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| How To Avoid Spending Money On Dating Products https://www.pick-up-artist-forum.com/viewtopic.php?f=6&t=45984 |
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| Author: | SandTiger™ [ Fri May 29, 2009 11:20 pm ] |
| Post subject: | How To Avoid Spending Money On Dating Products |
How To Avoid Being Convinced To Spend Money On Dating Products You Don't Need In the article before this one I stated pretty clearly that when it comes to improving with women, you don't have to purchase any advice. There's more than enough quality free information, and in this field guys often struggle more in the application of advice than having a lack of it in the first place. I couldn't really leave it at that though. Pretty much all of the dating information products out there use some sales tactics that often verge on the obnoxious. Unfortunately the genuinely good products are often just as heavy handed with the marketing as the less useful ones. Out of principle, here's a little guide to avoid getting sucked in by these tactics. Don't let your desperation cloud your judgment I'm well acquainted with how desperate you can feel when you're a lonely virgin with no prospects in sight. Sometimes you're climbing the walls you want to find a way out of your predicament so badly. Marketers love potential buyers in your situation. You're more likely to be sucked into sales copy that plays on your hopes and dreams and which promises fast-and-easy solutions. You're more likely to buy on impulse. You're more likely to pay too much for something, because you don't care about the price, you just want a cure. And almost by definition, if you're feeling sexually desperate, you're probably a little naive about what it takes to get a girl. So you're probably more likely to believe things a normal person would quickly dismiss out of common sense. This is another reason marketers adore consumers of this product category. A guy who's gotten girls before knows there's no 100% guaranteed way to pick up any woman, no matter how beautiful she is, or how awkward you are, with 0% chance of rejection. But if you're a twenty two-year old who's never kissed a girl, a product claiming this may seem like just the oasis you've been looking for. You want to believe it's true, that salvation is finally in sight. Don't automatically believe someone is an expert just because they say they are A lot of dating advice is sold over the internet. Everyone knows the anonymity of the internet makes it pretty easy for people to represent themselves as something they're not. In this field how much someone is perceived as an expert often has more to do with how hard they promote themselves as an authority, rather than their actual knowledge. For example, I easily could have written statements into this site saying I'm one of the world's foremost seduction experts, even though I'm not. If you were a naive guy who stumbled onto this site, how would you be able to tell at a glance I really wasn't? Don't take claims of expertise at face value. Dig deeper. Check out what others are saying about particular authors. Some of the unqualified people who create dating products are marketers first and foremost. Their thought process is 'Find area that holds potential for profit > Create and sell something in that area'. Crafting a misleading persona as an expert is just a step in their marketing efforts. The concepts in their products are usually recycled and repackaged. Their strengths are in selling, not creating. The second type of guy who charges for advice when they shouldn't are amateurs who start up companies out of a misguided belief that they're better than they are, or out of an urge to be seen as an authority. Sometimes they're well-meaning, at other times they want to hop on the money making bandwagon. These guy's products also tend to be derivative. Although unlike a marketer that may rehash ideas in a calculated manner, these amateurs may truly think they're experts and not realize they're just parroting other people's ideas. Be skeptical of standard marketing tactics If you look at the sales material for a lot of dating products, you'll notice they all use the same set of tactics. That's because they're well tested and tend to work. That doesn't mean you have to be swayed by them though. As a rule, marketers want to you buy now, not take your time to carefully consider the purchase. These tactics aim to get you to take out your credit card and order: Appeals to your emotions A classic marketing axiom is that people buy because of their emotions and later justify the purchase with logic. So any self-respecting marketer will try to appeal to your emotions. Since success with women is an area that arouses a lot of strong feelings in guys, they have it easier than someone trying to sell you new gutters. Some sales material may try to fill your head with hope and happy dreams. "Imagine having a life full of all the beautiful women you want.", "Imagine being able to seduce any girl you desired.", "Imagine all the hot sex you could be having with a revolving door of partners." "See these strangely cheap and outdated looking pictures of women on this site? Wouldn't you like to sleep with someone like them?" Who wouldn't like that? Of course the product in question is painted as the portal into this wet dream fantasy world. Taking the opposite route is just as common, arousing negative emotions and then claiming such-and-such a product is the way to vanquish those feelings once and for all. "Are you tired of being lonely, desperate, and frustrated?", "Have you you tried other advice and not had any luck with it?", "Are you really as satisfied with your success with women as you could be?" It's another classic advertising maxim: Create problem > Offer solution. Scarcity In marketing 'scarcity' is used in two ways. The first is in there being a limited number of something. The second is in something only being available for a limited time. Both motivate people to buy right away, or to buy when they otherwise wouldn't. People have a natural aversion to missing out on things or letting opportunities pass them by, and scarcity tactics effectively play into this. Some common scarcity ploys you'll see are: * "My e-book is $39 this for week only, but after that I'm raising the price to $97." * "Only 375 copies of this course will be available." * "I received so many orders of my new product that I'll be out of stock for the next two months. But if you buy now you can still get one before that happens." * "There are only two spots left for the upcoming seminar. Buy now to be sure you get a seat." * "I'm taking my book off the market forever, but I've arranged a special deal so you can buy one before it's too late." You'll also notice a lot of scarcity tactics are pretty blatant attempts to manipulate you. That one week special offer is still there months later. There's a limited run of a (digital) product for no real reason. The price of the DVD set never actually goes up after the launch. The marketer is just hoping you'll stumble across his site, believe his pitch, and buy right away. Hype I.e., blatant exaggeration meant to get potential customers revved up. Nothing is ever a middle-of-the-road addition to an overcrowded market. It's the most effective secret advice the author has ever come up with. It will make all other products obsolete. It's full of brain exploding new insights that will totally alter the way you approach interactions with women forever!!!! It's paradigm changing. You'll crush your problems instantly. Those seven other products you bought from the same company mysteriously didn't do much for you, but this one is totally different!!!! Addressing objections This isn't some sneaky tactic as much as something anyone selling something will try to do. Sales copy will try to bring up any potential objections the customer may have and then proactively diffuse them. Nothing wrong with that really. Just don't assume that an objection of yours isn't valid though just because some sales copy devoted a line or two to diminishing it. The new angle New products offering advice on women often try to differentiate themselves or capture a new audience by latching onto a unique angle, one which often hits some sort of emotional button in the intended buyers. It doesn't matter if the product is offering genuinely new advice or is just a retread of old ideas, it's all about the positioning. * "Picking up girls in (some situation) is different. You'll fail if you use the tactics for (other situations). This product tells you all the unique angles." * "All the other products focus on Y, this one focuses on the neglected area of Z." * "This e-book is tailor made to help East Indian guys pull hot white women." * "This CD set is about how to pick up girls using X." * (One year later) "Are you frustrated because X doesn't work? Here's the alternative!" * "Here's how to get girls if you're a geek." Everything is new and never been done before. No one wants to say they're offering nothing original or unique. High prices based on "value" Dating products you'll find online are often quite pricey, especially for the amount of content you're getting, and considering an e-book doesn't cost much to produce. Marketers try to justify this by saying the advice in the product has a high value. In the real world advice is priced based on the cost of the materials. If you go into a bookstore the useful and mediocre books on a topic all cost around the same amount. The classic book on communication skills How to Win Friends & Influence People can be had for $12.00 from a bookstore. If the same advice came out in an e-book tomorrow it would probably cost $97. And that would be totally reasonable right? How can you put a price on being better with people? Aren't you eager to get over your loneliness? Isn't that price worth it for the decades of enhanced relationships you'll have with people? For all the extra money you'll make charming clients? Faux value The way I look at all these products is you're paying for advice. So what's it matter how the information is delivered to me? Just let me read it. It's cheaper that way too. A lot of products get away with charging more for their information because they're audio CD sets, or ten DVD's of a video of a seminar, or a seminar itself. Why does this course cost $497? Because it contains twelve DVDs, ten CDs, and five workbooks. Another basic kind of false value is padding out the length of your product with superfluous information. All this crap can feel like you're getting more for your money, but again, aren't you just looking for information? Why do you need to spend an extra $200 to hear someone speak it to you? Why do you need to spend an extra $300 to watch a video of a guy presenting it in a sterile conference room? Why do you need to spend $2000 and a flight to another city to see a guy present it in person? Unless the advice hinges on being able to hear it, or see it, or interact with it, I think you're spending more than you need to on CDs, videos, and live presentations. An interesting kind of faux value is the chance to see one of your idols in person. I'm sure some people pay to attend expensive seminars and retreats not because the information being taught is worth so much, or is so special it couldn't be presented in a cheap book, but because they want to see a certain self-help or dating guru in the flesh, and possibly get to talk to them. I'm not sure how much marketers consciously play into this desire of some customers though. Bonus extras Bonus extras are used to entice you into buying products or signing up for mailing lists or whatever. They are full of "value". Who knew a three page PDF with a big font was worth $29? A thirty minute interview with someone that doesn't really cover anything particularly useful? $53 value. Social proof In the marketing sense of the term people are more likely to buy something if it seems like everyone already likes it. People just have a tendency to look to each other for information about the best way to act. You get two things out of this concept. The first are testimonials. Marketing rule: Don't brag when another, more trustworthy source, can do it for you. Sometimes these little statements are real, sometimes they're fake or heavily altered. The other thing you get from this is marketers dropping little statements like, "My new course is selling really well." They're trying to imply other people are on board, so you should be too. Email marketing Nothing is more arousing to an internet marketer than a huge mailing list full of qualified, motivated buyers. Email marketing in a nutshell: You give them your email address, often in exchange for a helpful newsletter or a bonus of some sort. Often the first thing a product's webpage does is try to get your email address. Once they have it they keep emailing you teaser newsletters and sales pitches and hope to slowly wear you down until you buy. They can also hit up their mailing list for various one-off offers and specials. When they have a new product coming out, you can bet they'll slowly try to build up anticipation for it via an email launch campaign. Teaser articles and newsletters A lot of marketers will write short free articles to establish themselves as an expect and promote their products. These articles can be quite useful and informative, but at the same time tend to be very basic and general and always seem to be holding something back. Usually the implication is that the free content will talk about a topic in a broad or roundabout sense, but the paid product contains the specific secret tricks and techniques that will allow you to really succeed. The articles can be used in several ways: * As the content in email newsletters. Hopefully they'll pique your interest in buying as they arrive in your inbox week after week. They often end with a mini sales pitch. * As content for a company's website or blog. This provides some free value to any visitors and gives them a reason to keep coming back. * As articles or newsletters the company's affiliates can email to their own mailing lists or post on their own websites. It's free material for another website owner to publish, with a chance for them to make a commission if anyone clicks the "For more information go to..." link at the bottom. * Free audio clips and videos are also getting more common. It's the same idea, but our minds tend to see them as more "valuable". What I've noticed is that some marketers give away more good advice in the freebies than they do in their actual products. They want you to think the real good stuff is locked away, but sometimes in order to get you intrigued enough to buy in the first place they have to give away their best ideas. I'm aware of e-books that have free promotional blogs attached to them filled with hundreds of free articles, while the actual book itself is 90-pages long with a large font and contains little new information. Gateway products Some companies also have a fairly cheap introductory product. It's all you may think they sell at first. Once you've bought that they keep the emails coming and try to upsell you into purchasing the more expensive stuff. The initial product is often portrayed as having covered the basics, but now the really advanced techniques are available. Insincerely saying "I was once like you" A lot of the people who sell dating advice were once bad with women. It seems to be human nature to want to help people in areas you personally have struggled with. This field is no exception. My whole motivation for creating my sites is tied into this. I have no problem with anyone saying this sincerely. I definitely get the sense though that some marketers claim to have once struggled romantically as a ploy to increase sales. Saying you've been in the customer's shoes and understand his pain, while also offering hope that if you could do it he can too, probably creates a positive impression of your product. I've read sales material for some products and when I got to the little spiel about how the author was once hopeless with women my intuition just said, "He doesn't mean that. He just coldly threw those sentences in there to try and connect with his audience." What also amuses me is how far people sometimes stretch the definition of "I used to be bad with women" in order to use the 'I was once like you' tactic. For example, I never knew having lots of previous relationships and even a failed marriage meant you used to be terrible with women, because you vaguely felt you could be more successful in the area. By that logic most men in the world are useless with the opposite sex. Covert persuasion techniques Some marketers get even more manipulative. They'll insert language into their sales copy that supposedly influences the reader on a subconscious level. They may use Neuro-lingustic programming (NLP) techniques. It's debatable whether this stuff actually works as powerfully as it's sometimes made out to be but they'll still do it. Some examples are: * Wording that 'forces' you to imagine certain things, e.g., "Now as you think about how great that would be..." or "As you consider what a good value this offer really is..." * Bolding certain portions of text to create a command within a sentence ("If you were to buy my e-book now you would receive...") * Painting a vivid, emotionally evocative picture for the reader that subtly plants the idea of buying into their minds. * Repetition of the same basic point several times throughout the sales copy, under the assumption that if you hear something enough you're more likely to accept it. There's a lot more to it than that, and my quick examples didn't really do justice to this sub-topic. Feel free to look it up yourself up for more details. Be very wary of what people say when affiliate links are involved If you don't know, here's how affiliate deals work online: If someone else sells your product for you, or just points a potential customer in your direction who ends up buying, you give them a cut of the profit for their troubles. That's fair enough. Every affiliate has their own unique link to your product's page, so it's easy to tell who's sending buyers in your direction and pay them accordingly. It's a way for product creators to extend their reach and create a virtual sales and advertising force. Some affiliates just put up ads to the products on their sites, hope people will click on them and buy, and don't do much more than that. Others act like straight up salesman and marketers themselves in pushing the products. And others get people to buy, and get their commissions, by recommending the product. It's this last category that's problematic. If someone's recommending a product to you, or reviewing it, and they have the potential to make money if you click the link and buy via their site or email, that's a big conflict of interest that's been created. Sure they may be honestly recommending a product that they think is useful, but you can never tell. It's best to take everything with a grain of salt. Another concern is that the more expensive products aren't always the best, but they provide the best affiliate commissions so recommenders have plenty of reasons to talk them up. In fact one of the reasons dating products, even relatively cheap ones, seem so pricey is that the creator has to factor the affiliate commission into their profit margin. If they want to make $40 on each sale, but know they have to give out a $40 commission to motivate people to push their product for them, then they have to price it at $80. You need to have a bit of a reputation to recommend a product to someone. One thing internet marketers will do is form relationships with other businessmen in their niche and promote each other's products through their own mailing lists or websites. Sometimes they use affiliate links and can have a quick payday by sending out one email talking up some other guy's audio course. At other times no affiliate links are involved, but there's an understanding that while you're promoting someone else's product for free, the day will come when they'll scratch your back. The other kind of recommender is a guy with a blog on the topic of dating. While they may write about other topics, occasionally they'll write about a product they like. Or they'll review a product, sometimes in language that oddly reads like a pre-canned pitch someone gave to them. Some blogs frankly appear more blatantly profit-driven than others and it seems every fourth post is a plug for some product (and most of the other posts are just those free articles marketers provide their affiliates). Again, be skeptical until proven otherwise. Look to user reviews if you really want to buy something and want objective information, but even that has pitfalls Until you've gotten a hold of a product itself, you'll never know how good it is or not. Barring that, I think the next best way to evaluate potential products you may want to buy is to look for impartial user reviews. But once again, you really don't have to buy anything. Although it may be informative, any review with an affiliate link can't be considered impartial. Your best bet is to look for user reviews in discussion forums. To make things even trickier though, not all reviews are created equal. And the characteristics of this field pose some additional challenges for finding good information: * When it comes to anything, I like to look at moderately negative reviews. They tend to be more upfront about a product's drawbacks. Positive reviews can gush too much and gloss over a product's legitimate flaws. In the end I may not follow the negative review, but they do tend to provide a more balanced picture. * Many people who consume dating products have a lot of theoretical knowledge about how to get girls but little real world experience or expertise. So when they review a product they haven't actually applied any of the ideas in real life. They're just going on how good the advice seems to them. Unfortunately they may be placing value on the wrong things. * Going through a new product may get someone excited and psyched up. They may feel like they're going to go out and conquer the world with all the new ideas they've read, even if in the end they never do. They may review the product in this charged up, but temporary state, inflating their opinion of it. * Who's to say for sure, but some companies have been accused of manipulating their customers into giving them good reviews. Like they'll encourage them to post a review when they're still experiencing that high of just having been exposed to the information. * Dating advice isn't like seeing a movie, you don't just watch it and then be able to give a judgment. You have to put the advice into practice and see if it gets you results. The ideal reviewer is someone who's commenting on a product they bought a while ago, and have been trying out the ideas from it in real life. That's not always easy to find though. Lots of people seem to review things just after they've bought them. Again, they're going on how good the advice seems, or how it makes them feel while taking it in. * And of course, look for obviously fake reviews. So in spite of everything I've said there's one dating product out there I truly do stand behind, and can recommend wholeheartedly...just kidding. Another marketing tactic is to disparage marketing tactics in order to establish yourself as a straight-shooting man of integrity, and then sneak the sales pitch in at the end. I won't do that. You really don't need to buy anything. http://www.datinggroundwork.com/avoidpurchases |
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| Author: | Jav [ Fri May 29, 2009 11:40 pm ] |
| Post subject: | |
It's still people's own decision whether they buy products or not. not even a story in the length of 2 posts is going to stop that. There really is some legitimate stuff out there that will improve your game majorly. |
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| Author: | jurupa [ Sat May 30, 2009 3:13 am ] |
| Post subject: | |
Or you can simply read this forum and other dating forums (they actually offer great insight into girls heads as they tend to not hold back), and read various dating articles. That is not to say there are worth while books out there to buy. |
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