Web-savvy shoppers would likely be hesitant to submit their credit card numbers to reputation-unknown shopping sites, especially those that also hype get-rich-quick schemes. Additionally, you'll be competing with hundreds to thousands of others who paid the fee too, and are attempting to sell the exact same products or services and the scheme itself, on identical, company-sponsored Websites. It sounds good on the surface when dot-con hype promises "free training" in marketing and sales techniques. But the fact of the matter is, those with duplicate Websites are your direct competitors, and they too are learning the same techniques.
Internet business opportunities also tend to hype the ease of online marketing and popularity of shopping on the Web (e-commerce). Granted, online marketing has a broader reach than most traditional methods. It's also true that e-commerce is a growing, multi-billion dollar industry. But that very reach and popularity makes the Web a highly-competitive place to do business, and it gets more so everyday. Many failed dot-coms will attest to that. Despite that some had millions in venture capital to finance far more marketing resources than home-based Internet businesses typically can, they failed.
Among the biggest dot-con hypes is getting "free advertising" in "hundreds" of search engines. When starting up a small businesses, you likely won't have much of an advertising budget. So, free advertising might sound good, and you can bet the dot-cons know it does. Because search engines are the "Yellow Pages" of the Web, it's true that they are the main source of Website traffic. But the reality is, there are only a handful that deliver significant traffic, such as Yahoo, Excite and Google. The rest of the "hundreds" are relatively inconsequential for marketing.
To get a free listing of significance in the popular handful takes search-engine savvy―a whole 'nother ballgame―and lots of hard work, such as keyword and meta tag optimization. If you don't know what a keyword or meta tag is when you pay the fee for an Internet business opportunity, you're already in trouble. Again, if the dot-cons promise to teach you the techniques, remember that they're also teaching your direct competitors. Besides, no matter how much training a seller of duplicate Websites promises, many of the popular search engines won't list identical sites or those that are even close. Search engines call them mirror sites, and consider multiple submissions of same to be redundant. Some won't list get-rich-quick schemes either, for obvious reasons.
"Build it and they will come" doesn't work nearly as well as the dot-cons would love for you to believe, so they conveniently fail to mention these and other inherent flaws. Natch, it's to their advantage to make it sound far easier than it is. They'll say anything to get your fee, their main source of income.
