As I have previously mentioned, I am on a lot of business opportunity mailing lists and so I receive loads of sales letters through the post.

This week I received a letter from James Rhodes telling me that:

You Can Make Big Money Part-Time From Home With This Amazing Turn-Key Internet Business!

In the envelope I received a two-sided A4 letter, a small order form and a leaflet, all showing me that I could have “2 hot web sites on the internet” for only £150.

I would also be protected by a 100% money back guarantee.

The whole sales package came from a company called Fast2Net who operate out of London but who are apparently an off-shoot of a business created in the US.

For my £150 (usually £445 but I got a discount of £295) I would get a choice of two passive income producing websites featuring either:

Books, software and music,

“Women’s” goods,

“Adult” goods or

Casino/gambling sites

I logged onto Fast2Net.co.uk to find out exactly what these websites looked like.

The first, a CD store at Go2emedia.co.uk seems well designed but doesn’t seem to rank particularly highly in any search engines and also has a rather poor ranking at alexa.com:

Traffic Rank for go2emedia.co.uk:  1,116,903
Speed:  Very Slow (90% of sites are faster)
Online Since: 04-Apr-2001

So, this is a flagship site for Fast2Net but doesn’t seem to attract many customers and is also flagged as being very slow.

The same was true of the “Women’s” store, 4her2shop.co.uk which had a rank of 1,386,660, loaded slower than 92% of websites but had been online for the same amount of time.

If these are Fast2Net’s examples of how good their customers’ stores can be then I am staying well clear of this one. These statistics are not very impressive whatsoever.

Another problem with the Fast2Net opportunity is that you barely get any time to test how well your sites will perform.

They say that you will have 2 sites up and running with 24 hours. Fine, no problems there…

However, the “100% Satisfaction, Money-Back Guarantee” is valid only for 7 days after you have ordered and therefore just 6 days after having your sites set up.

If I were to build a site and test it properly, I would need at least 30 days before I made any decisions as to whether it was performing or not.

7 days is woefully inadequate.

I won’t labour the point but this promotion didn’t get my heart racing or have me tempted to get my wallet out. The leaflet carries two quotes from Declan Dunn, a successful affiliate marketer. They are just generic quotes though and do not relate at all to the Fast2Net opportunity. They are certainly not a testimonial for Fast2Net.

Out of sheer curiousity I ordered Fast2Net’s accounts for the year ended 2005.

I won’t pretend that I can read balance sheets and make any sense out of them but the extremely negative six figure number next to “Profit and Loss Account” didn’t look good to me.

I’ll stick to creating my own websites thanks – or outsourcing the work so someone else does it for me!