What to Avoid (part 1)
First of all we will look at the ‘opportunities’ that are best avoided, and explain why they should be avoided.
Although I do have specific examples of these ‘opportunities’ I will use general terms rather than naming the individual websites or programs concerned. The reasons for this are twofold; firstly there are too many to name them all and I don’t want to give them impression that if it isn’t named here then it must be OK and good to use; and secondly because some of the people running these websites and programs are considerably richer than me and would quite happily sue me for naming them here!
I have made a lot of money and enjoy a good lifestyle, and I would like to keep it that way if at all possible…
Reverse Opportunities
Now you may not find any explanation of what I call a reverse opportunity on any search engine or on wikipaedia , mainly because I made the term up myself.
What I mean by a ‘reverse opportunity’ is an opportunity that someone may offer through an advertisement or email that appears to make sense. On the surface it would look like a genuine way to make money, but in reality it is purely of benefit to someone else entirely. Spotting them can be difficult, because they do seem to make sense and could possibly work in the way they are explained by the seller.
A typical example of a reverse opportunity would be a ‘Google Adsense’ income opportunity. Now I have been careful to avoid any of the branded products or websites who promote these opportunities for the reasons I stated above.
How they work, in theory, is that you pay your money and in return you receive a mini website containing any number of article pages, sometimes hundreds of them. You are given a quick and easy way of including your own Google Adsense publishers code into each of these articles. You then upload all of these pages to your web hosting account and submit your website details to as many search engines as possible, plus promote them in other ways that they will suggest to you, such as social network advertising, exchange links etc.
Because you have dozens, or even hundreds, of articles on various subjects you could get visitors from the search engines or other advertising looking at your pages to read the information in those articles. A small percentage of these visitors may then click on your Google Adsense links contained in these articles and if they do you earn a few pennies for each click. If you get enough people visiting your pages and clicking your links then you could make a lot of money. That is the theory anyway.
In reality, there will also be hundreds, maybe even thousands, of other people with exactly the same articles on their websites as you. The search engines would then ignore your article pages or list them very low down in their rankings, because they have exactly the same content as all of the others. This means that the chances of anyone finding your article page to read and possibly click one of your Adsense links is extremely slim. Your chances of making any money from them are almost none existent.
But where is the ‘reverse’ part of the opportunity? Who can possibly benefit from this? Well that is the clever bit.
Each of the Articles that you have uploaded to your web server and promoted will contain a website link underneath the name of the Author. By uploading that article and promoting your mini-site you will be creating additional one way links back to the Author’s own website, thus increasing his own search engine rankings and giving him more visitors and thus more sales from his own website.
Furthermore, the Article submission website that linked the Author and the person who sold you the Adsense package (if they were not the same person) would have had additional visitors and sales, and then the person who sold you the package would also have had a sale.
So you would in effect be paying out your own money to:
1. Make profit for the Adsense package seller.
2. Make profit and increase visitor numbers for the Article submissions website.
3. Promote the Author’s own website by boosting his search engine rankings.
4. Promote google’s Adsense service.
And after all that, you would be very lucky to even get back the money that you spent on the package in the first place, never mind make a in income from it…
Now I’m not saying Google Adsense isn’t worth doing, because it is. There are ways that work that I will cover later on.
Another example of a ‘reverse opportunity’ would be something you could buy from a website or even on ebay. A ready made website. Now some ready made websites can be great and make you a bit of money, especially if they are already operating and have existing visitors and products being sold from them. These good and worthwhile websites would probably cost you a couple of thousand pounds at least to purchase. The ones I am talking about are the ones you can buy for anything up to about £100. Typically these would be either google adsense websites (as covered above), classified advertising websites, dating websites, lingerie websites, adult toy websites etc.
Now with any of these websites they could possibly work in theory. Im sure they probably would work if you had an additional few thousand pounds / dollars or whatever your currency is to spend on promoting it through quality online advertising, search engine optimisation, newspaper advertising and so on. But the fact of the matter is that you still would have no guarantees of making back your money, and in any case if you had that much money to spend on promotion then you would probably have had your own better quality website built for you in the first place and wouldn’t need the cheap and cheerful one.
What happens in most cases is very similar to what happened with the Google Adsense package above. You buy the cheap website, you submit it to a few search engines, maybe place a free or exchange banner ad to promote it a bit more, and wait to see what happens. Well, if you do a quick search on google for classified advertising websites, or any of the other types of websites they tend to sell, you will find many thousands of results. How will you get anyone to use your new website, if they can even find it, when there are many already established sites out there already?
If you wanted to place a classified ad somewhere, would you use a small site that you struggled to find and that has few, if any, ads on it already? Or would you use one from the first page of search results that obviously has many visitors, thousands of ads already placed, and will give you more chance of selling your item? Again you will lose out and will probably give up on the site within a few months at most. So who wins here?
1. The person who sold you the website has made a sale of a website and maybe also a hosting account.
2. The person who sold you the website will have a link back to his own website at the bottom of each page of your site, something along the lines of ’site designed by abc design’, so when you list your site on any seach engines you are creating one way links back to his website, increasing his own search engine position, and boosting his business.
3. If products from another source are being sold from the site (lingerie, adult toys etc) then there may well be links to the supplier somewhere within the site, so again one way links back to them are being created each time you promote your site.
Again you will be lucky to make a penny from the website but you have still paid out money to help grow other peoples’ businesses.
There are other examples of ‘reverse opportunities’ but the principles are very similar. You are encouraged to buy something that will do you no good at all but will help other people make more and more money. Before spending your money on opportunities have a good think if they could fall into this category. Do a bit of research on the market or on the sellers. It is your money, don’t let them take it from you without giving you something of REAL value in return.
