Tag Archives: internet marketing

A Quick Guide On Scams And Internet Marketing

After some long thinking, I decided to write this post to help people who are searching for a solution to their height problems to not be cheated, tricked, or scammed by the countless number of Internet sharks out there.

I know a lot about these internet scams because I have been searching for a way to earn some passive income recently because I move a lot and wanted to see if I could find a way to earn money online. Well, here is the dirt that I have found which you can use if you want. I promise that if I ever sell anything on this website or promote any product, it will be of the highest quality and worth actually buying.

How most people online make money. – Here is a few sad truths.

I. Most people make money online by teaching other people how to make money online.

The sad truth is that even the most honest people in the Internet who tells you specifically that they are NOT using that form of business model is in some way using that business model. It doesn’t mean that they are doing it intentionally, but it does show that there are some very successful internet business models and it is hard to make good money consistently without using some form or version of the models. I list 4 good guys who actually do this but do it cleanly. Their stuff is worth reading about so you learn this stuff for yourself.

(Note: I am absolutely not affiliated or work in any way with these guys. I get nothing for saying that these guys are worth checking out. I would actually probably prefer you didn’t know too much about this type of stuff. It is  a very deep rabbit hole and if you choose to go down it, you may never be able to get back out.)

  • 1. Smart Passive Income
  • 2. Viperchill
  • 3. Problogger
  • 4. Income Diary

II. Most people who run successful online businesses teach other people how to start, build, and run successful online businesses. However, they rarely show you how to get your first customer, or how to sell your first product. They are mainly advice, information, and consultant driven. All the advice or information they provide can be found somewhere else on the internet, but are you willing to trade your time to find all the information or pay a little money to save your time? These are the few sites and companies worth looking into.

  • Andrew Warner – Mixergy 
  • Sterling & Jay – Internet Business Mastery
  • Chris Ducker – Virtual Business Lifestyle
  • Matt & John – Lifestyle Business Design

III. There is a special group of people who popped up in the last few years who live the mobile, great life by teaching you how to create the type of life and income streams they have.

  • 1. Corbett Barr – Lifestyle Design – (If you want to download his book that shows how he created a 6 figure business in 18 months  from 2 blogs and working from Mexico click HERE to get his free E-Book.)
  • 2. Tim Ferriss – Four Hour Work Week
  • 3. Chris Guillebeau – Art of Non-Comformity
  • 4. Mike – Road Warrior

IV. Almost everyone on the internet who sells or runs an E-Commerce website is a middle man. They almost never create or build anything that they sell. They are not the true creators of value, but the distributors, the salesman, the transmitters. They probably don’t have an actual business office. They probably stock up their products (better known as Inventory) in some big closet in their house or apartment they live in.

What these really good internet marketing guys do is figure out what exactly you really want, and then teach you how to get it.

Key Point I: What People Want – What most people really want when they fill out a survey is 5 main things. – All 5 are to make themselves feel good about themselves.

1. Money – How do I make money online, automatically, easily, and quickly ?

2. Own Business– How do I start my own company that I can run and operate remotely so that I can be anywhere in the world and still have money flowing directly into my bank account?

3. Sex (This one is mainly for men) – What is the easiest, quickly, most sure fire way to meet a really hot girl I can have sex with?

4. Relationships –  I want to know the easiest most full proof way to attract that girl/guy that I have been interested in for the last 4 months. OR I want to attract the best girl/ boy that I can so that I can be in a relationship and get love – basically I want someone good looking, kind, and smart to love me. 

5. Health – I want to get healthy and lose my excess weight and fat the easiest simpliest way possible. 

Well, the internet marketers know that deep inside of you that you pretty much really want those things. If you look at the biggest internet companies that focus primarily on marketing that is what they advertise and sell. They are selling you either money, sex, or something related to one of those two things.

One of the best known Internet Marketing Gurus Eben Pagan (who made his money selling information products on Dating Advice for men) once stated that if you want to get people to come to your website and buy your product, they must already have an irrational need or desperate desire within themselves to pull out their credit card and put in the right numbers and then click that send button. (Note: If you want some of his Online Business Building Seminar DVDs or programs (Like Get Altitude) for free, email me. I bought it and it is quite useful. I can’t put it on this site because I will be sued for that)

Key Point II : Mailing List & Newsletter – The email is the primary way that most people make their money online. The primary objective is to build that email list up more and more. Do you ever notice that every site these days seem to have a pop up that asks you to enter your name and email information? Well they are trying to get you to put in your information. That way, maybe 2 weeks later, the person who runs the website sends a newsletter to you through their mailing list provider. They write a nice sales letter by using a good copyrighter. At the end of the newsletter is always a link, either to something they want you to eventually hopefully buy or someone’s else site, who they are probably affiliated with or in partnership with.

The two most commonly used mailing list providers are MailChimp and AWeber. MailChimp is free to use while AWeber costs some money.

Now, you might be wondering, will I eventually put a popup or opt in page and ask for your email address one of these days? I don’t think so. If I did, I will tell you. If I plan to sell you anything, I will make it very plain and clear my intentions.

Key Point III: Affiliate Marketing – This is another way many people make money is buy promoting, endorsing, and selling other people’s products who also have companies is in the same or similar niche. You would  be amazed at how large the percentage is that affiliate marketing plays on an internet marketer’s total income.

Key Point III.2: Combining the power of affiliate marketing + Information Products +SEO – they go to a site like Clickbank, find out which Information product has the highest gravity (I am not going to go into what is gravity on here), get the embbeded code, set up a 1 page sales site, and place a bunch of ads by embedding that code. If they are good enough at SEO and writing some decent content, they can get 1000s of people to click and go to their site. Assuming the internet average of .1-1% conversion rate which they can check on Google Analytics (which is free), they get a high commission as an affiliate to an E-product (usually a pdf, mp3, or mpeg). That can amount to a good $40-50 per day per site if they are good at writing sales letter.

Key Point IV: Google Keywords – The internet marketer in the beginning is probably using some form of Software to analyze the types of keywords that people are typing into search engines like Google, Bing, and Yahoo. They look at what are known as “keyword longtails” to figure out what exactly people are typing into the internet. They compare the number of times people type a certain word or phrase and see whether there is large competition in that niche. A really popular software people use these days is Market Samurai, which basically shows you how to hack the internet and google to find what other people are looking for.

Key Point V: SEO – SEO stands for search engine optimization. Search Enginee Optimization is just a fancy umbrella term to refer to any strategy a “guru” might use to rank their desired website to be higher and higher on any of the search engine’s ranking page. Google is almost primarily talked about when one talks about Search Engines in the US. SEO tactics is something I haven’t studied or know about. All I did for this website is download two plugins (WordPress SEO and All in One SEO Pack) and add some meta information. You can’t click on a few links these days without running into a “SEO/ Internet Marketing consultant these days”

Key Point V.2 Pay Per Click – Google has this program called Adsense which allows people to make money when someone else clicks on the ads they put on their website. People have been making money through Adsense for at least a decade now. I remember using Adsense and realized that the Ads did not agree with the purpose of the websites I have created before. Overall, the amount of money a person can make through PPC or anything similar has drastically been decreasing over the years as people become smarter and smarter over the internet.

Key Point VI: Social Media – Everyone is talking about Facebook these days and trying to figure out what is the most effective way to market their products on this platform. LinkedIn is also doing it. A lot of companies think that by spending money to buy ads on these well known platforms they will increase their revenue. However, FB and LinkedIn are failing spectacularly at it because people these days are just getting smarter and smarter. No one is clicking on those ads anymore. Instead use Pinterest and Tumblr.

Key Point VII: Traffic – Traffic is the life blood of all companies and websites. If you have no traffic, you are essentially dead. No one is coming to your website and reading your information. You can’t sell your products and all the money you put into marketing your product was wasted. There are pages like Alexa which tell you how well a website is ranked. Almost everyone who does any internet marketing has Google Analytics installed on it. They know how many people are going to their websites and how well they people coming to the site are actually buying their product, clicking on the links they want, and where the people are coming from.

Key Point VIII – Twitter – Twitter is a tool that many people these days are using to promote their products or programs, as well as their affiliates. Just don’t fall for it. Ever see a weird url? Well that is the marketer using a program to squeeze a long url into a shorter one and wanting you to click on it. Filled with a lot of spammers who want you to use the Cialdini Influence idea of Reciprocity who first follow you hoping then you will follow then. Then later they over whelm you with spam trying to get you to check out their website or their affiliate partner’s site.

Key Point IX: Information Products – If you want to know what is the easiest and simpliest way to make money, it is to start your own website. You spend about $60 first to get a host, and pay only $12 per year to register for a domain name. If you want to get creative, add a nice wordpress template on there for another $50 and your website looks completely professional. Then you just start writing and trying to create the best content and value as you can and learn about SEO to get the people to come to your website. Then you write a 60 page E-Book mostly filled with fluff, put a price tage on it that ends in $x9.99 and link it with your paypal account and you wait for the sales to come through. Of course it is never as easy as it sounds but in this case, you probably can get the entire process done in less than 3 hours if you really sat down with someone who already knows the trick of internet marketing. In less than 3 hours, you can theoretically be getting money pumped into your bank account by selling immaterial products. No overhead, no fees, no stress.

The scam really comes in when the people who do the internet marketing tries every single trick they know to get you to come to their website and buy their information product while cost absolutely no $ to create except some time. Hell, some people don’t even create or write their own material but pay writers and copyrighters to write everything, form the sales page to the information product, to even the testimonials. Just look at the practices of Dan Kennedy or Frank Kern. They make millions a year doing very little, learning how to leverage the system, and profitting wildly from it.

My point is, most of the pages you see selling some form of product that is said to help you grow another 2 inches in 4 months are written by internet marketers trying to trick you to buy a basic multivitamin. Don’t believe in them.

Key Point X: Blogging – There is probably over 100,000,000 blogs out there right now with people writing about all sorts of things, stuff that interest them. How many of those blogs are actually worth reading? I am not sure but I am positive that we can all tell the difference between a good blog with high quality writing and amazing content to blogs that are not worth reading. I think it is the personal dream of millions of people who desire to just write and blog for a living.

I mean , just imagine this type of scenario and reaslize how damn seductive it sounds. It would be like the perfect lifetstyle. And millions of people every day get sucked into the whole Internet Marketing matrix believing that they have found the secret key, the perfect magic bullet or hack that would allow them to be financially free”

“You wake up in the morning at 11 am on a tiny secluded island in the middle of the Caribbean, and do your routine of morning ablutions. You then go to the nearby coffee shop and buy a super expensive cup of coffee and italian sandwich. You come back home at 1 pm and sit down. You spend 1 hour in front of your Macbook Air typing out a 3000 word blog post, send another 20 minutes editing, and hit the Send button. You go to Google Analytics to check the traffic on your website and go to your Paypal Account, or Clickbank account, or Bank account to see how much you made recently. You see that your information product or that recent program launch you did had raked in $1500 last night while you were asleep doing absolutely no work. You go around and make a few money transfers, give a call to your accountant to make everything is in order, give another call to a guy you are doing business with remotely to get them to join you in your affiliate marketing program. You then finish by answering the hundred of emails that appeared in your inbox asking you for coaching which you have been charging $300 /hr for with only a phone call. So after basically 2 -3 hours of work , you are done for the day and made over $1000.”

You made more money than some people make in a week by doing almost no work. That is probably the ideal lifestyle that many people who go into blogging for profit or money is really hoping for. They do it for year and years hoping to built enough of a traffic or mailing list to be able to finally sell some product or launch some program, wether it is a seminar, coaching program, or another information product.

Key Point XI: Advertising –Ever see those banners either on the side or the top or bottom of articles you read online? They are ads which someone paid someone else to promote. When you click on that ad, the person who was doing the endorsing gets a small bit of money becasue they managed to send “traffic” which is you to the ad payer’s webpage. In this model, supposedly every one wins. That is in theory but in reality, only the person who is posting the ads win, since they are in a situation where there is no possible way to lose. The person who paid to post that ad can lose from getting no conversions to buy their product. The person who clicked on the ad loses when they realize that they have been tricked to go something which they didn’t intend for.

Key Point XII: Consulting or Coaching – It seems like everyone these days is a coach. People are calling themselves Life Coaches, Business Coaches, Success Coaches, Body Transformation Coaches, Dating Coaches, SEO Marketing Consultants, – if you see someone  who has the title consultant or coach by their name on a resume or business card, be very suspicious. It is not that hard these days to slap on a label or title.

I started my own company which is a life coaching company because of a very horrible personal life experience which I went through in the beginning of this year (2012) and I wanted to find a way to make sure that what happened to me will never ever have to happen to another guy. I focus on a very small niche group of people and I don’t intend for that company to ever grow too large.

Last Key Point: All of the scammers and internet marketing guys should realize that their business model is unsustainable. They may be making 6 figure for 2-3 years but eventually their traffic and the people who go to their website will dry up. Their content will get stale and they won’t last. If they are not completely transparent with their business or practices, they will eventually be found out, exposed, and will be forced to shut down their website/business or restructure it to look liek something else or go into another niche. At last but defnitely not least, this website/ forum is the best or worst kept secret in all of the internet space when it comes to hucksters who learn new techniques and ways to get you to open your wallet. : The Warrior Forum – Be careful out there and don’t be cheated.