 | Ethical Internet Marketing | |
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The Stinkers!
I do NOT recommend the following programs and products. I am not suggesting that you cannot make money using them or that there is no value in these products. In fact, I am quite sure that some people have used them to make significant money or have in some situations found the products useful. HOWEVER, in my experience I have found that they did not produce the results that were advertised or I had ethical problems with their nature or the way they are organized. I think these are real stinkers! Often they simply do not meet AccerTruth’s standards for truthfulness. While almost all advertising puts the best possible face forward, there comes a point where the hype becomes deception. In general I find problematic programs and/or products fall into one of three categories.
- The Empty Box: With these products you find that when you actually get the product there is not much there. Now to be fair, usually the box is not completely empty, there is "something there." But what is there is minimal and is not the wonderful product that you had anticipated based on the advertisement. Then, you are supposed to make money by selling this empty box to others. I have ethical problems with doing such a thing.
- The Pyramid Scheme: Like chain letters and gift clubs, online versions of this claim to make money by getting a large number of people under you who will eventually send you large amounts of money. Usually only those at the very top make money and at times they make a killing, while the rest of the people in the pyramid make little or loose a lot. Usually the online pyramid scheme, like the offline chain letter, contains an empty box product so nothing of true value is being sold. Legitimate multi-level marketing programs have a pyramid format, but there are two important differences. First, in such legitimate programs there is a legitimate product of value being sold. Second, with legitimate programs there will be a fair distribution of the profits throughout the pyramid. Pyramid schemes are illegal and so to get around this, bad programs promote a box that is not completely empty. I am not a lawyer and so in no way am I making a legal judgment in my reviews. So with programs that I label pyramid below, I am suggesting that in my lay judgment and experience these programs lean more toward the pyramid scheme and away from legitimate multilevel marketing programs.
- The Inferior Product: Many internet products fail to live up to their hype. However, for a product to make it on to my list, it really has to be bad falling far short of its hype.
Here is my current list of Stinkers (they are NOT recommended):
$500 A Day: This $44.95 product is often advertised with the headline "Do not be scammed by
other programs out there that promise you money and never give you
it. This program promises real paychecks instead of fake offers. . ." Despite that claim this product is perhaps the ultimate empty box product. The whole product is one web-page that is about three or four screens long. In that space it briefly tells you how to sell this empty box to others. This program was my introduction into online marketing. I felt like I had been cheated. Even worse in order to get my money back, I sold it for a while. In fact, I made a little bit of money selling this empty box program. But I felt like a cheat when I did so. In fact I was so disturbed by this product that I decided to start a website where honest reviews would be presented and good products would be promoted. You are visiting that website as I call it AccerTruth. If you wish to explore $500 A Day's promotion page or you would still like to buy this product, simply click below.
$500 A Day
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Email 10 (and now) 50 Million: I find this product to be an inferior product. I have only used the free version and so perhaps the paid version is better, but the free version did not cause me to want to buy the paid version. First of all, this program is deceptive! It claims to blast
your ad to "10 million recipients" anytime you want. It appears to me that the messages only go to others who have joined this program and that the list name is 10 Million. So I am unsure of
the actual number of people who receive it, but I suspect it much fewer than 10 million. Moreover, it places you
on the list and so you get everyone else's emails. So it seems that
it is simply those trying to sell to those trying to sell. Your mailbox gets absolutely flooded and so you simply hit the delete button which I would guess is what everyone else does with your message. I know this is basically how "safelists" work, but I think the whole idea has serious issues. Even at the "free" price, this program is not worth it.
Google: I Hate Google!
Google is an internet standard with a vast array of high quality services and products. Most of us do not go a day without Googling something. It is also my understanding that working for Google is an amazing experience as they are an innovative and progressive employer. However, for us small fish trying to make some money on the internet, I would suggest you stay as far away from Google as possible! Run far away, run far, far away, now!
Google Adsense is a pay-per-click system in which you pay for connecting keywords to your website. It can be very effective at generating traffic for your site. However, remember you are paying the same for each click no matter if they are at your site for a few seconds, half-an-hour, or whether they purchase anything from you. You need to be very careful about having a high conversion to sales rate. If note, you will quickly be sending hundreds or even thousands of dollars to Google with little return for it. This has been exasperated by the fact that it is increasing more difficult to get affordable rates for important key terms. It is not unusual to see rates as high as $10-15 per-click on many key words. Well you better convert a hell of a lot of those clicks to sales with profit margins larger than $10-15 of your business will be filing for bankruptcy before you know it.
Then there is Google Adwords. It sounds like a great idea. It costs you nothing to join and you can make money by placing Google Ads on your website. Every time someone clicks on one of those ads on your website, you account is credited. It sounds like free money and theoretically it is. Who would want to sign up?
However, everything is not so wonderful in Googleland. They have a ton of rules. I read them all and I believe that I observed them all. However, I received this lovely email from Google
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Hello Joel J Heim,
While going through our records recently, we found that your AdSense account has posed a significant risk to our AdWords advertisers. Since keeping your account in our publisher network may financially damage our advertisers in the future, we've decided to disable your account.
Please understand that we consider this a necessary step to protect the interests of both our advertisers and our other AdSense publishers. We realize the inconvenience this may cause you, and we thank you in advance for your understanding and cooperation.
If you have any questions about your account or the actions we've
taken, please do not reply to this email. You can find more information by visiting
https://www.google.com/adsense/support/bin/answer.py?answer=57153&hl=en_US.
Sincerely,
The Google AdSense Team
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This message was sent from a notification-only email address that does not accept incoming email. Please do not reply to this message.
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They do not tell you what you have done wrong. They will not tell what you have done wrong. The link will give you some generic possibilities. But it also says that they cannot tell what specifically you did wrong because doing so will reveal proprietary information concerning their algorithms. Now I do not know what they think I did, but I certainly did nothing that would threaten their advertises–I was one!
There is no appeal from the situation. The only appeal that Google accepts is if you have been banned for checking on the Google Ads on your own page. Obviously this is a temptation as you make money when those ads a clicked, so why not do it yourself? Well Google’s algorithm will catch this and rightly so, because the advertisers are not getting interested prospects with their advertising bucks. I know that I did not do this, so I am left with no appeal from this banning.
Google provides no second chances. Everyone makes mistakes and a descent thing to do would be to identify what they think you did wrong and allow you the opportunity to correct. But of course senses that will not even tell you what it is that you supposedly did, then you cannot possibly rectify the situation.
Then comes the real kicker, whatever money you have in you account that is due you–they take it. Yes they do not pay you! Instead they say they redistribute it to their advertisers. That might make sense if there is a direct relationship between what you did wrong and those particular ads. That would be the case if you made money by clicking on ads on your own website, but for anything else there is little to no connection between the two. Of course you have no idea if there is any connection because they will not tell you what you did. In my case it was not much money, something like $40. But quite frankly, I consider it a theft that Google has perpetrated against me.
This experience is not mine alone. I have heard of this happening to many online marketers. In addition the same thing happened recently to an advertising coop in which I am a member. This coop is run by one of the most honest individuals on the internet. I am convinced that he did not intentionally violate Google’s rules and I doubt that he actually violated the rules. In that case Google took a couple hundred of my dollars and thousands dollars from the coop overall. Was there any explanation? Of course not. Google does whatever Google wants.
While Google is not a governmental agency and therefore can do or not do business with whomever it wants, Google is so dominant on the internet that its power is dangerous. Especially, when it acts in such tyrannical ways. They are prosecutor, judge, jury, and executioner, and are accountable to no one but themselves. They hold all the evidence and do not have to share it, do bother to inform you of the charges, find you guilty, banish you from the Google kingdom and seize your assets. Big Brother is here and it’s a corporation. This all stinks and so Google joins my Stinkers List. They deserve it!_______________________________________
I
turned $10 into $31,250 within the first 30 days: This is a pyramid scheme that is so cheap ($10) and promises so much ($31,000) that it is very tempting. It got me when I was new to making money on the web! For your $10, you get a software package, mostly containing ebooks and by doing this it probably avoided being illegal. (Remember, I am NOT a lawyer and so I am NOT offering a legal opinion.) The software was all I got for my $10, as I never got any payments to my PayPal account. The program also claimed to have been featured on TV programs such as 20/20 and Oprah Winfrey and also written up in the Wall Street Journal. My research has not been able to find any validation for such claims. Fortunately, this scheme seems to have mostly died out and I do not see it very often. Moreover, last I check the software provider was no longer online. Still you are likely to encounter this at some point in time and as much as each of us could use the $31,000, I suggest you keep your $10. If you would like to check out the hype you can click below:
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It Pays To Learn (IPTL): It is with regret that I move the previously recommended site, ItPaysToLearn (IPTL), to my "not recommended" list. IPTL
was never a big earner, but it was fun and I made a couple of hundred
dollars at it. It was listed on my "Other Income Page." However, it transferred to new ownership on January 1st and the direction the new owners have taken it is very disappointing. The
results is that it has been turned into an exclusively paid to accept
offers site, as if there were not enough of those already around.
Those sites perhaps get you discounts on your purchases but you do not
make money on them. So as a money-making site it now has no value and
is an inferior product. There are still quizzes on the site, but now there is really no incentive to take them. So it no longer "pays to learn." Finally,
I had money on my account, and my balance was zeroed out, meaning that
somebody other than me ended up with my money. I assume this happened
to other members as well. And that does not speak to the time and
financial investment I had in building a downline at the site. All
this means that IPTL now fails to meet the ethical standards required
receive a recommendation at AccerTurth. And so IPTL joins AccerTruth's Stinkers List (phew!)
MyNetMarketingCenter: It is with great regret that I move MyNetMarketingCenter and related product and programs by Howard L Moreland to the Stinkers list. This includes the following products that had been promoted by AccerTruth:
- MyNetMarketingCenter Affiliate Program
- My Free Ads Secret
- My Super Free Ads Secret
- My Perpetual Products
- My Free Credit Repair
- My Automatic Money
All of these programs have simply disappeared from the internet. I suspect that many people are owed a great deal of money by Mr. Moreland and I know that I am owed a small amount.
AccerTruth, while being clear that MyNetMarketingCenters
affiliate program was unproven, had been very high on this program and
its products. While they were over-hyped a bit (not unusual on the internet), I found them to be solid products. What made
these products so different from other affiliate programs was all the marketing
resources and step-by-step guides that were provided for free. However, in recent months I had noticed that the links on many of the web portals (which was the nature of many of these products) were not being updated on a regular basis. Looking back now this appears to have been a warning sign, but at the time I was just annoyed by it. I have had little success in tracking down what happened. In other words, I have no idea if it was the case of simply a failed business or something more sinister.
In any event, you cannot currently purchase any of these products. However, my suggestion is that you stay away from them even if they reappear on the internet. In fact, I know that I will be staying away from any product with which Howard L Moreland is associated.
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Click Here For Products Related to MoneyBank
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Residual-Income-Streams.com: This is a pyramid
scheme that includes a $20 payment to your sponsor and then a $9 setup fee. It is cheap and it only takes two sales for which you would get $20 each to put you into profits. This makes it tempting. It got me!
For your $29 you did get a software package, and by doing so probably avoided being illegal. (Remember, I am NOT a
lawyer and so I am NOT offering a legal opinion.) Nevertheless, it is mostly an empty box. The software was
all I got for my money as I never got any payments to my PayPal
account. Of course the real winner was the owner who got $9 off every purchase. Fortunately, this scheme seems to have mostly died out and its websites are no longer active. Still it could be back up at anytime. If you run across it, I suggest you
keep your money. ______________________________________
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