When You Get A Bad Product
The other day, I found an e-book on my computer that I hadn’t read. It’s from quite a big name in the make money onine crowd. I looked and saw that he was offering a hefty affiliate fee.
So I read the book and sat down to write a review.
It didn’t go so well.
The book, to start with, was only a few pages. The information it contained was really, really basic information. The formatting was professionally done so the book looked great – but it only had a few sentences on each page.
None of these things are dealbreakers, but the price was very high for the book.
In short, it’s a throwback to the days where people paid $47 for a 20 page .pdf on how to make money online.
Uneasy Feeling
After reading the book, I planned my bullets. I wrote out what the book gives you, and the benefits of that. I wrote out three things that you could use the book for. I wrote some of the negatives.
But an uneasy feeling was there at the back of my mind. It was the “Are you really going to recommend this to people?”
Now, I have no problem with this writer. I don’t want to name and shame them, because it’s their livelihood. Also, the book has rave reviews from other people all across the web.
Ultimately though, I don’t feel comfortable selling people a book I wouldn’t want them associating me with.
This is something weird for me because I’ve written product reviews for other things that I wasn’t a fan of before.
This time though, one statement was in the back of my mind, and featured heavily in the sales letter I wrote. (Annoyingly enough, as I tweeted the other day, the sales letter I wrote for this product is actually one of my best.)
You Can Do Better
I wanted to add a section on to the end of my sales letter.
” You can get many benefits from this product… without even buying it.”
Of course, in a sales letter you don’t want to tell people not to buy the product. But that was all I could think about.
If someone can build an empire selling fifty page books for thirty dollars, then if you’re a good writer, you can do the same.
The beauty of internet business is that it’s all out in the open. If you read a book or see a product that isn’t very good, then you can do your research in one go, and pull apart someone’s whole campaign.
I didn’t like the product. But:
- The landing page was great.
- The way this marketer collected testimonials was great. (Hint – it was a limited free period for advance reviewers.)
- The way his website is set up so that you buy all three volumes of this series was great.
- The way the book itself was used as an upsell was a little annoying, but I bet it worked like a hot knife through butter.
So there was plenty to learn from a product that wasn’t very good. What struck me was that it was attainable for any writer with middling skill as well – these books maybe pushed over ten thousand words. They weren’t 20k words by any stretch.
Closing Thoughts
This has been a meandering tale when compared to some other articles on the site, but here is the cliff-notes version:
1. Have integrity when it comes to reviewing products. If you lead a reader down a path to a bad product, they might never come back.
2. Just because something is bad, doesn’t mean there’s no market (or that other people won’t pay lots for it.)
3. Just because something is bad, doesn’t mean you can’t learn lessons from it.
4. If you buy a product and you think it’s terrible, then you should think about how you could do it better.
P.S. This obviously applies to products you’re writing for your own sites. If someone is paying you to write a sales letter, then you obviously need to write it and do a good job of it. If you’re being paid though, your conscience is clear and the sleepless night can be ethically passed on to your client.