Sunday, March 23, 2008

Home-Biz-Help BizOpp Review: Comparing "Data Entry" to "Envelope Stuffing"

Read the title and then read my lips: There is NO comparison!

I just read yet another article on a well established and well respected website about so-called data entry typing from home programs. This article basically equated data entry with envelope stuffing.

Huh? What in the world made anyone think the two concepts were anything alike? Has this author ever actually looked at either one?

"Envelope Stuffing" works like this: You answer an ad that tells you to send $5 for more info. You think, what the heck, I can afford $5, so you send it in. The answer comes back telling you to place ads like you answered, telling other people to send you $5 so you can tell them what the original ad placer told you. It is a genuine scam and illegal. Watch the Postal Inspectors make a bee-line to your door. I cannot for the life of me understand why Google shuts down accounts for legitimate online business owners (including ads for data entry) and yet continues to run envelope stuffing ads. Just boggles my mind.

Data entry typing from home offers are entirely different. First of all, they are NOT the mindless repetitive copying of info that some naive people think is going to make them hundreds of thousands of dollars a year for a couple of hours a day of work. Anyone who thinks that will happen needs a serious reality check.

They are an opportunity for the program buyer to learn affiliate marketing. All of these programs are more or less the same concept. They show you where to find affiliate products to sell online, they give you hints as to which kinds of products sell better than others, and they walk you through the process of placing pay-per-click (ppc) ads on the search engines. They also tell you where you can place ads for free; fewer results, less effective, but doable.

Most of them use a bit too much hype, but they do involve typing or data entry, and you probably will be doing it at home. They also show you screen shots of the ad forms you place in the search engines, and screen shots of a Clickbank Daily Sales chart.

To be successful, you have to have some skill, some talent, some insight, and probably a bit of seed money. Does it work for everyone? Absolutely not. Can it work? You betcha.

Example. I have access to the back office of one program that runs a monthly contest and gives prizes to the people who sell the most products, which is why numbers are posted. Anyway, so far this month, one person has sold over 1100 of this product. Rounding down to 1100, that is $38,445. Projecting out to the end of the month, (1100 / 23 x 31) = almost 1500 sales = almost $52,000. For one month. Not a bad chunk of change, for only one of who-knows-how-many products this person markets.

Person #25 has sold about 100 which projects out to about $4700. Could you use an additional $4700 per month? I know I could!

I have no way of knowing, but would not be surprised if these people are using the methods outlined in the program to actually market the program. No doubt this is not the only product they are marketing with this method, either.

So you see it can be done because it is being done.

You won't make that kind of money stuffing envelopes.

Am I doing this? No, I'm not, because I'm not that good. But that does not make the whole concept a scam, or the people that offer these programs scammers. Some, frankly are less reputable than others, and that's most unfortunate. But the concept is valid. It is a legitimate method of affiliate marketing that works very well for some people.

So where did the bad reputations come from? Envelope stuffing has a bad reputation because it really is a scam and it deserves a bad reputation.

Data entry typing from home offers probably got their bad reputation partly from the aforementioned hype (people see what they wanna see rather than what is actually there) but mostly because a few affiliates marketed using spam, and their accounts were not cancelled. They more or less got away with spamming, but the programs they marketed that way got blacklisted by e-mail servers.