Selling the Grant Scam

If I offered you $20 to scam someone you did not know and would never meet, would you do it? What if I told you that you could do this 10 times a day, and if you worked really hard and used ingenious and clever marketing methods, maybe even 50 times a day, netting you $1000 in a day? And what if I told you that if you spent a little money of your own for advertising, the income potential would be unlimited?

Most people probably would not mind the income potential, but does the end justify the means? Not for 90% of the people, I would guess.

Yet there is a hoard of people banking on the gullibility, stupidity and lack of knowledge of others. What's worse, these days those same people are trying to cash in on other people's misfortune, misery and hopelessness.

If you have never heard of affiliate programs, in a nutshell, here's how they work:

• A company has a product / service they sell and market, but they can only market so much
• To increase their marketing potential, they set up an affiliate program, through which they provide anyone who wants banner ads, links, images, etc
• These third parties use that marketing collateral to promote said company's products / services, for example by sending out e-mails (spam) or placing ads / banners on their own websites and blogs, or actively marketing the goods via Pay-Per-Click ads
  
• If these third parties make a sale through one of their affiliate links, they get paid a certain amount
  
• Depending on the product / service being marketed, these amounts range from anywhere between $0.25 to $50 or more (!)
• The income potential is typically unlimited; more sales means more cash for the affiliate marketer, and the amount of sales stands in direct relation to the efforts and effectiveness of the marketer.
  

Affiliate programs are nothing new, and they provide thousands of companies with a good way to expand their marketing base. They also provide thousands of others to earn an income by marketing the products of these companies. In essence, affiliate programs are a good thing for business.

But they can also be a bad thing, as is the case with the perpetuation and widespread 'marketing' of the government grant scams. Here is a quote from an affiliate blogger apparently excited about the cash prospect of marketing these grant scam sites:

"By now, MANY of you have probably heard of how much Government grant offers are killing it like crazy! I've heard reports of crazy high numbers... Such as what the average American earns in a year being earned in a single day using government grant affiliate programs.

I blame the popularity due on the new presidency and the whole talk of the stimulus. When people hear stimulus, they think, "Hey maybe I can get free money!"

As you can see, he's talking about 'killing it' and in essence calls people stupid in the next paragraph. Yet he apparently sees nothing wrong with it. He self-reports to be 'making hundreds of thousands of dollars' each month through affiliate marketing. Interestingly, in his bio he also states:

"As for me personally, you'll notice on this site that I am openly Christian. More than just a religion, I have a relationship with Jesus Christ and can't help but have that spill out onto many of the principals that I both write about here and also apply in the business world."

I'm not here to judge people, but in my book being excited about cashing in on scamming people and having 'a relationship with Jesus Christ' are two things that do not rhyme.

I do not know whether this guy actually participates in these grant scam affiliate programs, for his sake I hope he does not. I suggest he spends some of his fortune to educate would be victims instead of getting excited about making dirty cash by perpetuating the schemes of the grant scamholes.

In some of my next posts I'll talk more about these affiliate marketers, especially since many of the new grant scam sites are basically set up as entry pages with click-through affiliate links, and many of the contextual ads we see on Google and other search engines are paid for by affiliate marketers.