Keep watching for our updates of all the latest Internet Marketing Scams. We’ll take a look at all the so called ‘get rich quick’ schemes and expose the scams to save you money.
Please don’t be fooled by all you see on the Internet. There is no such thing as easy money in any type of business and Internet Marketing is no exception. Making money online takes time and work, and above all else, consistency.
Most people fail due to 3 things:
1. They fail to even get started. How many times have you bought the latest DVD’s, ebooks and systems, then did nothing with them? We’ve all been there and done that so you’re not alone I can assure you.
2. Lack of consistency. You find a product or service that works yet fail to put in the ongoing effort required to make some real money. It’s a very easy trap to fall into. You begin with good intentions yet get bored quickly with the required work and soon your attention is diverted away from your business to more fun things like Facebook or watching Youtube Videos.
3. You have invested both time and money into a business which will not work no matter what. A scam!
This section will not help you with motivation or consistency issues, but it hopefully will save you money and heartache and help you avoid the scams.
We also welcome your thoughts, so please write in if you’ve been scammed and we’ll do a write up about it here for you so others can avoid being ripped off.
But first of all, we’ll take a look at how the scam happens start to finish, then we’ll get to the fun bit where we name and shame the scammers.
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The Amazing forty seven Dollar, One Click Software Scam
Over the past few months, (since January 2011 to be exact) there appears to be an outbreak of ‘one click’ software for sale by the so called Internet Marketing Guru’s. This is the title they seem to have bestowed upon themselves.
So firstly, what exactly is a ‘Guru’? …
Wikipedia definition: A guru is one who is regarded as having great knowledge, wisdom and authority in a certain area, and who uses it to guide others (teacher).
So, what miracle will this latest breakthrough software produce?
No matter which ‘guru’ is selling it, in every case it promises to make you many thousands of Dollars literally overnight for doing nothing more than installing it on your server and clicking just one button with your mouse.
Now don’t get me wrong, there is some great, time saving software out there especially designed for us Internet Marketers. But that’s all it is… time saving. It will not produce instant riches, nor does it promise to.
I’ve been marketing online now for 11 years, and I have never yet come across any software at any price which can take you from complete beginner to making thousands overnight. No way! It does not exist.. period.
So how come both you and I are getting a never ending stream of emails about the latest, brand new, must have wonder product which will transform our lives for just forty seven Dollars?
Let me ask you this: If you had some amazing software which produced amazing results, would you sell it for a measly forty seven Dollars? I bet I know the answer to that. I know I wouldn’t.
How does this scam work?
It all begins with a tempting email from an affiliate of the scam. An affiliate is just someone who get’s a percentage of each sale made. Usually the percentage per sale works out at 50 to 90 percent so it’s in their best interests for you to buy using their affiliate link in the email.
The email looks very professional and usually always addresses you by your first name. The affiliate does not personally write this email. They simply copy and paste it directly from the scammer’s website, add it into their email programme (which puts in your first name automatically), then the email programme sends them all out to everyone on the affiliates email list.
So you decide to check it out and arrive on the scammer’s website. Within seconds, a video begins to play where you get to meet the scammer (or more usually, an actor) who proceeds to guide you through a pre-set speech. This almost always begins and ends the same way. It starts with them telling you how much in debt they were, how their house was almost repossessed, how they hated their job, and on and on.. I’m sure you get the idea.
Then it moves on (usually after 15 or more minutes of listening to their hard luck story) to how they discovered a way out of their financial hardship, walked out of the job they hated, paid off all their debts and now live like kings travelling the world whenever they want. They usually throw in a few pictures of their huge brand new house, sports-car and bank account. You know the stuff.
And now they move in for the kill. They have an amazing new piece of software that’s never before been released to the world, and now you too can get your hands on it and become rich beyond your wildest dreams…. overnight and just by simply one click of your mouse! They will always stress that the method their software uses has never been seen or heard of before thus filling you with extra confidence that this product must be hot!
The forty seven Dollar price tag is usually not on this offer at first. It’s usually seventy seven Dollars at this point, until you try and close the page. If you click the X to close the page up pops a little box on your screen saying… ‘wait, stay on this page for a special one time offer’… or similar words.
So you click ‘cancel’ to stay on the page, and suddenly the price has dropped from seventy seven Dollars down to forty seven Dollars.
Well, how can you possibly lose at this price? So you decide to go ahead and buy it. It has the statutory 60 day money back guarantee, so you can’t lose. If you don’t like the product, you’ll just return it anyway.
A quick note about the money back guarantee. Almost every product offered to you by an affiliate these days is listed on, and sold through Clickbank. The 60 day money back guarantee is a Clickbank provided guarantee. You are 100 percent safe using Clickbank whether you pay using your credit/debit card or through Paypal. Clickbank handle 26,000 product sales every day, that’s one sale every 3 seconds and have maintained their credibility due to excellent customer service and super fast refunds.
Right, you hit the ‘buy now’ button and off to Clickbank you go to pay for it. Payment made and back you go (usually automatically) to the scammer’s website where almost by magic you now get offered an up-grade to the product you’ve just purchased.
This is known in the business as an ‘upsell’.
I personally hate the way they describe the ‘upsell’. It almost always says ’if you want to make any money at all with the software you just bought, you will need to but this up-graded version’. Yet none of this was mentioned before you made your original purchase… spooky or what?
The upsell is usually priced quite highly when compared to the original product. Buy now for only one hundred and ninety seven Dollars, or there abouts. It’s at this point where thoughts of possible failure run through your head. ‘If I don’t buy this, they’ve just said I won’t make any money’. But you decide you can’t afford it, so you reluctantly click on the ‘no thanks’ button at the bottom of the offer knowing you may have blown your chance to become a millionaire by tomorrow morning.
As soon as you hit the ‘no thanks’ button, the price once again drops from one hundred and ninety seven Dollars to as low as ninety seven Dollars. This is known as a ‘downsell’. Now what do you do? You’ve just saved yourself one hundred Dollars, so you maybe decide to buy it to ensure your success.
Off to Clickbank and you make your purchase. All done and now you’re back on the website confronted by yet another ‘must have’ offer. ‘If you don’t buy this super duper add on, you will fail and remain broke’! Whaaaat!
You’ve just shelled out almost one hundred and fifty Dollars and there’s still more you need to buy. Now what do you do. You can’t really afford it but you’ve just been told it will not make you rich if you don’t buy it. But you remeber the trick that worked before and saved you loads of money off the price and you say no to it.
Now sometimes this works and sometimes it doesn’t. It all depends on how many upsells and downsells the scammer has put in place.
Right, you’ve now decided that enough is enough and you’ve downloaded your software to check it out. There’s usually a video guide which accompanies the software which will guide you through setting it up and starting it making money for you. Strangely though, the video will never ever show the software actually making any money, only the initial set up stages.
Now just when you think that’s all you need to buy, you are wrong. Depending on what exactly the software is and does, you will usually have to buy yourself a domain name and sign up with a hosting company. The scammer will always provide you with a handy link to click to make these 2 things easy for you to do. What they don’t tell you is they are an affiliate for the hosting company and they will make a good commission from them for you signing up. The hosting is usually over priced anyway and you would be much better off heading over to a cheaper host like Hostgator and signing up yourself.
Lets recap at this point: you’ve bought the software, you’ve bought the upsells (or if you were crafty, the downsells), you’ve bought your domain name, and got your hosting in place. Your initial forty seven Dollar purchase has turned into maybe two or three hundred dollars and you still haven’t got the software working yet.
Again depending on what exactly the software does, you may need a website in order to sell something, or you may just need to sign up at Clickbank as an affiliate yourself so you can sell the same type of product that you’ve just bought to your own customers.
A website these days can be built in around 30 minutes using the Fantastico feature in your host control panel, so it’s not a real hardship if you do need a website. So much for making money by tomorrow!
This is where it all turns ugly. You’ve followed every instruction only to discover the never seen before software which is going to make you stacks of cash by tomorrow is nothing more than one of the following: (note; these all currently exist and are being actively sold by an army of affiliates. We’ll look more closely at each one later)…
1. An article submitter. Simply a way to submit articles you write to article directories. Something you could do yourself without any software.
2. Submitting answers to Yahoo questions. This software literally spams Yahoo Answers with generic answers to open questions and includes a link to your product within the answer. It works once then Yahoo ban you. I know that for a fact because they banned me for doing this, and I’d only answered 6 questions!
3. Facebook fan page creating software. Again something you could do yourself without the need for any software. That’s all this software does.. create a fan page on Facebook. It doesn’t actually get you any fans and no way does it make you any money. It can’t.. it’s not designed to!
4. Youtube spamming software. This checks through Youtube videos using the keywords you’ve entered into the software, finds videos relevant to the keywords then spams all the people who have subscribed to the video uploader’s channel. This ends up with you very quickly getting banned from Youtube. Does it make you money though.. errr, not a chance.
5. Clickbank products review website creator. Hardly new or revolutionary as such review websites have been around for years. It is true that a good Google search ranking review website is capable of, and possibly will eventually make you a few product sales, but don’t expect this to happen overnight. Maybe for many months to be honest. So easy money? Will you become mega rich in one day as the software scammer promises? No way in the world.
Of course there are many, many more, and we’ll try and cover them all as time goes on. The above 5 are recent ones I’ve personally tested and of course, returned for my money back. They are amazingly bad products and I’ll be naming and shaming the websites involved and the scammers involved. There is no way I would keep quiet and let one of my members fall for such rubbish.
Here’s a quick example of one the scammers bragging to his affiliates about the upsells and downsells. This is taken directly from his affiliate page:
“We are going with the same formula that’s been so successful on many of the top Clickbank blockbusters in recent weeks…
Front End: £22.88
Upsell 1: £121.82
Downsell 1: £41.43
Upsell 2: £47.62
Upsell 3: £22.88 / month recurring”
So, you can see by that one example exactly what you’ll come across should you buy his initial software product.






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