I wouldn't call this the biggest scam on the web; not by a longshot. But over the years unscrupulous merchants have relieved unsuspecting internet marketers of so much of their hard earned money that I feel it needs to brought to light.
At one time or another, particularly while we were learning the trade, most of us have answered the beckoning song of promise by investing in a slew of "guaranteed signups." You've been there, right?
You bought and received the signups. If you ordered a thousand, you got maybe 1,150 or so. Not bad. A great over delivery. You're happy.
But have you been tracking your results? Have you been checking the IP addresses of your signups? Have you been emailing your signups and checking your bounces? And how many sales have you made?
Well, if you haven't tracked anything, then you deserve it. That's rule number one. TRACK EVERYTHING!
Now if you have been doing some meticulous tracking, you're going to see that most if not all of your signup email addresses originate from the same IP address. You'll also see that the bounces are astronomical, and your sales and upgrades are zero.
Tell me, how many sales did you get out of theses guaranteed signups? None, right?
Looks like a bad investment.
It was.
You bought a hundred guaranteed signups and paid a sawbuck for them. You received 112 signups, which cost you $ 0.089 each. That's less than a dime a piece. Good deal.
Except for the fact that you didn't make a dime off this deal and you're not going to send out any emails to a bunch of bounced addresses. And even if you didn't get many bounces, you still won't make any sales from future mailings because the recipients aren't in a position to buy a thing.
What has happened is that your vendor has recruited a bunch of third worlders who earn about two bucks a week doing back breaking labor. These he then pays a penny or two for every signup they execute. A hundred signups can bring in a week's pay for one of these people and they're happy to work all day, into the wee hours of the morning signing up to everything that's sent their way. Of course they'll never upgrade and they'll never buy a thing.
So what you bought is a bunch of dead, unqualified leads that have about as much value as a dead mackerel baking in the sun. Your vendor on the other hand, has collected your ten bucks, paid out $ 2.24, leaving him with a nice profit of $ 7.76 That's over a 70% markup for delivering a worthless product. Not bad. And you're even thanking him for it!
Now guaranteed signups are not to be confused with guaranteed hits, or clicks. Here we're running into the domain of solo ads, which will be a subject of a future post. You need to be very careful here too. this segment of the industry is teeming with flaky vendors and it's easy to blow a lot of money for junk traffic.
If you're intent on buying traffic through solo ads, then Mathew Graves is about as reliable as they get. He doesn't make any promises, but he does guarantee that you'll get at least a thousand hits.
Mathew will mail out your solo ad to his own list of more than 40.000 active buyers and he'll keep mailing until you've got your hits. These are as qualified a group of buyers you can legitimately expect to find in a solo ad service and the cost is only seven bucks. So Mathew has my recommendation and if you want to try getting traffic through solo ads, this is a good place to start.