In this article I want to talk a little bit about marketing scams.

Having run an offline manufacturing business myself for 12 months, I know what it is like to have to find someone trustworthy to outsource marketing jobs to because there are plenty of untrustworthy agencies in the marketplace – these are the pirates of commerce!  They are out to ‘steal’ your marketing budget i.e. deliver a lot less value than you could otherwise get if you had some insider knowledge.

I have recently been reminded of this fact by my son, who has started a marketing job with a company that sells higher-end accounting software.  They have put out for two marketing quotes:

• to restyle and vectorise their logo – they were quoted and paid £285
• to create a survey of their customers – they have been quoted £6,000

These are jobs that I could gave got done for $19 within one hour for the logo restyling with unlimited revisions and in the latter case I could have either set this up for free using Google Forms or, if they wanted a more sophisticated job,  for around £200 plus a couple of hours of my time bearing in mind that the survey questions will be created by my son’s firm anyway!

These are just two examples of marketing agencies leveraging the ignorance of their customer to quote outrageous fees. My son is learning fast that he needs to be very careful in shark infested waters!

I would say that 90% of websites created for offline businesses are marketing scams – most of them receive next to no visitors and even if they did would not convert prospects into customers and certainly they could not measure a return on investment.

This terrible scam has undermined the trust and confidence that many businesses have in online marketing which is a great pity.

I have had to bootstrap my business and, as a consequence, have uncovered many fast and cheap ways to get things done – I could make a very good business out of arbitrage i.e. being the middleman and taking a commission out of outsourcing marketing jobs but at rates that would severely undercut these agency sharks.

There is even software available that enables you to identify people seeking marketing help on Craigslist and then matching these request with gigs on Fiverr.com so that you can quote a competitive fee to the customer.

In the info-marketing world, the scammers are characterised by people using false income claims and lying or telling half-truths about how to earn an income online.  There are more of these than you would suspect.  In fact any small achievement or success is often blown out all proportion by the marketer in an effort to sell his/her product.

You can only implement what you are taught and then get the experience and data you get from taking action – until you have tested it for yourself you must not believe anything you are told!

However, if you have a little marketing knowledge, it can certainly be turned into a good income if you can help businesses to find cheaper and faster solutions than those being offered by outright marketing scammers who are the pirates of our trade.

In the meantime, every business needs to proceed with caution because there are plenty of marketing scams to catch out the unwary.  If you are aware of any, please post it in the comments below and share it with your fellow entrepreneurs because we need to expose these marketing scams!