The lowdown on “Get Rich Quick” schemes
Having noticed a recent upsurge of “get rich quick” type websites I thought it might be interesting to take a look and see if anyone was making any money by looking into one of the websites. As expected it turns out most of these sites are essentially a combination of pyramid scheme, search engine optimization and taking advantage of different web based advertising charging schemes.
A typical website would usually tell a story about someone quitting their job and making thousands of dollars by simply working a couple of hours a day – then for a cost of only $X they will share the method of doing this with you. This is usually backed up by free ebook type offer “for a limited time” (although I surmise not that limited due to the static HTML nature of the site) and pictures and endorsements from fictitious happy customers usually clutching a cheque. As expected these same “happy customers” turn up on other sites with different names attached to the same picture.
Anyway, the gist of the “secret” is to sell some sort of ebook on one of the following needy type subjects:
- How to lose weight
- How to get rich quick
Or similar other topics. The books are usually very short in nature with a lot of obvious stuff in it. In the case of loosing weight, some sort of dieting secret method, and in the case of getting rich quick how make the site with the ebook, or to make money on the difference between cost to advertise on google, and the cost of someone clicking through on another Google or similar link on your site. Essentially you build a site with a bit of content (which hopefully) you can sell, and make some money on the advertising.
How much money, well not much unless you are prepared to put some real useful content on your site and spend a lot of time optimizing for search engines. I did a bit of a test and put together a site http://www.looseweighthowto.com following these principles, and being probably a lot more knowledgable on page ranking and search optimization actually made about $3 USD a month with essentially no content and a lot of links. This plays on the weight loss, and misspelling to get cheap Google referrals, referring onto other diet, weight loss program sites and an external BMI calculator – about an hours work to build.
The links are included in javascript rather than typical href type links so Google hopefully (although it is pretty sophisticated so who knows for sure) can’t see the pages are basically just a list of links to other affiliate type sites.
In contrast my wife has her own cooking site in chinese ( Jamies Rules ) with geniune content and gets over 400 visitors a day and has recently added some amazon links – so it will be interesting to see how the performance compares to my experimental “snake oil” weight loss site over time. Anyway it all comes back to what we always suspected – the only way to make a lot of money on the internet without resorting to something more tangible like selling flights, books or cd’s is probably pornography related.
May 12, 2009 9:56 am 
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