Political Humor | Review of Brian Clark’s Teaching Sells

Brian Clark of Copyblogger has issued a new free report about making money online, called Teaching Sells. My main impression is that it’s a pretty good advertisement for the pay-to-train program that he’ll be running, much like Yaro Starak’s Blog Profits Blueprint was a pretty good advertisement for Yaro’s Blog Mastermind Mentoring program.

There are a few good points to extract from it, once you weed out the sales copy of it all. In some ways,I would say that having to weed through it to extract what’s useful also drives the point home that Brian was making that people will pay for good information handed to them on a silver platter. That’s definitely a key point of the paper.

People simply don’t want to navigate their way through sales pitches and cynicism to find the information that they need. They want to be spoonfed.

I read it so you don’t have to.

The Good

If you’re relying on Google for traffic and for your monetization, you’re really working for Google. I agree completely. It’s a crappy strategy.

You’re not going to make much money if you think that you’re going to make all your money from advertising on a free content blog. Most likely you can bring in a few bucks if your traffic is high enough, but the real money comes from using your blog as publicity for whatever it is that really makes you money, like Brian Clark is doing.

People are willing to pay for good information that isn’t riddled with sales pitches. No one really wants to learn through any actual effort. It’s part of our failure society. Oh, no! That would be too hard! Just tell me how to do it. I don’t want to put effort into learning.

Unfortunately, if there’s no effort, there’s no actual learning involved. Memorization or regurgitation maybe, but not learning. Be careful Special Ed, one of your brain cells might bump into another one and you’ll inadvertently learn something.

You want a niche product, not a niche audience. The reason people go to the specialty store instead of the big chain is that the guy who works there knows his products backwards and forwards, inside and out. He also remembers you.

As opposed to the big chain where you ask the sales guy a technical question and his eyes roll into the back of his head, and he starts to convulse. After he pisses himself, he spends 20 minutes hunting down the manager, who may or may not be able to answer your question.

The point of a niche is to have a loyal and returning customer base, not to limit your market.

There’s some inspirational bits, but it’s likely that it’s nothing more than a marketing strategy to get you excited about his program. Think about it. How many products are marketed like this:

Your life is a failure. Why not hang yourself. All ropes half price.

That’s not the way to sell. You tell people, “You can lose 30 pounds in one month if you sign up for our program.” The implication is that you can’t do it without the program. Sadly, you probably won’t either way because you’re trying to avoid the part where you work hard.

The Bad

You really need to realize that this is an advertisement for Brian and Tony Clark’s service. They even admit as much in the end. There’s not much in there that’s revolutionary. It has a few good points - see above - But the rest is an attempt to get you excited about signing up to pay for a tutorial service.

It’s a 24 page sales pitch, and not much else.

You’ll notice that many of the others linking to the report, like Problogger and Dosh Dosh are affiliates. They state as much openly. If you’re not familiar with what an affiliate link looks like, you can identify them because they have something in the URL that looks like ?ref=problogger&pid=3ed88ee2 or ?ref=doshdosh&%3bpid=5c41312e

Sometimes a blogger will use a redirect that allows tracking of outclicks. Dosh Dosh is one example. The link appears to point towards a page on Dosh Dosh, but then redirects to the landing page. You’ll note my links point to the top level domain, because they are reference links, not a referral links.

Essentially, these people are being paid to refer you to a sales pitch. What do they really think about the report. We’ll most likely never know.

The Ugly

The audio version, voiced by Tony Clark, is the perfect cure for insomnia. I think it may give Sombien a run for it’s money. Side effects include coma, and head trauma. Do not use while driving or operating heavy machinery.

One of the premises of Teaching Sells is that people want useful information. That’s true but it bugs the shit out of me that these guys consistently confabulate useful and utilitarian. Entertainment is very useful, whether it’s an engaging story, humor, or merely a sense of community. Otherwise, we would all be isolated, humorless, memorization bots.

The Analysis

Brian definitely is a master at what he does. That’s why I say that you can learn a lot from watching what they do, but not so much from what they say. I think it’s pretty genius to set up a program that let’s people pay you to train them. Then there’s the open possibility that if you’re one of the select few that bothers to apply any of your new knowledge into action, you might get hired by Brian Clark.

Isn’t that your life’s dream?

Also, it doesn’t really matter what method you use to teach people something. The fact is that too many people want it easy. There are too many people that think, “If it’s hard, it’s probably not worth doing.” No matter what, the best teacher will always be that bitch, Experience.

Humans will always learn best from failure. Which one is more likely to teach you to drive more carefully, your shrewish wife nagging you to slow down, or the impact with a telephone pole? Sadly, the Wife, although annoying beyond all belief is right, but you won’t listen until the telephone pole says so.

Ultimately, lot’s of people will pay lots of money to join Brian’s program, then they’ll fail to apply it to life because it takes some actual work. Never fear though, there will always be someone ambitious enough to do the work for you. Those will be the people succeeding in life.

The rest of our failure society will sit around wondering why nothing good ever happens to them, because they won’t make and effort, and they respond to failure by wallowing in self-pity, self-doubt, and self-loathing, rather than responding learning and adapting.

Now I just need to figure out how to turn this into a multimedia presentation and charge people too lazy to read and apply any of it.

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Would it be wrong to pimp this on Humor-Blogs.com ?

EDIT: I rewrote the portion about affiliate links. Thanks to Maki for pointing out that I had very poorly worded that part. It was not intended to insinuate that there is something underhanded going on, but rather to illustrate the concept of an affiliate link versus a reference link. I apologize for the misunderstanding.

On a related note, I wrote this before I had seen Yaro’s take on it. I think it’s amusing that I compared it to Blog Mastermind and so did he. He states a number of things that I tried to point out. These guys come off as experts at what they do, because they are experts at what they do.

They use their blogs to showcase their expertise, which in turn generates publicity, mailing lists, and leads. Ultimately it allows them to get big time consulting work, which is the real money in it. That’s a point made by both Yaro in his post, and Brian Clark in his report. It’s one I tried to make, but I was doing too many things at once.