Eric L buys a product he saw advertised on The Warrior Forum.
The product is about affiliate marketing. The e-book tells Eric if he builds a website and offers a free report in exchange for email addresses that he can sell other people’s products to his subscribers and easily make thousands of dollars.
Eric thinks, “Cool. I can do that.”
So he creates a free blog, registers a domain, and rents web hosting. He borrows a report on weight loss from Heidi G, a fellow marketer who sells interesting little reports to people to use as email-bait.
People LOVE free stuff and they LOVE learning how to lose weight, so they download the report and soon Eric’s autoresponder is full of hundreds of email addresses.
Eric decides the time has come.
So he goes over to ClickBank, scrolls around, finds a few weight loss related products and decides to sell them to his subscribers. One of these products is a pill that promises to melt belly fat right off without exercise.
Eric hires Gabriel to write six emails for him about exercise and losing weight. He tells Gabriel the main point he wants his subscribers to come away with is that exercise is really hard.
At the end of the email sequence Eric links to a sales letter written by copywriter, Kathie R.
Kathie is an excellent copywriter who really hates exercise and it shows! By the end of the sales letter, with the added burden of all of Gabriel’s content marketed emails, 60 of Eric’s subscribers buy the magic weight loss pill. Each bottle costs $200, Eric makes #250 in affiliate royalties. He pays Gabriel $50 and Kathie $100.
$150 isn’t much, but since Eric didn’t really do anything he thinks it’s not too shabby.
Six months later, Eric gets an email from a lawyer. 27 of his subscribers have died from taking that diet pill. Eric is being sued for $2,000.000 and will probably end up in prison.
Eric L did the one thing that internet marketers should never do – he sold a product without doing any testing on it to see if it was real, and most importantly if it was safe. When selling the products of total strangers do the responsible thing and test it first. If it’s a pill that you would never take – don’t ask someone else to!
If you’re not responsible before the sale you will be held responsible after.
[contact-form]
