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'Free Products', the Latest, Great Internet Con

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by: gwydion
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If , like me, you're on a whole range of internet marketing lists you will have noticed the latest trend by the big internet marketers to offer you 'free' products. These come in two flavours:

The Free CD/DVD offer

In this case you're offered a free CD or DVD packed full of videos and useful information. The cost of the 'product' itself is nothing, but you have to pay for postage and packaging. It all sounds reasonable, except that you're paying over the odds for postage and the CD/DVD (which costs pennies to produce) is packed with free reports and products that you could pick-up for nothing on the web or it contains the seller in a video that's been filmed at a meeting somewhere.

The marketer is making money on the postage and reeling you in with the promise of free information that you won't find anywhere else. This is an excellent con and as 90% of those who buy the product won't bother looking at it this really is 'money in the bank' for the marketer.

The second con is much more of a con and far more insidious in my belief:

The 'Free' Money-making Website

If you're an internet marketer then this is an excellent con. The bait is a free money-making website that you will set-up for your customer. The website makes you thousands of dollars every month and you show a check on your squeeze page to demonstrate this. Now you will say that you will set-up the website for anyone who signs up completely free. But the website is customizable so the person signing-up will be able to alter it any way they want to.

You offer them a whole list of affiliate programs that they can join and which you will add to their website for them. These are a combination of your own affiliate programs and programs for which you will earn second tier commissions.

Now, the website and the set-up is completely free, but you have to buy your own domain name and get a hosting package. Unfortunately, because of the cost, the seller will only set-up your website with a single hosting provider. They sell over-priced domain names and over-priced monthly hosting packages from which the seller gets a slice. Basically you're sold the promise of riches but the only one making any money from this scam is the seller. They get a slice of any money you shell out for hosting and they get a slice of any money you make in affiliate commisions. You're also giving them lots of in-bound links to their own squeeze page, making it more attractive.
It's a win-win system for the seller and this is how they get and can show very large affiliate commissions each and every month. Even when you get your site it's pretty-much worthless. It's a cookie-cutter site, exactly the same as thousands of other clones of this site. So you're never going to get good search engine listings. The only way you can make money is by advertising; which means that you shell-out even more money to try and make the site pay for itself.

In reality, the site you get would take a competent programmer a day to generate and you could probably be able to buy a bespoke site of this site for $50 just by paying someone to build it for you. Within three months you could save enough on the over-blown prices for the domain name registration and hosting costs for the 'free' site to be able to pay for this. Moreover, the site you pay for would be completely unique so you could build yourself organic search engine traffic that can really make you an income.

Next time you see an email or an ad offering you a 'free' product just remember to do your own due diligence and you will probably find that 'free' isn't free in any sense of the word at all. You have been warned....

About the Author

Dyfed Lloyd Evans, well as running the Celtnet Articles site and the informative /www.celtnet.org.uk/phpBB2/">Celtnet Forums also runs the Internet Scams and Cons site bringing you up to date information and warnings on the latest internet and email-based scams and cons.

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