I am writing this article for one reason and one reason only – most of the internet businesses marketed as "get rich quick", prey on people who can least afford it and to me this is morally wrong. These companies reach people who have lost their job or had some other misfortune in their life and need to find some way to replace lost income. They are probably down to their last dime and these businesses promise such gigantic rewards. Now how did I come to these conclusions – past experience. The position I had as a contract employee unexpectedly ended during January and by the middle of February, I found myself without much money left. I posted a listing on crags’ list looking for work, as well as registered with Monster.com, Hot Jobs and several other job sites.

By the next week, I was getting all sorts of calls to sell all types of products, but all wanted too much money to buy in. Most of the others after investigation were obvious scams. Then one evening I got a call about a product that interested me. $40 for my website, $10 a month for website maintenance, a product coach, a grant for advertising and a warranty in which I could get my money back after one year if things didn’t work out. There were 200 of these independent agents on the Better Business Bureau site and I checked out each one. Everything looked good so I closed by eyes and jumped in.

The next week a package arrived with two credit card receipts to sign, a copy of the warranty, an application for a credit card and some examples of marketing materials. The warranty was not quite what was explain to me – small details like if I canceled before the year was up, I would owe them around $300 and I had to have at least 12 product training sessions. I also noticed that the company’s name was different; phone numbers were different as was the company address. So, I called and asked about these small problems and was told they were doing so well they had to move into bigger offices. Sounds reasonable! I was given the name of a banker to call about my grant and told that I was to contact him. This person asked me the usual application questions – such as "monthly living expenses", "money in the bank", "do you have any savings" – more like a loan application than a grant.

Being the trusting person I am, I answered all the questions and several days later, I was informed that I qualified for a $10,000 grant – whoopee! I knew I could do some awesome e-marketing with that much money. (Here comes the but) But, to show good faith and belief in myself, the bankers wanted me to put up $1000 at $100 a month. Also I didn’t get a website for $40, just a URL re-directed to the company’s main website – well, it is very hard to do e-marketing on a URL re-direct. I was beginning to have suspicions and asked about the details of the grant. How was that money dispersed etc? No one could answer those simple questions for me except that they guaranteed me 9,500 unique visitors. Well, I have been doing e-market and SEO for about 10 years and that did not seem like a very good return on investment I then asked if the website had all the necessary meta tags for Search Engine Optimization – no one could tell me. But against the advice of the little voice in my head, I made arrangements to start my training.

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