7 Ways to Spot an Internet Marketing Scam

By David Eedle |

You probably see some of the same sales emails as we do. Our inboxes are constantly filling up with emails from people offering to make us rich using the internet. And now Twitter has become a scammer’s stalking marketplace with an increasing bunch of low lifes pumping out Tweet after Tweet promising instant internet wealth.

Invariably the sales pitches share similar characteristics, so here are our 7 ways to spot an internet marketing scam:

Length – gee these people need an awful lot of words to convince you to buy their secrets to success
Effortless – you can make thousands a month, working from home, while simultaneously looking after your children, doing the laundry, and cooking dinner. Unlike the truth that real money comes from hard work and commitment.
Speed – you’ll have thousands of dollars rolling in within weeks
Testimonials – paragraphs of hyperbole from ‘satisfied customers’, who invariably are only named with first name and initial (wouldn’t want you tracking them down to authenticate their success)
Pressure – sign up now or the world will end
Guilt – you and your family deserve to be rich, if you don’t buy this product/service/system you’re a bad person who’s consigning your loved ones to penury
Discount – the system usually costs $2,500 but sign up today and you’ll ‘only’ pay $250

The majority of these offers are usually one of three things: a front for a network marketing company like Herbalife; a pre-packaged information product through an affiliate network like clickbank.net, or worse, the product they sell is a how-to manual to sell the product – they simply tell you how to set up online to sell their system. A self-perpetuating pyramid scheme. They even sell you web page templates so you can create your own high pressure sales pitch pages, just like their own.

We particularly love the testimonials – try Googling some of the more unusual names of the people giving testimonials (the unusual ones are easier to search for, there are too many Smiths and Jones in the world). Surprise surprise. The same names often pop up on other sales pitch web sites. In fact, with a little digging, you’d be excused for thinking that all these sites are related somehow, which is possibly not far from the truth. When a business sells a system that is all about self-replication, and they sell it to enough people, you’re going to wind up with a lot of sites built off the same base templates.

Invariably these ‘products’ are low quality (including the content and the presentation); light on detail; and light on the qualifications of the people who wrote them. You’ll never see a real life case study drawn from their own experiences.

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