Wednesday 2 March 2016

Important: Please Beware of Any Online Money-Making or Internet Marketing Courses! [A True Story Shared In Singapore]


Some time ago, RedWire Times interviewed a 36-year-old male sales executive who signed up for a S$5,600 internet marketing course, and who totally regretted it later on. 
What happened, exactly? I will briefly summarized it for you below, so that you would not part with your hard-earned cash so easily too. 
The sales executive (let's call him Mr Y) first found out about the course on his Facebook feed, as the course owner has apparently advertised there. He described the advertisement as very impressive, featuring many successful students holding up big cheque and smiling broadly, posing with the course organizer himself.  
THE COURSE PREVIEW - ONE OF THE MOST DANGEROUS SALES PITCH SESSIONS THAT YOU SHOULD NOT ATTEND AND WHY
This 'trapped' him into the course preview, which Mr Y went. He was, as per other similar course previews, shown how much money the organizer (let's call him Mr X) and his students had been making using the internet. But due to his excitement, he failed to realise that none of the statistics nor material possessions were verified by anyone or a third party - he was just shown pictures after pictures of glorious and luxurious lifestyle of these people who have 'made it' via the course.

Mr X, according to the RedWire Times, presented the preview as though his income are on auto-pilot, and as though money will keep on coming in through internet marketing passively.

Mr Y was also asked to buy handouts to see what is included in the course, and he did, which I thought was quite weird, as usually, for these free internet marketing previews that I went to (and I've been to enough to know their patterns and styles of operations), these were given out for free.

These were printed on the handouts, and the following comments are from Mr Y himself and by me:

“NO TECHNICAL KNOWLEDGE IS REQUIRED”
Comment from Mr Y: Not true. A lot of technical knowledge is involved. It was left to us to come up with our own website.
Comment from MyInternetMagic: You will definitely need to know how to set up a basic website if you do not want to outsource the work to someone, and even if you outsource, you will need to know what to outsource so that you do not get cheated.Other small miscellaneous setups such as autoresponder, various plugins such as SEO plugin, security, formatting, etc. will all need you to do yourself as it is really too much money to outsource.
“NO START UP COST NEEDED”  
Comment from Mr Y:  Not true. Not only do we have to pay for the cost of hosting, there are A LOT of hidden costs that were not mentioned during the preview.
Comment from MyInternetMagic: This is even more untrue. There are startup costs here and there, such as domain name, domain hosting monthly, payment for a web developer to set up your website if you do not know how to, payment for someone to set up an autoresponder, payment for an autoresponder, etc. 
And the biggest chunk of the cost will come from ads, more specifically Facebook ads, which will suck up a lot of your capital. No one will bother to tell you this information at all. Think for yourself - if you set up a website, but there is no traffic, how do you get traffic instantly? Of course, there has to be some ads directed to your website. This works the same way for a brick-and-mortar shop - where you have to buy ads such as TV, radio, outdoor, or digital ads to drive traffic to your store.
“IT IS A FULLY DONE FOR YOU SYSTEM”
Comment from Mr Y: Not true. There is no such thing as FULLY DONE FOR YOU, because there are still a lot of things to be done. The so-call FULLY DONE promised and delivered was probably at most 5% of the whole system.
Comment from MyInternetMagic:  As per my explanation above, this is completely untrue. If it is fully done for you, it would not generate traffic for you monthly at all. You will still need to fork out cash to run ads such as Facebook ads to drive traffic to your 'system'.

After the preview, Mr X told the attendees to sign up on the spot, telling them that there are limited seats left. According to the interview on RedWire Times, Mr Y said this was not true because he found out later that even after the preview, there were still people signing up for the course!

Unfortunately, it was too late by the time Mr Y found out, because he had already succumbed to the pressure and signed up like the others, believing 100% what he was told in the preview. And what exactly happened during the 2-day Internet Marketing, Make Money Online Course, which Mr Y paid more than S$1,800 for?

Read on...
DAY 1 OF COURSE
To summarize, Mr Y said he was only taught how to create advertisements using Facebook for the entire 8 hours!
The course did not teach him how to sell on the internet, nor how to market his own products on different platforms other than Facebook. Throughout the course, he was just taught how to set up Facebook ads to promote Mr X's course (for a very attractive referral fee), a total waste of time and money. As well, the amount of money you put into Facebook ads might not be recovered if there is no lead at all, something which he did not tell you before. 
Comment from MyInternetMagic: For your information, anyone can learn how to create advertisements using Facebook online, for example on YouTube (just google for what you need, example 'How to Create Facebook Ads 2016 to get the latest information), or Udemy for just USD 10 (just google for a Udemy discount coupon online). There is no need to pay more than S$1,000 to do so. 
If you prefer to read words or text, then just follow the simple instructions on Facebook Help Centre. It's very simple. Even if you take a course for someone to teach you, you will still need to do it yourself later on. Alternatively, you can join our Facebook Group - No Nonsense Internet Marketing to get such free courses from us - there is no need to pay anything at all.
DAY 2 OF COURSE
Mr X taught them about affiliate marketing, and by then, Mr Y already realised that the cost involved to do affiliate marketing could easily be more than what you can earn. For instance, he mentioned that one has to spend extra money to buy email list, Facebook ads (which I have mentioned before, as one of the ways to drive traffic to your affiliate items), and if you are just starting out, you can easily spend more than $1k to $2k. All these Mr Y was not told during the preview. 
Comment from MyInternetMagic: Again, you can google for free courses on affiliate marketing online, without the need to buy any courses at all.
And the worst thing is, Mr X tried to upsell another course (his 2nd one) using the same method, counting down the number of seats left to pressure the attendees to buy on the spot. This 2nd course costs Mr Y another $3.8K, which he naively signed up for again.
2ND COURSE'S CONTENT

During the 2nd course, Mr X promised them a series of modules that they will be going though together. But in actual fact, only 2 modules are conducted as a live training! The rest of the modules they have to go home and download videos to learn, and Mr Y found out later that all are old training videos.
Comment from MyInternetMagic: In total, Mr Y spent more than S$5,600 which he could have got the content for free online. So do be careful of all these money-making seminars - some are quite aggressive in their ads and you will likely see them everywhere on Facebook e.g. Internet We***h M**te*y, We*l*h Internet A**d**, Ea*ypre**** and many more. If you are suspicious of any course, google for them online. Alternatively, follow this site for more information. And, if you must go to such a course preview, go without your wallet and credit cards.

Credit for content of this article: RedWire Times
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