When “Scam” Is A Scam Of Sorts
Posted by Mitch Mitchell on Jun 27, 2011
Last weekend I finished reading a book by a guy named Brendon Burchard called the Millionaire Messenger, which was recommended by Mitchell Allen of Morpho Designs. It’s a wonderful book with great ideas on how to earn money by promoting yourself as an expert.
 |
I was curious as to what Brendon looked like because he’s a fairly young guy; actually it turns out he’s around 38, but I had the feeling he was much younger. I go to Google and start typing in his name, and you know how it starts listing topics. The second thing that pops up with his name is followed by the word “scam”. I was curious so I decided to click on that link to see what I got.
There were a lot of links under that topic, more than 60,000 to be precise. A lot of the links had his name and “scam” in the topic line. A few asked if it was a scam, and a few mentioned it in the description of what we might see.
Y’all know me; it was time for some research. I clicked on about 10 of these things. I discovered that none of these people actually believed he or his books or ideas were a scam. Indeed, all of them praised the book and the man, even though some didn’t believe it was the type of thing for everyone.
Suddenly I felt scammed by all these people and all the other people that had the word “scam” and “Brendon Burchard” associated with each other. And yet, I know this type of thing isn’t the first time I’ve seen it.
Tell the truth, doesn’t it bother you when a headline totally misleads you? I see this type of marketing all the time; as a matter of fact, many of the so-called online marketing gurus tell you this is a great tactic to increase sales, whether you believe a product is a scam or not. Yeah, it got me to go check out these sites, but I think that kind of thing is disingenuous, hence my calling it a scam in and of itself.
For the record, this guy’s very legitimate, and he’s got a lot of energy. He’s written some other books as well. He talks about how he’s made millions and talks about pricing and marketing and getting the money you deserve to get. He gives you both pointers and motivation. True, it’s really not for everyone, but what book or program is?
This had to follow up my post about not falling for scams, didn’t it? Well, it’s something else to look at, that being people who purport something as a scam only to find out it’s not a scam. Personally, I wouldn’t buy anything from these people; I’d find someone else who was talking about that product legitimately and buy from them instead. I can’t imagine supporting anyone that tricked me in such a fashion; can you?
Or am I being too sensitive about this type of thing because I wouldn’t do it? What do you think?
Copyright secured by Digiprove © 2011 Mitch Mitchell
Determining A Scam Through Math
Posted by Mitch Mitchell on May 7, 2011
A few days ago I was sent a link by someone I know. It was to have an opportunity to listen to a webinar that was broadcast in November if I happened to sign up on a particular website by 11AM today. It proposed teaching us how to make 6-figures within 90 days doing online marketing.
 |
Yeah, the scam meter was up, but it was free so I figured what the hey. I might pick up a thing or two that I hadn’t yet tried before, right? So, around 4 minutes before 11 I went to the site, put in my first name and email address (throwaway email address), and waited for the link to the webinar, which came about 5 minutes later.
I’m not going to say who these guys are; frankly, they don’t deserve the publicity either way. What I’ll say is that 15 minutes into the presentation I knew they were setting people up for what I’m calling a major scam. Why do I say that? Because 10 minutes in they showed an example of one of the old default WordPress blog themes where this guy had supposedly written only one post; it was something about gout. In that one post he had one link. He’s never written another post, ever. He only had the one link, and it went to a book on how to cure gout, which he supposedly bought to cure his gout. And they said this guy was making $30,000 a month from just that one post and one link for over a year.
Minutes later they showed another thing, this time a one page website. Supposedly the woman that wrote it had only written one article, telling a story about her puppy and how he was very misbehaving. She had all sorts of problems getting it to do right. Then she bought a book, which she linked to in the article a couple of times, and all her problems were over. The guy on the webinar said she was raking in $70,000 a month just from that one webpage.
Now think about this for a minute. How much money do most books make? Okay, my book is on leadership, but I might have made close to $1,000 on it over 7 years. Either of these books making this kind of money would put them way high on the New York Times best sellers list. That’s because one would have to assume that if one person was making that kind of money off a book they didn’t write that the person who wrote the book would have to be making at least half that amount, and other people would have to be making major sales off it as well.
The first guy would be making $360,000 a year off one book from one blog post; the woman would be making $840,000 a year off one book off one webpage. I’m betting Stephen King isn’t making that kind of money off book sales online every month; who’s buying this?
I’ve heard promises like this often enough. One of the worst things about being online is that people will sell you a bill of goods that should sound too good to be true? Think about the top affiliate marketer you’ve ever heard of. Some of them have had million dollar product launches; no problem with that. But how many of them sustain that level of sales longer than a few months off one product? It just doesn’t happen. And if it’s not happening for them, then it’s not going to happen for every Tom, Dick and Harry that writes only one blog post ever, pops in a link and does nothing else, not even any attempt to promote it. The numbers just don’t hold up.
That’s why people get weary of what they see and hear online. That’s why many of us defer and want true confirmation of what we see and hear before we’ll buy. This is why it’s hard to trust people.
Unfortunately, I know many people will fall for this scam, which is actually an attempt to get you to spend bigger money to receive coaching from them. Can you make money online? Sure. Is what they’ve shown possible? Maybe one in 500 million times, if that. Don’t fall for this type of thing; always remember that if it sounds too good to be true… well, you know the rest.
Copyright secured by Digiprove © 2011 Mitch Mitchell
Why It’s Hard To Trust People
Posted by Mitch Mitchell on Apr 17, 2011
On this blog and my business blog, I talk about the subject of “trust” often. It seems that I’ve referenced the word 118 times on this blog, 136 on my other blog. Specific blog topics on the two blogs have ranged from my asking What Does It Take To Obtain Trust, talking about When Trust Is Violated, Figuring Out Who You Can Trust, and one article I wrote where I first announced that the three main virtues I judge every person I meet by are loyalty, trustworthiness and honesty.
 via Imagekind |
In this particular case I’m going to revisit a subject I brought up in a post I wrote here back in January titled Why We Don’t Trust Sales People. The quick update is that this guy representing a store we go to often (didn’t work at the store, but the store, BJ’s Warehouse, contracted with these people to offer something special to their customers), sold us a picture window for our living room that, in my opinion, wasn’t giving what he’d said it would give us. Then, 10 days later when he came by to inspect it, I told him I wasn’t sure it was doing what he said it would, to which he replied 12 million people can’t be wrong.
First, the update. The window looks good; I’ll give that to everyone. My wife says she thinks it’s stopped all the leaking we had; I still have grave doubts about that. Maybe air isn’t getting in but the window still gets cold right now, which means it radiates cool air into the house. We had one very weird day last week when the temperature suddenly shot up to 85, breaking a record, before falling back into the 50′s the next day, and on that day the living room was really hot; the new window was supposed to stop that as well.
Then there was this thing about a rebate we were supposed to be getting back. This guy told my wife that she’d be getting a check. Then he told her it would come back through her taxes. I told her it wouldn’t come back through her taxes because one, we’re still paying on some back taxes anything that came would be absorbed into it, and two, he said it would be $900 and I said there’s no way that much would show up. I suggested to her that she tell him she wanted a check from the company, since that’s what he initially told her.
On that day she told him that, and supposedly he went to make a phone call and told her that a check would be coming within a couple of weeks. Fast forward to now. Not only did she never get a check from the company but she could never get this guy to call back from the few times she tried to reach him after that. And when taxes were done, not only did the amount end up being less than half of what he’d stated but I was right, it immediately went to our back taxes. She felt demoralized, and I didn’t feel vindicated in being correct; to me, it really wasn’t a win in any scenario.
Why is it hard to trust people? Because of things like this, where someone sells you a bill of goods that you might not know how to check up front and then end up with something that didn’t give you what was promised later on. Why do many of us have our Spidey senses up all the time? Because we have this fear of being scammed by someone else and none of us wants to be made to feel like a fool.
 via Imagekind |
In my mind, one of the best things about blogging is that it gives you an opportunity to try to build people’s trust in you. By being open and honest over the course of time, your hope is that people will come to respect you, and thus if you have something you want to market or a service you provide, people will look your way because you’ve established yourself and shown people what you’re all about. You’re now one of the most trusted authorities because of your social media presence, right?
Unfortunately, not even close. As I touched upon in my recent post asking if anyone’s listening to you on Twitter, the only people that might trust you are those people who know about you, and in the scheme of things, for most of us it’s not that many people. For someone like me as a for instance, blog is ranked well, over 1,000 posts, put myself out there for the world to see, but with under 200 RSS subscribers and a relatively small cadre of blog comments on a consistent basis what would make someone who’s not a consistent visitor here decide to trust me? For that matter, think about your own circumstance; what do you think could compel people to trust you?
I thought about this a little bit when there was a brief tet-a-tet going on at Tristan’s blog based on a guest post with a title that was, well, kind of inflammatory. Now, the post turned out to be kind of inflammatory as well, but it turns out that the post author hadn’t initially wanted to use that as the title. The title in the end was exactly what the post was about, so it hit it on the nail, but in my mind it brought up this thing about trust once again. I mean, Tristan had to trust the guy to write a post that he thought would be good. The guy had to trust Tristan that the title would be good. In the end I’m not sure that both guys got exactly what they wanted, but each guy got something out of it. But do they specifically trust each other anymore?
Frankly, as I commented there, I’d have never written the post to begin with and certainly didn’t like the implication of the post, but at the same time I’m not sure I would have wanted someone to rewrite my topic line either. I wrote a post on one of my other blogs called I Hate Syracuse.com, where I lamented the comments that newspapers and news sources online allow these days. I then had a long conversation with someone from that website who said he didn’t like the title or the implication, though he agreed with me in principle as to why they allow what they do. I said my title was no different than what newspapers have done for years and he said it was in their best interest to get people to the story, but mine seemed misleading since I didn’t actually hate the entire site. I was thinking that was “pot calling kettle black”, and then thought about the trust issue overall once more. I stuck with my title, as you can see, and they’ve stuck with the trash comments they allow.
Why is it hard to trust people? Probably because we don’t always trust ourselves to make the right decisions either. At least that’s my thought on things, as I think about all the people we’ve allowed into our home over the last 10 years that have given us a bill of goods that haven’t panned out. But maybe I’m being a bit cynical on this Sunday morning; not sure. But if anyone has a different viewpoint on it all, I’d love to hear it. And while you’re at it, if you’ve been coming to this blog for awhile I’d like to know if you trust what I’ve said in the past and why; if not, I’d like to know that as well. And we’ll still be friends afterwards; trust me. 
Copyright secured by Digiprove © 2011 Mitch Mitchell
I Know Nothing About Affiliate Marketing
Posted by Mitch Mitchell on Apr 2, 2011
Lately I’ve been thinking a lot about affiliate marketing, something I’ve been a part of for at least 5 years by now, and wondering “what the heck am I doing wrong?” I’ve made few affiliate sales over the years, but at least I can say I’ve made some. I guess that puts me ahead of a few people, but so many others are really rocking the industry. Then, after yesterday’s escapade and thinking about it some more, I realized one very interesting fact; I know nothing about affiliate marketing!
 by Frédéric Dupont |
That’s a very disconcerting thing to come to, and though it’s probably over the top, especially since I once wrote an article on how affiliate marketing works, truth be told I’ve been looking for answers for a long time. I’ve read a lot of stuff; I even put together a post where folks could download free ebooks on the subject.
Last night on Zac Johnson’s site, as he was talking about another affiliate marketing program, I left a comment saying that it was nice for him to profile, but I wondered how he did things, even though I had read his book Six Figure Affiliate Blogging and even wrote a review on it. No answer yet, but he’s probably still asleep since I wrote it around 2AM.
You know what the problem is? Well, it’s actually twofold. One, I’m not innovative when it comes to marketing in the first place. It’s never been my strong suit, even though I’ve been working independently for almost 10 years now. I’m okay at networking, which has saved my behind over all these years, but marketing; nope. Two, with all the books and such that I’ve read over all these years, information I’ve eaten up and memorized and understood, I’ve never picked up that one big nugget that I’ve really been looking for, and that’s the first 3 steps of it all. And no, I don’t need to read “create a product” or “set up an autoresponder” or “capture emails for lists” again; none of that tells me a thing. I once asked Willie Crawford this question and he said he’d think about it and get back to me on it; didn’t happen, unfortunately.
I belong to Commission Junction as one of my affiliate programs, as you know. I used to pop one of their products or banner ads into every post up until the new year began. At least half of the time the product or banner ad had something to do with the topic of the day. Obviously just showing something that no one was interested in on that day didn’t work, as I rarely made sales from doing all that work, though I did get a few clicks here and there. My question was what the heck was I really supposed to do when I either selected a product or a banner ad from one of these advertisers; that’s the step I’ve never really gotten.
At least I did get one question answered a few days ago on Lisa Irby’s blog, where she had a post, along with a video, titled Why Some Blogs Don’t Perform Will Affiliate Marketing. It wasn’t in the video, which was still neat to watch, but in her response to the comment I made on the blog. I said it sounded expensive to do what she did, having to buy a lot of domain names, and after a back and forth she said she doesn’t buy a bunch of domains, but drives people to an existing site where she markets her items.
That was an aha moment for me because she’s the first person to ever say that from all that I’ve read. It takes a load off my mind to know that I don’t have to do like some of these big time marketers, create a product, buy a new domain name and push it like crazy. Whew! At least stage one is set; I’ve finally learned something useful, so thanks Lisa. That one nugget gave me other things to think about, and really that’s what it’s all about. I now have a better idea for what I could be doing.
In 2009 I wrote a post called Let’s Learn Affiliate Marketing Together; seems we still need to learn that lesson.
Copyright secured by Digiprove © 2011 Mitch Mitchell
Why I’m Now “Mitch Mitchell”
Posted by Mitch Mitchell on Mar 15, 2011
I know the title of this post could seem confusing to some people, but to others they’re probably only now getting another introduction to who I am. My name is Mitch Mitchell; has been for, oh, at least 35 years or do. “Mitch” isn’t the first name I was born with; no, I’m not giving it, but for some people it’s not hard to find. I just don’t choose to use the name, haven’t since I was 16, but people who met me through someone else who gave them the other name tend to use it . Since I don’t like it, I just choose not to tell it to anyone, even if my main organization is called T. T. Mitchell Consulting, Inc.
 |
For all the years I’ve been blogging I’ve always gone by Mitch. It really hadn’t occurred to me to have it being anything else. Yet, at some point near the end of last year I figured it was time to start putting my entire name into blogging. I really hadn’t thought much about it until I started writing my posts about influence. Realizing that I wanted a bigger slice of the blogging and overall internet and social media pie, and other reasons, it suddenly came to me that many people by this time might know “Mitch”, but they didn’t know “Mitch Mitchell”.
Of course, just saying that means nothing without some background. So, here’s a part of the thought process for it all, something that you might think for yourself at some point.
1. I have a lot of articles on the internet. I have my EzineArticles posts. I have articles on my S&S site. I have articles on a lot of other websites that I’m not going to list. I’m in a lot of regular magazines as well, many of them health care related, but other topics as well. I started thinking that it would be easier for people who might see some of that stuff to realize that I’m the same guy who was writing all that stuff, even if it’s across the board.
2. There’s one prominent Mitch Mitchell and one a little less prominent that I’m competing in name against. Let’s face it, I’m not going to overtake the Mitch Mitchell who used to play drums for Jimi Hendrix any time soon, deceased or not. His first name wasn’t really Mitch either, but John. There’s also a reporter for the newspaper in Fort Worth whose name I see all the time; being born in Fort Worth, that’s a strange coincidence to say the least. I think I compete with him on a regular basis; at least in the top 50 listings of the name I come up at #16 because of my business blog, and at #23 because of this blog. As a matter of fact, out of the top 50 listings only 2 of them aren’t me or the drummer, and none of them the reporter; I can live with that. 
3. There’s another “Mitch”. Actually, I’ve known of Mitchell Allen of Morpho Designs for many years, but our paths rarely crossed until fall of last year when we both ended up on BloggerLuv (which I’m not putting up a link for because it’s possibly gone forever, as it’s not showing up anymore for now) and started talking. Suddenly, being “Mitch” didn’t make much sense anymore with their being two of us showing up in a lot of the same places, and he’d always had his last name attached so it made sense that I do it as well.
4. For that matter, there are a lot of “Mitch’s” out there, even some female ones. Sure, my image accompanies me on most blogs, but I’ve found that if you don’t have a Typepad account your image won’t show up there. Suddenly, I’m just “Mitch” on the wind without any real recognition of who I might be. At least being listed under my full name will get me fairly quickly on a search engine; just the first name wasn’t going to cut it.
5. Of course, my business name is T. T. Mitchell, and I could have gone with that, as I did on LinkedIn. However, it’s so weird having people calling me “T. T.” there, and I’m trying to figure out if I can change it. In the long run whenever I meet people and they call me that I tell them to call me Mitch, and I realized I didn’t want to get into that kind of confusion across the board.
And there you go. It might seem like kind of a complicated process, but I’ve noticed many of you who comment here use both your first and last name, and since I have a long range goal for using my full name it makes sense for me to change over to it now. From a marketing standpoint, it seems to be a no-brainer. In my opinion, it’s much better than a keyword name any day of the week. What are your general thoughts on the subject?
Copyright secured by Digiprove © 2011 Mitch Mitchell
I'm Just Sharing is where I share my thoughts on internet marketing, writing, blogging and many other things. You never know what I'll be posting on. So keep coming back, read, enjoy, and buy something! ;)
