Before You Even Think About Venturing Online

You are reading this now because you are likely interested in starting your own business online or are still learning the ropes of internet marketing. You possibly may have bought a couple of courses/secrets/loopholes promising you six figure earnings within a span of 30 days.

My purpose today is to help you understand certain realities of this industry and more importantly, help you save your hard earned money. There are tools and courses that are real ASSETS and worth buying. Sadly, there are products that are outright scams. Here is a real case from Andrew Hansen who had first had experience of meeting unethical internet marketers: IM has a Cancer.

Now a big question comes, how do you know if a particular internet marketing product or course is legitimate or not? Here is a 5 level litmus test that I usually do to verify validity:

Is the system vague and promises QUICK results? When a particular product is not very clear on what it does and what the method exactly is, 90% of the time it’s bogus. Usually sales letters of these type of products spend time informing you of what it’s not. When you see a mention of, no website required, no article writing, no work (absolute crap). That should already ring a bell. If it’s too good to be true, it usually is.

The reality is, internet marketing and setting up an online business, regardless of what model it is, REQUIRES WORK. If you are not willing to learn and work on it, if you just keep looking for the next big thing. You are setting yourself for failure. You will simply waste your money and will not get anywhere.

Does the sales copy mention exploiting a particular loophole? First and foremost you don’t want your business model to depend on an exploit because once this is addressed, you are immediately out of business. More importantly, most products that sell exploits are simply blatant lies. One product I bought from ClickBank advertised a loophole in Google where I can generate traffic immediately WITHOUT COST. After buying it, the methods involved article marketing, directory submissions, social media linking, given the methods are legitimate but where’s the loophole in that? The sales copy was just a LIE.

Does the sales process have too many upsells? Have you ever bought a product then after thinking you are done, you get another offer basically saying “the product isn’t really complete without this, so you have to buy this!” Okay, you decline and just skip it but then you get another upsell “there’s a more elite version of the product you just bought, upgrade now because there’s only 5 3 copies left!” If that’s not enough, you skip it and you get another upsell. After you are through five of these, you begin to wonder if the front-end product is even actually worth it. When the ethics of a particular author are in question, he doesn’t deserve your dollars.

Does the author of the product offer support? If you can’t find any means to contact the authors of a particular product or even if there’s one one and you don’t get a reply, this should already ring an alert. Legitimate internet marketers who run real businesses attend to their customers, even if these are just potential customers. They answer questions and make sure people understand what their product does or how it will help so that their customers will be happy with their purchase.

But wait here’s more! Finally, even if you don’t buy a product because it looks suspicious in the first place, have you tried closing the browser and you get a message box saying “wait, if you click OK we will give you a discount!” Then proceed to take ten dollars off the actual price. You try closing the browser again, yet there’s another offer to slash the price off for another few dollars. This is a mere indication that the product is not being sold by it’s real value which is crap. DO NOT BUY.

Given that a few of the things I mentioned above are marketing techniques to increase sales, there’s a right way and definitely a wrong way to do it. I hope I’m not too late yet. I’m informing you of this reality so that you can make a wise decision in your future and save you from making a stupid purchase that you’ll later regret. I’ve been there before, I’ve made my share of mistakes. You don’t have to learn from your own mistakes, you can learn from mine and save yourself the hassle.

If you know someone close to you who’s diving into internet marketing, I hope you share this to your friend, it will probably save him a lot of heartaches.