Yes…yes they can.  I was recently shopping for a new camcorder.  The retail value of the one I had in mind was $1,200.  My goal was to get it for $500 lightly used.  On one site I found my choice, the Canon HV20 for $369…what was my first thought?  “Wow, hook me up with that” or “What’s the catch…is it made out of used pinball machine parts?”  Sure enough, after a little research this website was famous for selling you something for super cheap and then refusing to ship it unless you were successfully upsold to a variety of different accessories…all with high markups.

Recently, a project of mine was faced with small margins that left it little room for growth.  Over the course of many months however, prices for this product soared, leaving me the opportunity to almost double my prices while maintaining the niche I had of being the affordable solution.  The result?  Order volume stayed level, leaving me with an huge jump in revenue and the ability to put a lot more into marketing and advertising to foster some growth.

The lesson?  If I would have kept my prices where they were before, what would have been the thoughts of people doing some comparison shopping?  It could have been, “wow, what a great deal”, but at the same time, they could have felt my product was either inferior…or just too good to be true.

I am tired of websites that shout at me and I am tired of hype.  I am tired of headlines full of words like: instant, secret, laser, exposed, killer, and explosive.

I miss simplicity.  I miss clarity and honesty.  I miss being able to trust a website.

Stop shouting…talk to me.

While the name is still a secret while I work out a few kinks and get ready for the launch in about three weeks.  This is the design for my new site: a video podcast featuring free tutorials on internet marketing for small businesses.   The focus will be on quick, afforable IM solutions without the need for techy knowledge.

I have the content about wrapped up for the first 4 months of tutorials (they’ll be released every other Tuesday) and I am just waiting to put the final touches on everything until after I come back from the New Media Expo this weekend.   Something tells me with all the stuff I’ll be learning there, my plan/model with this project might need to be tweaked, so I will launch it officially on either Sep. 2nd or the 9th.

I went to a concern a few nights ago…Nada Surf was the main band.  The opener, Tim Fite was a dude in blue, cut-off overall singing some of the weirdest stuff I’d ever heard.  It was a cross between Salad Fingers and Weird Al.  Crazy at is sounds, I liked it…really.  The dude was so crazy eccentric that it was fun, I have no idea why.

So, sometimes I create a website or product or whatever that is logically perfect and smart…and it turns out average.  Sometimes I see a product or website that makes me scratch my head and wonder why moron spent 10 minutes on this one…and then notice that is in the top 20,000 in Alexa’s rankings and kicks the trash out of all my sites.

So why do they work?  I dunno…I honestly don’t.