It Started With a Phone Call.

It started with a phone call – on a Friday no less. On the other end, a long time client and friend who had just been pitched by an internet marketer. Why does this always happen to me?

Excited at the prospect of thousands of visitors coming to his website for only a couple hundred dollars per month, his credit card was just burning a hole in his pocket. Luckily, he picked up the phone first. He was on the edge of falling prey to yet another twist in the never-ending string of internet scams. This particular flavor is vicious, and is sucking the lifeblood out of the very engine of this economy, the small business.

Don't let this happen to you.

First, do not ever believe that a visit to your website has any value whatsoever. Visits can (and are) created by various means - only one of which is an actual live person who is interested in your products or services. There is an enormous incentive in the industry for generating apparent "visits". In fact there has developed a primary market for "visits" to websites as businesses become increasingly frustrated with the return on their internet investments. Up until recently, it was mostly an underground, secondary market that was exploiting the misunderstanding among the general public.

So now I am forced to reveal the unfortunate underside of the search engines and internet marketing in general to him over the phone. It’s not a pretty picture for an advertiser. “Let’s start by talking about what a visit is, and what value it really has . . .”

The incentive to create a “Visit” comes in two primary flavors, and several twists do exist. First, we have the fraudulent publisher - the AdSense master. This person publishes a website with no intention other than to create revenue as an affilliate of a search engine or other pay-per-click marketing company. The second flavor is the "Clickster". This person or firm hires representatives to solicit small business owners with promises of hundreds, or even thousands, of visits to their website for a modest fee.

ConMan #1 - Adsense Master.

Each time an ad on the AdSense Master's site is "clicked", the publisher earns a portion of the revenue that is paid for by the advertiser. The advertiser pays the search engine who then pays the AdSense Master. By this point, I think you have a pretty good idea of what the incentive might be here.

For the AdSense Master, it's not too hard to figure out various ways of getting clicks to occur on an advertisment. In fact, vast networks of people and computers all over the world are involved in exactly this activity, clicking away on ads that are paid for by real companies trying to drive customers to their websites. Are you one of those companies? How much of your money is doing nothing but lining the pockets of the AdSense Masters and search engines? Do you suppose those "visits" are worth one red cent to your company?

Let me clue you in on a dirty little secret: The search engines know this, they permit it, and in fact, they encourage it. The AdSense Master has an enormous positive impact on the bottom line for the search engines.

ConMan #2 - Clickster.

As described above, this scam is more grass-roots based. It's more deceptive, and on a one-to-one basis. Small businesses today know that the internet is the future for their business, but they have nowhere to turn. They have already been ripped of by unknowing web companies that have produced little or no results. One day, someone shows up or calls telling them about the "thousands of visits" they can drive to a web site. Some of them masquerade as search engine optimization companies. Again, we have the same tools for creating visits as the Adsense Master. Their motiviations are the same: To profit from the uninformed small business.

Tip: Visits are not the barometer by which internet success is measured.

Success is measured in conversion, some action by the customer. This can mean a sale, an email, a phone call, subscription, even in a return visit in some cases. There is always some ratio of "visits" to "conversions". The goal is (or should be) to maximize this ratio. "Visits" by those interested only in making money for themselves are not likely to convert.

The long and short of this story is that another small business saved themselves a few thousand dollars by not falling victim to another internet scam. This story is true, and my hope is that by sharing it with you, another small business will think twice, three times, or more before parting with their hard-earned dollars to one of these scams.

If you are still wondering if the deal is “for real” with any person trying to sell you an internet program, you, too, can ring my cell phone. Whether you are a client or not, at least get some advice before making a mistake. There are real programs that drive real traffic that really converts for just about any business. The fact of the matter is that it simply is not cheap or easy to do. If it sounds like a silver bullet, remember to take your wolfs bane.

Steve Szettella
4word systems, inc.
(810)-333-1869