Thursday, July 17, 2008

Were You Hyped Or Scammed?

By Lucas Heijn

Do you want to start an online business? Work from home? You are not alone in your quest. You have probably already looked at many things and some of these have cost you money. I want you to imagine you're looking through your newspaper in the classified ads columns, and you come across an ad that reads something like this "Profitable Business Ready To Go" it's an ice cream franchise.

You just love the ice cream, and this looks like the best business to be in. You find that the price includes a new ice cream van as well as ice cream making material. The more you look into it the better it sounds. You decide to buy the franchise. And then find that the area that you have got is an industrial area with no residents. So you have a beautiful new ice cream van, ice cream making material, but no customers. So, in fact, you have no business.

Products you may have bought on the Internet may have ended up exactly the same. Beautiful website, great product, no customers. You would have spent time editing the site and making sure the payment buttons worked. After checking that everything worked just as it should, you sat back and waited for the sales to come in. And then what happened? Nothing. Very disappointing.

Your new business is just like that ice cream van. It is beautiful and new and very well stocked, but you have no customers.

When you bought the business. You were told you could be making money within 24 hours. This was hype.

So what is hype? Basically, Hype is not a total untruth. It is S-T-R-E-T-C-H-I-N-G the truth, to convince you to buy. What it comes down to is they are after your money. People use hype to convince you to use your money to buy from them. So what is the difference between hype and a scam? They both want to part you from your money. In this they are the same.

Everyone hates being conned. The scammer is basically a con man. They will pose as something they're not in order to get your money. An example of this may be in some of the e-mails you receive. I'm sure you've received e-mails from people posing as PayPal. They hope that you will follow the link and fill in your login details so that they can use these details to steal from your account.

On the other hand, Hype offers you a legitimate product, but over states the truth. It is good to keep in mind that any product that offers you instant success, over night wealth are using hype to get you to buy. Running any business takes work to succeed.

Whether you want to build a business online or off-line, it will take time. You need to build customer trust. They need to believe that you will be there for the long haul. Most important, you need to build a customer base.

Remember our ice cream van? Great new van. Plenty of products. No customers. Your new website is exactly the same. Nobody knows you're there. You need to draw traffic to your new site. This doesn't happen overnight. It's a process that takes a lot of time and hard work.

How to go about getting traffic to your site is a subject I will discuss in another article.

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