The Quandary – I’m Hooked
The problem began when I sat down to write a personal e-mail to sent to my fellow affiliate marketers. Perturbed by the content of e-mails I was getting that threatened to close my PayPal account, pay me some unrealistic amount of money if I would only sign up for anything from $1.00 to $299.00, provide me with free credits good for God only knows what, even cash and or products for which I had no need. Those e-mails used every word in the English language to entice me into some free sign up to view, to learn, to observe, to receive and ultimately to pay for a free web based business that ran itself while it made me rich. For a while I thought I was dealing with the car business where buying a body and paying extra for the wheels was a normal occurrence.The irritation was minor compared to what I felt about the result when you answer one of these E-mails. Sounded good, sign up now for free, earn a gazillion dollars before breakfast and if you sign up all your friends and relatives, they’ll get rich too but not richer than you because you get all their slag – offs. Sounds good right? Imagine my surprise when I awoke the next morning to 387 e-mails in my box. Eagerly I began opening them up…especially the ones that began…payment received check your PayPal account or ‘ you have money in your ClickBank account’. When opened, each of them said the same thing…’that’s what you will be receiving in your inbox when you upgrade – buy – rent – borrow – to the next level and don’t forget to drag your downline with you or those relatives will be richer than you’. That is if you receive anything at all.Then there’s the idea of having your very own website. First those e-mails told me I had to have one…sign up pay for it now and sell to your hearts content. I mean even the products were provided and I would get all the money from sales from my site and a percentage from the downline. Wonderful – sounded great. I then had a web site someone else designed and operated – and oh yes I forgot, a web site was no good without an autoresponder, a blog setup and a tweeter machine. I got them all. The emails were up to a thousand a day and I lived for the one liners that dictated whether I designated them read or delete.Autoresponders seem to have one serious problem…they send at command, timed or otherwise, and do not respect the fact someone else may already have offered me the same product, offered to discount it, lied about only 6 remaining….they’d sell 600 if asked…and needless to say my PayPal account was very active – unfortunately all outgoing.Another week and I was deep into clicking for credits, for money, for surveys – each one brought a new series of requests for upgrades, new products and services; none sent money. I think someone is getting rich by picking up all the referrals that go down the drain when the inviter goes belly up from frustration, or got buried in the return e-mails I was sending from my own autoresponder. One site wouldn’t let you get the fuzzy letters right so you could never login to ask for payment. One offered to pay well for a click service that only paid out at $5000 which was almost impossible to reach in the time allotted. There was the one that paid out a $1000 but paid a cent a click. Old Rip Van would need every sleeping moment awake and would certainly have bolted up at the sight of the $100 to $500 click site. I didn’t try to join that one figuring the buy would have to $50,000 when I noticed the payout minimum was $50,000. It was stretching my credibility, never a difficult thing to begin with, until I took a break to avoid looking at the dwindling balance of my PayPal account.And then came dawn. One morning I woke up to find my web site was getting an inordinate number of hits and visits. None of the products I had listed were selling, the results of my own bad choices, but at least people were looking. Imagine again my surprise when it turned out it was my efforts with the manual tracking programs for some part but mostly it was the purchases I had made on the affiliate sites that did sell from time to time, success being a matter of how many times you duplicated the process. I was finally a success at getting people to my site. Now if I could separate the real people from the affiliate clickers who offered and bought each others promises of riches for buying the system – to hell with the products leave those to the newbies relatives – I began to sell an actual product. Wish me luck, for its off to the autoresponder for e-mail time. I’m hooked again.
