How to make life difficult for your Internet Marketing customers October 25, 2006
Posted by Andrew Wee in : Internet Marketing , trackbackHere’s a pet peeve.
Doing unnecessary technical stuff to make things hard for your customers.
I was offered a ‘leaked’ chapter for an affiliate product.
I filled in my name and email, ready for the onslaught of email to come.
I get to the download page, and download the file.
I look at the file.
.RAR.
Hmm. I’m just wondering.
Why use a file archival format that isn’t natively supported by Windows?
I’d have to download extra stuff just to look at an ebook?
I looked up this page: Cross-Platform File Compression and Encoding
To open this RAR file, I’d have to download a third-party decompression utility, 7-Up .
The user interface is somewhat clunky and designed for techies.
Then again it’s free.
I finally opened it.
It was pretty good, 58 pages of how to use MySpace to expand your network, do more sales, bake better bread and take over the universe. (I was kidding about the bread baking.)
But from a usability standpoint, look at this for a moment.
Most of us are on broadband Internet access, aren’t we?
We diligently support our telco, cable or satelitte provider.
We download lots of stuff every day.
Sometimes we even read it.
But I hardly feel a 2 megabyte ebook merits using a proprietory compression format.
You just make things hard for your users and yourself.
People (Internet Marketers included) are fundamentally lazy.
The less we have to do, the better.
If happiness could come with a mouse click, I’d bottle it up and list it on Clickbank.
So the unnecessary file compression creates a barrier to entry, or barrier to use in this case.
Do you really want to make life difficult for us?
Instead, give us instant gratification.
We’ll give you the balance in our PayPal account.
PS: I estimate the clock is fast ticking before Ewen Chia’s Web Advertising Secrets gets pulled off the market. Give up the balance in your PayPal account now…!
Popularity: 18%
Text Blog feed
It’s funny how people do this often. I think that when one gets so used to using personal programs (like winace or winrar), you often forget that these programs arent always on other people’s computers. Then when you end up in an internet cafe or a computer lab, you get that bitter sensation of solitude… where have all my programs gone?!
It’s a good idea to make things as easy as possible! But perhaps the original isnt compressed that way and only the leaked chapters were?
Zach
Hey Zach,
yeah, the worst is being in a computer lab or an internet cafe and not having yr apps around.
i’ve not decided if i’ll get it yet.
but i’m thinking usability doesnt seem to be their strong suit.
I have to agree with Andrew, when I come across files with extensions that I am not familiar with, I really do not feel like traveling the entire websphere to figure out how to access it.
It’s good to realize that I’m not the only that see’s it that way…. lesson learned here -> convenience is the key!