Internet Marketing Scam?
This is something from a free report recently published by a well-known marketer so I hesitated to call it an internet marketing scam but it sure sounds like one.
I won’t tell you his name. He says that this is not his idea, he has taken it from another well-known marketer, so I don’t think I have to give him credit for it, if credit is the right word.
This is how it works.
When anyone releases a new internet marketing product (as I am about to do on Friday), they often send a review copy to other marketers asking if they would like to promote it to their list. Of course there is an affiliate commission involved, so the idea is that this JV partnership is mutually profitable. The product creator gains from extra sales of the product, and the JV partner gains from affiliate commissions.
But any well-known internet marketer gets a ton of these requests and doesn’t have time to even look at them all. So unless they know the product creator or there is something very special about it, they turn them down without even reading the review copy.
So what this list owner says he is doing (let’s call him Joe, since that is not his name) is to write back to any product creator that sends him a JV partnership offer saying that he will only consider it for payment of a fee of $1000. There is no guarantee Joe will promote it, and the fee is non-refundable. The email goes on to say that as he has a list of 75,000 subscribers, this will result in huge profits if he promotes it and if the product creator has any confidence in his product at all he will not hesitate to pay $1000.
Just after I read that I was out walking and I started to think, okay, so say he gets a 0.5% conversion rate from his email to his list, and I have no idea if that is realistic because it depends on many factors including how many people read his emails, but that would be 375 sales. The selling price of my product launching Friday is xx and he gets a 60% affiliate commission so that would mean I would . . .
Hold on. Non-refundable. What if he doesn’t like my product? Well, he will, because it’s great. Yes, but what if he’s sick and doesn’t have time to send the email? What if he’s about to launch something a little similar? There’s no way he would promote a competing product.
Then I would just have wasted $1000. Regardless of how great my product is.
Don’t fall for this kind of thing, will you? He says that about 1 in 50 people do pay. If he would refund the money if he did not promote, then okay. There would still be a risk, you might or might not cover your $1000 outlay, but I guess that most people would make that back and more if it is true that there are 75,000 subscribers on his list. (It’s no gamble for him, of course . . . he has earned $1000 even if he does not make a single sale.)
But if he doesn’t refund when he doesn’t promote, the word ’scam’ does spring to mind, doesn’t it?
Some people might say “Well, if anyone is stupid enough to pay him, they deserve to lose the money.” And that is exactly the argument that scammers use when they try to defend what they do.
I’m not saying that it IS a scam. As far as I know this marketer is entirely ethical. Perhaps in practice he would give back the money if he was sick, at least. I am just saying that it sounds like one. And as he is suggesting in his report that his readers should consider using this technique too, just perhaps reducing the amount they ask for, the potential for this to turn into the next internet marketing scam is surely there.
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Rosie,
Phrased a bit differently, your putative JV partner could have a selling point. But the phrasing you reported makes him an opportunist, not a marketer or consultant.
If he charges $1K _to review the product_, then send you his review, that’s consultancy, and perfectly legitimate. A bit steep, perhaps, but legitimate. And he should, along with that, tell you whether he will promote or not, and if not, why not. Could be lack of time, could be workload, could be most anything – but he should so state.
However, if he charges $1K simply to _entertain the thought_ of reviewing the product, w/o any return review to you & w/o even saying he will/will not promote, nor why, that puts him beyond the pale, to my mind.
Sounds as though he’s trading on a good name that could be lost over such an opportunistic methodology.
I’m certain someone will chime in with _business ethic_: there is no such thing. Any ethic is *personal*. Nevertheless, what is ethical in your situation may not be ethical in mine. So you can’t really question his ethic(s) without being intimately familiar with his situation.
However, his approach would seem to reflect more of greed than anything else [grin /].
Make a good day …
… barn
Rosie,
Just a thought.
Your comments would look much better (to these old eyes) – and be easier to read – if they were left-aligned, rather than centered.
Barney, thanks for your comments. I don’t think there is any question of it being a consultancy. He doesn’t mention giving any kind of review. It just seems exploitative to me and I hope it will not become prevalent.
Regarding the layout, I had a look in the theme files but cannot see where to alter it. However I am planning to move this site onto a new server fairly soon and at that time I will change the whole template.
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