Hello Everyone!

Do you hate “cheesy” information products? Have you ever purchased an eBook, piece of software, membership account, dvd, cd, or related product, only to have it arrive and disappoint you? If you’re anything like me, this situation is not only frustrating, but enough to make you livid. (I’ve actually received a couple of products that were so cheesy, they made me almost ‘pre-postal’, but that’s another story.)

So what is a “cheesy” information product? Essentially, printed or electronically downloadable product that purports to provide information of the how-to variety, on any manner of subject. In my case, I consume a ton of information products on a wide variety of topics, but the cheesy ones tend to be financial and internet marketing related. You know the ones….

“Order now, we only have 2 left, and then we’ll never, ever, ever, print another one at this price…”

-or-

“Don’t leave the order page yet. If you order within the next 20 seconds, we’ll throw in an extra $10,000 worth of downloadable bonus products.”

-or-

“How to just push a button, and have thousands of dollars show up in your bank account, as if by osmosis”

Ok…some are slightly exaggerated. But not by much. This post is about seemingly legitimate “internet marketing related” products from reputable publishers. Folks who should know better, but cannot resist making a Euro (or Dollar) or two from a cheap piece of garbage that took no more than a few minutes to put together.

Before going on, I’ll clear the air a bit. The Internet is chock full of some really great information products that can be worth many times their price. One eBook in particular that I paid about $17 for a while back, netted me 3 traffic generation tricks that we still use in a couple of our businesses. It was definitely worth while. The positive examples are legion, and should not be tainted by the examples I have listed here.

Here are a few reasons that Mobile Business Owners would wish to consider purchasing quality information products:

• They really want to learn more about the topic covered in the materials
• Things to listen to in their laptops/ipods/PMP while jogging, or traveling for business
• They want to use the materials as research/reference materials for other products
• They may want to get ideas from the construction and content of the materials
• Gifts for others
• And so on

The second extra-cheese product came this week. It had a really great title (for legal reasons, I won’t list it here, but will say that the subject was related to reselling product rights and licensing). The product was highly touted and since we had a related projects in the works, we thought “why not.” So this thing arrives in our business mailbox in a plain brown wrapper. Inside, were two cd’s with home made labels on. One of the two CD’s simply contained a “lnk” file, which in case you haven’t run into this before, is essentially just a pointer to another file on someone’s hard drive, not the file itself. So one of the two disks was already useless. Next, we gathered round at lunch and give it a spin in the DVD player. It was so bad, that my emotions fluctuated between laughter at the raw unprofessionalism of the piece, to anger that such a well-known website run by a very famous internationally best-selling author would actively promote such tripe. My favorite features of the disk were: