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It makes me so sad.

By Arthur Webster of Ask Old Coot

It makes me so sad to see the absolute balderdash that I see being swallowed by so many people on line who want to earn a second income.

The latest greatest is apparently some sort of predator programme which is so brilliant that you can make $,000s every month with just eighteen clicks of your mouse.

There was a time I too was stupid enough to believe all the hype that appeared in the ten feet long sales letters that promised the earth in return for $67 and not a lot of effort. The repetitive verbiage and superlatives that litter the sales letters simply mesmerises the unwary into believing what they read.

It is an outside chance that this new programme will let you do what it says, make $,000s with eighteen clicks of your mouse but, since the programme is selling affiliate products that thousands of other people are selling you can imagine why I am dubious.

Looking at the affiliate marketing programmes I have seen, they all have several things in common:-
1 - they are cheap ($'000s a month for $67 for example)
2 - they are aimed at the new marketer who knows little about driving traffic and has no list of subscribers
3 - they seldom explain the methods to get your affiliate site visited by anybody
4 - they never offer a genuine free trial
5 - the programmes are so good they have to be sold with a stack of bonuses worth a kings ransome (What's wrong with that picture?)
6 - worst of all, they all start out telling you how to earn a fortune doing nothing and, at the very best, leave out a vital instruction in the training or, at the very worst, introduce much more expensive stuff that you are recommended to buy so you can multiply your income before you actually have any.

I looked at affiliate marketing as a way to be able to eat every day but I must have chosen the wrong people to follow because nobody (except Kevin Riley) has actually followed up their offer with help rather than more products to buy.

Eighteen clicks of the mouse sounds like something that my eyesight will last long enough for but $67 represents three times what I currently have left to buy food with each month.

It makes me so sad that I still am capable of thinking 'this one might work' - will I never learn?

Contributor's Note

If you belong to the one programme that produces results, let everybody know.

I had someone call me a few years ago and ask if they could sell product off my website for a share of the gross profit. I agreed and they proceeded to start a website with a shopping cart. A few of their close friends and relatives bought a handful of product over a period of about 6 months and then they called me and said they were shutting down their web sit. The monthly costs were too high. He had shared with me that the professionally created web site had cost over $3,000 and he just shut it down after 6 months

People think that their web site will attract traffic immediately. Truth is, it takes years to build traffic to your site in most cases. Starting a new site is like opening a new business on a deserted country road. You put out your open for business sign and the only thing missing is the customers.

That just about sums it up and yet how many times do you see adverts that 'guarantee' a flood of web site visitors?

There are 'click' centres in India where people are paid to 'visit' web sites - it is better to have no visitors at all than to pay for these 'virtual' visitors.

You are so right on this Arthur. I consider 99.225% of these sites to be predatory in nature -- taking advantage of the newbies out there. There are some that at least SEEM to be genuine. These are the ones that give away a lot of free value in the form of common sense advice first. They appear to be mentoring sites. One of these sites turned me on to Qondio (and other article sites). Another site told me to keep things simple and choose 1 or 2 things at first and concentrate on doing it well and stay in it for the long haul (article and blog writing). But these sites eventually bombard your email multiple times a day with their mentoring programs.

Even the so-called "rating" sites are self-serving. It takes a person quite a while to learn discernment, and even then one can still get caught if you let your guard down just a tiny bit...

I don't know why we should have to accept this, but I don't know what the answer is either.

The learning experience is massively prolonged because all newbies are taught how to spam massively by using emails that they do not even have the knowledge or sense to edit. It is almost criminal that newbies are given marketing emails that say "you can earn $1,000 a day just like me" when the poor saps have not even earned their first cent.

The major problem is that if you really want to learn about internet marketing it is virtually impossible to find someone you can trust until you have no money left to pay for proper mentoring.

Thank you for sharing these truths about internet gurus, Arthur.
Many of us have had your experiences with these wild promises. Maybe, as James said, it's a learning experience.
Best wishes.
Frederick

Most learning experiences teach something useful - all internet marketing experiences teach you is that 99% of people out there are selling stuff that is useless. The 1% of good guys are like needles in haystacks.

Years ago I read a sales pitch that said the guy made a Million dollars a year on the internet. After researching this guy for weeks I found out that he did make a Million dollars a year on the internet BUT it cost him 500k a year to drive traffic to his website.

In my opinion to be successful in any business on the internet or not you have to have Passion for what you are doing and you have to have Traffic.

There are many reasons that the idea of doing something you are passionate about AS A BUSINESS is the wrong way to go for some people.

I am passionate about aiding people who suffer from some of the physical problems that I have. To put these up as a web site would aid nobody since most of the people I help don't want others to know about their problems.

In the same way, there are many niches that can be very profitable but they are not at the 'glamour' end of the market. Chimney and Flue cleaning are high demand services yet there are few web sites catering for those who need them. More than doing what you are passionate about, I think it is important to feed a hungry market.

The major problem for most internet marketers is still finding out where that hungry market hangs out so that they can direct them to their web sites as traffic.

The enormous increase in web sites is diluting the amount of traffic for each and the increasingly sophisticated search engine algorhythms demand ever more dedication to producing unique and valuable content.

Many sites that, at one time, could sell the information that they provide have now been suffering from the insanity of giving away valuable content. If you have multiple talents you can possibly give away some of what you know but if you are a speciality cake icer, there are only so many trade secrets that you can create a product from.

I like the SBI video because it gives most of the facts while the training that goes with the system does not con you into thinking there is not a lot of work to do.

Arthur, You are so right! Only this morning, I was thinking of a blog post along these lines on my business blog.
There are so many programs promising so much. Where does a newbie start? How do they know what to look for?

At the beginning I was taken in by some of these so-called "opportunities" but these days, I have a very healthy dose of scepticism to help me.

I think the best by-product of 'The Secret' was the ground swell of scepticism generated as forums and message boards became flooded with marketers preaching about 'manifestation'.

It was so laughable to see people saying 'you only need to ask the universe for what you want because it wants you to have it' followed up by the offer of their $67 ebook which taught you the correct way to ask!

You couldn't make it up, could you?

I am pretty sure those of us whom have been involved in any affiliate marketing online have been bitten at least once , by one program or another that looked 'promising'. Until the time we spent with it and once we got the toffee of the apple, found it was again, another program that was rotten through to the core.
I feel their are a few ways to make money online, article writing, blogs, eBay, domain flipping (buy a cheap website, sell it later for a profit), and various other means, yet these folks fail to tell anyone that one of the long term strategies is it's a numbers game. If you have one blog, that makes 5 bucks a month, it makes sense that having 200 blogs adds up to a lot of dosh.
Some people have and use this strategy, yet I don't have a clue how they maintain all that info (and their sanity!)
Me, I am still learning, bit by bit, and making a few dollars, which is very slowly and incrementally growing. Will be a long time until I retire.

With regard to this particular intel, I think it should be on many blogs about affiliate marketing, help some of those new and green folk out there be aware about the wolves and use that $67 bucks on something more important.

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