Saturday, December 16, 2006

Many "Free" Offers Online Can Scare Newcomers to the Internet

In the time it takes you to read this article another several thousand
newcomers will be surfing the Internet for the first time. Many will be
excited, then delighted (especially if they enjoy cable hook-up), become
anxious and finally overwhelmed.

All of this can and does happen because on the Internet, home of Internet
Marketers (kind of like having your in-laws and outlaws in the same room at
the same time), many Internet Marketers believe if they do not relieve you
of your money first, there will be none left for them to get.

If you thought they were going to give you a congratulatory greeting and a
helping hand, then your education will progress very rapidly.

This rush to get into your pocket is exactly what financial institutions and
predators do to young adults after high school. These money grubbers (also
known as money lenders) want nothing to do with a marathon in chasing the
naïve, they will choose the sprint every time, without fail.

Financiers know the first one to tie up a young person with a car loan and
several credit cards has a leg up on enslaving the young, naïve borrower
forever; it becomes a done deal when they lock in the same borrower with
their first home mortgage (real property loan).

At this point, the young borrower is now exactly where the fastest lender
could bring them to: years of hard work, unfair taxes and a lifetime of
debt.

I felt like going down to the local credit union and slapping the loan
officer that set my son up with a loan for a new car that he acquired with a
part-time job, no assets and no real credit rating. My son thought he was
king of the hill (mind you, this was no $2,000 used car loan, this was more
like a $20,000 new car loan).

My son figured it was easy to get loans. He kept going back until he was in
for about $300,000, and then all of the lenders backed off like he had
developed the plague and was contagious.

The point is a 30-year-old or 40-year-old man could have gone to the same
credit union, or bank, or whatever your lender of choice is, asked for the
same loan, and been laughed out of the building. Surely you get it, the
first one in gets the prime filet mignon, the rest of lenders get the crumbs
off the table.

You may imagine it could not get worse online, and you would be dead wrong.
At least my son drove away with a car and had the transportation he thought
he needed. Newcomers to the Internet many times buy products and services
that simply do not perform (I have bought my share), never mind whether the
newcomer wanted or needed the purchase of the moment.

All of this comes back to me today as I received an e-mail from what appears
to be a nice, concerned fellow Internet Marketer, which says:

"I don't normally pay much attention to these internet
(sic) marketing giveaway events (that is why I have received another similar
offer from the same marketer this
week) that spring up every now and again (looks like at least a dozen in my
e-mails today), but when I seen some of the tools available free at the
'Blank Blank Giveaway', I wanted to make sure you had the chance (so very
thoughtful of him) to check it out . . ." (followed by the link to the web
site).

Turns out that "Not only can you grab 200+ hot Internet marketing tools
without spending a dime, you can also build a list at the same time!"

Any newcomer to the Internet that has just started an Internet Marketing
business may already know the idea is to generate traffic to his web site.
This looks like another can't miss deal, but is it?

Let us look at this offer from the perspective of a
newcomer:

1) Many newcomers have virtually no technical knowledge or skills (I was
one). How overwhelming would it be for me to download 200+ Internet tools,
install them (if I can), and then use them effectively? Talk about being
overwhelmed.

You might ask, why does this happen (the big time offer of
200+ tools)? Probably, a long time ago, some enterprising
marketer offered one software tool as an incentive to sign up a newcomer on
his mailing list, and then, you guessed it, things got out of hand, and soon
it took 100+ free Internet tools to get that same newcomer to volunteer for
a mailing list.

Look for someone to offer 300+ Internet tools soon, as the Internet is
nothing if not a copycat business of the first order. There is such a lack
of originality in marketing on the Internet that if the Internet exploded,
it would probably take 1,000 years to resurrect it.

2) There is a great possibility that response to this kind of offer leads to
the newcomer becoming a list member who will then be exposed to hundreds of
offers to make instant money with a free web site, free hosting, free
everything, and no requirements to think, do or say anything (the money, of
course, will fly through the newcomer's front door because the whole system
will be automated).

But what is really happening here? Only this: You will probably be asked to
advertise to drive traffic to your new, free web site (with access to the
"secret"
money-making techniques of your guru, and his personal schmuck-proof help),
at your expense, in exchange for earning a commission on something sold.

Sounds OK, but what do you get besides the commission?
Answer: nothing. Who gets the names for their mailing list?
The guru, not you. What have you really accomplished? Only
this: you have helped build the guru's mailing list at your expense. The
guru now has more newcomers to sell to over and over again, and you, you
have nothing.

Well, not exactly. You, of course, have more advertising expenses, which we
surely hope you can pay for out of the commissions you earned, assuming you
earned any commissions. What you are really doing is subsidizing your guru,
and he is making the money you want to make.

The guru (or any other Internet Marketer) is not giving you a free web site,
hosting and all of the other amenities because he is feeling rich, blessed
and altruistic (that is only what he is telling you with a straight face).
He is giving you all of this because he can stuff his pockets 100 or 1,000
times more with affiliate web sites than without them, and so he spends his
time creating affiliate web sites. It is called leveraging your time and
money, his (the guru's), not yours, he is bleeding you dry.

Gurus will quickly fall all over themselves telling you there are thousands
of marketers making millions of dollars a year in affiliate marketing, and
that may be, but will you be one of them, and what are you willing to do to
make money at someone's expense without really telling them the truth about
what is happening here?

Some gurus (and other assorted folks) may be better off as an Internet
Marketer if they have no conscience whatsoever.


----------------------------------------------------
Ed Bagley is the author of Ed Bagley's Blog, which he publishes daily with
fresh, original writing intended to delight, inform, educate and motivate
readers. Visit Ed at . . .
http://www.edbagleyblog.com

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