What are the Most Scammy Practices in IM?

I guess there are more than a few but here are a couple that usually grind my gears:

- Sellers in the make money online / internet marketing space who outright claim that they have a software or loophole that literally does all the work to make you rich beyond your wildest dreams; the ethical implication I see here is the blatant lie that you don't need to actually work to build a sustainable income or business.

- People selling "cures" for diseases which certainly do NOT have any known cures to the wider medical and scientific community. 'Cause hey, I'd like if there were really a herbal blend that could cure cancer but I suspect the secret recipe is hidden with the Tooth Fairy's stash of old chompers.

Daniel

Have to be long form VSP they take forever and they waffle on for 30 mins before you get the cost of the wiz bang crappy thang they are flogging

then once you get to the buy now button you get so many up sells you wonder why you bothered

Jason

Hey Mark,

The scammiest (<-- is that a word?) practice that I've seen, is the practice of promoting the most basic and rehashed advice on an internet marketing forum, claiming that it has made money for the promoter, with a link to a squeeze page conspicuously in the signature box.

While the promoter returns a year later to said internet marketing forum to beg for help, claiming that they've done everything they can think of, but have failed to ever make any money and they're not sure if all this internet marketing stuff is real.

There are a whole bunch of scammy products I receive daily through my safelist subscriptions that ALWAYS make me roll my eyes...

If you've seen these headlines then you know what I'm talking about

For example this is one I got this morning:

3 HOUR SALE- 1800 NEW SIGN UPS + TRAFFIC FOR LIFE- $17.99

...These types of ads/websites are designed to suck in and deceive the newbie.


Gosh, they must make some money doing this otherwise they wouldn't be spending +- $10 per solo ad each time.

Usually I never trust any Sales Page that has those BIG red Headlines and a lot of hype, whenever I see something that starts with .... ''From the Desk of Mark Singletary'' I immediately cringe and hit the back button Lol

Big, long flashy sales pages make me click off. Videos with not much written text make me click off as I dislike watching such things. Not saying all videos are scammy but it just seems like people are using more bells and whistles.

I'm attracted by honesty in what's claimed and no B.S. tactics.

I am on the email marketing list of a lot of IM "gurus" out there just to see what they're doing, what they're promoting and how they're writing emails.

What really irks me is reading emails that show launches that say something like $117,287 in just 21 days. Which I have no doubt that these guys are capable of. Then they sell a product that supposedly is the "system" for how they accomplished those figures. But what they leave out, and what the average IMer (especially the newbs that these products often target) doesn't have is the network of affiliates and connections ready to immediately put their offer in front of hundreds of thousands of people. So, to advertise that you get the blueprint to a formula for success may technically be right, it's not advertised that devloping the necessary network is what makes it all possible and that cannot be done in 21 days. It takes years.

I think the one-click upsell is pretty evil.

I do it and I've made a ton of money from it.

But in my heart I am not happy about it.

But once you hit some oil, its hard to walk away.

I think fake scarcity is a big one. You go today to a site and the special price absolutely ends at midnight. Go tomorrow or next week and you get the same offer. Where I come from that's not called marketing, that's called lying.

Mark

I hate the fake screenshots from clickbank......oh that makes me mad!

People who claim they can teach you how to make money but do not have 2 nickels to rub together between the the cheeks of their lying backside, they base all knowledge / information on what they think will work, over and above a proven and sustained actual method that they have done.

Ah, fabulous question and I'd like to add my 2 cents worth to the list, which I totally agree with by the way.

* Literally spamming customers with sales email after sales email and thinking that customers have bottomless money pits to purchase the next best thing they tout. They've taken the saying: the money is in the list to the inth degree and forget the rest of the sentence: treat your list with respect and ensure you add value to support them to implement the product/service they paid you for. Really gets on my nerves and I end up unsubscribing. I simply don't want to be 'sold to' all the damn time.

* Saying you can access their system for $1 and when you do, you find they have locked the videos and insist you have to contact their 'coach' to unlock the videos. Then you find that after watching the 6 videos, you still haven't been given the genuine financials i.e you can make "up to" 90% commissions if only you will give them $2K to use their system. A couple of twists to this one is insisting you sign a non-disclosure agreement only to realise the information they've given in their videos is not unique. Again another twist to this is giving a money back guarantee 10x times what you paid if you do not make money within 30 days; and then when you access the system, you're forced to watch 6 step videos which basically is selling to you their high end products and then claiming they've given you a bonus of the affiliate link to promote their sales funnel system!!!! Still working out exactly what product in their sales funnel you get your money back guarantee on!!!!

* Another pet hate is purchase the system by Paypal only for the vendor to state in the members' area if you use the Paypal system to seek a refund, the vendor will refuse to uphold the money back guarantee and provide the refund. I don't know about anybody else, but surely this must be against Paypal's terms of reference and exactly what has the vendor to hide with Paypal that they make this insistence. I'm not a serial refunder but I sure as hell will seek a refund on shoddy products and I'm buggered if I will not use the Paypal system to ensure I have the full buyer protection that Paypal offers. One vendor even wanted people to agree prior to purchase that if they sought a refund from Paypal then the vendor will sic their legal team onto the customer!!! Sure doesn't do vendors any good for their reputation and their business brand instituting such practices is all I can say.

* Sending you sales emails to your Paypal email address rather than the email address your requested to receive the product or communications; then adding salt to the wounds, passing your email address along to their 'mates' so they can also spam you.

Anyway this is my 2 cents worth for what it is worth. I prefer people to be upfront and honest, state that this strategy may or may not suit your needs and please undertake your due diligence first so you can make an informed decision. Let's bring email marketing back to providing genuine and real information to customers rather than seeking to continually sell to them. Maybe I'm wrong, however, I for one would prefer to receive 5 informative emails to 1 sales email. Maybe then I might remain as a subscriber, and I don't believe I'm alone in this, even if what I think is not like the majority.

Thanks again for asking.

The most scammy thing in IM is people who are selling training on things they haven't tried themselves. If you're going to give advice, don't say "I've never used this but..."; please, for the love of God, give advice on things you've used and know that work!

One of the self proclaimed white hat SEOs 301 redirecting ranked pages on Google SERPs directly to Amazon via affiliate links. He had his blog readers hoodwinked into thinking he was a saint. All they had to do was a site:domain.com search on Google for his sites to find the 301s.