Does your website make you look like a poor loser?

June 27th, 2008 · No Comments

If you’ve never seen the website You’re a Poor Loser then take a moment and scroll through this amazingly simple, single-page site made primarily with colored markers. This is a sales website, dedicated to shaming you into buying a single product that will transform you from a ‘poor loser’ into a ‘Creative Genius’, just like the creative genius who created this website.

It is really incredibly refreshing to see something like this, a product sales website, approached in this untraditional (ultra-traditional?) way. It’s a total departure from your typical hard-selling product site. Sonia Simone of Copyblogger describes this type of site as having “red headlines, yellow highlighting, and aggressive copy that grips the reader like a terrier shaking a squirrel.”

Thank you, Sonia, for introducing me to youreapoorloser! The copywriter/artist of youreapoorloser [from hereon referred to as the Creative Genius] takes to the extreme what people like Joe Vitale and Clayton Makepeace do for a living in a very sensationalist way. Simplifying it into a caricature, the way a political cartoonist simplifies the features and idiosyncrasies of our political figures. Like the masters of harpoon marketing, the Creative Genius uses different colored text, stars, quotes and testimonials like this one:

Like other sales sites, the length of the page goes on and on like Kerouac’s On the Road manuscript. In his words, The Creative Genius is here to “pimp slap you” into buying this eBook. Oh, I didn’t mention this was all to sell an eBook? Well, it is, but it wouldn’t matter what the site was selling. The variety of information that you are presented with in this steady stream, has an hypnotic effect on the reader. Before you know it, you are at the bottom of the page, next to the click here to order button. This is what Joe Vitale calls Hypnotic Marketing and, if done correctly, it absolutely works.

What are the problems with Harpoon marketing?

Simone’s article calls this ‘harpoon marketing’, as opposed to ‘net marketing’. Harpoon marketing aims to spear a ‘whale’ with one shot;’Cos with a site like this, that’s all you get. Net marketing is all about casting a wide net with your message and offering something to your readers other than a once-in-a-lifetime-offer. You offer your readers content, resources, opinions, places to participate in a community. You also gently suggest they try out this or that product. Sometimes it’s your product, sometimes it’s someone else’s. It doesn’t matter because you have built trust and fostered a relationship with the reader. If you recommend it, it must be good; if you made it yourself, it must be even better.

Harpoon marketing, on the other had, makes it very difficult for you to form a relationship with your community. Some people, like Joe Vitale, have done it famously. But even the most naive consumer can spot a fast-talking sales pitch and these sites just scream Snake Oil. This makes it very difficult to build credibility and does not foster readership or community, only customers.

Is there a happy medium?

I believe there is a way to create a sales page within your “supportive net”. This is something I am working on right now, actually. I have a product that should be ready soon, it’s an actual physical product, not an eBook. So that’s my challenge right now: finding ways to promote my product that have the effectiveness of an infomercial without coming off like a timeshare salesman. It’s a careful highwire act and when the time comes I’m counting on you guys to let me know if I’m coming off more like a guy who wears a tracksuit or one of those really shiny suits.