Moneymaking scams - part 5

This series is devoted to exposing online moneymaking scams. This is the fifth installment of the 17 types of rip-offs that will be listed here. To see previous installments scroll down the page or use the links on the right.

Mystery Shopper

Notice a trend here? Yes, the previous items in my list all have something in common. They just sound so down right easy! After all you can do any of these things right? Anyone can! And the fact that they say they are going to pay you insane amounts of money to do something anyone can do should give you a clue that they might not be on the level.

Ok, on to the infamous Mystery Shopper scam. This is not really an internet scam because I've seen it advertised in the back of magazines and newspapers but I included it here because I've seen it also advertised more and more on the Internet lately.

Beware! 99% of these are scams! It's so easy today to set up a website and promote anything you want. I could easily set one up to promote a mystery shopper membership site in as little as an afternoon. I could bid on some Google Adwords to drive some targeted traffic to it overnight and I could charge $25-$69 to supply my new "customers" with a list of outdated and non-existent businesses that pay for them to shop. Then when I've gotten so many complaints that I just can't live with myself anymore I'd take the site down (notice I didn't mention anything about refunding any signup fees) and create another one under a different domain name tomorrow and start all over again.

This is the way that 99% of these things work! There are a few companies out there that really do provide this service and it can be fun but not exactly lucrative.

For one thing, if you are in a small town, chances are you're not going to get an assignment anywhere nearby. This means travel expenses. A lot of times you are paid in merchandise, or in the case of restaurants you get your meal paid for and nothing else. Then you are expected to report back on your experience.

If you are in a large city you may think there are a lot more assignments. You are correct! But there are also  lot more people doing it so you may go a month at a time before getting an assignment. If you really want to pursue this one, because I have to admit, it can be fun, you need to be super careful about the company you select. 

I have only found three companies (although I'm sure there are a few more) that I would even consider recommending and I'll list them here. I'm even hesitant about recommending these because there are better ways to make money on the internet.

But for those of you that find doing business on the internet too complicated even after checking out what the Internet marketing Center has to offer, these might be for you. 

Shopping Jobs

Shop Until You Drop

Get Paid 2

Until next time, to your success,
Ken

Moneymaking scams - part 4

This series is devoted to exposing online moneymaking scams. This is the fourth installment of the 17 types of rip-offs that will be listed here. To see previous installments scroll down the page or use the links on the right.

Paid Survey Sites

Since these are related to the Paid-to-Read email type scams I thought I'd keep these together. Instead of getting paid to read e-mails, you get paid to take online surveys.

In a nutshell this is how they work. You register with the company. This can either be free but most likely at a cost, some as high as $70. The company then send you links to take online surveys. As with the Paid-to-Read e-mail scams, they promise very high pay for simple surveys. They are lying just like the Paid-to-Read e-mail companies.

First, you have to qualify to be able to take the surveys. Qualification is hard. Sometimes you have to be in a very small group. Think about it as a business owner that wants a survey for market study, if it was easy to find people to take your survey why on earth wouldn't you just set up the survey yourself rather than farm it out to these guys? You could put a survey up on your site or those sites that you do business with and even offer and incentive, like coupons, free merchandise, or gift certificates, to get people to participate.

No, they hire these guys to get people like you to take the surveys because they are looking for particular people to take these surveys and those people are hard to find. But wait... even if you do qualify what happened to the large cash pay-outs for these surveys? You get excited that you have qualified for a survey only to find out that this particular survey only pays ten cents (about the average in my experience). So you'll have to take a hundred surveys to get $10.

Figure the average time to take the survey at 10 minutes and you are making a whopping $0.60 an hour! Wow! I say no thanks and you should too! The only reason that these are still around is that people (like me) still fall for this scam for the same reasons they fall for the Paid-to-Read e-mail scam, it sounds just to easy! These guys make their money up front with your account setup fee and they do real well by the way.

I'm sure you've seen these, and, by the way, the reason you see these all the time is because they usually have pretty good affiliate programs. This means you can sign up as an affiliate and make money by getting other people to fall for this scam. Some people make a good living just of the affiliate programs on these things. Do me a favor, don't fall for these, and whatever you do, don't even think about promoting them. That would make you no better than them and karma will catch up with you! You have been warned! :)

For real honest moneymaking opportunities click here.

Until next time, to your success!
Ken

Moneymaking scams - part 3

This series is devoted to exposing online moneymaking scams. This is the third installment of the 17 types of rip-offs that will be listed here. To see previous installments scroll down the page or use the links on the right.

Paid-to-Read E-mails

These are probably the worst programs out there right now and have been for quite some time. I think it's the simplicity of the system that makes it so appealing and why they have survived for so long. I mean think about it... "all I have to do is read e-mails and I can make a decent living from home?". Wow! I can read e-mails!

Reality check. While these companies say that you can receive up to $500 per email, they are lying! How quickly do you think a company advertising via e-mail would go out of business if they paid $500 for each e-mail that was read by someone?

This is probably the biggest scam on the Internet today. But before I go too far let me say that there are some legitimate companies out there that actually will pay you to read e-mails (and click on the links contained in them to view a website). But they pay nowhere near even a dollar per e-mail. Most are in the sub-penny to three cent area.

Now that would be fine I guess in that if you were very efficient with your time you could probably get through 6 e-mails a minute or so (viewing the web page 10 seconds per e-mail). But the problem is they only send you between  10 and 50 e-mails a day.

So let's do the math and let's take the best case scenario (50 e-mails @ .03 per). Let's figure 30 days in the month, so.... 30X50X.03= a whopping $45 per month! WOW! I'm rich! :) And this is the very best case scenario. You actual results would probably be more like $5 to $15 per month.

Just say no to these obvious scams. And especially so if they want some money up front to set up and maintain your account. If you see an ad for one of these and I'll positive you will since they just won't go away, do me and yourself a favor and run away as fast as you can!

For real honest moneymaking opportunities click here.

Until next time, to your success!
Ken

Moneymaking scams - part 2

This series is devoted to exposing online moneymaking scams. This is the second installment of the 17 types of rip-offs that will be listed here. To see previous installments scroll down the page or use the links on the right.

Freelance Writing

This used to be advertised much more as a way to work from home but it has lost favor lately. Probably because people have finally caught on. Or more likely it was hard to make it sound easy so it was a bit harder to sell than most scams. Either way, it's still not completely gone (though I wish it was), so I thought I'd mention it here for those that haven't tried this one. 

Unlike some of the other scams I list here, this is a real job opportunity and can pay fairly well, but you will never get rich off of it. This is more like a real job, and like a real job you normally have to apply and be accepted. This means you will have to have not only experience in writing (I'd never qualify if you have noticed already:)), and you are expected to be somewhat of an expert in the field or fields that you would be writing about. This would include a resume with prior works and/or references. But like I said, this is a legitimate job and does offer the flexibility of working from home and choosing your own hours. Just don't expect to be working full time and don't expect to make more than about $10 per hour when you can find work.

So why is this even on this scam page? Here's why. There are companies/people out there that will actually charge you to give you instructions on how to go about landing one of these "dream" jobs. They'll even give you listings of companies that purchase articles and short stories. This will cost you anywhere from $29-$197.

In reality, they have given you nothing you couldn't have discovered yourself with one little Google Search for "Freelance Writers wanted". I just did that search and came up with 44,700 links to sites that matched on the exact phrase. If I take the quotes off (fuzzy search), I get 3,920,000. I really don't think you need to pay someone to send you a list of companies looking for freelance writers. Don't do it! If you need a list that badly and you can't seem to figure out how Google works, send $20 to my Paypal account and I'd be happy to send you a list! :)

For real honest moneymaking opportunities click here.

Until next time, to your success!
Kind regards,
Ken

Moneymaking scams - part 1

This series is devoted to exposing online moneymaking scams. This is the first installment of the 17 types of rip-offs that will be listed here.

Randomizers

First things first. These are illegal. While there are a lot of scams on the Internet today that are illegal and that doesn't deter people from joining and promoting them, these can cause you more grief than they are worth. You could even lose your Paypal account if you get caught in one of these things (although a lot of them are going to different payment processors just because of that).

As with any "get rich quick" scheme these are flawed from the start. This is how they work (or don't work to be more accurate). You join, usually from someone's link who is promoting it. You'll pay anywhere from $5 to $20 to join. When you do, a portion of your payment is given to the person who’s link you used, some goes to the site operator, and the rest gets paid to a random member of the program. Now it may look like the site operator is getting such a small amount that he can't be in it for the money, but see how many members there are and multiply that by the site operator's "small" take.

So say there are 5000 members on a particular site. Say the site operator gets $2 per signup. Now you join for $20. Of this, $8 goes to the person that had the link you used, $2 goes to the site operator, and $10 goes to a random person in the program. Now say the very next day you got lucky and you received a $10 random payment. Wow, you have received half of your money back in one day! At this rate you'll be rich in no time right? Wrong! Now you have to wait for 5,000 more people to sign up before you get your next $10! And to make matters worse, once you get the second payment, meaning another 5,000 people for a total of 10,000 now in the program, you have to wait until they are all paid before you get the next $10! Then it's 20,000, then 40,000, then 80,000, then 160,000.... I'm sure you catch my drift. Even if the payments were totally random it wouldn't be any better than playing the lottery.

Now you can go out and try to make your money by getting people to sign up under you but if you've never tried, let me save you some time. If you promote heavily even using free as well as paid advertising methods it would probably take you a month to get 5 signups. That's $40. Figure minimum 30 minutes a day for the 20 working days in the month. You just made yourself around $4 an hour and only got to work 10 hours in the whole month! So you say you can work more hours? You can, but it's been my experience that you will start to see a curve of diminishing returns. You'll work more and more for less and less return on your time. I don't know about you, but I would rather spend my time working a real program that has the potential of making at least a couple hundred dollars a day working that same 30 minutes to an hour a day.

Like the ones I recommend here.

Do yourself a favor and do not even consider these Randomizers, not only are they illegal, they are a total waste of time, energy, and money. Google is your friend... do a quick search for "randomizer scam" like I just did and it returned 120,000 hits. Read a couple then do another search for "randomizer illegal" and you come up with another 36,000. I'll save you the bother... you don't even have to read any of the pages, these things are illegal, period!

Until next time, to your success!
Kind regards,
Ken

Welcome to the Onlinebizhelp Blog!

I am really excited about Internet marketing! I'm also very disappointed with most of the products being sold to supposedly help new or even seasoned Internet marketers. So much so that I decided to take my beautiful wife's mantra to heart. She is always saying, "If you are not part of the solution, you ARE part of the problem."

Keeping that in mind, I asked myself what can I do to improve the dismal condition of the Internet marketing education niche. (Products, eBooks, and systems geared to help people make money, or more money, from online ventures.) After all, I'm only one person. But this one person is absolutly sick and tired of seeing the same old crap being sold and circulated to people honestly wanting to start a home business and make a decent living form the Internet.  So I decided to put up a small website and this blog devoted to not only exposing the scam artists, but also to highlight the honest programs out there that really can help you to succeed.

People are getting scammed over and over by the so-called "internet gurus" because they have a true desire to succeed and will do practically anything to achive that success. This includes buying nearly anything a guru offers as the "next big thing" that is absolutely garanteed to put thousands of dollars into your bank account every month without you having to get out of your underware or do any work at all. Guess what? The gurus not only know this, they count on it. There are tons of sales copy manuals out there that teach you exactly how to manipulate people into buying whatever you are selling. I intend to expose these sales tactics so you will know what to look for. After a little while of reading my blogs you'll know right away if the program offered has any value or is just another "me too" offer that won't do you any good.

I've been in this business longer than I care to admit (graduated a computer science major in 1976!) and have quietly been making part of my living online. You've never heard of me right? That's the way I like it! You never seen an eBook by me because I don't make money from selling eBooks covering ways to make money on the Internet. Have I bought some of the books out there? Sadly to say, yes, most of them, numbering easily into the hundreds! I have read and studied them until I was blue in the face and while I have gleaned some gems from a few, most were nothing but rehashes and basic information that can just as easily be aquired free with a few well thought out searches. Some were just plain wrong and could cost the inexperienced tons of money before they figure out there's no way it could have worked form the get-go.

So welcome aboard and feel free to get an RSS feed if you want.

Until next time, to your success!

Kind regards,
Ken

Opportunities To Avoid

Or you may want to call this "Internet Moneymaking Scams Revealed".

I have had such a hard time finding any truthful online money-making information that I actually believed at one time that none existed. While I'm sure I haven't looked at every legitimate online business opportunity (you stop looking after you find something that works, right?), I have had plenty of experience with programs that are nothing but scams. I've been working with computers since before I graduated from college in 1976 and was making money online before the internet got all pretty with graphics, sound, video, and a high-speed connection was a 1200 baud modem.

Here's something to remember when searching for an internet money-making opportunity, in the pitch, if the list of what it isn't is longer than the list of what it is, RUN AWAY!!!!!! That's the oldest trick in the book. If they really had valuable information they would tell you what it was before you buy it! I'm not saying they have to give you their secrets... I'm just saying you should know at least how it works and what t really is from the sales copy. If not, don't buy it!!! Enough said!

You'll notice that all of the programs I recommend tell you what they are and what they are about before you buy. That is one of my requirements when recommending a program. I have never found a legit program that only tells you what it isn't! Over the next few days I will be revealing 17 types of online business "opportunities" for what they are. Nothing but scams. Just a way for someone to make lots of money praying on people's hopes and dreams of becoming rich or self employed. If you've ever wondered how scams work, now you can find out *before* you lay down your hard earned money!

I should mention that these are in no particular order. I don't have an axe to grind, I just don't have a lot of respect towards people and businesses that use the internet to rip people off. Keep in mind that these are generalizations and there are some exceptions to the rules, but where there are exceptions, I've done my best to point them out. You'll find that these generalizations are 99.9999% accurate. Want to know how I know how this? Yep... I fell for each and every one of them! Don't get scammed! Read and learn! :) Internet marketing can be fun and very profitable, but it can also be like walking blind through a mine field. Arm yourself with the mine detectors I have already bought so you don't have to!

Throughout this series I will be recommending a couple programs that I have used and I believe in. Do yourself a favor and save some time and money by taking a look at them. These are serious programs ran by people who seriously want to help you with your success. I don't recommend programs lightly, so you can be sure that when I do suggest one it's because I've bought it, studied it, and use it on a day-to-day basis. I am so tired of seeing the "next new thing" flooding my inbox sent by all the so-called gurus... all with a slightly different pitch... all with their exclusive bonuses... all promising that we will all get rich with no money to start and no work involved. You know that most, if not all of these offers are being made for one reason and one reason alone, so the guru can get his affiliate commission. It's almost comical. With every new money-making release I can count on at least 20 emails from 20 different "gurus" touting it. Then there are the amateurs, the ones just under the radar, you can tell they are just getting started from the amateurish prose and terrible sales copy. You can also tell that they have not bought the product themselves, especially when the product is "How to create great sales copy and have customers banging down your door to stuff your bank account with thousands of dollars"! Fictitious for sure, but you get my point.

Keep an eye out for the first couple installments in this series starting May 10th. Or subscribe to the RSS feed to be sure not to miss a single one, yes, it will be that important.

Feel free to leave a comment if you so desire. Also, never hesitate to ask questions if you have them... remember, the only stupid question is the one not asked!

Kind regards until next time,

Ken

P.S. If you simply can't wait to read the whole series you can go to the link below to see them all now. There are no links to this page on my site on purpose.... I'm doing a little test and I'll let you know how it turns out! ;)

Here's the link: http://www.onlinebizhelp.com/scams_index.asp