Some English marketer once said “You don’t get owt for nowt” and for anyone not from the North of England or who is not a follower of ‘Coronation Street’ (both of which include me incidentally), this term means: “You don’t get anything for nothing”.

When I began to find out how to make money on the net, I had no money, but like so many others out there, I was desperate to earn a buck. Unlike some however, I was not interested in ‘get rich quick’ schemes, just a way to make a living so that we could pay our bills.

But everywhere I looked, it seemed that I would be offered ‘the secret to making money online’… but only a small part of it. And, if I wanted ‘the whole secret’, I had to ‘click here’ to buy anything from an ebook to an expensive (’guaranteed to earn you mega bucks/get you thousands of backlinks/get you thousands of subscribers’) and probably useless marketing tool.

I saw immediately what these guys were doing (although I have to say that some of them did it very well), but had I wanted to, I couldn’t have clicked to ‘buy their secrets’ because I couldn’t afford them anyhow.

So I went backwards, back through the links that had taken me to these ‘unbeatable offers’ to the original publishers advertising those expensive tricks, and I found affililiate codes. So I said to myself, “why don’t you do the same? Just stick up an ad and if I write something too, then maybe I can make some money online?” (and remember here, I was desperate to earn some cash and I hadn’t found guys like Vic and Griz). So I signed up for a couple of scammers as an affiliate.

Big mistake.

Not only could I not make decent money selling those ’secrets’, but the most annoying thing about it all was finding my email box full to the brim with spam from these guys.

They were not content with having me trying to sell their products to unsuspecting punters, they wanted my money as well. It seems that they knew, that not only were their ’secrets’ worthless, but that most of their affiliates could not sell them either. And the only way to make money was to sell the products to their affiliates.

And it seems that this was ‘the big secret’ to their success.

At that point, I was still almost pennyless and none the wiser about the real secret to making money on the internet. Not only that, but I also didn’t feel good about selling ’secrets’ that I knew didn’t work. I wanted to make a living selling something that people actually wanted, rather than something that would do them no good.

So I went over to ‘adult’ and made real money selling things that people wanted to buy.

Luckily I hadn’t wasted that much time trying to promote the scammers, but it was still time which would have been better spent making money, rather than reading all the bucket loads of crap those guys constantly sent.

And this is also what angers me about the whole scamming business. Many people spend their hard earned cash on fake ‘get rich quick’ schemes, and even those who don’t still end up wasting their valuable time promoting stuff which will not make them the living that all their hard work deserves. And those who refuse to spend their money are simply told “you don’t get owt for nowt’.

make money and go to the beachBy this time, many people will have realised either that they are investing in crap, or that they can’t make money this way despite loads of hard work. And that’s a vicious circle and the reason so many people simply give up.

And while all this is going on, the scammers sit on a beach somewhere and drink to their success, without a thought for all those poor sods working their asses off for nothing.

Which is why, when I came back over to mainstream after making money from adult, I knew I would find a whole sh*load of scams which didn’t work. But now I am finding even more than I ever discovered before.

It would be less frustrating just to concentrate on building my adult sites and carry on just collecting cash. But the reason I came back to mainstream too was because of another old but more useful saying which goes “don’t put all your eggs in one basket”.

But sometimes when I see all the wasted cash and wasted time being spent on mainstream scams, it is tempting just to close the door and head back from whence I came. Just to sell the stuff that makes me money and which brings a little joy into people’s lives, rather than poverty and disillusion.

And if you wonder why this has been just another entry about watching your back when you make money on the internet, well, that’s because I think it still needs to be said, over and over again, until enough people get the message.

Related posts