Have you noticed that most of the youtube adverts recently were about starting your own social media online business or ditching your 9-5 job for a new opportunity garanteed to increase your income X-fold?
Usually, I won’t think about these ads and skip them if they come up, but the sheer number I came across during these few days, coupled with the deteriorating economic situation, got me thinking: maybe more people are looking for alterate sources of income. Yet where there is increasing demand, there will be scammers, so you need to be careful not to fall into these possible traps. This article is my personal opinion and perspective and I will not list names for the sake of legal repercussions. If you want to question or challenge what I have to say, make it civil at the very least.
It all started with the youtube and facebook ads
Now, if you watch videos on youtube about business startup or economics, you will most likely come across one or two adverts that offer you an opportunity to develop an online social media business with the aid of their automated CRM and sales funnel system. So what happens if you commit? Some youtubers have posted their experiences after the first stage, where they were contacted by one of the fellow trainers to sell you the package for a “just-for-you-right-now” deal price that will go away as soon as you hang up the phone. To rub it in more, should you decide to reject their offer, they will hammer down on you, saying phrases akin to “you dont have what it takes to do online business” to pressure you into buying.
Do bear in mind that these are high pressure sales techniques trying to grasp your fear of losing out on opportunity, as well as to establish a dominating mentor/mentee relationship. These techniques are not unlike several similar overseas “online gurus” selling online sales courses. Their use of wording, their confident outlook and their videos showing expensive cars, houses and planes make them very appealing, but
that is the point of their videos – to attract you in and get you to sign up.
Are their systems so unique that you have no choice but to buy in?
About those “systems”, if you search online for sale funnel systems, you find a lot of these exist such as Clickfunnels, Getresponse. Heck if you want your own one, you can hire someone from create a simple version from Fiverr or Upwork. Same thing for a CRM – in Hong Kong, a lot of companies have their own CRM systems and renting these systems for your work is not expensive. Therefore, what some of these gurus offer for many sums of money can instead be substituted by your own combinations of these systems to get you going. I am not saying all of them are false prophets, but if you are considering whether to take the courses, you have to make sure you do your own research into the authenticity and what you can realistically get out of it. Do remember that you are not the only person looking into these, there a lot of people possibly in similar situations as you and these are you potential competitors. The pie is only so big and the more people going into it, the harder it is to make a profit, so know how much you can put in and how much loss you can bear if things go south. This sector of online business does not have much solid regulations or monitoring of activities, so their activities cannot be said as “illegal”. In the end, if you get burned and lose money because of their courses, it is almost impossible to get back at them.
I, too, had experience with these encounters…
I had personal run-ins with these online schemes on two occasions. The first was with a MLM from Melaleuca back during college (this I will discuss when I talk about MLM and Pyramid Schemes). Since it has been a long while since then, I do not know if the MLM segment is still continuing to this day. I will only talk about my experience then.
The second from a free seminar I went to a few years back, possibly 2016 (that was the copyright year written in their books and documents). That seminar hosted by MOBE – the My Own Business Education started by Matt Lloyd. However, this one was not hosted by Matt himself, but rather one of his associates Shaqir Hussyin and his team (these guys were the forefathers of this online wealth mentoring business). I remember at the time that the name of the seminar was about online business technology, or what I thought was about that. It ended up being a sales pitch to bait the audience into buying their packages. I ended up just getting his book “limitless” and some other booklets on sales strategy – the free stuff – because the talk was nothing about new online technology and I don’t like being pushed around like that. MOBE was shut down by the United States FTC in 2018 because of their fraudulent actions and consumer complaints, so lucky I did not commit a dime.
What I will do is to make a post about the common signs that an “opportunity” may instead be a scam, gathering information from the experiences of various youtubers and people who wrote about their run-in with these “gurus”. I hope you will find it useful in using it as a checklist to judge their authenticity, so stay tuned for my next post about it.