I read an interesting post about who to take advice from on John Carlton's blog yesterday. (If you don't know John Carlton get over to his site and start reading. You'll learn more for free than most "guru" packages will teach you, even for thousands of dollars.)

It seems a non-marketing oriented website (metafilter.com) asked a question of its readers whether they thought a long-copy sales letter or a short-copy sales letter would work better. Carlton's site was used as an example of a long-copy site.

The inexperienced masses jumped all over it.

It's run by scammers. The design sucks. Too much scrolling. Looks cheap.

And so on…

Apparently, John Carlton is trying to scam any sucker who's stupid enough to hit his site and actually read it, instead of quickly jumping away to a "nicely designed" site.

A couple of these insightful posts caught my eye.

Because they don't have a design-oriented person to talk management out of terrible site design, I'm guessing.

Now there's a great business idea. Take advice from someone who knows how to make something look pretty and override the advice from someone who knows how to make money. That's going to give you some job security, isn't it?

They work, but only if you're selling to stupid customers

Stupid people must be pretty damned lucky then. I know more successful marketers who name John Carlton as one of the reasons for their success than almost anyone else (except maybe Dan Kennedy, who it seems is from the same school of scammers as Carlton). If they're all stupid for buying his course, luck must run deep with the IQ-challenged crowd.

The fact is, this post on Metafilter is a prime example of why so many people fail to find success in this business - they ask the wrong people for advice.

Why would you ask a bunch of people who have no particular marketing credentials or experience how to market successfully?

You don't go to your auto mechanic looking for medical advice do you?

If you want to be successful at something, you need to find other people who are already successful at it. They know what works and what doesn't - that's why they're successful.

Ask those people what works and what doesn't. Pay them for the advice if you have to. That will give you a headstart on 99% of the other marketers out there.

And then, once you've got a good foundation in place, test.

Test, test, test.

That's the only way to know what's going to work for sure. The person who wrote the original post on Metafilter shouldn't have to go to the site's readers to find out what to do. Just create a test to compare a long copy promotion against a short copy and see which does better.

You see, that's the other side of the coin when you're looking for advice.

Even if you get advice from the most experienced, knowledgeable person, unless they're in the same market and selling to the same people as you, they can only give you a best guess.

The only way to know for sure what works best is to test it yourself.