What we Practice to Ignore-May Prove to Help us Even More!

As with most people who have an online business, I get a lot of email and I have developed some acute instincts for when to read an email and when to delete it.

I know many experienced marketers will tell you that the more times an ad is placed in front of prospects; the more likely they are to act. I don’t really believe that. I find the whole idea that people can be trained to buy a product, if they see it often enough, as silly and mildly offensive. I don’t think any person buys a product unless they genuinely believe it will help them in their business and if they think that, they’ll check it out and make a decision. Not hang around and wait till they’ve seen it seven times.

Sure, inexperience can sway someone to believe that a useless time wasting product is going to help them, but that’s because, when you first start out, it takes time to learn what tools and programs they are going to need. I can guarantee you that anyone who buys an online product truly believes it is going to help them, and they will most likely buy it on their first visit to the website.

My view and it is a personal view, is that an ad that doesn’t get immediate response is an unsuccessful ad and needs to be either tweaked until it works, or rewritten from scratch. I don’t believe anyone, even at a subliminal level, thinks, ‘ hey I’ve seen this ad a couple of times already, I don’t need that product, it’s not what I want, but it will become irresistible to me when I’ve seen it another five times.’

I’m prepared to go out on a limb and say that even a manic compulsive buyer is likely to ignore a dull headline no matter how often they see it. It’s like the old adage, ‘familiarity breeds contempt’. It is so easy to think: ‘I’ve seen this ad before, I didn’t like it then so clearly I don’t want it’.

You may think all this is unimportant since it doesn’t harm anyone, but that’s not quite true. I know of a couple of MLM website owners who encourage their new members, mostly newbie’s, to spend $30+ a month to advertise their new found product in a traffic exchange, on the premise that repeated views of their replicated webpage will eventually turn clickers into buyers. It is never going to happen. These website owners may not mean any harm, and there really is no gain for them to so frivolously push their new members in the wrong direction. So one has to wonder, is it jaded indifference or do they actually believe their own hype?

The real cost to the business community, is that these ‘Guru’s’ turn people off in droves, people who may have otherwise found their niche and started to make a little money to eventually end up as worthy contributors to the circle of business and that makes these vendors shortsighted and selfish.

I know many products sold on the internet today are, at best, very shoddy. Often, the less substance, the higher the price and many of the owners who promote these travesties, would not make it on the internet today if they had to start as beginners. At least not based on what they produce today. Other vendors are simply ruthless and feel quite justified to push any rubbish at any price. Having said all that, what prompted me to start writing this article, and what gave me the title name, was a recent experience I had which ultimately proves my point.

I have around a dozen email addresses and in all of them I kept getting a particular ad, always in three’s or four’s at once, with identical headinglines, so much so that it began to irritate me. The thing is I never opened a single one. Why? Because of the “I saw this ad before, I didn’t get it then, so I don’t want it now”. I’m not going to tell you that I finally opened one of those ads. That just doesn’t happen, but one day, through a series of chance links, I found myself on a website, which I didn’t recognize, but which had exactly what I’d been looking for, the perfect little business for me.

It took me a while to realize I was on that very same, annoying website. My point? The ads were repeated constantly and the heading was not changed. Presumably, nor was the content. But because I didn’t open it when I first saw it, I came to ignore it and never opened it at all. Then, when sometime later, I found the business I’d always wanted, it turned out to be the one I had so often ignored.

Had the heading been changed a few times, I have no doubt I would have opened at least one of the ads. So in a way, that proves my point. Don’t ever think that repeatedly showing an ad will improve it and get you the business. If your ad is not responsive, it’s because it is a bad ad and it will not get better unless you change it.

Good ad copy is everything. If the copy works, keep using it, but keep testing it, and experiment with different headings. Just remember, repeating a bad ad will not make it a better ad. It is like wishful thinking, it feels good, but it never gets you where you want to go, no matter how hard you wish for it.

Finally, if an ad doesn’t get an immediate response, change it. Be sure to track your ads and monitor your results, I can recommend ProTracker Plus, it’s inexpensive, effective and very easy to use. If necessary, learn from the ads you admire and hone your copy writing skills. In this business you’re going to need them.