How To Start A Business Without Getting Scammed

November 11, 2008


There’s plenty of folk online who’ll teach you how to start a business. Trouble is for every legitimate guy who wants to show you how to start a business the right way, there’s a hundred others waiting to fleece you for every penny you’ve got.

So How Can You Learn How To Start A Business Without Getting Scammed?

Nobody knows how to start a business instinctively. You’ve got to learn from somewhere and if you’re serious about achieving business success, you’ll never stop learning. But you need to make sure you’ve got the right teachers. Otherwise, you’ll waste time and money that you can’t afford to lose.

Now, you’d expect that folk who teach others how to start a business would have done it themselves right? Trouble is, many of them haven’t. So why on earth would they want to show others how to start a business?

It’s One Of The Easiest Things To Sell To Anyone

  • The easiest things in the world to sell are: sex, diet and money. It’s not a trend - it’s always been that way.


  • Lots of folk want to start a business because they want to make money. That’s where the scammers come in.



    • The Illiterate Marketing Guru Who Sucks At Marketing

    I’m always keen to improve my business knowledge. So, a couple of years ago, I downloaded a free chapter of a new marketing ebook. It had a great title, the sales page was expertly written and the “marketing guru” who wrote the book, claimed to have discovered a brilliant new Internet marketing concept.

    • The first chapter of the book sucked. A free dose of herpes would have given most folk more incentive to buy.


    • He’d obviously paid an experienced copywriter to write his sales page. But the marketing emails he bombarded me with, appeared to have been written by an illiterate smurf.


    • He sold his expensive course first - I don’t remember the exact cost but it was thousands, not hundreds. When it didn’t sell well, he converted it into a cheap ebook and said the course had sold out. Yeah right - and I can stand on my head and kiss my own butt at the same time


    • I did a bit of research and discovered that he’d never sold anything, aside from showing other folk how to start a business and make money. And he hadn’t even had a job in sales or marketing.

    But He Must Have Learned While He Earned - So You Could Benefit From That Right?

    Well, not really. And he’s certainly not going to teach you how he made money himself - here’s why:

    He had a huge list to market to and his joint venture partners also have huge lists. Even marketing that sucks still works to a point. So if his conversion rate was low, he could still make money, as he was marketing to huge numbers.


    Couldn’t That Work For Your Business Too?

    • You probably don’t want to start a business showing other people how to make money, so your conversion rates will be even lower if you follow his tips.


    • You don’t have his huge list. So if you’re using his sucky marketing techniques on a small number of people, your results are going to be terrible.


      • But If You’re New To Business - How Can You Spot These Scammers?

    • Check their “about page”. Do they have any past achievements, or experience that would qualify them to teach you how to start a business? Or, is their “about page” a bit vague?


    • Sign up to their mailing list. Do their emails make you want to trust them? Do they make you want to buy? If not, whatever they’re offering isn’t going to be much use to you.



    • Don’t just read the glowing testimonials. Go to the websites of the folk giving the testimonials. If it’s a scam, chances are you’ll see the same old faces giving each other testimonials.

      And if you sign up to their newsletters too, you’ll probably notice the same folk are also promoting each other’s stuff.

      If you’re hoping to start an online business, you might want to check out the online business course, by Naomi Dunford. She shows you six different ways that she’s made money on the Internet in the last year. Amd she’s not promising to make you a millionaire by next week.

      But she’s so confident that she can help you to make money online, she guarantees to give one on one tuition, if you’re struggling to grasp the course. Oh - and her course doesn’t cost thousands. In fact, the first two thousand people to sign up to her Online Business School will receive a 50% discount.


    • Subscribe to this blog in a feed reader and learn how to start a business without getting scammed.



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    Posted by cathlawson | Filed Under Marketing, Planning | 11 Comments 

    Twitter & Stupid Internet Marketing Gurus

    November 10, 2008


    Twitter & Stupid Internet Marketing Gurus is a guest article by Tim Brownson. Tim is a professional life coach and you can find him at: A Daring Adventure Life Coaching.

    Twitter is a great tool for growing your business. All you have to do is build up a large enough network of people following you, spread your word and sit back and wait for the cash to roll in. It’s a simple tactic and one that just can’t fail, or can it?

    I don’t have as many people following me as some of the more hardcore Twitter users and there are several reasons.

    I don’t automatically follow people that follow me. If you have a coffee shop in Belarus and like to chat about knitting and wrestling, it’s doubtful I’ll reciprocate. It’s not a judgment call on you as a person, I’m sure you’re lovely; it’s simply that my knit one purl one and half nelson days are long gone.

    I tend to unfollow people if every post is a link and they seem incapable or unwilling to get involved in any discourse. I have enough links to follow thanks very much and any more is likely to further fry my frazzled brain.

    I’m not famous and people love to follow famous people, even if they are only famous within the relative narrow confines of the blogosphere. Having said that, I do have an insatiable appetite for fame. I read about fame, yearn to be famous and realize that without fame my life is a meaningless travesty. I have one goal in life and that is to be more famous and better known than the Pope. It’s a tall order admittedly, but one I am quietly confident in achieving it by the end of next month.

    To help me with my lofty goal I decided that enlisting the help of somebody that actually knows what they’re talking about when it comes to marketing would be a wise idea.

    I trawled the web looking for small niche companies that specialized in online marketing and specifically social networking. Alas, it was all to no avail; I was simply overwhelmed as there were over 196 million such companies in Florida alone.

    Then I thought ’Why not bring the mountain to Mohammed rather than the other way round.”

    At the time I had about 330 people following me on Twitter and I knew for a fact that at least 20 of those were in the marketing industry and some were undoubtedly gurus. If you’re going to aim high get yourself a guru that’s what I say. I knew I couldn’t fail with Twitter because Twitter is simply dripping with gurus. Admittedly they tend to be self-proclaimed gurus, but beggars can’t be choosers.

    I Twittered my desire and requested people respond to me via DM. I was a little concerned that I was going to have to turn down some people, but hey if world domination (in a life coaching sense of course, I have no plans to invade small countries) is my desire, I’ll have to break a few hearts along the way.

    I blocked out an hour to research my respondents and make a decision to get things rolling. It was an interesting hour spent checking my e-mail, checking my e-mail connection, checking my eyesight and watching my message slide ever further backwards.

    On the upside I didn’t have any tough decisions to make because nobody replied to me, even when I posted a second time

    Could it be that everybody on Twitter is so busy with work that they just can’t deal with any more? That certainly would explain it, but it does tend to fly in the face of the troubled economic times we currently live in. Recession, what recession?

    You could be mistaken for thinking that this was an isolated instance and everybody was just busy that day. Not so. Previously I had asked for help with YouTube marketing three times and Facebook once and got the same response

    I’m a strange fish in so much as when I go on Twitter I read the posts. I know, I know, call me old fashioned, but I like that kind of stuff. I love to chat to people and build up relationships, but I’m starting to wonder if I’m in the minority.

    It seems to me that many Twitterers are so busy shouting at each other and posting links, they haven’t got time to take a look around and see what’s going on. They’re missing opportunities in their haste to tell people not to miss the opportunity they have to offer.

    I’m not at all sure what the logical conclusion to this is, or even if there is a logical conclusion. My hunch is that Twitter may be a victim of it’s own success in the not too distant future. As more and more people dive in seeing it as a chance to sell their product or service, rather than an opportunity to connect. The net result will be that more noise will created and less can be heard.

    This is A Guest Article By Tim Brownson of A Daring Adventure Life Coaching


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    Carnival Cruise Line On Twitter: Maybe I’m a snob but the concept of Carnival Cruise line’s Great Gig in the Sea, Pink Floyd-themed cruise just irritates the hell out of me.
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    American Airlines on Twitter: Thrilled that American Airlines destroyed my luggage.
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    Posted by cathlawson | Filed Under Marketing | 38 Comments 

    Is Blogging Dead?

    November 9, 2008


    Is blogging dead? According to this article by Paul Boutin of Wired it is: Twitter, Flickr, Facebook Make Blogs Look So 2004.

    So Who Killed Blogging?

    According To Paul, blogging isn’t as personal as it used to be. He claims that underground marketing campaigns and journalists are drowning out the voice of the personal blogger. It just isn’t as easy for a blog to rank highly on Google for popular keyphrases anymore.

    Also, Paul claims that blogging made it easy for non techie types to publish their thoughts. But they’re now turning to applications like Twitter instead.

    But Isn’t All This A Bit Deja Vu?

    A few years ago, it used to be easy for your blog to rank highly on Google for popular keyphrases. But this was also the case for the earlier websites. When I built my first website in the nineties, there was little competition. In fact, it was so easy to get a heap of traffic, I didn’t even bother to learn SEO. I just wanted to write and have fun.

    To give you an idea how simple it was, I remember searching “Disney World” on AOL one day and discovering that I ranked number one. The Disney Company ranked below me. No wonder I had thousands of newsletter subscribers. And folk were quite happy to mail me cheques from the other side of the world and wait for their digital product to be delivered.

    Could you see that happening now? I couldn’t. Things change and if you want to stay ahead of the game, you need to change too.

    Is I Still Worth Starting A Blog To Promote Your Business?

    If you have a business, or you want to start one, it’s essential to bring it online. And I still think a blog platform is the easiest way to do this. Using other forms of social networking, such as Twitter, is going to be just as important. But you still need a home on the Internet to bring your Twitter traffic to.

    And you need to work hard and smart and learn as much about marketing your business online as possible. Then, when things do change, you won’t get trampled on by the competition.

    And there’s nothing unfair about it. Millions of blogs are being launched each month. Many of them will only write a few crappy posts, then quit. Can you imagine what a mess the Internet would be, if they could easily rank at the top of the search engines for popular keyphrases?

    What If You Don’t Have Time To Put In All That Work?

    If you don’t have time to put in much effort, wouldn’t it be easier just to use social networks? Social networks are becoming more sophisticated. Imagine if your Twitter profile was more like a blog. It would probably be easy to forget about blogging and keep everything on Twitter right?

    I’ve thought about that a lot. It seems like a great idea and it would eventually bring social network owners a lot of money. But what about you and your business?

    Social Networks Could Become The Free Hosts Of Tomorrow

    The trouble is, many of todays social networks remind me a lot of the old free webhosting services. I had one, so did many others. Obviously, social networks are more sophisticated but you’d still be hosting your web presence on someone else’s space.

    And today, nobody in their right mind would dream of hosting their business website on a free webhost. So if you relied on one social network to promote your business, what would happen to you, if today’s social networks became yesterday’s free webhosts?

    What do you think? Is blogging dead? Or can those who make the effort still thrive? And will social networks become the freehosts of tomorrow?

    I’d like to thank John Hoff of EventureBiz for passing the Wired article along to me. John provides a personalized webhosting service for bloggers. And he takes some of the headaches out of setting up your Wordpress blog, including free installation of Wordpress on your domain name.

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    What To Do When You Can’t Find Customers

    November 7, 2008


    Is it a struggle to find customers for your new business venture? Lots of new business owners find it difficult to get their first customers. I know, because I’ve been there myself. And I get heaps of emails asking for advice every week.

    Now, I could charge an hourly rate to help you get your first customers but chances are, you’re bootstrapping your new business. And you need every penny you have to invest in marketing it.

    Also, you’re probably looking for a quick fix for your customer shortage problems, so you don’t have time to study on a course for several weeks, to find the answers to your problems.

    So, I’ve put together these band aid solutions to help you find new customers fast. Some will apply to your business and some won’t. But I can promise you that they all work, if you do it right.

    Problem: You Have Few Potential Customers Visiting Your Website.

    Solution: Start a pay per click campaign.

    Optimizing your site to get a decent amount of search engine traffic is a good long terms solution. But it isn’t going to bring you immediate results. So, if your budget allows, consider starting a pay per click campaign with Google Adwords, to drive customers to your website. If you don’t have a clue how to run a pay per click campaign, I highly recommend grabbing a copy of Definitive Adwords now.

    I tried pay per click before reading Definitive Adwords and I lost a whole heap of money because I was doing it all wrong.

    Problem: You Have An Online Service Business & You Can’t Find New Customers.

    Solution: It Might Be Faster To Find Your First Customers Offline.

    If you have an online service business, you may be able to find your first customers faster off-line. And if you’ve done your research, you should have a good idea where to find those customers. So now you just need to do as many things as possible to get yourself in front of them. Here’s a few suggestions:

    You could write to potential customers to explain how your service can benefit them and follow up with a call to make an appointment to see them. Or you could cold call - by telephone, or knocking on their door.

    Also, consider having some leaflets made and drop them by hand to prospective customers - if you choose this option, drop at least three leaflets to the same potential customers over a few days. You’ll find you get better results that way, unless your leaflet really sucks.

    And don’t forget to speak to anyone you know who may have the same customer base as you and ask for referrals.

    Problem: You Offer An Expensive Online Service & You Can’t Find New Customers.

    Solution: Offer A Cheaper Product Or Service First.

    If your business is new and you only offer an expensive service, you’ll struggle to find customers fast. Most folk have no problem buying a cheap item the first time they visit a new site but few are likely to purchase anything expensive, before they know and trust you.

    Consider offering a cheaper product or service first. That will help to get some cash in and it’s a good way of adding new customers to your mailing list. If you don’t already have a product or service you can offer, consider writing an ebook that will appeal to potential customers. I know an ebook doesn’t sound like much of a quick fix but the 7 Day Ebook shows you how to write one within a week.

    Problem: You’re Getting Plenty Of Visitors To Your Website But Nobody Is Buying

    Solution: Plug The Holes in Your Sales Process

    Is your site easy to navigate, or would a potential customer need to click several times just to find out what you are selling? Pretend you’re a customer yourself and try navigating your way round your website.

    Or perhaps your sales copy sucks. Did you write it yourself? Do you know much about copywriting? If not, you’re probably losing customers through crappy copy. You could always hire a professional copywriter.

    And if you’re not sure what is stopping customers buying from you, or your sales process has more holes than a string vest, you might want to check out these excellent traffic conversion DVD’s.


    Have you struggled to find customers? Did any of these answers help, or do you have another problem that I didn’t mention?

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    Posted by cathlawson | Filed Under Marketing | 9 Comments 

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