Three Make Money Online Scams: Data Entry, Paid Surveys, and MLM

Data Entry

One of the most popular scams currently being promoted is not a scam as far as the actual technique is concerned, but from the angle of the language used to market the technique, namely "data entry".

In real and practical terms, what a person is doing is one step of the affiliate marketing process whereby ads are written promoting someone else's product in return for a commission for every sale referred.

However, the whole process is marketed as "getting rich by doing simple data entry". There are literally scores of products of this nature currently being promoted. Recently, both Clickbank and Google have kicked out product owners or promoters of "data entry" related schemes.

Its very important to note that the actual technique itself is certainly not a scam. It is very legitimate and it earns thousands of people, thousands of dollars per month. However, the reason it is a scam is due to the deceptive marketing surrounding it. In addition, when you buy one of these programs and log in to the customer area, you are strongly encouraged to promote the very same program you have purchased using the same so called "data entry" technique.

What the owners of such programs want to do is maximise the money they make by leveraging your time and your advertising budget to their benefit. Years ago, you probably would have been extremely successful, but now, due to the fact that so many people are doing it, it is harder to make money just by blindly following this process without any underlying marketing knowledge.

If the owners of such programs actually gave their customers an education and taught them proper marketing skills instead of just showing them this affiliate marketing technique they deceptively call "data entry", there would have been something of value offered to the customer.

Paid Surveys

Another very heavily promoted scam is "paid surveys". You must have come across claims such as "Earn $100 per hour filling out simple surveys". How this scam works is that people are asked to pay a fee ranging from $35 to $50 dollars in order to gain access to a list of companies that offer paid surveys. The surveying companies themselves do not charge people for taking surveys, rather they pay participants who complete their surveys subject to certain requirements such as age, demographics, gender etc.

Many, if not most, paid survey offers do not deliver the rewards they promise. There are a number of ways that paid surveys mislead or inconvenience participants. Many of them compile personal information about participants to sell to marketers. Others require people to pay to access a database of survey opportunities that the participants could find on their own for free.

Survey databases can cost participants money. Many databases let people have access to lists of paid survey opportunities for a subscription fee. Once people have paid the fee, they discover that many of the surveys listed do not pay, and that nearly all of the listings are available elsewhere for free. Many of these offers seem legitimate because they feature phony testimonials from satisfied users.

A few people might be fortunate enough to earn some regular money, but it will never amount to much, no more than a few hundred dollars per month at best!

Multi Level Marketing

As has been noted by Quatloos.com, "once upon a time, multi-level marketing was a legitimate business which provided a way for small companies to get their unique products to consumers in small towns and rural areas which had no access to these products. At this time, the products sold themselves, and the multi-level aspect was a way of giving a small reward to those who had worked hard to build the organization. But the focus was always on the product.

Today, and especially with the growth of the internet, it is possible for consumer to get about whatever they want at competitive prices. There is simply no real need for distribution "systems" as there once was, and indeed the focus of all the programs is not on the products they sell -- which are usually either bogus or are available somewhere else to the public at the same or lesser prices. Instead, the focus now is solely on recruiting new people to either buy into the program or else to buy products that are grossly overpriced (i.e., a $1 bottle of "herbal shampoo" for $26), with the idea that those people will recruit additional people who will also buy into the program or themselves buy the grossly overpriced products.

Thus, today just about ALL of the multi-level marketing programs are scams. In today's internet economy, there is simply no need for multi-level marketing or the overpriced products that they sell -- meaning that the only thing they are selling are memberships in anticipation that future memberships will be sold in the future, which is the classic definition of a pyramid scheme, and thus securities fraud.

Because products are available over the internet to everybody at lower costs than ever before, claims that "Multi-Level Marketing will take over the World!" are completely bogus. Indeed, the fact that no MLM schemes sell significant product to anybody other than the people who bought into the programs is proof positive that MLM is a dinosaur in today's economy, and exists only by defrauding people to buy memberships in anticipation of being able to make a profit defrauding other people into the program."

Michael Andrews is an online marketer who makes a full time living online. He is the creator of the Profit Lance course (http://www.profitlance.com) which teaches real long term and practical skills to make money online.