I have to warn you: this might upset you…
I was looking through the results of the reader questionnaire I ran a couple weeks ago.
And one comment really jumped out at me.
Basically, this guy was trashing “gurus” who used their daily emails to regularly sell stuff.
He’d signed up for these FREE emails…
And was put off by the fact that there may be an ulterior motive… To actually make money!
He didn’t want to believe their promises: that you could make a great living (or even get rich) from home, using internet marketing.
And he held me up as an upstanding citizen because I often write essays that reveal incredibly powerful marketing and selling tactics and strategies… Without sticking an offer on the end!
If you’re concerned about folks using their daily emails to make offers to you, I’ve got news for you…
You’re in the wrong business!
Listen, this is the nature of the beast.
This is the nature of marketing, of business, of entrepreneurship.
We sell stuff.
It’s the lifeblood of any business.
Without sales, you don’t have a business. You’ve got a hobby.
And frankly, for that reason you could consider Breakthrough Marketing Secrets to be mostly hobby for the last two years.
Sure, I’ve actually generated tens-of-thousands of dollars as a direct and indirect result of writing these daily emails.
But I really don’t sell you enough stuff.
And in that regard, my emails are a BAD example of what you should be doing!
There might be something to pitching you every day…
Sure, I LOVE to deliver great content.
I love to make sure you’re getting as much value in my FREE daily emails as most “gurus” paid newsletters.
I love to engage with you, for fun, and to help you grow yourself and your business.
But c’mon…
Some of the time, that means I’m going to pitch you.
And if you sign up for anybody else’s FREE daily email (that they invest time and money in putting together for you), you can absolutely expect they want to make money off of you.
And you can’t — in sane mind — make a moral or ethical argument against that.
If you don’t like to be sold to, you have every right to unsubscribe.
But as long as you’re a subscriber to the email newsletter they pay to deliver to you, they do have every right to pitch you.
Here’s who this does NOT apply to…
The only folks this doesn’t apply to are the shysters and hucksters. The lying sacks of bull dung who are selling you empty promises.
But there’s a lot to determining if a promise is empty.
And notably, I think the FTC and other government regulators get this wrong.
A promise isn’t empty when one customer fails to get the result.
A promise isn’t empty even when a lot of customers fail to get the result. Especially when you’re talking information, there’s a lot of ways customers can screw themselves up. They can never consume it. They can never implement. They can implement wrong. And so on.
A promise is only empty when you can’t possibly get the result by following through on it.
Imagine…
A “guru” sells 1,000 copies of their “Kitchen Table Millionaire System.”
800 people fail to get any result, because they either didn’t go through it, or went through it for intellectual entertainment and never implemented.
Another 160 don’t come anywhere close to becoming a millionaire, even though they tried to implement. They went through the system, and took a half-hearted approach to making it work. Maybe they started off with the best of intentions, but moved on to the next shiny object before they really got going. Maybe they implemented here and there, but never really gave it their all.
We’re left with just 40 people who seriously applied themselves to implementing. 32 of them do pretty well, and over the course of a few years do make significant money by following the system.
And the final 8… Just .8% of everyone who bought… Experience everything the course promised and more…
Does that make the title false and the promise misleading?
If so, nearly every promise ever made for even legitimate information products is a farce.
Because the vast majority of people don’t implement, and even those who do are usually doing it at least somewhat wrong. Some people implement, and do well, and it’s usually the very smallest fraction who achieve incredible things and make great case studies.
It’s not because that’s how the system works — the system is the same for incredible successes as it is for incredible failures. It’s because that’s how people work.
Inevitably, nearly everything falls into the 80/20 pattern. And 80/20 of the 80/20.
If you blame it on the guru, you’ll be in the bottom 80%…
That’s virtually guaranteed.
If you put the responsibility for success outside of yourself, you give up all control.
If you take responsibility for your own success, you will be able to exercise control over it.
And by taking responsibility, it almost doesn’t matter what system you’re handed. As long as it has a reasonable possibility of working, you’ll make sure it does.
So when these gurus are making big promises and pitching you every day, you can chose to dis them, and assume they’re charlatans.
Or you can consider that at least some of their customers are getting their money’s worth. Some of their customers think it’s an incredible deal. And some of their customers are probably getting some pretty good results that more than justify purchasing.
And that’s how they stay in business, month after month, year after year.
Are there exceptions? Certainly. If you find one, run away and don’t look back. But by and large, what you get out of nearly all these “gurus” offers will be what you put into it.
And most of them have some pretty valuable experiences to share, and recommendations that they make.
Of course, I am still the best. And you should buy anything I offer to you in the near future. 🙂
Yours for bigger breakthroughs.
Roy Furr
