Why It’s Hard To Trust People
Posted by Mitch Mitchell on Apr 17, 2011
On this blog and my business blog, I talk about the subject of “trust” often. It seems that I’ve referenced the word 118 times on this blog, 136 on my other blog. Specific blog topics on the two blogs have ranged from my asking What Does It Take To Obtain Trust, talking about When Trust Is Violated, Figuring Out Who You Can Trust, and one article I wrote where I first announced that the three main virtues I judge every person I meet by are loyalty, trustworthiness and honesty.
 via Imagekind |
In this particular case I’m going to revisit a subject I brought up in a post I wrote here back in January titled Why We Don’t Trust Sales People. The quick update is that this guy representing a store we go to often (didn’t work at the store, but the store, BJ’s Warehouse, contracted with these people to offer something special to their customers), sold us a picture window for our living room that, in my opinion, wasn’t giving what he’d said it would give us. Then, 10 days later when he came by to inspect it, I told him I wasn’t sure it was doing what he said it would, to which he replied 12 million people can’t be wrong.
First, the update. The window looks good; I’ll give that to everyone. My wife says she thinks it’s stopped all the leaking we had; I still have grave doubts about that. Maybe air isn’t getting in but the window still gets cold right now, which means it radiates cool air into the house. We had one very weird day last week when the temperature suddenly shot up to 85, breaking a record, before falling back into the 50′s the next day, and on that day the living room was really hot; the new window was supposed to stop that as well.
Then there was this thing about a rebate we were supposed to be getting back. This guy told my wife that she’d be getting a check. Then he told her it would come back through her taxes. I told her it wouldn’t come back through her taxes because one, we’re still paying on some back taxes anything that came would be absorbed into it, and two, he said it would be $900 and I said there’s no way that much would show up. I suggested to her that she tell him she wanted a check from the company, since that’s what he initially told her.
On that day she told him that, and supposedly he went to make a phone call and told her that a check would be coming within a couple of weeks. Fast forward to now. Not only did she never get a check from the company but she could never get this guy to call back from the few times she tried to reach him after that. And when taxes were done, not only did the amount end up being less than half of what he’d stated but I was right, it immediately went to our back taxes. She felt demoralized, and I didn’t feel vindicated in being correct; to me, it really wasn’t a win in any scenario.
Why is it hard to trust people? Because of things like this, where someone sells you a bill of goods that you might not know how to check up front and then end up with something that didn’t give you what was promised later on. Why do many of us have our Spidey senses up all the time? Because we have this fear of being scammed by someone else and none of us wants to be made to feel like a fool.
 via Imagekind |
In my mind, one of the best things about blogging is that it gives you an opportunity to try to build people’s trust in you. By being open and honest over the course of time, your hope is that people will come to respect you, and thus if you have something you want to market or a service you provide, people will look your way because you’ve established yourself and shown people what you’re all about. You’re now one of the most trusted authorities because of your social media presence, right?
Unfortunately, not even close. As I touched upon in my recent post asking if anyone’s listening to you on Twitter, the only people that might trust you are those people who know about you, and in the scheme of things, for most of us it’s not that many people. For someone like me as a for instance, blog is ranked well, over 1,000 posts, put myself out there for the world to see, but with under 200 RSS subscribers and a relatively small cadre of blog comments on a consistent basis what would make someone who’s not a consistent visitor here decide to trust me? For that matter, think about your own circumstance; what do you think could compel people to trust you?
I thought about this a little bit when there was a brief tet-a-tet going on at Tristan’s blog based on a guest post with a title that was, well, kind of inflammatory. Now, the post turned out to be kind of inflammatory as well, but it turns out that the post author hadn’t initially wanted to use that as the title. The title in the end was exactly what the post was about, so it hit it on the nail, but in my mind it brought up this thing about trust once again. I mean, Tristan had to trust the guy to write a post that he thought would be good. The guy had to trust Tristan that the title would be good. In the end I’m not sure that both guys got exactly what they wanted, but each guy got something out of it. But do they specifically trust each other anymore?
Frankly, as I commented there, I’d have never written the post to begin with and certainly didn’t like the implication of the post, but at the same time I’m not sure I would have wanted someone to rewrite my topic line either. I wrote a post on one of my other blogs called I Hate Syracuse.com, where I lamented the comments that newspapers and news sources online allow these days. I then had a long conversation with someone from that website who said he didn’t like the title or the implication, though he agreed with me in principle as to why they allow what they do. I said my title was no different than what newspapers have done for years and he said it was in their best interest to get people to the story, but mine seemed misleading since I didn’t actually hate the entire site. I was thinking that was “pot calling kettle black”, and then thought about the trust issue overall once more. I stuck with my title, as you can see, and they’ve stuck with the trash comments they allow.
Why is it hard to trust people? Probably because we don’t always trust ourselves to make the right decisions either. At least that’s my thought on things, as I think about all the people we’ve allowed into our home over the last 10 years that have given us a bill of goods that haven’t panned out. But maybe I’m being a bit cynical on this Sunday morning; not sure. But if anyone has a different viewpoint on it all, I’d love to hear it. And while you’re at it, if you’ve been coming to this blog for awhile I’d like to know if you trust what I’ve said in the past and why; if not, I’d like to know that as well. And we’ll still be friends afterwards; trust me. 
Copyright secured by Digiprove © 2011 Mitch Mitchell
Blogging/Sales Experiment; The Follow Up
Posted by Mitch Mitchell on Nov 4, 2009
In my last post, which was kind of brief, I mentioned that I was trying something new. That was to see if I could create HTML pages and attach them to this blog in some fashion.
The immediate answer turns out to be yes. I don’t know why I’d never thought about it before, but just because one has a blog, what would have prevented me from uploading HTML pages? Nothing, it seems. After all, I’ve uploaded pictures and files before. That part was actually very easy, as I just added a pretty much nothing page with one line, and it worked just fine.
The next part wasn’t as easy, though. I thought about it, and wondered how easy it would be to make at least the header look like the blog header. The first thing I realized is that I couldn’t just look at the source code and get what I needed because much of what you need is coded into the CSS files, along with the PHP files.
But I’m not so dumb; where there’s a will, there’s a way. It took me about an hour, but I figured out how to get the image to do what I wanted it to do so at least that looked like the blog. Then it took me another 10 minutes to figure out how to get the blog name onto the image; that was just stupidity on my part, and that’s one of the problems with trying to do things really late in the evening, or early in the morning, since it was almost 1:30 at this point. I did get it on there, though, got the font correct also. What I can’t do, though, is get the spacing correct. So, it’ll look like the main page, but the name will jump if someone comes to the page. That may or may not be a minor issue for some people.
The next thing I wanted to try was to see if I could get my brief content to look like it does on the blog. I spent 25 minutes on that before I decided either I was too tired or there’s something I’m missing. When I got the font and color to look like it does on the blog, it also added this line in front of the content, looking like some emails do when things are repeated and people aren’t using the > sign to indicate it. When I didn’t have the font color looking like my blog everything defaulted totally to the left. I tried adding the “blockquote” attribute, and things went, well, weird. Seems the blog software, even if it’s an independent page, just doesn’t like that one.
In the end, I’m left with some conclusions. One, can it be done; yes. Two, is it worth trying to make everything look like the rest of your blog? No. Three, is that a major deal? Probably not, but I’m troubled with some of the formatting issues I was having, especially everything defaulting totally to the left. I’d hate to get into having to add that “nbsp” thing all the time (I didn’t type the code in correctly because then you wouldn’t see it here) to add spaces for every line; that’s ugly coding, and way too much work if you want to have a long page with lots of content and products on it. At some point it might be worth it to do things that way. For now, though, I think I’ll continue sending people to my S&S blog to see my weekly specials. So much easier to deal with.
A Blogging/Sales Experiment
Posted by Mitch Mitchell on Nov 4, 2009
This is going to be a relative short post because I’m working on a project, mini project, that I want to see what happens with it.
This blog is actually the domain, as you can probably figure out. I’ve been wondering if I could add a HTML page to my host, link to it, and have it show up as a page off this site. I’ve never thought about it before until today, and I’m thinking that, if it works, I just might add a few sales pages, with specific products from specific affiliates, and see how that all works out.
This should prove to be interesting; stay close to see how I report on this one.
Oh yeah, one more thing I want to mention. Seems I won a contest on Sire’s Wassup Blog, and I now have a 125×125 badge as one of the prizes; neat!
See, short and sweet; this definitely isn’t my norm! lol
Why I Don’t Want To Follow Some Twitter Folks
Posted by Mitch Mitchell on Feb 8, 2009
My goodness, another Twitter post!
Yes, another Twitter post, but at least each time I write about it, I’m writing something different. In this case, I want to talk about some of the more irritating things I see on Twitter. Overall Twitter is an interesting diversion, and it’s proven to be a news breaker. For instance, Twitter users spread the news about the Hudson River plane landing at least 15 minutes before the news organizations got the story. Twitter has allowed me to talk to people, albeit in short bursts, like Guy Kawasaki and Keith Ferrazzi.
But there are some habits from people that I don’t really like. I remember having a conversation with someone one night, though I can’t remember who, on the subject of some of these bad habits. Frankly, I chalked some of it up to ignorance; ignorance of proper decorum, ignorance of what irritates people, and ignorance of new technologies and how to really use them. However, we have a mixture of things to talk about, so let’s get started.
First, there’s this new trend of people who are creating new Twitter accounts for the purpose of selling something. I’m sure that’s nothing new, but in this case what they do is create the account, then try to start following as many people as they can. They usually pop a picture of a pretty young woman in there, and I wouldn’t doubt that most of the people they’re following are men. Sometimes the names make sense, sometimes they don’t. What I do is see the email come through telling me someone new is following me on Twitter, click on the link so I can take a look, and most of the time, now that I’ve seen it so often, I know it’s a fake account and won’t follow. Usually you see something like them following 1,600 people and maybe 30 people following them.
At the same time, there are some people who legitimately do the same thing. I have no idea how they find me or anyone else, but they do, and they just start following tons of people. I also won’t add most of those folks, but if they have a link to a blog or website I’ll at least check it out first to see what I think about it all. Sometimes the person does look pretty interesting, and I’ll follow; most of the time, though, I want to wait to see if that person draws interest.
Sometimes I take a look at how often someone is updating their own Twitter messages. If they’re not doing any talking, just following lots of people, I won’t follow them; I mean, that’s a waste of time. Obviously they don’t care to share, so I leave them alone. The people who bother me the most that do something like this, though, are the people who follow you, then when you check them out you see that they have their updates protected. Sure, you could ask them if you can follow them, but didn’t I get married so I wouldn’t have to deal with having to ask women I didn’t know if they’d like to go on a date with me? Unless it’s business, I don’t give people a chance to possibly reject me, so I don’t ask, and therefore I’m not following them.
Another thing I don’t like are those folks who have automatic messages when you decide to follow them. I’m sure they think they’re being helpful, but to me it feels more like they’re trying to be pushy. If the messages just said “Thanks for following me” or something like that I wouldn’t be bothered at all. However, what happens is that they either want to tell you about their website or their product, or they want you to download something. Of course, I’m not sure whether it’s a pure download, or an attempt to get me to put my name and email address on a list so they can start sending me all sorts of stuff, but I don’t care. I don’t like it, but I don’t immediately go and unfollow them, though I should. I just don’t pay much attention, don’t download anything, and go about my business.
I also don’t follow anyone who’s barely following others. There’s something narcissisticly wrong in following 10 people when there are 20,000 following you. If the ratio looks wrong, I’m not going to follow because I know that person isn’t going to follow me. Now, if that person follows me first, then I’ll follow them, but really, when is that ever going to happen?
One last thing I hate, but ignore most of the time, is someone who keeps writing post after post, not because they’re giving us a lot of stuff, but because they want to ignore the 140 character limit and actually have a full conversation, like chat rooms or IM’s or email. Having a conversation with someone is one thing; having a conversation with yourself is another. I’ve seen quite a lot of that. I have one friend who does that very thing; once she gets going, she just goes on and on. Sometimes I jump in and start talking to her; sometimes I just ignore it and move on. Since I’ve added TweetDeck to my system to use for my “twittering”, it’s made life so simple because I get to decide who I want to follow with a custom column, so it’s easy to ignore her when I wish. But I love her just the same. 
Twitter can be a lot of fun, and informative also. Some folks just don’t get it; for the rest of us, though, let’s just keep enjoying it.
Copyright secured by Digiprove © 2010 Mitch Mitchell
Let’s Learn Affiliate Marketing Together
Posted by Mitch Mitchell on Jan 19, 2009
Check out my Big RSS Subscriber Contest after reading this article.
As many of you know, our buddy Yan wrote a post early in the new year called 2009 Is The Year Of Internet Marketing. As I read that article, I was thinking how, for me, last year was supposed to be my year of internet marketing, and I can’t say it turned out all that well. Sure, I made some money, probably my best year ever, and yet, when it’s all said and done, I don’t really think I learned much this year to push me to the next level.
And I’m not alone. Let’s face this fact; there’s a lot of us out here who are trying to learn this internet marketing thing better. We buy the books and manuals and CDs and videos, and, well, we probably don’t get to most of it. I know I got to just under half of it, and, oddly enough, the one thing I really worked at, that I read deeply, was Joel Comm’s Adsense Secrets, and my income did drastically increase from it, though not on the blog, but from my other sites.
This proves that sometimes this literature and stuff we decide to invest in does work. And yet, it doesn’t take care of everything, does it? Let’s take a look at this affiliate marketing thing. Last year, when I started this blog, I decided to add some affiliate banners and products to my blog. I put either a link or product at the end of every post; I didn’t make a single sale from any of that in 2008, so obviously it takes more than that. Well, I did more than that a few times; I actually wrote entire posts about some of the items I was advertising because they were things I was using and I liked, and the only one I know about that a few people actually clicked on and signed up for was Tweet My Blog, and yet I never earned a dime from them (maybe I don’t understand how they’re supposed to pay, but I know at least 3 people went ahead and downloaded the product based on my recommendation) through Clickbank; sigh,…
Enough of that. Time to stop whining, and time to start learning. Obviously I don’t know it all, but I’ve learned a bunch of things, and y’all have learned a bunch of things, but we’re still missing it. So, here’s the challenge. Let’s put together our list of questions, things we want to learn as it pertains to this thing called affiliate, or internet, marketing. I have met some big time internet gurus in the last year, and if we can put together a package of questions, I will contact one of them and ask them if they can answer our specific questions. How does that sound?
I’ll start with mine:
1. Is the list really the most important thing to making consistent sales, or any real sales?
2. With Clickbank, do we write our own squeeze page to then send someone to the squeeze page of the product, or is there a way to work around that?
3. What is the best way to sell our own products?
4. Going back to the list, is it really ethical to always gather email addresses when giving out free items, then bombarding people with sales offers?
5. How does one really go about asking for the sale, especially on a blog?
And there you go; my questions. What are yours? Or, if you can answer those above, what are those answers? Let’s all learn and grow together.
Copyright secured by Digiprove © 2011 Mitch Mitchell
I'm Just Sharing is where I share my thoughts on internet marketing, writing, blogging and many other things. You never know what I'll be posting on. So keep coming back, read, enjoy, and buy something! ;)
