In my last article I talked about how I responded to an invitation to a free Internet Business Opportunity Seminar. The seminar was a presentation or call to action to get the participants to spend $50 for a web site and a full day training session.�I decided to attend the "free" seminar and even decided to spend the money to attend the training session. I was curious about what was going to be taught and what was going to be sold during the training session. It was for both education and entertainment.
Before going further, I should let you know that I am an Information Technology and E-Commerce professional. I have over twenty years experience and have worked for several well known companies. These companies have sales in the multi-million to multi-billion dollar range. They also each have a thriving E-Commerce (Internet) based business.
I have to give credit to the presenters. They were very good at what they did. The presentation was very polished. They included a component of education which was valuable for any would-be small business owner who wants to perform business on the internet. The presentation also focused on how easy it was to be successful with a high dose of a sales pitch. And as the session progressed, so did the motivational call to action.
Each person was given a credit application and an appointment with a counselor for one-on-one training. If the attendees could not afford the cost, they could apply for instant credit so they could get started with their internet business opportunity. I wonder what many of these people will do when they realize that running a business will require more funding than their initial investment that they had to apply for credit in order to initiate.
For the investment of $6,000 here is what was being offered: An unlimited number of ecommerce web sites. Each web site will require an additional $25 per month of hosting. And not surprisingly, they suggested they each person run several web sites. I actually agree with the diversification of internet business opportunities. If you want to accept credit cards, as opposed to just paypal, there would be additional merchant services charges. That is true of course with any ecommerce storefront (unless the cost is buried into the monthly hosting fee).
They provide basic tools for looking up keywords. This will allow you to identify profitable business ideas. The tool allows you to search for keywords that are in high demand by search engine visitors. Yes, this is important. However, there isn't a monopoly on available tools to help you with this research. They also offer you tools that will help you identify the keywords used by other web sites that rank well with the search engines.
The main idea is that you want to be on the first page of Google, or second page at worst, for the selected keywords you have chosen. Clearly there is merit in that. They showed a few of their customers that ranked very highly in the Google search engine ranking. I believe they seriously down played the amount of work, initially and ongoing, that is required to rank well and stay there. There are some keywords that will be too difficult to rank highly with. I didn't hear that caveat.
If you need product, don't worry. They offered thirteen integrated drop ship vendors that you can simply select from. This gets you out of that pesky business of order fulfillment and buying inventory. I am a strong proponent of vendor drop shipping. However, I do not believe you can run a growing, successful business using vendor drop shipping as an inventory solution exclusively. There are good alternatives for finding reputable product sources. Like search engine optimization (SEO), I believe they over simplified the degree of complexity and issues related to product sourcing and order fulfillment.
So after providing some education and over-simplifying how easy it would be to become successful, they turned on the motivational component of their sales pitch. They talked about people who had nothing and took a chance. I believe that is code word for making a large investment. These people were the traditional rags to riches stories. I don't recall seeing pictures and testimonies of these people living the good life - vacationing in the Caribbean and driving expensive cars.
I agree in principle with much of what was presented at this sales presentation. I do not agree with how easy the picture was painted for the novices. There are a lot of people who signed up. I suspect that many of them are finding it harder than they were led to believe. If you want to put in the effort, the internet does indeed offer a variety of business opportunities. To sum up, caveat emptor - let the buyer beware.
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