘selling’, and so do products I own the resale rights to.

But then I can do some research on the product developer and be comfortable with what they are saying, whereas with some of the products out there there’s a concerted effort to ensure that nobody knows who these mystery people are – as if it’s better for me not to know who I’m buying from!

So next time you’re looking for a new product to buy or promote to your list, take a little bit of extra time to see if the salesletter or affiliate resource pages suffer from “Lies, Damned Lies, & Statistics…” and if they do then take an extra minute to do some basic maths to see how the numbers really add up.

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Tagged as: affiliate marketing, internet marketing