Internet Marketing: Successes or Scams?
5 Jun 2007 (Tue)DO INTERNET MARKETERS MAKE MORE MONEY on the Internet or off the Internet? This is one of the many questions that came to mind at the end of the recent World Internet Mega Summit (WIMS 2007) at the Singapore Expo. My ex-boss, now a corporate client, had given me a complimentary ticket to the mega seminar. At the end of the four-day event on May 26-29 (Saturday to Tuesday), I was glad to have learnt a number of marketing techniques. I was also troubled by some of the things that I saw and heard.
There were 10 speakers: Brett McFall, Tom Hua, Jay Abraham, Mark Joyner, Armand Morin, David Cavanagh, Ewen Chia, Stephen Peirce, Mike Filsaime, and John Childers. Each internet marketing guru on the stage spoke persuasively of having a simple easy-to-follow system which guaranteed success. Some qualified by adding, “lots of hard work over a period of time”. Somehow though, with the possible exception of Jay Abraham and Mark Joyner, their systems all looked and sounded the same:
Basically, each guru suggested offering a freebie to lure prospects to a site and into giving their email addresses. Then the hardsell process begins in earnest: A one-time irresistible offer is made online and the specially designed website starts to sell in almost all possible ways (upsell, downsell, cross-sell, etc.) until the prospect yields to temptation and pays up.
AT THE END OF EACH GURU’S TALK during the WIMS 2007 seminar was invariably a sales pitch, whereby the guru would show what looked like an endless list of over-priced products/services. Then he would slash the prices to about a tenth or more, and tell the audience to buy NOW. Many people actually did as told.
I did a quick estimation. Some of the speakers charge each attendee $5,000++ for attending his program which includes one day of training, two days of coaching and monthly meetings for one year. If 100 people sign up for the program, he’d have made $500,000 (half a million!) per program.
I also ran some checks on the PageRanks (using the multiple PageRank checker) and the estimated traffic (using AttentionMeter.com) on the speakers’ websites and found the following:
Fig. 1: Google PageRanks for the 10 speakers.
Fig. 2: Google PageRank for some of the speakers’ sites
Fig. 3: Compete.com Graph for ArmandMorin.com, BizSuccessOnline.com, BrettMcFall.com & StephenLive.com
Fig. 4: Compete.com Graph for Abraham.com, Aesop.com, EwenChia.com, MarkJoyner.name, MikeFilsaime.com
Fig. 5: Compete.com Graph for Aesop.com, ArticleCity.com, AutoPilotProfits.com, eBookWholesaler.net, Simpleology.com
Notes:
- AutoPilotProfits.com belongs to Ewen Chia, Aesop.com and Simple-ology.com belongs to Mark Joyner, ebookwholesaler.net belongs to Tom Hua.
- With rampant link exchanges on the Net, PageRanks are increasingly being manipulated.
- Traffick, a search engine blog, wrote (”On Alexa, Compete.com, Quantcast, et al.”, February 06, 2007):
“People who don’t know too much about web stats love to quote Alexa ranks way too much… that’s seen as a silly thing to do by those “in the know”. But still, darned tempting. You can buy better data, but Alexa is free.
“More recently, upstarts that don’t seem too dissimilar to Alexa have come along: Compete.com, Quantcast, etc…. Based on the evidence I’ve sifted through, there’s not a shred to suggest that Compete.com is better at this stage, and some to suggest it’s actually worse.”
I remember from experience that hardsell also happens in face-to-face sessions. And how I hate being subject to it! These guys are shrewd marketers. These techniques probably really work well. Perhaps consumers need to beware! How many times have we bought things that we don’t need but thought we need at that moment of buying? Still, what are the right things to do when one really needs to make a living and so sell well on the Net (or elsewhere)? And just who (if any) have achieved real successes?
Related Posts:
- Scam? Ewen Chia, Adam Wong, Both or Neither?
- Alexa Ranks Ping.sg Above Tomorrow.sg!
- Virtual Conferencing Not Here Yet?
- Insight#4: Of Alexa, Dmoz & Technorati
- Uzyn, the next “Kevin Rose”?
- Over 50% Internet users to be Asians soon?
- The Rise of Conference Wikis
Posted by J.K. in *Insights, Business, Marketing, Possibilities, Problems | blog reactions | |
June 5th, 2007 at 6:23 pm
Screw the scammers. They do not even worth a plug here.
June 5th, 2007 at 7:29 pm
Most IM started off as ‘guru’ or ‘master’ or something in selling online, etc. They have loads of websites to spam their message, newspapers too. Do it long enough pple will start to believe it. Lol…
Then they charge premium dollars for talks and ’silly’ bosses will sign up for them.
It would definitely be better to get a 14 years kid from US to do it for you, they are the best marketers if you asked me!
June 5th, 2007 at 8:38 pm
Uzyn, this is not a plug.
I’m just stating the facts and asking quite pointed questions.
Paul, hahaha! I half-suspect that. Still, if that’s so, why hasn’t anyone come up to expose them yet?
Afternote: There is apparently an audience of over 5,000 at each summit. Some of the speakers said they give talks as many as 25 times a year. The “World Internet Summit” seminar has been (and still is) held in many places worldwide, sometimes more than once a year in the same place. Notice the spikes in the People Count of the sites shown above.
June 5th, 2007 at 10:28 pm
ClappingTrees,
didn’t know you were at WIMS. i was there too.
from the experience that i get from the summit, i would say, they are making more money offline than online..
i also made an estimate of half a million dollars per program like u did..
it was interesting to see how naive some people can be.. no wonder most of them are retirees or “senior executives” who know nothing about the internet.
nevertheless, it was a good experience to attend such an event, since i got a free ticket too.
thanks for the great post!
=)
June 6th, 2007 at 12:55 am
How do you define success? If enough gullible people buy a product and make the business owner rich, is he successful or just another hustler?
With the convenience and powerful connection of the Internet, it sure is easy to reach many many innocent and gullible people on this planet.
June 6th, 2007 at 7:33 am
Precisely!
June 6th, 2007 at 8:45 am
Willing buyer, willing seller. It boils down to that. Of course it takes some skills to persuade people to buy and that’s where they come in. What is really good value and what is really crap is debatable. If the person buying feels that he has learnt a lot, the money paid is worth it. Of course and vice versa. So what point is there to expose? I think people are entitled to a refund if they’re not happy. At least if they bought it online, they can
That said, i know of a site where one can get those pricey internet marketing books, those written by GURUS for free hehe. Anyone interested?
June 6th, 2007 at 9:53 am
I think the reason why they agreed to be speaker is because they can sell their products to you at the end of the talk. (plus maybe the pay is quite good)
Seriously, these people are trying to make themselves rich by telling you they want to make you rich.
June 6th, 2007 at 12:16 pm
If a drug lord says their business exist because of “willing buyer, willing seller”, does that make them right?
August 7th, 2007 at 5:29 am
I think, if you can see, hear and touch a particular product, you are more probably to buy it than if you just look at it or read about it on the Internet. So, my idea is that Internet marketers make more money off the Internet.
November 15th, 2007 at 1:52 pm
I follow Jay Abraham and he is an advocate of building multiple pillars in a process called the partheneon.
Now the thing is that each pillar generates its own leads but also supports the sucess of the others so it becomes mopre difficult to separate the results.
You read about someone on line and the go and see them live - which made the sale?
November 24th, 2007 at 6:16 pm
I agree with Paul, Jay Abraham is deffinately a internet marketer that you can listen to what it says and not think that it’s the same things that every other guru is saying. I’m following the partheneon process with very good results so far.
February 14th, 2008 at 1:57 pm
NOTE: This post is now closed to comments which do not give any new useful information, e.g. merely repeating what has already been said, or worse, descending into personal attacks.
February 14th, 2008 at 10:32 pm
I purchased a$3000.00 program from Abraham. He preaches risk reversal but doesn’t practice it. He gave me 30 days to cancel out of a 13 month program that met online once a month. Now he is sending collections after me cause I dropped out after the 30 days. He is just all about making and keeping himself rich!
April 18th, 2008 at 12:58 am
I will answer this based on my experience. I myself is internet marketer but Im not buying any gurus or blackhats that telling 5k$ a month using our methods. Any internet gurus will not tell their real secrets unless you are close friends? Because if they do so they will have many competition and probably their business will fall.
July 1st, 2008 at 12:24 pm
Most Gurus offer real content, the only draw drawback is that they overhype their content, but it is really possible to earn that kind of income over years of hard work and learning.
July 20th, 2008 at 2:30 am
Real content is what’s required to draw visitors and traffic. Hard work is what will pay off in the long run.
July 20th, 2008 at 7:45 am
i was at a brighton bootcamp and saw armand and tom hua earn over 2.5 million sterling in an hour each, very slick, what do any of the readers think of huas 227 website in a box biz
July 25th, 2008 at 12:01 pm
I am betting that they make more money online than their offline ventures. Had it been the contrary, then they would not have been where they are, and yet up to now, they remain marketing online.
September 2nd, 2008 at 3:51 pm
a lot of them are scams.
need to be careful.