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November 23, 2007

Internet Marketing Scams

So many Internet marketing scams and so little time and space to list them all here. With all of the Internet marketing scams that are a plague on the net it is almost impossible to weed through them all and determine which are legitimate, and which are complete scams. It’s very annoying actually. Here are the most common Internet marketing scams that I have been spammed with.

Order now or lose out forever

I love this one. You are told that if you don’t buy the piece of garbage that is being offered by a certain date you will lose out forever. They will say something like, if you don’t buy this by 12:00 midnight on that day you will not be able to get this product ever. How unlucky that would be. :) When you go back to the website the next day the date will have changed to that days date. You could go back 6 months later and find that date there. As long as these morons are making money, the timestamp on the offer will be for as long as it is making money. I hate this type of Internet marketing scam.

Then you have the Internet marketing scams which is very similar to the one above. This one will tell you that you must be one of the first 500 to purchase in order to get their invaluable product. What really annoys me about this is that they will make it sound like you are one of the lucky one’s to get in on this great opportunity. Yeah right! Hit me for a crap load of money and deliver nothing. How lucky can I get? ;) You will get a count down of how many are left to be sold. This Internet marketing scam generally never expires either. If it does, it almost always will reappear in a month or so.

This Internet marketing scam is an offshoot of the first two Internet marketing scams. Notice the trend? All of these scumbags seem to think alike. Here you will be told that if you don’t buy right away that the price of the newest piece of crap that they are selling will at least double in price if not more. The gurus love to use this one. How nice of them to give me the opportunity to get this at half price. Again, the price almost never goes up. If it does it’s to somehow legitimize the piece of garbage that they are trying to sell you.

Another one of those Internet marketing scams that makes the hair on the back of my neck stand up is the one that tells you that anyone can do this and that almost no work on your part is required. Just put it on autopilot and you’ll be rich in no time. Yep, that’s been my experience with these products. NOT!

I’m a millionaire and if you follow my proven system step by step, you’ll be one too. This is one of those Internet marketing scams that I can’t help but chuckle when I read it. Most of these guys don’t have two nickels to rub together yet they are going to make you rich just like them. The worst thing about this Internet marketing scam is you usually get a story of their humble beginning and how their system pulled them out of the gutter. This Internet marketing scam is too pathetic to even comment on.

As I said there are so many Internet marketing scams out there that I could write about this forever. I’ll stop here because I am too lazy to list them all. :)

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October 14, 2007

Hit Booster Another Sebastian Foss Scam

Hit Booster is a submission software that I’ve been getting spammed on a consistent basis from Sebastian Foss who has been peddling it for the past few months.

Foss claims that Hit Booster will bring you in tons of targeted traffic in a matter of just 15 minutes after everything has been setup.

Exactly how Hit Booster works is very unclear to me. There is no real information on the Hit Booster website or anywhere else that I can find. Hit Booster is supposed to send out the URL of a website to who knows where and within minutes you will magically be getting targeted traffic to your website.

Hit Booster in my opinion is just another too good to be true software that does absolutely nothing. The fact that I don’t know where my information is going is enough to keep me away from Hit Booster.

Sebastian Foss the creator of Hit Booster is another reason to stay away from this software. If you run a search engine search on his name followed by the word scam you will get quite a list of unhappy people who have bought products from him. Here’s a search I ran on Ripoff Report. Ripoff Report on Sebastian Foss you will find his name come up several times on their site as well.

From my personal experience with automated traffic generators, they simply don’t work and generally will get you in trouble for spam. I suspect that Hit Booster is no different.

From what I’ve read about Sebastian Foss, I would never consider buying Hit Booster or anything for that matter from him and suggest that you don’t either. Here’s the link to the Hit Booster website if you’d like to check it out.

September 4, 2007

Adwords Tycoons

I’m sure that some of you have seen the Adwords Tycoons program that has been circulating on the net for a while now. I get spammed just about daily with this thing.

I am very leery of products that have a time limit on them. You know, the ones that say buy now before the price goes up or buy now before I stop selling this forever.

I can tell you that as long as this thing makes money they will continue to sell it. The price almost never goes up on these things either. It’s just a ploy to convince the reader that if they don’t buy now they will lose out forever.

The sales letter for these types of products are always better than the actual product is.

With Adwords Tycoons they really do need to have a great sales pitch to justify the $1500 price tag that they put on the thing.

I can tell you from personal experience none of these programs are anywhere nearly as easy as they are made to sound and forget about being taken by the hand stuff too. Everything that you do in Internet Marketing does require some level of knowledge otherwise you will never understand what is being taught to begin with.

Stay away from Adwords Tycoons because the price tag is way too high. I’m sure that you can get good info on the adwords system at a much lower price.

I use adwords and I can tell you that it is a tough game to beat even if you know what you are doing. It is however, straightforward enough to know that there are no hidden secrets to using adwords as Adwords Tycoons claims there are. I’ll bet that you can readily get the same information for free online if you were to look for it.

Bottom line. Stay away from Adwords Tycoons. It has scam written all over it.

June 2, 2007

How Can You Tell if it’s a Scam?

There are definitely many scams out there especially on the Internet. Because everyone is hidden behind a computer monitor and the fact that ones identity can be easily hidden makes the Internet a perfect place to scam people. The disturbing thing about it is that many of the people who are involved in scams on the Internet are considered honest people in the real world and would never think of getting involved in this type of thing if their identity were known. Just goes to show you that many people will lie, cheat, and steal if they know that they can get away with it.

The definition that I found on the word scam is ‘to defraud; swindle or to deprive by deceit’. Because there are a lot of gray areas when it comes to scams I will give you my perception of what I think a scam is. It’s pretty easy to scam someone and come off like you delivered on your promise of what a product does.

I’ve seen and I’m sure that you have too, so many products out there especially digital, and member sites, that make outrageous claims that kind of deliver on what they say but doing it is nothing like they claim. I’m sure that you have seen and probably have tried some where the sales page implies that all you have to do is buy their product and do practically nothing and the money will roll in by the truckload only to find that it will require some real knowledge and serious work on your part. I’m not impartial to hard work but I do have a problem with someone telling me that I don’t have to do much only to find that its a complete lie. The marketer figures if they tell you that a lot of work is required you won’t buy their product. While some may not call something like this a scam because it gives you a workable strategy to get there. Deceiving people to believe that there will be little work to do when in fact, there will be, makes it a scam.

My perception of a scam is when you are made to believe that a product will do something that it does not do. A great example of this is the ‘Get Google Adwords Free’ e-book. The sales page leads you to believe that there is some kind of loophole in the Google adwords system that will allow you to advertise for free. The e-book tells you to sell ad space on your landing page to offset the advertising costs through adwords which is the same as getting your adwords advertising for free. The deception of the sales page and the reality of the strategy makes this a scam. While the sales page never says that there is a loophole in the adwords system, you are lead to believe that there is.

While there is no foolproof way to identify whether what is being advertised is a scam or not there are some things that you can look for that will help you determine whether it is a scam or not.

Be very leery of websites that display their earnings. This is done to give you a picture that you will attain the same results if you buy their product. You will almost always see some kind of earnings disclaimer somewhere on their website to protect them from being sued when their product doesn’t deliver on its claims, however, the implication of attaining the same results is there.

Watch out for marketers who do reviews by slamming one product and then proceed to try to sell you another one. This is the oldest ploy in the book and has worked very well for years, and still does. The problem with these types of reviews are that they are very biased and are written to sell you another product. In most cases, the marketer has never used any of the products being reviewed. This is not always the case but it is something to be suspicious of.

Another thing to look out for are the marketers who claim that they have been scammed over and over again until they finally found a product that works. These marketers are the worst because they feed on the fear of being scammed and they use this technique to let you know if you don’t buy their product that you probably will get scammed buying someone else’s product. This type of thing is almost always a scam.

Stay away from online job sites, survey, and data entry programs that require you to pay a fee because these are scams. No legitimate company will require you to pay a fee to do a service for them. It works the other way. Legitimate sites will always pay you to do the service. The rest are scams.

I know that almost every sales page on the Internet uses a lot of hype to sell their products. It’s just part of selling on the Internet. The ones that you want to be suspicious of are the ones that are over hyped and make outrageous claims. Always keep in the forefront of your mind that if it sounds too good to be true, it most certainly is.

As I said before, there are a lot of gray areas when it comes to Internet scams and most Internet marketers will do just enough to keep themselves out of trouble but many of them step over the line in order to make a sale and it is up to you to use common sense when considering to buy something online. Before you buy any product run a Google search on the product to see what others are saying about the product in question.

May 21, 2007

Get Google Ads Free? What a Complete Scam

Get Google Ads Free is the newest piece of garbage being sold through Clickbank. Get Google Ads Free is an e-book that is supposed to teach you how to use pay per click advertising for free. As a matter of fact these idiots tell you that you will be able to spend millions of dollars on pay per click advertising and it won’t cost you a dime.

I haven’t read Get Google Ads Free nor do I intend to. If anyone wants to tell me that how can I call Get Google Ads Free a scam if I haven’t even read it? My answer will be that I’m not a moron and I do have common sense. I don’t need to buy a scam product to know it’s a scam. Save yourself the time and effort and don’t bother to ask because I just gave you the answer.

What totally amazes me is that Get Google Ads Free is number one on Clickbank which means a lot of people are buying this piece of garbage. The people who bought it have no reason to complain because they deserve to be scammed for being so stupid. I have no sympathy for them.

The claims that are made on the sales page on the Get Google Ads Free website are criminal in my opinion. It is written to completely mislead the suckers that come to buy the thing. I call them suckers because there isn’t a better word to describe people who are stupid enough to buy into something as idiotic as Get Google Ads Free.

I’m not shooting completely from the hip here either, I did run a search to see how the author of Get Google Ads Free could possibly explain how to get millions of dollars worth of pay per click ads for free.

It seems that the way that Get Google Ads Free works is you get your millions of dollars worth of free ads is to sell ad space on the landing pages of your website and charge a higher price than what you are paying for your pay per click ads to offset your ppc costs which is the same as getting your pay per click advertising for free. I wonder how long the author of Get Google Ads Free took to come up with that one? I got the info here about how Get Google Ads Free works. Go to this site to read the review of Get Google Ads Free. It’s a very entertaining read. (especially the comments) :)

As I said earlier, the sales page of Get Google Ads Free in my opinion is criminal in the way that it misleads the reader. The person who wrote this piece of crap should be in jail in my opinion. Clickbank should do a better job of screening the products that are sold through their system. Since they haven’t done so to this point I guess they never will. As long as garbage products like Get Google Ads Free are making them loads of money that’s all that counts I guess.

Here’s the pitch page for Get Google Ads Free. http://getgoogleadsfree.com

May 13, 2007

Day Job Killer Takes a Nosedive

I was just over at clickbank and found that day job killer dropped from the number one spot on clickbank all the way down to number 13.

I guess most have now realized that DJK doesn’t live up to all of the hype after all. I predicted this back when this thing was the hottest selling digital product on the net.

Today you can find so many negative things written about DJK which is what is probably keeping people away from it. I said in this post that day job killer was nothing but a piece of garbage and people would come to realize this sometime in the near future.

The fact that day job killer has dropped all the way down to 13th implies that that day has come for djk.

If you have never heard of day job killer or what it’s about read the post linked above or you can go their pitch page here http://www.dayjobkiller.com. Don’t buy into it or buy it because it is nothing but a bunch of smoke and mirrors and none of Chis McNeeney’s claims are true.

The unfortunate thing about it is that I’m sure Chris McNeeney made millions on this thing before people started to wise up about the product. It’s unfortunate that so many spent their hard earned money on this thing. The very fact that the product dropped all the way down to 13th is pretty telling.

To me, the worst thing about the day job killer ebook is that the original $77 selling price went to $197 in a matter of weeks and is still selling at that price. How can a product that costs $77 dollars one day, be worth $197 the next day? As far as I’m concerned no ebook is worth that kind of money. Increasing the price of a garbage product won’t add value to it.

The only thing that puts a smile on my face is that Chris McNeeney left his download page wide open and I’m sure that a lot of people have downloaded day job killer for free. I won’t give you the link to the download page because it is unethical to do so. I’m sure if you do some searching you will be able to find it on your own. :wink:

April 2, 2007

The Scam of All Scams

I know that this is the “Internet Scams” category and I guess this is a review about the worst kind of scam. This is the type of scam that falls prey on those who fear being scammed online. Anyone who falls for this scam deserves to get scammed.

Let me start by saying that I only read part of this so called review of scams. I had to stop reading because of the ghoul of this reviewer thinking that people in general are this stupid. I can only tell you about the part that I read before I stopped reading this idiotic review.

Basically he starts out with the standard I’ve been scammed quite a few times until I learned my lesson. You’d think that these morons would come up with something a little more original. They are all the same I guess.

He then goes on to say that some girl (he doesn’t tell you how he knows her) was informed that she had won a lottery that she had never bought a ticket for. So, super investigator comes to the rescue by posing as a TV or radio reporter. That’s where I stopped reading. I had no reason to read any further. Now that really happens in real life doesn’t it?

Come on, what moron would believe this garbage. I don’t know about you but I don’t like my intelligence questioned with fictitious garbage.

Here’s a good one for you. He has the nerve to place a form on his website for anyone who wants to have a particular program investigated. He will do so for a nominal fee of $25. You can bet that he will never do anything at all except take your money and give you some made up review on the product.

At the bottom of his web page he has a list of three products that he found to be the best of the best. One of them is one of those ‘type at home’ jobs which is just a nice word for data processing scam. I have not seen one online data processing job that is legit. The other two are programs that been around for a long time. Nothing to really review there. Great investigative work buddy!

As I said before, I only read a small part of this BS review before it made me nauseous. I have provided the link here even though it kills me to give this moron a back link. Be warned that you may be offended by how this guy thinks that the average person is nothing but an idiot. I know I was. http://www.moneyscamsrevealed.com

March 27, 2007

Duvet Dollars Saga


First it was Day Job Killer and now it’s Duvet Dollars. A few weeks after Day Job Killer was launched, Duvet Dollars was launched. Some say that, Duvet Dollars is authored by the same person, Chris McNeeney. Don’t know if that is just speculation or if there is any truth to it or not. Personally, I really don’t care who wrote it.

I don’t know if anyone here has read the Duvet Dollars sales page or not. I have, and it screams ‘Come over here so I can pick your pocket’. I haven’t read the Duvet Dollars ebook nor do I intend to. From the few honest reviews that I’ve read about Duvet Dollars, the thing is a pile of garbage.

From the reviews that I have read pretty much everything that is written in the Duvet Dollars ebook is common affiliate knowledge that can be found on forums, blogs, and websites, for free.

If you are brand new to affiliate marketing the Duvet Dollars ebook is probably ok. It will save a newbie a lot of time trying to find the information bit by bit as long as it is formatted in an easy to read way and is workable. With that said, if this is a newbie guide then $77 is way overpriced for information that you can readily get for free. There are many guides our there geared for the affiliate newbie for a lot less money.

What irritates me about the Duvet Dollars ebook is that it is in no way pitched for what it is. Reading that sales page makes the reader believe that this is some deep secret that the author stumbled upon and implemented it and made their fortune with it. It goes on to say that you will be able to quit your job within a few weeks after implementing the strategies in the ebook. Kind of sounds like the Day Job Killer pitch doesn’t it. Probably the reason some think the two authors are the same. I don’t read too much into that because of all the copycat marketers out there.

I can’t believe how stupidly the Duvet Dollars sales letter was written. Just goes to show you that people don’t pay attention to what they read. If they did they wouldn’t have purchased Duvet Dollars in the first place. In one breath Victoria (the author of Duvet Dollars) says that you can quit your job in a few weeks and then in another breath says that Duvet Dollars is not a get rich quick scheme. If you can quit your job in a few weeks after reading Duvet Dollars, that’s get rich quick. Both can’t exist at the same time.

The fact that I have never heard of and I don’t think anyone else has heard of this Victoria person before Duvet Dollars makes me wonder if this person isn’t using an assumed name. She also doesn’t know crap about protecting her download page as it was listed on Google until she moved the Duvet Dollars web page a couple of times. A lot of people got a free copy of Duvet Dollars. I don’t think that I want to take advice from someone who doesn’t know how to do something as simple as protecting the very thing that is supposed to support them. A robots.txt would have kept that from happening. Like it or not, knowing basic things like this is part of being an Internet Marketer.

I’ve been watching the Duvet Dollars saga unfold for the past couple of weeks. I will say that it has been entertaining to watch. She has discredited herself, along with others discrediting her, to the point that she will never be able to sell anything using that name again.

I’d like to know, what the hell a Duvet Dollar is anyway? That was a rhetorical question. No reply is required. I can’t believe the crap people will come up with just to make a couple of bucks. The name Duvet Dollars sucks in my opinion and is enough to keep me from getting it on the name alone. I guess she thought it was cute.

I don’t know when people are going to learn that if you are not willing to do the work, you can’t make money online. Do yourself a favor and quit now. You’ll save yourself a lot of heartache and money. Internet Marketing is for those who truly want to change their lives and have the drive to do whatever it takes to make that happen including the work.

Here’s the link to the Duvet Dollars sales page - http://duvetdollars.com/

Here are a couple of websites that don’t think that Duvet Dollars is all it’s cracked up to be.
http://www.netfrontiermarketing.com - http://www.aojon.com/first-ebook-idiot-exposed/


March 2, 2007

Is Paidsurveyprogram.com a Scam or Legit?

After writing about the benefits of a blog yesterday along with the fact that I continue to drive traffic to this blog from a simple meaningless comment that one of my readers submitted about paidsurveyprogram.com, I figure I might as well give those searchers what they are looking for.

Here it is. Are you ready? DON’T PAY ANYONE TO DO SURVEYS! PaidSurveyProgram is no exception. No legitimate survey provider will ever ask you to pay them to do a survey. It just doesn’t work that way.

Here’s how a legitimate survey program works. You signup for free and you only take a survey when invited to. When a new survey goes live you are notified by email and given a link to follow to a questionnaire. The questionnaire is not the survey. It is a qualifying form that you fill out to see how much knowledge you have about the type of product that is being surveyed. If you don’t have enough knowledge in the area that the product target’s you will be skipped over and not invited to take the survey. You must be invited to take the survey in order to get paid.

Think about it. Why would you want to pay someone to perform a service for them? Shouldn’t it be the other way around? Companies do surveys on their products to get input from knowledgeable people to get a better idea of what the average person wants from a product or what attracts them to the type of product that is being surveyed to get a better idea of how to market it.

Companies pay millions of dollars on high quality surveys. They are not going to allow just anyone to take them. They want people that can give them input that will help them advertise their product. High quality surveys are gold to these companies.

Here’s how the paid survey programs work. After reading a long hyped sales pitch you are asked to pay ‘X’ ‘?’ amount of dollars to join. You are then provided a list of companies that you can do surveys for. They will always imply that it is an automatic process and that you are guaranteed that you will be taking surveys by the truckload. They make it sound so easy by saying things like, if you do just 10 surveys a day and get $25 for each, you will make $250 a day. Multiply that by thirty days and you will be making an easy $7500 a month.

I can tell you that there is no way that you can take 10 surveys a day with a legitimate survey provider because you won’t have that many opportunities a day to even qualify, let alone be invited to take that many. Most, if not all, of the surveys that you will take with the companies that are given are bogus. Some of them won’t even exist for that matter.
The only agenda that the paid survey providers have is to take your money and run. Stay away from this type of survey program because each and every one of them, are scams. PaidSurveyProgram is no exception.

One last note; If you think that taking online surveys is an easy way to make money, think again. You don’t get paid all that well to take them and it will require you to be knowledgeable about a lot of products or you will have to do a lot of research in advance to even make it somewhat profitable and you will also have to signup with many survey programs in order to get enough opportunities in the first place. You have to ask yourself, is it worth it? If you do want to try doing surveys, only signup with the one’s that don’t require you to pay money. The rest are nothing but scams including PaidSurveyProgram.

February 19, 2007

The Answer to 37 Ways to Get Scammed


Christer Edwards, pointed out yesterday in response to the I’ve Been Scammed 37 Times post that I wrote that talked about what the appeal was to this ppc ad that seems to pop up no matter what search term you use. In that post I said that there was nothing obvious about that ad that would make it so popular.

What Christer basically said in his comment was that the advertiser was probably targeting people who had felt the same way about the things that they had bought. Makes perfect sense but it still surprises me that this technique of selling still works. That scam has been around forever.

I decided to check this out by running some Google searches that didn’t include the word scam or anything related to the word scam to see what would come up. You’d be amazed at how much you can learn by doing a little research, something that a lot of marketers don’t do enough of (myself included) in my opinion.

Before I go any further, let me explain a few things about Google’s ppc program that some here may not be aware of. While Google adwords is probably the most expensive Pay Per Click program on the net and at the same time is probably the fairest. While Adwords is the most expensive doesn’t necessarily mean that will be for all advertisers.

I know that some of you may be a little confused by what I just said so let me explain. Google ranks all Pay Per Click ads by performance. The better an ad does the cheaper it will cost you per click for the keyword that you have bid on. Here’s the kicker, if your ad is outperforming all the other ads for that keyword, you will be placed higher than the other ads at a lower price for the same keyword than the others. Performance and quality is everything to Google.

If you think that the sponsored ads that sit above the organic ads are there because the advertiser paid extra to have their ad placed there, you are wrong. Those ads are there because they outperformed everyone else for the keyword that was used to perform the search. I can tell you that those top advertisers are paying less than anyone else is and are probably paying less than if they were to advertise with any other ppc program.

Creating ads that are highly relevant to what you are selling and has a highly relevant well optimized landing page is what will help you get more click throughs and a better ppc ranking with Google. A well optimized ad and landing page will always outperform those that are not. Quality Score is what Google calls the performance ranking of ppc ads.

Now that the mini tutorial is over I will continue with what I found. I wanted to give you an overview so that you would know why I searched where I did and what you should do if you ever want to do any research on PPC advertising.

What I ran was three searches, all on information products. I ran all of the searches by its product name. I used only the sponsored ads that sit above the organic search results. As I said before they are the best performing ppc ads. If you want to know what others are doing, you want to research the best.

When doing research on paid ads don’t click on them. How would you like it if someone with no intentions of buying did that to you? To access the pitch page that the ad leads to, simply right mouse click on the ad link and choose ‘properties’. You will get a very long string of the URL most of which is Google’s code that tells Google who to charge for the clickthrough. Toward the end of the long string is the direct URL of the pitch page. Highlight the direct URL and copy and paste it into your address bar. Don’t copy and paste the entire string because the advertiser will be charged as if you had clicked on the ad.

Boy it took a long time to get to the point of this post. :-) Hope you have stayed with me.? I found that the scam angle is well and alive. The three searches that I ran all used the, don’t get scammed angle to promote the products that they were selling. Keep in mind that these were the top performing ads on Google.

To me these ads are scams in themselves using the premise, if I scare people enough and get them to believe if I don’t buy here, I will get scammed if I buy somewhere else. These marketers are what gives IM a bad name. It is ashame because there are many legit marketers out there who have been labeled for something that they don’t deserve.

The three products that I checked out are from reputable business owners. There is nothing wrong with the products; it’s the tactics that the affiliates are using to promote them that is the problem here. There are far better ways to get a point across about a product than making up a bunch of BS to make a sale.

The Internet community has a very long memory and crap like this doesn’t go unnoticed and eventually it will come back to haunt the scammer in the form of posts in forums and other places warning others about what is going on.

If your name means something to you then I’d advise that you don’t use this kind of strategy to promote whatever product it is that you sell because your name could be branded forever. If that were to happen, you won’t be able to sell anything to save your own life. What else could happen is that someone could complain about your advertising to the search engine where you advertise. While the search engines robot may not be able to catch this type of thing you can bet that human eyes will spot it immediately. I will bet that the human element comes into play when someone complains. You could get banned from the search engine for life.

If people did more research, they would learn how to avoid being ripped off. The only reviews that are truly unbiased are the ones that don’t provide an affiliate link to the products site that they are reviewing. Those are the sites that will give you an impartial review. I know that truly unbiased review sites are far and between but they do exist. You just need to find them.