Anyone who has spent time researching an online business niche and what they can do to make a living online will have come across sites and pages offering you the opportunity to make more money than you thought possible. Usually the sales page will have one or more of the following elements:
- Fonts in about 4 different type faces and 6 different colours
- Pictures of someone standing next to a very expensive car or boat (with their face blurred out)
- Copies of cheques, bank statements or Paypal statements
- Testimonials from people who go by only one name
- Statements like “As seen on CNN, MSNBC, Fox News” etc
Too many times, people can be tempted to look for quick riches online, and unfortunately these types of programs seek to profit from them. The reality is that those selling them aren’t using the methods. They are making the money from selling them to others, and having affiliates do the same – ultimately, the program they offer may have no proven results.
Two recent examples come to mind that I want to share with you.
Given the number of sites I subscribe to, I received an email the other day that wanted to tell me about a newbie on the net who had made $70,000 in 7 days. This person had only signed up to his program in June and was already raking it in. Now, the glaringly obvious problem with this is that the person had only signed up in June, yet managed to make $70K in 7 days when the email I got was on the 5th of June? Something was amiss and sadly, these types of email can come from sources that you considered reputable to start with.
One scam that I particularly wanted to single out is the so called Google Income System. You may have seen ads on Facebook for it. What they promise is that you have the opportunity to rake in around $5,000 per month using Google’s AdWords and getting paid on a pay per click basis. They draw you in by only having to pay $1.95 for the postage of the disc which has all the “training materials” on it.
So what aren’t they telling you? Firstly, the $1.95 is the “introductory” rate, which gives you seven days to review the program, after which time if you do not want to take part you need to email them and if they don’t hear from you, then you are charged $39.99 USD each month. Two problems with this – the disc takes 7 weeks to arrive (rather than the 3 days as promised on the site), putting you well outside the 7 day window of review, and for your trouble all you get is a recurring charge on your credit card each month. Nowhere on their sales page are the terms present, and in fact, not even on their site. It wasn’t until I did some research did I discover a link that someone else had provided, to page that can’t be found on the site, where it set it out. Any and all emails all come back undeliverable and it turns out the training materials are a grainy webinar recording and a single page PDF.
I need to say that I am not wanting to tarnish all those promoting these types of programs, there are a number of them that do truly produce good results. Unfortunately, the wild west nature of the internet means that anyone can deem themselves an expert and deliver programs that “even the experts haven’t worked out”, another of my favourite tag lines. Sure, there was a time in the early days of the net where these kind of opportunities may have been profitable and worked, but now the web has reached a critical mass of sorts and all you have is marketers selling to marketers. A number of them now include earnings disclaimers, again, buried in the fine print as their reputations become even harder to manage.
This post is more of a cautionary tale to anyone who is looking for their online business niche. I’ve said before that making real money and building a reputable business online takes time, and these kinds of scams can really distract you in terms of time and effort, so proceed with caution when looking at them.
Do your research. There are so many places where people who have tried these programs have vented, and you can usually find them by Googling the name of the product and the word “scam” to find them. But you should also be careful of these kinds of rating sites are set up to lend legitimacy to the programs and are not actually factual reviews.
Finally, as a general rule, anything that promises high SEO rankings or massive dollars, both in ridiculously short periods of time, should be taken with a grain of salt.
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