Several UK marketers were featured yesterday on a BBC Radio 4 show called “The Internet Millionaires’ Club“.

Mark Lyford, Chris Cobb and Dean Holland were three that I recognised.

The description was:

“Jolyon Jenkins enters the world of mirrors that is internet marketing. Here, ordinary people dream of becoming millionaires without having to do any work. It is really possible?”

You can listen to it via BBC iPlayer at the following link:

BBC iPlayer – The Internet Millionaires’ Club

Some thoughts:

* Dean Holland probably regrets admitting that he didn’t buy his new ‘$44,000’ BMW outright and that he had to use hire purchase. An admission like that does weaken the boast somewhat.

* The presenter states that he thinks some marketers should be hauled in front of the courts for fraud. 100% agreed.

* He sums up internet marketing pretty well – Mentor A mentors B, B becomes mentor and mentors C who then becomes a mentor and so on.

Obviously he wasn’t going to be able to delve very far in just 30 minutes of air time but some good points were covered.

It would be great if this started a series of shows featuring more of the so-called experts as the presenter was asking some good, probing questions.

However, considering this was broadcast at 11am on a Friday it looks like the BBC isn’t going to make exposing dodgy internet marketers one of its priorities.

Willie Crawford’s Internet Marketing Inner Circle site was a membership site which contained downloadable interviews with experts as well as other material that promised to help those who were trying to sell products online.

It also contained a small forum which was popular with a handful of members who would post semi-regularly.

A few weeks ago the whole site – theinternetmarketinginnercircle.com – just disappeared. It no longer resolves to a website and trying it from my home PCs I just get a Virgin Media error page saying that the website “may not exist”.

As a lifetime member, I never received any warning that this site was going to be taken down.

Then again, this doesn’t surprise me whatsoever as Willie Crawford is not the most talkative of people.

He has constantly ignored my requests for a payment of the affiliate commissions I have earned. More here:

Willie Crawford and the Internet Marketing Inner Circle

The URL is due to expire on the 13th October 2011 (tomorrow) so I imagine we’ll know then if this is just a glitch or if Willie just decided to close up shop and not tell the members…

Paul Lynch – Honest Work From Home Success Forum

Just a few days ago Paul Lynch ran a reasonably successful and populated forum called “HonestWorkFromHomeSuccess.com“.

In the past the forum had various “experts” as guest members such as Tim Lowe, Holly Mann, Kevin Potts, Mark Lyford and Nick James.

Almost all these names deserted the forum months ago, Lyford it seemed within minutes of arriving as “co-owner”.

Earlier this week the forum disappeared with no word.

When you try to access the website now it shows a plain, out-of-the-box template site that’s trying to sell PLR products.

The URL it is showing (7PLR.com) is owned by someone in “AE” which I assume is Arab Emirates?

Judging by the amount of time Lynch actually spent on the forum, this could simply be a mistake that he hasn’t spotted yet and the forum may well be back online shortly.

Time will tell.

However, with Willie Crawford’s site, it looks like it’s curtains. That means no lifetime membership for those who paid and no affiliate commissions for those who promoted Willie’s site.

More fool me for doing both!

** UPDATE 25th October 2011 **

Paul Lynch’s forum is now back online. It turns out that a hacker got into his GoDaddy account and several of his domains were stolen. The forum is back up and running so he obviously got the domain back somehow.

Willie Crawford’s site remains down. It looks like it might be safe to assume that the Internet Marketing Inner Circle website isn’t coming back.

So many blogs, so little time.

Unfortunately a lot of blog posts are boring and uninformative.

Not all, of course. You just need to do some searching to find the worthwhile ones.

Here are 5 interesting reads for your next coffee break (links open in a new window):

(1) Marcus Passey – Internet Marketing – I Am Failing Fast – So How Will I succeed?

This very refreshing blog post from Marcus Passey, a UK marketer, shows that there are marketers who aren’t afraid to tell the truth when it’s warranted.

Marcus was one of those rare marketers that made money within the first few months of trying.

However, he soon got disenchanted with what he was going (essentially using ad swaps) and made this blog post to tell his readers why.

Good stuff.

(2) Erica Douglass – The Failure Manifesto

At the age of 26 Erica sold her business for $1.1 million which made a lot of people take notice of her.

I don’t know about you but I always figured that once you made a million, you were on easy street but in this blog post Erica explains why she’s spent a lot of time crying.

The million hasn’t set her up for life, anything but. In fact she notes; “sold my company for $1.1 million, and I don’t even have enough money for a house down payment.”

Another refreshing blog post that shows that even the “big winners” from the internet don’t have it easy.

(3) Jeff Wellman – Product Positioning & Differentiation Strategy! Why New Products Fail!

With more that a little help from his son, Jeff Wellman drew in six figures from his first product in 2007 – “Lay Off Your Boss“.

Sadly the money he made didn’t last long and soon he had to do another product launch. This blog post describes how the second launch wasn’t quite as successful.

Most marketers wouldn’t be as honest as Jeff is being in this post. Whilst you’re at his site read some of his other posts as he has written a lot recently about his marketing exploits over the past 4 years.

It’s all good, honest stuff and shows that even with a big leg-up you can still struggle.

(4) Bret Thomson – How To Deal With Blood-Sucking Leeches Disguised As Wanna-Be Clients

This is funny.

I read this blog post and immediately got a mental picture of the kind of person who would approach a copywriter in this way. I’ve seen them lots of times at seminars – the man with the big idea.

Oblivious to their stupidity, they think they are doing the copywriter a favour by letting them work for free.

Thankfully Bret gives this idiot his marching orders.

(5) Mark Lyford – Chris Cobb Scam

This isn’t a blog post really, more of a “name and shame” website.

The short story is that Mark paid Chris Cobb $25,000 for a service but doesn’t think he got that service so now he is asking for a refund.

Chris refuses to give a refund so Mark created a website on which he details all of their email exchanges.

An eye-opener.

2010 saw the general uptake of a particularly scammy technique – the “False Scarcity” claim on a sales page.

The way it works is simple – a marketer releases a product in a big launch but swears that there are only x copies. The x is usually a small, believeable number such as 200 or 300.

The limit is placed on sales to give the launch a feeling of scarcity and prompt the potential customer to act quickly before “stocks” run out.

Of course, most of these products are digital – eBooks, videos, membership sites – so they will never technically run out of stock.

Is it fraud?

I’m not a lawyer so I wouldn’t know. It does strike me as a bit of a scummy thing to do.

These marketers are lying to their customers.

A good (or bad, depending on how you look at it) example of this in action was Matt Bacak’s “Mass Money Makers” launch on the 28th December 2010.

From Matt’s salespage:

“we’re forced to limit access to this powerful software to the next 200 lucky individuals”
“After we reach the next 200 downloads, we’ll be forced to pull the software off market”
“Thousands of people will see this page, but only the next 200 individuals will get access to this software”

To anyone reading that they would think that there are only 200 places available. However, that’s not so.

On his JV pitch page – where Matt sends potential affiliates to ask them to promote his product – he says this:

“We’re talking reaching the unreachable…2,000 Clickbank Gravity (which has never been reached before) and seeing the unseeable, 20,000 front end units (front end units, not total units) – and in turn create history”

20,000 front end units?

I’ve one question; how would you be able to sell 20,000 front end units if you are limiting the number of customers to just 200?

Very disappointing behaviour but I’ll bet now that, because it works so well, false scarcity is used more and more in 2011.

Has anyone seen Kevin Potts?

Kevin Potts, the man behind the Cambridge Business Academy and the wildly expensive “Churchill Apprentice” course, has disappeared.

His membership site has been closed down with a notice claiming it has been “sold” and his business partners (or should that be ex-business partners?) aren’t saying anything at all.

It’s a big mystery what’s happened and with Kevin keeping a very low profile he is just fuelling the speculation.

The “Churchill Apprentice” course cost £20,000 per place and if claims are to be believed around 100 people signed up.

These people were promised full access to the Cambridge Business Academy website and staff but now, a few months later, all of that appears to be gone.

A very strange way of doing business.

One of the reasons it was successful was because the website ranked very high for the term “make money online”. Surely anyone buying the site would do so to take advantage of that ranking?

By wiping all of the content from the site and leaving just a small piece of text on the front page, the site will lose that valuable search engine ranking. This does sow doubt in the mind to the claim that it has been sold.

Any information would be gratefully received, the Kevin Potts saga is turning into a big talking point going into 2011.

Over the last year it’s been interesting to watch the fallout from the recession, especially in the business opportunity world.

It’s a funny thing selling business opportunities – you are selling a product that is supposed to make the customer money.

Therefore if you sell products about making money, your company should be able to make money. If you can’t make money and admit you can’t then you lose all of your credibility. So it’s very important for biz opp publishers to keep up the pretence that they’re still making a lot of money.

Over the past couple of years the market for selling “make money” products has become more and more difficult. You won’t hear this from many people because they can’t admit this.

What you will hear more and more are such claims as; “it’s easier to make money in a recession because more people are looking to make money“.

Rubbish.

The usual buyers in the business opportunity market aren’t buying as much as they did two or three years ago, this is something that is being talked about in the bar at seminars, during mastermind sessions and via gossipy Skype chats.

We’re seeing some big biz opp and internet marketing people suffering in this downturn – but they’ll never admit it simply because they can’t. Their methods are supposed to work in all climates but cracks are beginning to show.

Take for example the £2,000 one-year mentoring course from a big UK publishing company that is now offered at £750. It wouldn’t usually raise any eyebrows except this is a company that never offers discounts and never reduces the price of its products.

Something’s very wrong if they’re suddenly offering huge discounts…

And there are other examples.

Take a look at the high-profile casualties of the recession:

Tim Brocklehurst – Tim closed his “MyViralSpiral” site with no warning and it later turned out that he was having financial difficulties:

What happened to Tim Brocklehurst’s MyViralSpiral?

Andy Shaw and Greg Ballard – Andy and Greg claimed to be millionaires who had made it big via property investing and information publishing. It was less than a year ago that they both were declared bankrupt in Brighton:

Andy Shaw and Greg Ballard from Passive Investments – Bankrupt?

(Greg seems to have vanished but Andy is now trying to sell a financial trading opportunity)

Pat Lovell and Sean Roach sold Rip2It as a complete business-in-a-box that anyone could use to make money, even if they’d never build a website before. Their whole business partnership collapsed late in 2009 and Pat appears to have left the internet marketing scene completely:

Pat Lovell is No Longer Associated with Rip2it

Sometimes Things Happen for a Reason

Which leads to…

The lastest offering from Streetwise Publications.

This is of lower quality than their usual offerings and certainly isn’t something they would’ve released a few years ago when they were able to sell 10 CDs for £2k (remember the Insider Signal?)

I can’t say I’m impressed with the Complete Computer Cashpoint and that should be obvious in my write-up:

The Complete Computer Cashpoint from James Walker and Streetwise Publications

When will things improve? No one can say for sure.

I’d imagine that we’ll know that the economy is improving when the quality of business opportunity products begins to increase and we see less and less “get rich quick” opps being offered.

It’ll be nice to write about some good opportunities for a change…