Business Reviews

Archive for March, 2009

Your Bill Killer is a $50 “automated money making web site” with several upsell products after the sale. It’s been alleged that Chris Jackson is just an alias for Costa Dedes since that’s the name on the newsletter offered on the site. The domain uses a proxy to conceal the owners identity, which is a red flag when talking about a business. It all started when I was reviewing another site and saw their banner:

Of course, there is no job, that number was made up, and it’s not free. The banner links to yourbillkiller.com It then proceeds into a story how an old friend shows up in a Lamborghini and takes him to a private jet but no last names are mentioned of any these people so it reads more like a work of fiction. The page is non stop talk about money, he doesn’t even stop to catch his breath on the topic.

There’s no mention of the product you’ll even be selling, only more talk of riches and jets. It’s so over the top that only someone on drugs would likely fall for this. There were several posts on the Net from people saying they didn’t ever get thier web site, and couldn’t get a refund and also the email address Chris Jackson used was now dead. There’s no contact information, only a one way form that says refund requests will be ignored if you try to do it online. Instead you have to fill the refund form out, then print it and mail it to:

AFM Computer
Attn: Refunds
1900 Empire Blvd #217
Webster, NY 14580

This kind of connects the dots, as a Costa Dedes message post was saying how he ran a computer business. Also the refund policy gets worse with the mention of fees they can tack on “subject to any applicable processing and/or administrative charges associated with issuing the refund, in the sole discretion of Your Bill Killer”.

On that page the company name is WD Advertising LLC, but the address is the same, which is at yourbillkiller.org instead of yourbillkiller.com. In fact, searching just for the street address yielded the most information and people complaining they didn’t get anything and couldn’t get a refund. Well, you can reach your own conclusion but I wouldn’t touch this with a ten foot pole. Also, no matter what business you do or web site you make, you still need to learn how to do promotions. None of these are automatic, and people won’t find it unless you throw some time and money at it.

The Home Business Connection at homebusinessconnection.com is a collection of the worst business opportunities on the entire Internet. First off, if it’s a business opportunity you cannnot promise income, and that’s all they do. It’s not legal for that matter, but plenty of that is going on here. “Make $7,500 a week, make $925 a week, make $1,000 to $3,000 a week for taking vacations” and this goes on and on. It’s a complete setup, giving exact dollar numbers for a business which is a risk like any investment.

With employment at a company they will tell you what you’ll be making for a specific job. With a business there is no way to predict what you’ll make. You could lose money, make a little or a lot. This is why if you see a place like this say “you’ll make $7,500 every week” like they actually do here, you know you’re screwed right from the start.

With keywords like “Easiest money you’ll ever make” and “Create a lifetime of unlimited wealth” the site is aimed only at the person who is new, and doesn’t know the failure rate of online businesses yet. If you’ve not been screwed over several times yet, then I’ll tell you a secret. If any place has any of the claims this place makes, you’re walking into a financial train wreck.

They cover all the black sheep of Internet businesses like paid surveys, sweepstakes, reading emails for 1 to 10 cents each, claiming cash rewards, money for playing games, and every disaster you could ever imagine. If you haven’t fallen victim to all these things yet, then call me personally.  I just cannot completely describe in less words than Moby Dick as to what a disaster this place is. The problem is, there’s an army of Internet business opportunity seekers at any given time, and it takes several failures before a person realizes that places like this exist to prey on them.  This is a clear example of the places that know how to press your buttons and tell you what you want to hear.  I wish I could sugar coat this, but I refuse.

Media Buying Secrets Revealed is a program by Carlos and Lupe Garcia to teach you how to do media buying. This is buying huge amounts of traffic from media companies who can put your ads on big numbers of sites at one time, compared to natural search engine traffic and pay per clicks. This type of thing is for when you have a tested product that can scale to large numbers. Also, this requires a very large investment as you can imagine.

Their tactics are sound, based on studying the competition and seeing what works for them instead of trying to reinvent the wheel. Then writing something similar or doing a similar offer for your competing product.  Also they stress testing, which is a must before spending a few hundred thousand dollars on a media buy.

They aren’t selling this anymore, using the limited availability method to create buzz. However the free videos are well worth checking out, but this is for people who have a business in place, it’s well beyond what someone can use who hasn’t even decided on a business yet.

This is good advice, but it’s not for everyone. Optimizing a site and testing to increase conversion rates is good for any business of course. The part about media buying is going to require significant investment (in the hundreds of thousands) though. Carlos and Lupe Garcia are very down to earth and effective, but media buying is only for people with deep pockets and a proven business in place already that’s capable of handling large scale sales if you do it right.

ITV Ventures sells natural health and beauty products with an affiliate program that has a twist on most. The way it works is you sign up, they run infomercials, and direct calls to the affiliate to close the sale.

This has a few advantages, like lower overhead for them, and the fact an affiliate working for straight comission will be more motivated than a call center cubicle dweller. The fees for this program are substantial however, but lets take a look at the products themselves first before going into that.

First off, these are “all natural” types of products, what that means is there is no active ingredients of any kind. There’s also no scientific proof they work, and the FDA doesn’t review or check on these kind of products like regular ones that have to go through an approval process.

Any claims they do make for these kind of products, is usually to do with the ingredients and “supportive but not conclusive” evidence.
The sales copy for these is hard to write, they want to imply health benefits without making claims that will get them sued by the FDA.

The fact is they don’t provide scientific studies or proof, and you should know this before buying any “natural remedy” because you often pay substantially more than an over the counter type product with active ingredients (i.e. science behind it).

It really boils down to whether they can talk you into buying it on their word it does anything, and of course there’s the credibility problem since they are the ones selling it.

You’ll find a lot of phrases used for these kind of products like “bioavailable” and “wildcrafted” because they hope you won’t know what they mean and they will sound smart.

Bioavailable means that if you ingest it, it will be available to your body. Wildcrafting means it’s picked from trees in the wild, not on a farm. From a marketing point of view it’s very misleading, there’s no ingredients list so don’t look for it on any of their products.

They barrow from every study, and use every name they can when someone did a study of any of the ingredients in a product. They are simply skating on razor-thin ice when it comes to these  health claims.

To be an ITV Ventures independant seller, you’ll be looking at the following fees:

$165 initial payment to be a reseller.

$334 additional for the optional premier package, a random selection of products as well as the above. You don’t get to pick what you get, management decides.

$100 per month if you fail to order at least that much in product every month.

$29.95 per month eductation and training to be in the matrix program. If you don’t pay this, you get no comissions from your downlines, so basically you have to pay it, but they say it’s optional.

$2.95 each month for them to send you a check for bonuses, and $5.95 fee on all transactions (shipping and handling additional) each month. This means annually it’s another $106.80 in fees to get checks and the auto order products.

$99 annually to be in the program in addition to the monthly ones.

Also $59.95 a month to be able to get calls from the infomercial runs, plus up to $35 each call will be charged to you whether they buy anything or not.

This works out to an initial payment of $165 to get you in, the first year you’ll be charged $2583.60 plus at $35 per call from the infomercials, even assuming five calls a day, five days a week, that’s $875 a week or $45,500 annually and if they don’t have a credit card, or don’t order anything you take the loss and pay for the calls anyway. Also, if you don’t buy or sell $100 a month in products for two months, they terminate your membership without notice and you lose all comissions. This certainly is good for them, but for you? Not so good.

As a business, the biggest problem is the ticket price of these, even the cosmetics line is priced higher than even the top commercial brands, and selling overpriced anything in a recession is a huge nightmare. These are not competitive, and with no active ingredients or scientific proof, wow you’ll be pushing your sales skills to their limits.

At least the people calling will be in response to the infomercials, so they will be qualified leads, so there’s some help there. You’ll pay up to $35 for each call, and the risk is all on you if they don’t order.

The real problem above all else is that Kevin Trudeau is invovled with this, you’ll see his line of books included in the product line as well. He’s done prison time for larceny and fraud, been fined and forced to pay millions by the FTC, and if you check the Wikipedia page for him, you’ll see the whole history for deceptive health claims and so on.

In fact he’s specifically banned by the FTC from selling any of these products, that’s why you won’t see him on the management list for this company, Donald Barrett is leading this one, and just having Kevin and his books (under the first amendment he can write those books) involved I believe will be the kiss of death for this company.

Update! As of September 2008 ITV Ventures has closed down. Donald Barrett is starting a new business, EVS Group (Elite Virtual Systems) with similar products but without the MLM business model (no more residuals). They will now let you try to qualify for free calls if you stick to their script and have a good enough closing rate from the 25 they give you. An insider who did ITV said they were closing due to mismanagement. And it looks like the exact same thing, including three of their previous products in the new line.

Truth To Wealth is an affiliate site for Global Resorts Network. I have an exclusive knowledge of this business since we were members of GRN through the Reverse Funnel System. Global Resorts is a discount travel vacation package provider which  competes on price with those online travel services like Expedia and Travelocity. About one third of the time you can do better with GRN.

The problem is availability. They negotiate for lower rates, usually with lower end hotels or family owned motels. You won’t be getting a discount at a Hilton or Marriott. In fact when I looked for a hotel in New York all I found was some camp up in the Catskills. Yes, ONE lodge in their program at the time for all of New York State.  There are some good deals, but you can probably do just as well scanning the discount travel sites for good deals there also. Many of the rooms look very dated, you’ll see more shag carpeting browsing the listings than an episode of the original Bob Newhart show.

The business end of things is the back end office you use like Reverse Funnel, there’s also several others that are less expensive that will provide tested auto responders, telemarketer teams, and other ways to support your leads and turn them into sales. Since I’m not here to blast sunshine and puppy dogs into your monitor, let me tell you the downside to this as well. Global Resorts is a nice membership, but it costs $3,000 to join, you get $1,000 each time you sign someone up, and you get $1,000 when your downline does the same. There is a way to dramatically increase those commissions, but when we spoke with Reverse Funnel support and asked them about it, they said they couldn’t even talk about it. If you want to know the secret call me at 813-930-5156 and I’ll tell you how to do it.

This is what gets most people into it, just the big dollar signs. The problems are that you have to be able to get business opportunity seekers in droves because their failure rate is going to be sky high. In today’s economy, getting people with $3,000 plus all the advertising money needed to push this through is going to make it hard. Most of the people doing GRN are recruitment mills, they get you in, then the nonstop deluge of “dream you’re rich and you will be” and conference calls where you have to sit through 40 minutes of talk and hype to get the little snippet of information you were after.
The heart of the problem is you have to recruit people who really know Internet marketing, or those who have the financial legs to spend on advertising. These are far and few between. Most people who will sign up for this have dollar signs in their eyes, and are usually doing this because financially their backs are to the walls and they want a quick fix. Of course, here lies the problem.

Global Resorts is a good package for someone who travels a lot, but with the economy the way it is, it’s a hard sell. Usually you’ll only sign up the greedy, desperate, or ill prepared to find the huge number of opportunity seekers you’re going to need to find the ones with a few thousand dollars to risk. If someone travels a lot, they will save some money with this membership.

That’s not the problem though, when doing it as a business, you just won’t find enough people to make it worth doing. Any MLM system depends on your downline doing well, not just as a recruitment mill making a one time profit. Most people doing GRN see it that way, and just are out for their commissions that way.

This is why this kind of system will be around for a few years, but no longer than that. Most of the marketers I know have done it, run it’s course, and then gave it up for something more solid. It’s short term money, not something that you can stay with for 10 years.