Joel Comm Scam? Where is Your Price Integrity?
Apr 18th, 2008 by Charles
Here’s what happened.
Mark said all the above messages in just about 30 minutes before I logged into my twitter account in the morning. He made me wonder about the adsense book I bought last night. Then, I told Mark that I bought the book. Mark replied me to remind me of the upcoming unknown monthly subscription.
1 Sales Letter, 2 hidden behind.
Joel has done up a well-crafted sales letter with three tiers of upselling. And if you have noticed, the focus between Mark and myself is only on the chargeable $29.95 per month. After you have purchased the book, you will be brought to a new sales letter again to upsell you another thing. And then, he will upsell you again with yet another thing. All these upsells are ok for me since he’s trying to ask if I am interested by the way. And it is a common thing after the first upsell technique (known to me) is used by Ewen Chia. Now, it’s also been used by many others.
So is the Adsense Book worth buying?
I have not started reading it myself, but judging from a brief browsing through of the ebook, the contents look pretty good. Just remember to click on “Cancel” when you first purchase on his website when I first recommended this book. Or if you really want his subscription, just get it from there.
Such Techniques Should Stop
It almost makes no difference of Joel Comm from scammers to do such a thing in his sales letter. There are a lot of scams out there who are already polluting the Internet and causing people to beware from buying anything online. If any reputable marketers were to do such a low-class technique, it will be a shame as they are helping to reduce demands on the internet even though they may have a better conversion in their sales letter. It only means that these people have bought their stuff, but they will never ever buy things online again. You know about this term “Once bitten, twice shy!”
Here’s the post from Mark talking about the Adsense Secrets Scam Alert. Below is the video of Mark explaining about the scam.
Hi Charles,
I was browsing online looking for ways on how to transfer my WP site and I saw this post.
I have also bought Joel’s Adsense Secrets.
It’s only now that I realized it too.
It should have been indicated in the 1shoppingcart that there will be a monthly charge. This is very disappointing indeed since Joel is now one of the “big guys”, he shouldn’t have used a tactic like this.
Any idea how can I cancel the monthly subscription before I get charged?
Hi Jo, thanks for dropping by.
You could go to his adsense secrets website again. Go to the support, and send a ticket to him. This way, he should get it done. If not, please let me know… He made it so easy to subscribe, but it seems not easy to unsubscribe…
Hi Charles,
I did that and I just received an email from their support that the monthly subscription is now cancelled. They would still be sending the first free issue.
I wish they would revise their “tricky” sales page.
I have also seen a sales letter like this which was sent to my email. I don’t know if you’ve seen this.
https://mattbacakretires.com/wow.php (no affiliate links there)
However, this guy makes it clear in his checkout portion that there will be a monthly bill after the first issue.
I guess this is a new tactic the big guys are using now.
These kinds of tactics may not be ideal in this new world of Web 2.0 where things are getting more personal with social networks…
Let’s say if we happen to see such a thing more and more often, we may have a negative thought against this person when we met them on facebook…
I believe this tactic may phase out pretty soon if more bloggers are talking about it.
They mail the newsletter BEFORE you are billed. You also get a bonus CD every month and a membership in private member site.
The newsletter has a reminder stuck to the front of it so that you don’t forget to cancel if you don’t want it.
I think Joel is going above and beyond to give us time to opt-out before we are billed.
He’s playing with human psychology where we are given the first issue for free. When we finished reading his first issue, we tend to feel the issue is good and just let it be since the subscription is already on…
On the other hand, when we have not paid anything yet and we got the first issue, we may be too lazy to ask for subscription later…
It’s a brilliant idea… But still, the initial tactic of not mentioning about the monthly billing on the checkout page is still a scam…
I wrote a post about the “scam design” of these sites and why they fail to convert
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