Yesterday while leaving the grocery store on the way home from work I noticed something on my windshield. While my first reaction is the usual "son of a f*#$* as*(#$* sh#$@%">sh#$@%* jerk" [yeah, like a sailor], I thought I'd take the opportunity to see if any interesting marketing ideas could be gleamed from the brute force marketing approach being employed.
I laughed for about 5 minutes straight. Why?
The person leaving the flyer was trying to sell me a payday loan, but if that weren't enough, the URL used was of the obfuscated CJ.com variety…seriously, 70+ characters that would have been nearly impossible to fully type in due to the recent rains occurring in the Phoenix area.
There are some important affiliate marketing lessons here:
1. Know your market - the parking lot of AJ's probably isn't where your target consumers are hanging out.
2. Know the medium - if you are trying to sell something online, and are using an offline approach, you need to make it as simple a transition as possible. The 70+ character URL probably won't get you any consumers…it got me to check, but only after a couple tries of mistyping the damn thing to make sure you weren't promoting us.
3. Know your product - financial products and services usually require a higher trust factor for a consumer than something like buying a book, the reason being the type of information required in order to complete such purchases; a sketchy flyer on a windshield with an insane URL is a very low signal of trust.
You gotta love affiliate marketing; it takes all kinds.
JoeSinkwitz