The Internet Marketer’s Who Cried Wolf

Today we’ll take one of Aesop’s fables and try to use it to teach a lesson to some stupid marketer’s.

There was once a young shepherd boy ( internet marketer ) who tended his sheep ( his ezine list ) at the foot of a mountain near a dark forest.

It was rather lonely for him all day ( plotting ways to extract money from his list, rather than creating unique, remarkable content ), so he thought upon a plan by which he could get a little company and some excitement ( rather he looked for affiliate offers to send out at a rate of 20:1 over content ).

He rushed down towards the village calling out “Wolf, Wolf,” ( he sent out offer after offer ) and the villagers came out to meet him, and some of them stopped with him for a considerable time ( they read his crap for a week or a month ).

This pleased the boy so much that a few days afterwards he tried the same trick, and again the villagers came to his help ( in other words, the fool though he could just send offer after offer and not try to educate, entertain or enlighten his readers ).

But shortly after this a Wolf actually did come out from the forest, and began to worry the sheep, and the boy of course cried out “Wolf, Wolf,” still louder than before ( which means everybody got tired of being pummeled with crappy offers and unsubscribed from the list/ezine ).

But this time the villagers, who had been fooled twice before, thought the boy was again deceiving them, and nobody stirred to come to his help. So the Wolf made a good meal off the boy’s flock, and when the boy complained, the wise man of the village said:

“A LIAR WILL NOT BE BELIEVED, EVEN WHEN HE SPEAKS THE TRUTH.”

The moral to today’s lesson is one you need to learn, if you’re going to have an ezine in today’s world of webbiness:

You absolutely must provide unique, creative, maybe even remarkable content at a ratio of 4:1, I’d prefer 7:1, over offers, if you’re going to cultivate a relationship with your list, which will enable you to harvest the fruits of your labor, which is that list buying from you when you make an offer of a product or service that’s relevant to the topic of the ezine.

I have unsubscribed from multiple lists over the last 6 months because, it seemed, that the ezine owner had forgotten what his/her purpose in life was.

Either that or Glenn Frey, of The Eagles, was right when he said: ” Words are not a replenishable resource. “

Bloggers and ezine owner all over the world are finding this to be true, as they let their blogs die and/or pummel their list with offers, because they ran out of things to say.

For those of you out there who subscribe to multiple ezines, do yourself a favor and see if you can remember the last time an issue actually contained some viable, unique, creative content. If you can’t remember, use the unsubscribe link and use the time you used to use reading all that trash as time to create your own unique, creative, remarkable content … and then sell it !

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