Marketing, Honesty, and Profit

Posted by Lorren on June 29, 2010

A month or two ago, Glenn Beck encouraged us to live our lives with honesty and integrity. While I completely agree with him on that factor, in the last couple of days, I have begun to second guess the integrity of many of the people around me… and have wondered if the integrity (or lack of it) of these people will affect the amount of money that I will make.

I have been trying to think of ways to make more money from my writing. Writing articles pays some, and it certainly pays more than it did a year ago, but it doesn’t pay a lot yet, and we have rent to pay. So one of my strategies to branch out is to concentrate on selling more products.

So right now, I’m trying to learn what I can about marketing. I figure, why not market a product that I already know and use? So I set out to promote The Diet Solution. It’s a product that I know and like, I know it works, and the science seems good.

However, to be honest, I can only truthfully say that I’ve lost 7 pounds (so far) using it. This cannot compare to people that claim to have lost 50 pounds or so with one program or another. Can we really believe their claims though? Can we believe what anybody says about one product or another? I know that some people believe that the way to sell is to hype up a product and say that it’s the greatest thing since sliced bread, whether or not they actually have purchased the product themselves. If you look at some of these product promotions, they all seem to have the same feel to them.

Take the One Week Marketing Plan that PotPieGirl has developed. Now, I believe that PotPieGirl herself is probably quite honest: she has a pretty good reputation; I receive her emails and I think that she is well-intentioned and knows her stuff. However, I’m not so sure that the pages and pages of people on Google that have promoted her products and say how wonderful it is have actually used the One Week Marketing Plan. If you actually look at these people’s ads, they all seem to say pretty much the same thing. If you have used the product and it is that great, why is it that you don’t have anything unique to say?

So will actually telling the truth cut into my profits? Perhaps. Are you going to buy from someone that says she lost 7 pounds, or 50 pounds? I suppose that in the end, it doesn’t matter. God has a way of taking care of people that do the right thing.

Just yesterday, we had some extremely good news. We had been worried about how we were going to pay our bills, especially rent and the car payment this month. I wanted to send my daughter to gymnastics camp, and saved up my earnings from writing to send her; I thought I might have to spend that money on necessities. I thought that I would have to spend my birthday money on rent.

That will not be necessary. ASU took over the management for the house we live in, and not only are they lowering our rent by $135 a month, but they are also giving us our deposit back, and are not requiring us to pay the rent until the 25th of the month (and they are changing the late fee structure too). So God has taken care of our finances, either way. Dh is going to look for jobs delivering pizza too. I know that doesn’t pay much, but our expenses are fairly low. Our rent is pretty low, we only have one car payment and no other debts, and all we have outside of that is utilities, and the gymnastics payment. That might be an extravagance, but some people spend the same amount of money on cable (we get our cable for free).

Beck was right, and so was George Washington, who originally coined the phrase: “Honesty is the Best Policy”.