Review Rules for Rook’s Money Blog
I have decided on creating some rules for products I will be reviewing in the future. This is due to the fact that so many online review sites are just portals for selling money making schemes. I will probably be revising these rules from time to time, such as when a new type of scam comes along.
1. The product must come with a fully refundable guarantee. Honestly, I don’t like returning things at any time, not even to a retail store, but I also don’t like the idea of paying for something completely useless and not being able to get my money back. It also smacks of a scam.
2. Products are divided into several categories. The first of which, are two big buckets, ‘Scam’ and ‘Legit’. Even if a product might not work for me, does not automatically qualify it as a scam. A scam is a product or service that is designed strictly to take someone’s money without really delivering any benefit. For example, if a vendor offers a book on ‘Internet Traffic Secrets’ and the book is promoted as offering ‘new’ and ‘inexpensive or free’ ways to generate quality traffic for any website, then that’s what the book should have. It should not be a 20 page book on buying Google adwords to drive traffic. Following that, I will divide the products into what type of scam they might be or what type of market the book is for. I have several types of scams:
The Stuffing Envelopes Scam: the stuffing envelopes scam gets its name from con artists who place classified ads claiming that anyone can make $1000 a week stuffing envelopes. People send in $5 to the con artist, who then stuffs 250 envelopes containing letters that say “take out a classified ad claiming to make $1000 a week stuffing envelopes”. It’s not only diabolical, it’s illegal. So if there is an Internet Make Money System and it involves making money my reselling the Internet Make Money System, then it is the same old Stuffing Envelopes Scam. Pretty similar to the pyramid scheme- technically it is a Pyramid Scheme, but I hate it so much I wanted to put it in its own special category.
Pyramid Scheme: A Pyramid Scheme is any non-sustainable business model which involves payment for services or a product that may not even exist. For example, let’s say an individual starts selling franchise shares in a new ‘rooftop advertising’ plan, where individual homeowners can make money by putting a billboard on their home. Some people buy in, and get billboards on their houses, and low and behold, they start getting paychecks. The problem is, the paychecks are funded by sales to new ‘franchisees’, not real advertisers. This is not a sustainable business model. A similar scheme is when a person goes online and sells “Money Making Packages” that can be resold by the people who buy it.
Internet Guru Scam: This is a tough one to really nail, because it walks a fine line between legitimate marketing practices and pyramid schemes. I define an Internet Guru scam as one where the only possible way to duplicate the guru’s success is by selling internet marketing information. For example, a person could write a book about making money writing Google ads. This person will skirt the ‘letter of the law’ about pyramid schemes by telling the purchaser of the book up front that the book is a ‘marketing’ book, giving ‘marketing techniques’, and that using these techniques, you can sell products like shampoo and dog walking services. But the book’s examples are things like ‘figure out a way for dog walkers to make an extra $1000 a month, and then market it to dog walkers’. Of course, this makes very little sense. Would a product teaching dog walkers how to make an extra $1000 a month be pretty easy to sell? Of course, the real product being sold is ‘How to make $1000 a month doing X’, where X can be anything. This is pretty much the same as the Envelope Stuffing Scam, except the sellers of this package stuff a lot of known marketing language into their products to hopefully avoid the Federal Trade Commision. Truth is, any Madison Avenue marketer knows that good headlines sell better than bland headlines, and most everyone else does too. I think I could sell $97 ebooks pretty easily with the title “How to make $1000s per year without lifting a finger”, in which I would say “write a book about how to make $1000s per year without lifting a finger”.
3. Products which are not scams must be worth the price tag. I honestly doubt there are very many ebooks out there worth $97. This is not to say there aren’t, but it’s rare. The information would have to be worth a LOT in order to justify paying more than most college textbooks. One of the ways online marketers often justify these prices is by claiming that the information will pay for itself, which may be true but generally isn’t. People always want to feel like money they spend is invested, not spent, so if they think ‘I can buy this ebook on Google Adsense for $77 and it will make me $1400 a month’. Well, it might if you are going to sell a book on making money on Google Adsense, but not if you are going to sell a book on repairing waffle irons. Make no mistake, good marketing can sell most good products, but you can get the two or three HIGHEST rated marketing books on Amazon.com for $77, and the information won’t be much different. So when I review a product, it really has to be worth the price tag.
