Selling Air

Those who do, do. Those who can’t, teach. It’s a line that has stuck with us for more than a decade and a half and has worked its way into an article or two over the years. We first heard it from someone who had just started down the path of Amway. They must have heard it during one of their orientation speeches championing the victory of the common man versus the root of all evil, their Ivy League brethren who has worked ceaselessly to limit the common man’s rise. Intimidated by teachers or fancy schools? Think you need that to succeed? No, says the action oriented modern day proverb. If anything, you can partially pity those with extended schooling because they spent years learning from sub-par doers.

The validity of school is one of those arguments that has become a parents dilemma and a marketers dream. It’s both provable and easily disprovable. Want to prove the value, just look at lifetime earnings on average. Hello education offers. Want to disprove it? That’s a little harder objectively (maybe the debt load) but much easier emotionally. And, it’s no wonder that some of the biggest preponderates of the argument are the work from home programs and its followers.

For as long as their has been performance marketing, there has been work from home offers. The performance marketing world and the work from home world have traditionally had little interaction. That has changed over the past five years, and now more than ever, the performance marketing world and the work from home world, work hand in hand. The biggest change is the shift from MLM to repackaging performance marketing. The difference doesn’t sound like much, but it explains why we see more and more. MLM programs like Monavie and Amway, heavily discourage and can often penalize those who grow their business by buying internet leads. The revenue models are skewed as well and are something traditional performance marketers don’t get. In the world of performance marketing, if you drive revenue to a business you get paid. You don’t just get paid, but you usually get paid upfront before the company recoups its value. In the world of MLM, you don’t. You get meager commissions even though new users end up buying a lot of support materials.

Enter performance marketing work from home. It doesn’t work like an MLM. It’s still leveraging the desire to get rich quick(er), but the model supports media arbitrage. It’s selling people you don’t know on a product instead of trying to change the behaviors of people you do know. You make money from the signup not from the activity of the person on the program or the people that they recruit. It’s cleaner, simpler, and these types of offers are now on almost every flog. Not to make it sound new. Make money from eBay made a handful of people rich (the creators of the program that is). There was a temporary Make Money from Google until those purveyors felt the wrath of Google directly. Now, it’s all about the automated money machine. We watched an infomercial of one of these products, and it was spectacular. The value propositions:

You get a website, no maintenance, no hosting

Do more than teach you, have a vested interest in you

Once a month you can talk to them live

You get an exact copy of the site that has made this person money

No free trials

Shown a simple process – step 1, step 2, step 3

Proven techniques and strategies

Teaching you how to get started doing something that works

All for 19.95. Two books and a DVD.

What’s so interesting about the, “Those who do, do. Those who can’t, teach,” line is that its biggest fans are its biggest perpetrators. As if someone was reading our minds, we received the following-up email just seconds ago from “Chad.” It reads, “Found your business on the net and was wondering how things are going for you?” Go to the link in the email, and you go to an affiliate for secretformulawebinar.net. “Are you fed up with the biz op B.S.it proclaims.” “Do you finally want the truth?” “Attend the secret formula webinar to get it.” Click play on the video and an error message proclaims, “Whoa, I know you are excited, but enter your email address in the box to the left and click WATCH WEBINAR NOW!. You will be sent a confirmation email and link to the absolutely free video.” Brilliant. This is what the flog guys should do. Watch the video but make it an email capture before allowing them. The point though is that what is it that all of these programs do. They try to make money by teaching you.

Let’s look again at the infomercial, “Advertising Profits from Home.” What is it really? The story told sounds so impressive. It begins with how “big companies” allocate so much money to advertising and especially online, that he went to them and worked out a deal to help them place their advertisements. The difference is that he gets paid when he sends them customers. And, he’s found a way to make sure everyone can do this, i.e., when people search, they find your ad; when you send these “big companies” customers, they send you money. Somehow this falls under “no selling” because you aren’t selling, you are letting the big companies do that. What is it really though? Affiliate marketing / arbitrage. And what is his vested interest? Well, he gets bonus checks for helping grow their sales. That’s why he is willing to teach others. It’s a wonder that this guy is on TV and not a well known arbitrager or a network. The networks should create such a program.

Now, what about our Biz Opp B.S.? It’s more hype but much of the same. It’s templated landing pages that you learn to frame. It too is shrouded in mystery and monetized through a subscription service. But rather than selling “big companies’” products, you are selling the same system, a single person’s product. What is my real email address that I must confirm for a free webinar where a biz opp millionaire shows his “exact method and secret formula” that lets him make five, even six figures per month? It’s not a true pyramid scheme, it’s just a scheme – the world of “Look at this nerd in a Ferrari,” “easy, passive residual income for life.” Do those who know really do? Or, does everybody just want to teach because doing is tough? Maybe the saying was started from the teachers because they knew what a better gig they had.