I'm sure you've seen the late night television ads for the Don LaPre money making system. The ads are great - awesome, in fact. They show this young "kid" (Don LaPre) who is incredibly excited about life and everything, so happy that he's found a way to share his money making ideas with the world. Cindy Margolis (a famous model) is in some of the ads, and she is equality excited about these ideas.
Their enthusiasm is difficult to resist. I know how hard it is as I saw the same infomercial month after month. The same cheerful young man almost literally jumping up and down with energy, apparently wanting only one thing: to help people make some money so they can get ahead in life. The infomercial is peppered with interviews with successful students who have used Don's methods to make zillions of dollars.
What they are asking you to buy (at first) is a package of booklets, an audio cassette and a video tape which tells you various ways to make money. We purchased that package and it's actually pretty good stuff. It only cost $40 or so and the data it gave was most definitely worth the dollars. It's nothing special, but for the price it's good information which anyone can use to get some money making ideas.
But what happened next was we received several phone calls with pitches for additional money making schemes. One of these was a 900 number service. It sounded great - you purchase these 900 numbers, they run them for you and you advertise them. The profits are split 50/50. What a great idea - everyone knows that 900 numbers make money, right?
Well, we got very excited and purchased two lines - an internet tips and a dating tips line, for $700 in advance. This bought us a few booklets, some sample advertisements and a 2 year lease on two different phone extensions. Someone who wanted to listen to the service dialed the 900 number then entered the correct extension. He would be billed by the minute started after the first minute.
We advertised the 900 numbers very heavily for over six months and we didn't receive a single solitary phone call. During that time, we received additional calls from Don Lapre's service trying to get us to purchase pre-made web sites and other promotional materials to sell our 900 numbers. By this time we were becoming very skeptical of the entire thing and decided we needed to make back some of our investment before giving away more of our money.
We tried everything that was available to us to sell our 900 number service. We created web sites (in fact, Internet Tips And Secrets is an indirect result of those efforts), sent out flyers and performed very other action mentioned by Don's literature. We even put an ad in the National Enquirer (what better place to market a dating 900 line, right?) without pulling in a single cent.
Fortunately for us we managed to avoid the severe temptation to spend even more money for Don's internet marketing service (a mere additional $700 after all). We had the gall to want to see some money, any money, before throwing in still more.
We finally did receive a check for about three dollars. That's the entire amount that we received for our investment in time and money. After six months, we finally just gave up, removed the advertisements and put our money and time into better things.
One of the things that I've really come to hate about Don LaPre and his 900 number services is the incredible amount of silly, one-page web sites all over the internet advertising these numbers. Put in a search for just about anything and you're likely to pull up one or more of these little sites. I am guilty of creating a few myself, until I figured out that it was all a scam.
I wonder how many people actually surf the web, run across one of these pages, and then jump on the phone to call the 900 number? Anyone?
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Unless otherwise noted, all photos and text is Copyright © Richard G Lowe, Jr.