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Unscrupulous Hype in E-marketing
By A. David Beaman
There is a type of online marketing for products claiming to make money for their users, often involving products listed on Clickbank.com in their E-business and E-marketing Category, that I characterize as unscrupulous hype. In the past couple of months, I have purchased several of these products and followed the instructions to see if they delivered what they promised. They didn't, and I returned them for a full refund. These products are usually sold for a relatively small amount, such as $37. However, once you pay and before the product can be downloaded, you have to go through several up-sell pages, in which you learn that the originally offered product will work much faster and better if you purchase these up-sell products. The up-sell products sell for sums up to $297. I did purchase the upgrades so my results reflect the use of the originally advertised product along with the add on products. Typically, these products consist of video training, concerning keyword research, backlinks, article marketing, bookmarking, paid advertising on Google, Facebook, Twitter and Plenty of Fish as well as some other topics legitimately related to online marketing; and some sort of software that expedites the use of these techniques. Sometimes, the training is quite good, and the software works well enough. So, what's the problem? It is in the way that these products are described in terms of what they will do for the purchaser. These products are pitched by video presentations that included some one talking about the product. The people talking are very persuasive in their presentation, which would be OK if what they were claiming for the product was true. The claims usually are that use of the product will within a few hours, a week, a month or some other relatively short period of time, will earn the user tens or hundreds of thousands of dollars; and will keep on doing so as often as the product is used. Furthermore, the claims are repeated and hyped to the Nth degree. The advertising is hard to resist. It is very persuasive. It feeds into the dreams and needs of financially stressed people. It leads them to believe that the product will propel them to unlimited income and financial independence. What they do not tell you is that if you use the paid advertising approach and do the required tweaking of the ads to finally get a sale, your advertising costs will be very high and when you subtract cost from income, you end up either at a loss or with only a small profit. If you use the free advertising approach, it takes an exceedingly long period of time to start getting sales. It certainly does not deliver within the time framework promised. End result: the vendor of the product makes money; their inner circle of JV partners make money; but the people purchasing the product make very little or lose money. Yes, all of these products are sold with an income disclaimer in exceedingly tiny print at the bottom of the page. It is proof that these vendors know that their product will not do for most people what it claims; maybe not even for any. But, I suspect that few people read the disclaimer; even if they do, some still purchase the product. Desperate people hope against hope and want to believe that they will make the money promised. My experience at testing some of these products has caused me to have a strong desire to clean up this sector of online marketing and bring about an end to the work of the hype-masters by advocating certain actions to advocate for truth-in-advertising of these products and to stop the harm that these products do to financially stressed people who are desperate for a solution, making them even more susceptible to those unscrupulous marketing tactics. As such, I went public with a blog that, hopefully, will do some good.
A. D. Beaman loves online marketing and wants to clean-up certain sectors of it through advocacy presented in his blog .
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 | | appreciated this intel. Mar 10, 2011 |  | | jannepaige liked this intel. Mar 10, 2011 |  | | adac agreed with this intel. Mar 10, 2011 |  | | Marika agreed with this intel. Mar 10, 2011 |  | | frederick recommended this intel. Mar 10, 2011 |  | | Marsha Gellerman recommended this intel. Mar 10, 2011 |  | | nick agreed with this intel. Mar 11, 2011 |  | | Edie Dykeman liked this intel. Mar 11, 2011 |  | | bronnamdi agreed with this intel. Mar 11, 2011 |  | | LadyD appreciated this intel. Mar 12, 2011 | | | appreciated this intel. Mar 13, 2011 |
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Thank you for sharing this valuable information, Dave.
A few of these scammers have showed up on this site, but for the most part, their work didn't score well and probably won't get reprinted anywhere.
I read your blog, Been there, Done that!!
Keep up the good work.
Best wishes.
Frederick
Hi Dave - I stopped buying products after the transcript of a seminar was released, where the Internet Marketer referred to everyone who bought the product as sheep, (including, I guess the people who paid to attend his seminar,) and that the way to make money was to bleed them (the buyers) dry on the upsell. I'm not sure I'd ever have the nerve to say this to people who just dropped 5 grand to attend a seminar which was the end result of a series of upsells. The transcript disappeared a few months after it was posted, but I never forgot it and it's been four of five years.
I'm impressed that you managed to get yourself those refunds. Way to go!
 | | nick Mar 11, 2011 01:56 | |
Sadly, this is all too true. When I first tried affiliate marketing, the shiny-object syndrome took hold and I purchased far to many of these products. If I now had all the money I spent on shady products, I would could go on an extended travel vacation. Instead, I ended up with mostly useless information and a bad taste about marketers in general. Thanks for leading the way in getting this type of information out to those who need to read it before they needlessly spend their hard earned money.
I have been at the receiving end of these marketers' hype and I could not get a refund for the item I requested to be refunded. I have bought some other products that promised taking me up to a mountain; I ended up on a high ground; the mountain could not be attained. I once paid for an over-hyped product only to download it to discover that it was offered free on many other sites on the internet. These marketers have the impression that telling lies is an advertising strategy. However, a lie is a lie and liars are children of the devil according to my bible.
Rated you pretty high on this as it has been a thorn in my side for a long time. The ones that get me are the free trials or free subscriptions that give extremely limited functionality and pretty much just say 'this is not available in the free version'. How can one evaluate the efficacy of a product if one is unable to see the intelligence the product purports to offer.
These products are dumped as soon as - they must fool some people as they continue to offer the product.
All power to your campaign!
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