Join the business, drink the koolaid! - Aridni
Personal Finance
Entrepren- eurship
Building Business
Debt Destruction
Follow the Startup Crossing RSS Feed
Join in on Facebook
Follow me on Twitter

Join the business, drink the koolaid!

During the first meeting, I learned that I was talking to a sort of affiliate marketer.  I also learned that there was a startup fee, as well as a monthly fee for the program.  Once you are in the system, you can make money in two ways.

First, by selling stuff and collecting an affiliate fee.  Secondly, you can recruit others to sell the junk and collect a referral fee.  And it’s only going to cost you a set up fee of $126 and a monthly fee of $50 to keep your website running.  I don’t know about you, but this has bad idea written all over it.  Especially when I got to the second meeting.

This time there were two people involved in selling me this system.  The same person from the previous meeting, and someone higher up the food chain came to talk to me.

They began talking, and half an hour later they were repeating themselves profusely; however, their circumlocutory speech was not the real issue.  They mentioned that setting up your business, and getting sales would pay for itself in the first month.  “Okay,” I asked, “So how do you get sales on your site?”

The two looked at each other, then at me before saying, “Well, how would YOU get sales?”

I mentioned I would find some relevant keywords and bid on them in Google Adwords to direct people to my targeted pages.

The two looked at each other, then at me.  They had no idea what I was talking about.  So I asked again what they did.

The way they get products sold from their site is to buy it themselves.  Now at 10% to 50% commission that means they are buying somewhere between $100 and $500 on their sites each month.  All this was to gain some sort of PV (or Point Value in their strange little world) witch somehow gets transformed into cash back.

The money with this is made of course once you get enough noobs under you to buy their own products.  Then you will get a small chunk of change from their sales.

I asked to see the backend of one of their sites.  I wanted to take a look at how much control the pupetmasters gave them.  But of course this must lead up to another meeting!  So I’ll let you know what happens if this meeting ever does.

I feel bad for all of the people who drink the koolaid without knowing what they are getting themselves into.  Which sounds like a lot of people are doing with their ‘pie in the sky’ wishful thinking.