ChrisBailey.info

So, is PeopleString.com a scam?

The relatively short answer for those who don’t want to read my rambling below, lol.  No, I wouldn’t say that peoplestring is a scam.  But there is a lot of hype and misleading info out there about the true potential of this type of site.  You can make money with sites of this nature, but unless you can recruit heavily, the amount is negligible.

When dealing with internet based money making opportunities, it’s not always quite as simple as whether something is an outright scam or not.

The basic premise of “paid to” anything, i.e. paid to read email, paid to click, etc. is seriously flawed when it comes to the ability to attract major advertisers.

Along with YourNight.com, PeopleString.com is one of many relatively new “paid to” social networks on the net that is luring many naive internet users into thinking they can make substantial money playing around on a social networking site.  A few others that may or may not still be around are wowzza, yuwie, flixya, friendswin, hellohello, revver and  guba.

For the most part, I have very few issues with these types of sites.

Unfortunately, just like so many other money making ventures on line, they are ridiculously overhyped and create unrealistic expectations for naive new members.

PeopleString’s mantra is ‘Where You Own the Web’ and they claim they are giving back 70% of profits to the members.

With misleading banners such as PeopleString promoters are suckering people in at a pretty good clip.  And yes, I actually wasted some time and registered as a free member with PeopleString.

Supporters of these misleading opps love to challenge those of us who point out the flaws by saying we don’t know what we’re talking about if we haven’t joined.  This, of course, is a bunch of crap.

If the opp you are looking into is even somewhat upfront about what they offer and you have a little bit of marketing knowledge, you can easily see through the hype and find out what you need to know.

So, what exactly does PeopleString offer its members.

As mentioned before, they claim to give back 70% of profits to their active members.  This is based on a point system that allows members to earn People Points for their activities on the site.    If you loaf on the site enough, you can earn up to 200 People Points per day.

There is no set value for these points and revenue sharing is distributed on a fairly inconsistent basis, but it is distributed.

PeopleString wants you to believe that they will someday be making big bucks from major advertisers when in reality these types of paid to sites never hit the big time.

Big time advertisers have little interest in these incentivized types of sites.  As someone who buys my own advertising, I would much rather purchase CPA or CPM ads from sites that I know visitors are coming to my site out of genuine interest as opposed to hoping to earn a few pennies from a site like PeopleString.  The type of traffic that a retailer gets from sites like PeopleString simply doesn’t convert into sales.  It never has and it likely never will.

In addition to the revenue sharing, People String allows the members to earn in the following ways:

• Overrides on the earnings of your downline starting at 5% for your direct referrals and 2% on your 2nd through 6th levels.
• Mail Box Cash Box, which many promoters market as a great opportunity, although it’s not really showing any promise of going anywhere or generating serious interest from any major advertisers.
• People Dollars – these allow members to earn almost instant cash rebates for completing offers or ordering products/services from various company.  This is really nothing new or original and members could often earn the same or more back by doing the same thing via companies like ebates.com
• Cash Back shopping – again, similar to what ebates and other companies have offered for years.

When People String first got going, they were also dangling extra commission earnings for those people interested in “upgrading” at a cost of $200.  This is supposedly going to be stopped on May 16th.

They’ve been threatening to close off the upgrade opportunity since the middle of last year.  Then they started saying that they were going to cut things off at 5000 upgrades.

So instead of just cutting it off at 5000 as stated, they are deciding to allow their marketers to grab as much cash they can by setting a deadline date so experienced marketers can keep on pushing their downline to upgrade, even though the benefits will be significantly less if and when upgrades are no longer offered.  Those final few to upgrade won’t be able to pocket the $40 that original members used to be able to get for coercing direct referrals to shell out $200.  Or the $10 overrides from lower level upgrades.

The bottom line is that PeopleString isn’t much better or worse than many other biz opps out here on the net.

Following are some reasons why I don’t consider People String to be anything special.

Unoriginal – Paid social networks are nothing new and they are always going to be small time venues just like paid to read email and paid to click sites.  They can hang around forever and if you know how to recruit thousands into a downline, you might be able to make decent money.

And unlike original social networks like Facebook, PeopleString has not created a site from scratch.  Instead, they bought a cheap, off the shelf social networking script from socialengine.net  and like to act as if integrating the site with major players like Facebook and Twitter is some big accomplishment when in reality they are simply purchasing mods an plugins to achieve these simple tasks just like those of us who use WordPress and Joomla platforms do.

Ownership allowing, encouraging, and participating in the hype.  This is especially true of the big stink many promoters and ownership are making about the Alexa.com rankings.  This is not a great selling point to draw in major advertising dollars because anybody with a little bit of experience in internet marketing knows that the Alexa rankings are particularly irrelevant for sites like People String where users have a financial incentive to visit.  Past surfing ponzi scams like StudioTraffic and 12DailyPro easily cracked the top 500 and 300 respectively.  Over the last 7 months, they have climbed in Alexa steadily but are now starting to stagnate, especially in the U.S.

9/29/09
Global: 4,921
USA: 2,961

5/12/10
Global: 1899
USA: 773

Just for kicks, I joined PS on 7/22/2009 and I’ve “earned” a whopping $14.64 doing what I already do with Facebook in nearly 10 months.  Just like so many other opportunities online, there is very little money to be made with PeopleString.com unless you can recruit heavily.

If you’re wondering whether or not Wealthy Affiliate is a scam, so am I.

I’m always very leary of these types of paid membership sites and actually looked over Wealthy Affiliate last year before deciding to pass on it at that time.

This weekend, the topic of Wealthy Affiliate came up while I was chatting with an old forum friend.  He signed up for their course 3 weeks ago and liked what he saw so far, so I decided I would give it a test run myself to determine if it is worth it for me.

Wealthy Affiliate Will Not Make You westernunion agents Rich We will Teach you how to Make Yourself Rich.

Why did I have a change of heart?

To be completely honest, I fully believe that everything we all need to succeed is freely available on the net via newsletters, discussion forums, etc.  My decision to give Wealthy Affiliate a test run was not purely for the educational value, although they do provide significant value in the member area of the site.

If I like it and find enough value, I’ll be happy to promote it wholeheartedly.  Due to the way it is set up, I’ll ultimately have to ask myself the same question MLMers need to ask about their programs, “If there wasn’t a compensation plan attached, would I still be willing to pay for what I’m promoting?”

My main motivation for giving it a shot was to see if it truly helps me have a more structured approach to my marketing.

You see, I have plenty of knowledge rattling around in my brain.  But like most, I have rarely applied it consistently to my marketing.  So my results have been inconsistent.

Technically, I would still be considered more successful than most marketers because I have actually made money online when most never make a dime.  Nothing that I can retire on mind you, but I pull in a few bucks each month.

What I will be doing is going through their 8 Week Action plan step by step and taking advantage of the multitude of resources offered as well as the knowledge shared in the Wealthy Affiliate forums to see how it all plays out.

I’ll be posting my progress or lack thereof on my Work At Home Network site under the Affiliate Programs and Products Testing section.  I’ll be posting once or twice a week with my thoughts.

If you want to try Affiliate Wealth University along with me, feel free.  If you have some thoughts, good or bad, share them with a comment.

BTW, even if it is everything it says it is, there is never a guarantee of success for any of us.  We all have to apply ourselves and put our knowledge to work for the best chance to succeed.  This program is just a tool to help that along, not a magic pill.

Best wishes for your success.

Here we go again.  There’s just a never ending supply of these things out there.

Give us just $100 and we’ll give you $90,000.00 back in 3 short years.  Well, not exactly 3 years, LOL.  From their FAQ:

Q: I use your calculator to see what my return would be, if I invest $100 I do not get it to be the full $90 000 in 3 years as you claim, please explain.
A; We use 1100 days to calculate the return when it is stated as 3 years. This is to give us a few more days as reserve when selling of all the websites in the package. This explains why thee is a small difference in the calculations.

C’mon people.  If you’re anybody other than the usual hyip, ponzi game playing scam lover, you should know to avoid anything that even hints at such a ridiculous payout for doing absolutely nothing.

Much of what they talk about on the Web Builder Web Site Owner(WBWSO) actually makes sense as far as buying sites, flipping sites, optimizing them, etc.  BTW, I’ve also seen some people call it Wealth Builder Website Owner.  Not sure which is right, but the latter makes more sense since they call the investments Wealth Builder packages.

I have had an offer for one of my sites at 75 times the monthly revenue.

I was considering letting this potential scam go unmentioned until I read the following typical ponzi/pyramid scam lingo in their terms.

Every transaction is considered to be a private transaction between WBwso LTD and the member. As a private transaction between WBwso LTD and its member, any program on offer is exempt from:

• the US Securities Act of 1933, the US Securities Exchange Act of 1934,
• the US Investment Company Act of 1940, and all other rules, regulations and amendments thereof.

How many of you have seen that type of statement in the TOC of any legitimate company?

Guess what?  When you tell someone you will pay them $90,000.00 3 years from now if they give you $100 today and they don’t have to do anything to earn it, you are selling an investment.

If they are not registered with the SEC, they are not legally allowed to offer this deal in the U.S.

I’ve already done a quick skim of some of the ponzi player hotspots, so I know they are currently paying.  So did YMMSS, PIPS, 12Daily, ASD, and a number of other pie in the sky schemes……for a while at least.

In the end, it’s unlikely that they’ll be forking out over $450 Million Dollars in the next few years.

In case you’re wondering, their initial goal is stated as 5000 members X $100 investment X $90,000.00 return = $450 Million Dollars

Ahhh, the good old www(wild, wild, west).

Those of us who have been around the internet marketing block a time or ten remember more too good to be true scams than we care to count.

Anybody who is looking into one of the latest and greatest we’ll make you rich before you have to pay us a cent offerings called 1on40.com needs to do a little research on two previous similar offerings called Monopolizer.com and MoreThanTraffic.com and use just a little common sense.

Both of those turned out to be scams, as expected.

In a nutshell, 1on40.com guarantees everyone will get to the top of “Google, Yahoo, and 38 other top search engines” within 120 days for 5 keywords. And get this, they get you there for free and then you simply have to be the top bidder for your chosen keywords to stay there. Sounds absolutely wonderful, doesn’t it?

Anyone that has even the slightest knowledge about SEO and how search engines work will immediately be skeptical, to say the least. Rightfully so.

Some of the glaring Red Flags:

• The usual extreme hype geared to people looking to get something for nothing
• Guaranteeing something that simply can not be achieved, or at least can not be achieved via ethical means
• Plenty of awe inspiring testimonials, every one of them anonymous
• A site promising to get me to the top of Google that currently carries a Google PR of 0 and is nowhere near the top, if they are even listed at all, in the SERPs for its own obvious keywords
• Just like the Monopolizer and MoreThanTraffic scams, 1on40.com operates out of a drop box in the UK
• Many of the so called “search engines” listed aren’t search engines and a number of them don’t even exist
• etc., etc.

And yes, free businesses can scam you. They rob you of time and sap your energy getting you excited about results and guarantees that are impossible to honor. You are also providing them with at least some personal info at some point.

As always, time will tell the truth. I already think it’s quite obvious how this one will eventually turn out.

For those who decide to take the chance on this, I definitely recommend a throw away email address and don’t use an established domain for your test.

Good luck