What’s a scammer? A person who is taking half-truths, spinning them into full stories, and pitching a product at the end. Pretending they’ve invented something when in reality, it’s just a repackaged, overpriced been-there-done-that offer.
Who’s the accomplice? Those who convince others the Scammer is right.
Who’s the victim? Those who pay for all that.
I regularly see these annoying videomercials of “Website vs Sales Funnel” lingo. It’s a made-up dichotomy to polarize folks into thinking that funnels are the way to go and that it’s time to stop wasting money on dumb websites. Dump your website, dump your hosting account, and point your DNS over on our platform. It will make you money, and you too will be able to have over-sized gold-plated braces & all the other bling that mere website owners will never have (probably because we don’t care for pretense and focus on measurable value over stories).
And many industry veterans, like confused puppies, are standing on the side, wondering “how can folks be so gullible to pay so much for something that’s already been on the market, at a fraction of the price, and with a lot more functionality?”
Comparing a website to a sales funnel is like comparing a cake to a bag of nuts. A cake consists of all sorts of stuff, plus some nuts. Or it might not have nuts at all. Having a bag of nuts, on the other hand, isn’t a cake. Because it’s not the full package. And if the cake doesn’t have nuts, you don’t throw out the cake and buy a bunch of nuts.
That’s nuts.
In the same manner, a website could contain sales funnels. Or it may not. And if there aren’t any sales funnels, this doesn’t mean that you need to scrap your website and go for a sales funnel alone.
That’s nuts.
A sales funnel needs context, other ingredients, in order to make some sense (i.e to “convert”). The context may be provided by email marketing, PPC, Social or organic traffic. In an of itself, a funnel is just a collection of web pages linked together, pushing traffic from Page A to Page X. A glorified nothing-special. Something that was in existence long, long ago.
Now, if a sales funnel starts expanding beyond itself, it morphs into a website.
So, for the person peddling this false dichotomy, and to the folks who throw their hard-earned cash on this glorified page builder, STOP IT. You haven’t discovered anything. Sales funnels, lead gen funnels, these things have been in existence for decades now.
The internet didn’t change when the half-truths peddling guru launched an over-hyped page builder attached to a hosting deal. All that happened is that a lot of people didn’t deconstruct the pitch to see that the constituents of the offer are a website platform and a hosting account. Something that was already here, at a fraction of the price, and just as good… perhaps even better.
You see, website platforms like WordPress, Drupal, Joomla, etc were built to serve as website content management systems. There are huge development communities around these CMS solutions, providing themes and plugins, paid and free. Many of them are over 10 years old. Which is like the age of the dinosaurs, man!
And for these platforms, a page is a page is a page. Whether it’s a landing page, a squeeze page, an up-sell page or whatever else… IT’S JUST A WEB PAGE.
Just because there are new and blingy “platforms” costing 10 times more than it ought to, doesn’t make them any better.
Disclaimer: This is a rant about a social phenomenon of people knowing the price of everything, and the value of nothing (lifted this off of the book Priceless). It’s a satirical text aimed at causing a few giggles for website developers, as we stand and witness yet another hyped-up product family. About the same innocent giggle of some old retired folks as they sit in an Italian cafe, sipping a soft drink, and looking at a bunch of teenagers monkeying around, trying to impress “women of the opposite sex” (lifted this one from Allo-Allo), thinking “Ahh, those were the days, when everything seemed exciting. Even yesterday’s news.”
