The Work From Home Illusion
Exactly who do these people think they are kidding? I've recently been surfing the muddy waves of Internet Home Working. There must be millions of people around the globe who are desperate to break into the prosperous lifestyles expounded at these sites, if only you could spare a meagre amount in order to get started.
Why do I say it's an illusion? Is it because there is NOT ONE SINGLE home working opportunity out there that is real? No, that's not it. They are ALL real, except for two important points:
1. EITHER you have to clone the idea to perpetuate the illusion and hope you can fool as many people as possible,
2. OR you have to sell some product (if I can call it that) which purports to be a secret to making large sums of money.
An example of the first one is a website that gives you a choice of joining a scheme and finding other affiliates to join it as well for commission. The second is a little more subtle. It is actually selling you a product, like an ebook for example which contains the secret of doing something to increase your income but at the same time you can toil day and night selling this ebook and all its secrets for even more money.
A very large percentage of these websites (I would estimate about 99%) have a mark across the forehead which sets them apart. Whenever you see this, don't even read it. Just move on.
What's The Mark
The website is a single page sales letter with a very long column of text, testimonials, videos, pictures etc. running down the centre of the page, telling you all about the product or scheme without actually telling you anything useful. If you scroll all the way down, you will almost without fail find a multitude of bonus gifts which are worth many times the amount you are asked to pay and of course all with their iron clad satisfaction guarantee. The real price is always crossed out and next to it a lesser sum available only for a limited period.
Anytime you see a website that exhibits the above characteristics, click the tiny cross on the top right corner of the window.
What's The Latest
These days, the scammers are a little more subtle. The format is still the same but if you bother to read it, you might first meet with a series of emotionally charged rhetorical questions to get your pulse running. I know I'll be laughing when I write them and hope you'll be as well as you read them.
Are you one of those people who's been looking for a genuine opportunity to work from home? Are you tired of hearing about all the other people who've made thousands working from home? Are you fed up of scams that promise a lot and deliver nothing? If so, you've come to the right place. How would you like to work just 30 minutes a day from home and watch you bank balance grow? No experience necessary, no selling, no MLM. Fifteen minutes from now you could be receiving your first commission straight into your online account?
Now for the "I was once like you story"
Believe me, I've been there. Joined one scam after another, lost all my savings and was down and out. But I always knew I'd bounce back. Then one day, I came across X. I couldn't believe it. In the first week alone I made $799. The second week, $1987. In fact, over the last year, I have made a total of $1,189,384. Yes, over a million dollars. Please see bank statement below. But this is just the tip of the ice berg. We are now looking for new recruits to join us.
Yaddy yaddy ya. Testimonials. Yaddy yaddy ya. Picture of house, expensive car, swimming pool, exotic holiday etc. Reiterate the benefits. List of Bonuses. Guarantees. Price. This is a one time fee. Please understand that we have to charge this because we only want serious people to join. Yeh, Yeh.
Analysis
The price is always interesting. It never seems to be a round number. It's usually something like $49, $97, $149. The format and content is designed to stir a very powerful emotion within you. The first one is to make you think you've found something special (like finding an old antique worth thousands whilst digging your garden). This is around the beginning of the sales letter. If you are that charged up, you will read and probably re-read every word over an over again until you can't look for the "buy now" button quickly enough. But I'm hoping the average surfer is a little more astute these days. Nevertheless, judging by the number of sites, the huge amounts of money advertising them on Google Adwords, the effort of choosing key words to achieve high ranking as well as all the other tools you can buy to help you get to the top, needless to say it's big business. But the loser, as always, is the ordinary person (like a housewife who wants to make some use of what little spare time she has between caring for the children) looking to make even a fraction of what is promised at these websites.
Our Greed-Oriented Society
There is of course a much more sinister side to all of this. It began in the mid 19th century with the industrial revolution when a drive to mass urbanisation in England saw the beginning of almost all that is negative in our lives today. If you live in a city or close to one, there is no shortage of people with bigger incomes, houses and cars. There is no end to advertisements in films, on television and radio, newspapers and of course the Internet, to tell us all about who made what and how much they are worth. But does anyone actually stop to think about the effect this constant dose of knowledge overload is having? It's turning good people into greed-oriented, intolerant, hateful, reactive, uncaring individuals whose only goal in life seems to be to get rich or die trying.
Anyway, the main reason behind this article is to ask you to be careful when you're surfing because in many ways the Internet really is a spider's world wide web. You can get caught and eaten.
I almost feel guilty (after all of that) telling you about my new book "Will of Dreams", but maybe you'll find a moral or two worth reading, even there. Please click on http://www.willofdreams.com to visit the site and learn more about the author and the book. Thank you for your attention.