Internet Marketing Tips - Who Do You Listen to?

By Steven Wagenheim

Okay, here's the scenario. You're marketing a product. It could be your own or one you're promoting as an affiliate. It doesn't matter. You're looking for feedback on your promotional methods. You go to a forum and ask for advice. Who do you listen to, a respected guru or your target market? Think very carefully before you answer that question. In fact, you might want to read my opinion on this subject before you do.

As marketers, we truly believe that the gurus have all the answers. After all, they've been at this game for a long time and they've made countless sums of money. So why wouldn't we listen to them? Well, there could be several reasons for not listening to your local guru.

At the top of the list, they may not have any experience with YOUR target market. For example, let's say you're selling products to people who are into golf. Guru X may have absolutely no experience selling to that market. Thus, he'd have no tangible advice that he could give to you that's applicable to THAT market. Sure, he could give you some general advice for copy such as "have a headline with a strong benefit" or something similar, but as far as specifics...he has no first hand experience.

Another reason that you might not want to listen to guru X is because his particular skills may not mesh with your ad campaign. Not every guru, no matter how successful, is an expert at every little thing. Some are great at list building while others are fantastic copywriters. Still others may be great at putting together a pay per click campaign. Many of these gurus have other people do the work for them that they're not particularly good at. Therefore, you never know what advice you're getting is good and what advice is just plain bad.

On the other hand, your target market KNOWS what it wants. If an avid golfer sees your sales letter and says that he's not getting the real benefit out of buying your product, you better darn well believe that there is something missing. And if he tells you EXACTLY what it is he wants to see, you better darn well put it in there because HE is your target market and HE knows EXACTLY what he wants.

This is not to say that guru X can't offer some good general advice. Naturally, if your sales letter is total trash, you could learn a lot from some general info such as headlines, bullet points, testimonials, guarantees and so on. But when it comes to the bottom line of what your target market REALLY wants, the only place to get that kind of feedback is from them.

So listen to both, but pay close attention to what the guy with the credit card on the other end is saying.


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