Sales Page Bullshit Busted

3. Quick, Buy Now!! Only 37.. 34.. 28.. 23 Copies Left!

The Pitch: The idea here is that only limited stocks of the product are available! You’ll have to be quick and buy before they’re all gone! When the product is an ebook or digital download where limited sales are not realistic, you might see a back story about how “this incredible new programme is going to totally dominate Google and put SEO out of business, that’ll lead to Google fighting back and closing this loophole down! To prevent this, we’re only giving away 52.. 47 more copies!!”

The Scam: These claims are very rarely legitimate. The purpose is to create a sense of urgency, that if you don’t buy now you wont have a second chance. This is because a long time ago sales people learned that if the reader doesn’t buy the first time they read your sales pitch, on an impulse, then they are very unlikely to come back. A commonly used method for this trick is to install a little javascript or php script to track the visitors IP and generate a new countdown timer for that IP with a message like “$20 off if you buy in the next 24 hours!”. Inevitably, if you come back 24 hours later the message will reset. Because of this, you usually only see this on sales pages of relatively little or unknown sales guys that aren’t worried about their reputation.

2. Testimonials

“Your Bluestone Brand Buttscratcher Saved My Life!”
Mrs. F. Icticious

The Pitch: Testimonials are a quick and easy way to add the appearance of credibility. The idea is that the testimonial comes from an outside or third party source or a customer who was so pleased with the amazing product that they just had to let the sales guy know how much the product helped them make buckets of easy cash. All lending to the idea that this is an unbiased review of the amazing product.

The Scam: The vast majority of testimonials on sales pages are offered during the product testing phase and follow a trend where the product owner offers a free copy of the product in return for a testimonial. This is typically done on a forum and immediately biases the recipient to create a positive review (you wouldn’t turn around and bash someone who had just given you a free product, would you?). Another commonly used testimonial bait is to offer a free link back to the recipients website for their testimonial. Again, if you think you’re going to get a free link, you’re going to write them a damn positive testimonial.

In many cases the testimonial will simply be written by the website owner themselves and may use a”personal” portrait photo, usually sourced directly from iStock. This way they can write whatever they want about the product without the risk of having to put up a photo of some ugly mug customer, and they don’t even need to offer a link or a copy of the product.

1. I’ve made $535,677 from this unethically easy programme, just look at my paypal screenshots!!

The Pitch: The idea is to convey the fact that the product has lead to the sales guy becoming so incredulously rich from his product that he falls asleep on a blanket made of 20 dollar bills, that it takes him half an hour to scroll to the bottom of his PayPal incoming payments screen. This usually completely ignores the logical fact that if he were making this much money he wouldn’t need to sell the product in the first place.

The Scam: Once upon a recent time, virtually every sales page on the net had PayPal screenshots with either a month-by-month layout or a total-to-date shot. Due to the saturation of this technique and the fact that you’d have to be a top notch idiot to believe that they weren’t cooked up in Photoshop in 17.5 seconds means that the PayPal screenshot is less common these days. But it is still out there, and it’s just as fabricated.

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