Monthly Archives: April 2005

Business Scams and Reverse Psychology

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I’m always fascinated by how businesses can con people. For some reason, it’s one of the few areas where it’s perfectly fine to lie outright, even expected. Take advertising, where an actor can glibly tell us something is ‘lite’, with everyone understanding it doesn’t need to really be light at all.

But there are other, more subtle cons out there. One I’m calling the ‘reverse psych’ con goes something like this:

  • Person A comments on an item in a forum. Mild, pleasant, just trying to help out.
  • Person B attacks him – a lot. Calling him names, accusing him of all kinds of things, and all completing unwarranted – in short, behaving completely psychotic.
  • Everybody else reading about the attack, feels an immediate sympathy for Person A, goes and buys his book, visits his site, gets on his list, or whatever.
  • Person A and Person B later meet over a beer, and split the ‘take’.

Do I have concrete examples of this? No. Is this happening? I’m certain of it.

People are terribly angry these days, and it doesn’t take much for them to fly off. But I believe there’s people who have caught on to the benefits, too.

It’s similar to what I said earlier about charity; I believe there are people who attack just to build sympathy for someone else.

Of course, not all such ‘extreme’ comments are from calculating and amoral people – there’s a goodly share of nutjobs out there as well to provide their fare share. I recently offered a product on the Internet in a 4-day special. Someone short on research but long on opinions decided I was doing something illegal, and tried to scare customers away. In the end, she possibly helped keep the forum posting alive longer – certainly, she entertained the readers with her quasi-coherent rantings.

And possibly I even got a sale or two from their sympathy, which became the genesis for this article.

So what do you do? I hate to preach callousness, but learn to take emotional outbursts with a grain of salt. Evaluate deals on features and benefits alone, and don’t let feelings sway you into a bad or unsafe deal. And be extremely suspicious of any postings that seem to go from 0-60 in no time at all – bizarre extremes of emotion may not be bizarre after all, just a new way of using reverse psychology to part you from your hard-earned money.

Review: Organize Events with Jumpstart-It by Jumpstart Information Technology

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It wasn’t until I received an email from my friend Taco Oosterkamp of Jumpstart I.T. that I was introduced into the world of event management software.

For a neophyte, visiting the web page for JumpStart-It was an eye-opener; until then, I thought a business party involved a case of liquor and a few bags of chips and Nuts’n Bolts (I admit they were always small, casual parties).

Take for instance organizing a seminar online – there are forms to fill out to reserve rooms, tables (or booths), arrange for classes or meetings, and so on. JumpStart-It allows you to set up custom databases with the appropriate fields, and place the forms online. So if you’re arranging for a special event not covered in the ‘other’ products, you can add it specifically here.

It also arranges for payment, so once people have enrolled for an event, fees can be collected. And it lets you do partial payments, for example collecting a down payment for a hotel room or a seminar.

One you’ve set up the fields you need, the program can upload the form to your website.

Another feature: the program manages registrees, so you can output a list as needed, or email attendees (for instance, to acknowledge reservations).

That’s just the tip of the iceberg – if you are in event management or simply planning a seminar or class, you could find this a great way to streamline your work.

With a 15-day test drive, you can decide if it’s right for you before buying. And if you do manage events, I recommend you give it at least a try – it could be the answer to a lot of your event management problems!

Mesothelioma And The Lure of Niche Markets

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If you haven’t noticed, there’s a buzz in business – niche marketing and niche websites.

What are they? Simply put, niche markets take a narrow focus on a subject, and then put a whole cluster of related content online – in the end, search engines will index them well for the term (hopefully), and send traffic to their site. From there, using ads, affiliate programs, or what have you, the site tries to make money from the visitors.

The reference to Mesothilioma is a bit of an inside joke in the niche market. At one time, lawyers wanting to be part of class-action suits were running very expensive AdSense ads, in the hope of targeting people with the disease. For that reason, ads rates went very high, and people eventually started developing sites on the topic of Mesothiliema, in hopes of attracting ‘clicks’ – and high payouts.

(For those actually interested in the subject, Peritoneal Mesothelioma is a tumor occurring in the membrane surrounding the organs of the abdomen, and has one cause: asbestos exposure. The good news is that not all Peritoneal Mesothelioma are cancerous; some may be benign. Of course, the cancerous versions are what are attracting the interest of lawyers hoping for a payout. For more information, you can read an interesting explanation of peritoneal mesothelioma here).

Now in my case, using the words here likely won’t do anything (although there may be an ad or two displayed), primarily because my site is less targeted (surprisingly enough, this is the very first time I’ve talked about Peritoneal Mesothelioma, or in fact any Mesothelioma). But if my site was devoted to the topic, and I provided relevant and useful information, and the AdSense ads appealed to the visitors (who we hope would be interested in following through with a lawsuit), and they then clicked on them,… well then you see the way it works.

And that’s a niche site. There’s a few twists and turns to the technique, but it involves ranking high in the search engines for a given topic, especially in a narrow focus, and then finding a way to monetize at the end of it. And the nuts and bolts – picking the words, getting the content, monetizing it – that’s where the riches (and secrets) lie…

On The Perversion of Charity

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It’s sad – I remember not too long ago a girl wanted people to pay off her credit card bill. So she appealed to people via her website. And she got her money – and a lot of publicity as well.

But I wonder how many truly needy charities and people missed out on a few dollars because someone couldn’t control her spending habits.

This comes up right now because it seems the theme of the past week has been ‘I’ve got problems, help me’:

  • One person offers a report – at the end of his sales letter, he mentions that he’s sick, and may not be able to write something for awhile – SO GET IT WHILE YOU CAN.
  • Another report from a well-known business person mentions a friend who found a dog – and now he’s selling a report to help out the dog.
  • Sometimes the reverse seems to work out as well – not too long ago, a person involved in a business forum had a serious accident, in which his wife was killed. People were concerned and helping out a bit – and then someone complained. THAT got the ball rolling, so much so I started wondering if this ‘enemy’ might actually have been a friend using a bit of reverse psychology.

So where’s the bad in all this? Because the bad ones can overshadow the good – and in the end is we get callous to everything and everyone.

Remember your first Nigerian email? Could somebody really need help getting their money out of an evil dictatorship? Now we look at them and laugh (if we even look at all) – and possibly ignore other, more reasonable pleas for help.

Or worse yet, give in when we shouldn’t, and get burned. A few years ago, a coworker sent me an email with instructions to contact this cancer-stricken child, who was trying to get into the Guiness Book of Records for most emails received. I refused – no doubt coming across badly.

Of course, there was no child, and news agencies later reported it as the greatest email address harvesting scam to date, by people conned into doing the ‘right thing’.

So my advice – start a policy. Avoid any and all online attempts to get you to be charitable. Find an off-Internet charity you feel does good work. And give generously to it.

Over time, the scams and gimmicks people use to get money force me to just ignore all requests, no matter how genuine they seem – because I’ve learned that while there are many people truly hurting, there are many more that simply know how to appear to hurt.

AdSense Ads for Clickbank?

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With the popularity of AdSense ads, it’s only a matter of time until other forms of contextual (content-based) ads would appear. CBprosense is one of those, delivering ClickBank oriented ads that look similar to Google’s AdSense ones.

With a piece of code placed on your page, the ads match the text around them, and point to relevant Clickbank products. You get ads, visitors get interesting items, and you and CBprosense divvy up the commissions (CBprosense gets the commission on the first item listed, while you get commissions on all other links).

Although I haven’t used it myself (Google AdSense terms of use prohibit other contextual links on the same page as their ads), I’m thinking of setting up a site with it – it looks very promising, and free. And a chance to get the power of a free Clickbank search script shouldn’t be ignored…