Hi everyone! How often have you had to go take a shower after you read an email, blog post, forum thread, or product from certain marketers?  They tend to make you feel dirty and foolish. There are a lot of scumbags in this industry – and a LOT of victims. I’ve been one. Not from my purchase of things, but as a service provider getting ripped off.

Still, I’m of the mindset that it’s YOUR responsibility to not become a victim. I fought back in my case and I’m going to show you how to as well. It isn’t fair because here you are wanting to learn the ropes of marketing but in order to do that you have to learn from other people. You have no clue who to trust, whose products work – you’re feeling like a lamb being led to slaughter half the time.

Greed is your obstacle – on both sides of the coin. The marketers operating sleaze tactics are full of greed. It’s their mantra – whoever dies with the most stuff wins. But don’t think for a minute we’re not guilty of greed, either as victims.

We are blinded by the riches we want. Very few people (compared to the total amount of individuals trying to succeed online) are willing to slowly build a sustainable, ethical business the right way.

You who follow me for the most part probably are, because you know I steer clear of get rich quick scams. But look around in forums (I see emails come to me too) and people are saying, “What can I do to make money FAST – my mortgage is due, etc.”

Call it desperation if you want, but in many cases, it can bring your ethics to its knees and make you more susceptible to sleaze tactics. You’re willing to write phony reviews. You’re thinking maybe it wouldn’t be that bad to spam for some backlinks. There are so many sleaze tactics it’s hard to count how many exist.

What is sleaze marketing?

It’s teaching someone in a manner that’s void of ethics. It might be a scummy strategy they know will expire and leave you scrambling in a few weeks. It might be the fact that their product leaves out details on purpose because they don’t welcome the competition.

It could be that they whipped up a WSO on how to make money BECAUSE they’re so flat broke they need to scam other people to make rent. It’s whenever they get so excited that some “bigger than them” marketer agrees to blast his list for them IF they’ll blast for him – and even though they KNOW he spams his list and the quality of his stuff stinks, they do it anyway because they want to level up.

It’s the person who charges $997 for their product worth only $27 because they learned it will be more in demand and people will max out their credit card if they put a catchy title like, “Make $1,976 in the next 24 hours with one push button technique!”

That’s sleaze marketing.

Look at this sleazy tactic that so many newbies succumb to: Fake “I Got Scammed” Review

Not only did this guy catch someone they know of a discount (lie), but they also lied about being an affiliate.

Who is practicing sleaze marketing?

You can pigeon hole a bunch of people, like “everyone in the Warrior forum” or “gurus” because then you look ridiculous. It’s obviously not true. It shows your anger and frustration, but it also means you aren’t taking responsibility for your victimization.

I got ripped off by one marketing guru who always kept promising to show me the ropes. He always got me to charge less, with promise of a big payday later. I let this crap go on for YEARS before I wised up. What made me stay? GREED! I wanted that big payday – I was soooo jealous that I was writing an eBook for $1,000 bucks and he’d make $10,000 on day 1 of his launch. I wanted to be able to someday lock arms with him and JV as a partner, not a service provider.

I wanted just enough info from him to know what marketing was all about and I figured once I learned, I would be able to THEN ethically teach it myself. Once I caught him scamming me, I felt like I had been whoring myself out. I stopped and boy was it hard. I had to turn down what had been steady work for years. But I felt clean and good and proud.

Many of these sleaze marketers – you’d never know were the scummy ones. They are the sweethearts in forums. They’re sometimes the most helpful ones, or the funny ones who make you laugh. But behind the scenes, they’re engaged in back scratching. “Hey you start a thread about MY product, and then we’ll have 10 more people from our mastermind group compliment it, and later I’ll come in and ‘aww shucks, thanks’ in front of everyone!”

I’ve seen this. Angered me SO bad when I found out it was some of the people I thought were good eggs.  Think I’m alone in knowing this goes on? Read this – this guy’s seen it too! It’s a strategy being TAUGHT!

So the answer is – you won’t know (could be a grandma, a moderator, or even someone who teaches ethics), but there are clues you can watch for. We’ll get into that in a second.

And don’t even try typing in (product name) + scam. That’s already been taught as a way to attract suspicious people and convert you into a customer.

When are you at your most vulnerable?

When you’re already at your rock bottom – when bills are past due, when a loved one passes away, when you’re lonely and scared and reaching out for help – that’s when the sharks start to circle and prey on your desperation.

Don’t think for a second these people (men and women) feel bad about your situation. They are looking at vacations THEY want to take, lying to themselves and saying they worked hard to get where they are – and your situation isn’t their fault, and convincing themselves their product might help you if you’re smart enough to “put it into action.”

Did you know some marketers were teaching others to blame the customer whenever they’d fail? They had catch phrases like, “it works IF you take action” (heard that one?) or “for those who are SERIOUS about making money online” (as if you were working this hard for fun).

The ones who take their time and aren’t desperate rarely get taken advantage of if they are diligent because they’re not rushing. They weed out the sleaze from the ethical marketers and pursue opportunities that are realistic.

Where sleaze marketers are lurking.

Allllll over the place! For all you know, I could be one (but I’ll show you how to find out in a sec). They’re in EVERY forum. They’re friends with a marketer who you DO trust wholeheartedly. They’re in free giveaways. They’re on ClickBank, PaydotCom, and every other processor. They’re sometimes top marketers on IM Report Card or have glowing reviews by the dozens on Amazon.  They rank high on Google because they aren’t stupid – just shady!

The ONLY one who can identify them is YOU – trust NO ONE (not even ME) to tell you who’s legitimate and who’s not. YOU are your expert, once you know how.

Even reviewers who are seemingly in the same boat can’t be trusted much of the time. This article explains recent news that researchers are developing ways to weed out sleaze tactics, like fake reviews in the marketplace. (hooray!). Look at this scenario the article discusses:

In February, the owner of a home improvement company in Texas posted an advertisement online for “a writer who can write and post 25 positive reviews” on eight popular websites, including Yelp, Google Places, and Citysearch. A man in Chittagong, Bangladesh, won the gig and agreed to do 200 fake write-ups for $100. Within days, rave reviews for the company started popping up online. The business owner, who spoke on the condition of anonymity, says he doesn’t feel bad about the deception. He says clients call all the time extolling his service, but they don’t post reviews.

What a SCUMBAG!!! He feels no remorse. If your business was that great, people WOULD go online and post reviews – or you could tell one of those “MANY” (wink wink) satisfied clients “thank you, and I’d love it if you’d post your feedback for others.”

Now is that so hard? No – but you don’t do that because you’re SLEAZY! And a Texan – UGH – get out of my state!

How you can protect yourself from this minute on.

First the stuff you don’t want to hear: Online marketing is NOT what you want to do if you’re unable to put food on your table and you’re about to lose your house. If you want to succeed, it takes a little awhile to build a long-term non sleaze business. It will NOT happen in 48 hours, period.

So if that describes you, PLEASE go try to get an offline job to take care of bills. If YOU tell yourself you’ll allow yourself to dabble in the sleaze JUST until you take the edge off financially, like selling a WSO on how to make money that you rewrote from another marketer, then YOU are part of the problem and should be ashamed of yourself.

Protecting yourself from sleaze marketing means you’re able to think clearly, have time to investigate and dip your toe in the water to see if a shark bites it. Desperate, panicked people do not have time and are not thinking clearly.

First, you have to read – a LOT! You have to go to forums, not “reviews” and see what people are saying abut this person. Do some investigation and see if you see them reply on the forum with a username that’s not their real name. Like “giftguru” or something. Take that username and plug it into Google. See what else they’re posting online. They may be in some other place talking about how they make money and get you to buy. (Scumbags often like to brag about their sleaze tactics – guess they think it makes them look so cool).

Realize that some marketers often PAY their subscribers to go onto places like IM ReportCard or WF to post glowing reviews – or simply ASK their loyal fans to go do it so that they’ll drown out people who DID report them as a scumbag. There are many people willing to permanently plant their lips on a gurus butt (wow look at how PC I’m wording that) just to be buddy buddy with him. It’s like some of these individuals never outgrew high school and are still trying to be BFFs with the quarterback or something.

And when I say you have to read a LOT – that means for a few days or a week or so, so if you’re panicking about a strategy being flooded in the marketplace, doesn’t that TELL you that maybe it’s not the kind of business you want to be building online? Don’t you want something that will last years so you don’t have to star from scratch in 6 weeks when Google does a smack down?

Pricing – is it affordable for you? Are you about to forego something your family needs because you’re crossing your fingers that you’ll make your money back before little Jimmy needs his fee to play on the local soccer team? Don’t do it! There are NO promises in IM – not with ANY product (not even my OWN)!

If a marketer emails you back after you spill your story of woe out and wonder if it’s possible to make $159 by next Thursday and he says YES so eagerly, he’s probably a scumbag. Unless…he is very careful to say it’s POSSIBLE but he doesn’t offer any guarantees because everyone’s different.

Realize he’s probably sitting there salivating over the prospect of a sale (and list subscriber, let’s not forget – so he can rip you off repeatedly). MOST marketers DO NOT CARE about getting to know YOU personally. Why is that? Why don’t they open their own email? Because putting a face to your receipt is uncomfortable to THEM.

Imagine if they got to be good friends with you, sharing heartfelt stories back and forth and then they had to sell you something knowing they were ripping you off. It might actually make them squirm a bit. They don’t want THAT!

Who’s scratching whose back? If you’re on my list, ask yourself how often I’ve promoted someone else. Not often. Now if you’re signed up to many lists, can you see the incestuous relationship happening with some of these people? You see the same names circulating around in a tight knit group.

That doesn’t always mean all in the group are scumbags but IF you know for a fact that someone’s sleazy and your FAVORITE marketer is promoting them, it should make you question them. For example. I promoted one product/person quite awhile back whose product was AWESOME.

But that person became a list whore. He pimped his subscribers out to every Tom, Dick and Harry on the ‘net – not a couple of times, but a couple of times PER DAY! It was the most atrocious case of greed I’ve ever seen.

What did I do?

I blogged that I could not promote this person or product anymore because of this. I emailed that person to TELL them what I thought about their tactics. And I emailed my list.

In other words, I was VOCAL and fought back!

Don’t rush into a purchase. If something launches, it does not make you cooler if you’re one of the first to buy it. Let others grab it and implement it and see their feedback. Are they abandoning it? Are they raving about it? Are they only raving because now they’re affiliates? Be skeptical – always, until someone gives you a reason not to be.

Why it’s important for you to be a sleaze fighter.

What I teach here is ethical marketing. I don’t care WHICH niche you’re in, you want to be respectable. Your online dealings are leaving a footprint on the ‘net and people will find out what you stand for (if anything). You need to help squelch the sleaze tactics that are causing people to be skeptical about all Internet businesses.

Also, it’s just the right thing to do. Preventing another victim is practicing ethics. Call it good karma or whatever you want to – but it’s what you should be doing.

Here’s a sleaze marketing tip article where I agree with everything BUT one answer. They state:

You explain why you are good rather than why the competition is bad. You know that running down the competition only makes you look jealous or defensive.

Now to some degree, this is accurate – you should stress your unique qualities that set you apart. But I also encourage you to shine a light on what is bad within the marketing industry (or other niche). People don’t just want to be educated about the GOOD – they want to know what they should AVOID – and they’re potentially building trust with you to help show them the way.

When and if you get scammed, here’s what you do:

You first contact the person and give them up to one week to respond. I know normally I answer in hours, but many people have tons of emails to go through, so give them 7 days.

If they don’t respond, take it to your blog. And a forum that matters to them.  Keep in mind you can’t “name and shame” in the main section of WF but you can post a review of their product in the review section!

Tell your list. Spread the word about who they are and what they did.

Refund. I know many people who don’t refund. There are a few marketers who drag out the communication to prevent a refund because your time expires. Go straight to ClickBank and escalate it. Bypass the product owner if you KNOW there’s no way to solve this problem at this point.

Don’t be a part of the problem – by ignoring it, by being friends with sleazy marketers, or by becoming a victim to it.

Tiff

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