How to make money the maverick way
Today's Adventure in the Biz Opp Jungle:
‘In which Charlie gets snowed into his bed, struggles to
research The Success Principle, and reveals the controversial methods of this online marketing maverick.’
Hi,
Every year I forget how cold January is.
After I woke this morning I spent 20 minutes scraping the ice off my
eyeballs with a tiny screwdriver.
Then my legs wouldn’t start.
I tried turning myself over in bed a few times but nothing. No action
at all. I was snowed in.
I explained all this to my heavily pregnant wife as she ran around
sorting my daughter’s breakfast. I shouted down the stairs to her
about how I couldn’t possibly get up, not for a good while yet.
...and another thing... could she bring me some coffee?
You wouldn’t believe how little sympathy I got from her. The
language that comes out of a woman’s mouth! Honestly! Anyone
would think I was making this sort of stuff up.
I’m always this way after New Year. It takes me a week to get
going. For instance, I’m supposed to be meeting my business
partner in Central London tomorrow to discuss our growing online
health empire.
The only thing that’s motivating me to get on the freezing bus to
Soho is the fact we’re meeting in a drinking club....with an open
fire!
Luckily, the Biz Opp Jungle doesn’t require me to leave the house.
And having gone though all the emails sent to me over Christmas,
there’s a LOT to go through.
So here we go...
My first job of 2010.... to investigate a guy called Mack Michaels...
Is this maverick legitimate?
A reader emailed me to ask about ‘The Success Principle’,
published by Maverick Coaching, run by Mack Michaels, an
American marketer.
This is a $67 coaching product. It offers the classic goal-setting,
Think and Grow Rich, motivational fayre. I haven’t yet sampled the
actual product, so if you have feedback, let me know.
However, I decided to do some digging on Maverick coaching and
Mack Michaels. And what do you know, I found myself SNOWED
IN AGAIN.
Seriously. Trying to do an online research on this product was like
driving into a snowdrift.
All around me... for miles and miles.... wherever I turned.... it was
wall-to-wall glowing reviews. A gleaming whitewash of universal
praise. All these brilliant reviews were written in an obviously ‘salesy
tone’.
This indicated that all these comments were by affiliate sellers.
Now, this isn’t a rare occurrence. You often get a situation where an
internet marketer sells a course that tells other people to promote
his course... thereby creating an army of online sellers who flood
google with praise and links for the product.
To give you an example. It’s a bit like you paying me for a
programme called The Charlie Wright Secret of Making Money.
...In return, I send you a copy of The Charlie Wright Secret of
Making Money...
....Inside it tells you that the Charlie Wright secret of making
money...
...is to SELL The Charlie Wright Secret of Making Money to other
people just like you!
... eventually you get 10,000 people all trying to sell The Charlie
Wright Secret of Making Money, by convincing everyone how great
The Charlie Wright Secret of Making Money really is.
It works very like a pyramid scheme. It’s completely legal, and it’s
absolutely true that there’s money to be made in this way. You
could well make money by selling the Charlie Wright Secret of
Making Money to other people.
But just understand it for what it is. It’s a way of passing down a
very specific type of biz opp business to other biz opp buyers.
Some people DO make this work. However, there seems to be a
LOT of competition out there. Many multitudes all vying to sell on
The Success Principle using the same techniques.
Usually with an affiliate product like this I can find at least ONE
realistic review or comment, but not in this case. The Success
Principle completely dominates the search engines with affiliate
selling comment and nothing else.
However, I did manage to find some stuff out about Mack Michael’s
more expensive product, called Maverick Money Makers.
At $97 per month, I expect that it’s THIS product that you’ll be
urged to buy once you’ve tried the cheaper Success Principle
product.
About the Maverick Money Maker...
Maverick Money Makers is an internet marketing membership
service.
There are mixed reviews of this online. But it’s definitely not a
scam, and Mack definitely has solid, workable information to pass
onto his customers.
He seems to concentrate a lot on the technical stuff about setting
up affiliates, getting high rankings and drawing in names from
google and stuff like that.
Now this is fine. However to my mind there’s too much
concentration these days on newfangled technical systems and
search engine stuff, and not enough about having a good core
business idea.
Anyway, each to their own. I don’t pretend my way is the absolute
right way. It’s just that I don’t use any of these trendy search engine
techniques and I do fine.
But is it ethical?
The REAL downside, as far as I can tell from the various comments
I found on forums… and the few impartial reviews… was that some
of Michael’s recommended methods were “unethical”.
One of his techniques is to use forums in order to drive people to
your own site.
Now, while I don’t agree with hurling luncheon meat at forums , I
don’t think it’s a problem using forums CLEVERLY and SUBTLY to
locate potential customers.
I don’t think you need to invade forums like a crazed Attila the Hun,
but there’s nothing wrong in going to places where your customers
hang out and talk to them about your product or service.
People WANT to hear recommendations. They LIKE knowing
what’s out there if it can solve their problems.
As long as what you have to offer is decent, with a money back
promise, you should be okay.
There’s nothing wrong with using social networks to find potential
buyers. Why should there be? I mean, all the big corporations are
using all kinds of infiltration techniques all the time.
So his first technique I am fine with, if it’s done sensibly and with
restraint.
However his second technique is very dodgy....
The fake job trick
Michaels recommends a strategy where you advertise for a fake job
and get people to respond to it. You then use those names to build
a contact list of customers.
Ouch. You can imagine that being splashed across Watchdog in a
millisecond.
Saying that, he DOES advertise himself as a maverick right up
front. So if you take advice from a ‘maverick’ you can hardly be
surprised is his techniques are controversial.
That’s surely the point!
A final criticism of Maverick is that for $97 per month, the continued
supply of new content was not as good as the first blast. And that
while there was a customer service team, you couldn’t ever actually
to communicate with him directly.
I assume by the wall-to-wall search engine presence that Mack
Michaels is now so big, it would be impossible to deal with his
customers directly.
This is the common problem with over-selling your advice, and why
the best consultancy-style services are limited to certain numbers
of subscribers at any time.
Anyway, I’ll keep my feelers out regarding this. My personal opinion
is that this is a US based affiliate business and it’s not something I
would get into.
I’ll be back with another increasingly ‘talked about’ internet marketer
at the weekend.
Later alligator
Charlie Wright
The Biz Opp Jungle