Hype and scam. What is the difference?

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.

This website, you just put up is just like that ice cream van. It looks great. It even works great. Youve tested those payment buttons and they all work. But you make no sales. You have no customers.

You were told this product is selling like hotcakes. You will have your money back and more within 24 hours. That was just hype. Hot air.

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.

Hype, on the other hand offers you a legitimate product, but it over states the truth. Any product on the Internet that promises you instant success is hype. If you want to start a business on the Internet there is no such thing as instant profits. Anyone that promises you other wise is stretching the truth.

Whether you run a business online or off-line, it takes time to build it. You need to build a customer base. You need to convince your customers that you are there for the long haul, that you're not a fly-by-night operator.

On the Internet, your new website is much like that ice cream van in the middle of the Sahara Desert. You have no customers. You don't even have people browsing. You need to draw traffic to your new site. This is not something that happens over night. This is a long slow process that takes a lot of work.

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

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Filed under Internet Marketing by Lucas Heijn