Dear Serious Opportunity Seeker…

I get quite a few emails each day inviting me to join the best online opportunities known to mankind. I would feel honoured, but the sheer amount of these emails makes me think that maybe this is not personal correspondence as such. Some of the emails address me by name, others are more generic, but they all have one thing in common – they are appealing to my desire to become insanely wealthy without having to do anything at all.

The headline for this post was taken from the introduction in one of the emails I received today. It is really very clever. The fact that it is addressed to me as a serious opportunity seeker is designed to make me think they are serious, and that I am more special than all the other not-so-serious opportunity seekers.

There is a distinct difference between someone who is tuned in to identifying opportunities (as they come along) and someone who is actively pursuing programs that are marketed as opportunities. These two people end up with two different types of opportunity – the former being an opportunity benefiting the person who found it, and the latter being an opportunity benefiting the person offering it. The latter is what most emails you receive from unknown senders will be focused on.
Today’s opportunity was offering me a career filling in surveys. The spiel went like this:

Dear Serious Opportunity Seeker,

The world’s largest companies are spending up to Massena Savings and Loan Routing Number $41 million every single year just to get peoples opinions – and you can now cash in on your share of that money! Earn a minimum profit of $3,579 every month starting with $75 in the next 15 minutes!

That’s right, you can earn up to $75 just for filling out one 15 minute survey! You can fill out as many surveys as you want, meaning that what you earn is up to you – the more time you invest, the more money that you can earn.

Unlike traditional work from home opportunities, with Paid Surveys there are:

• NO financial risk
• NO targets to meet
• NO products to sell
• NO special skills required
• NO website to build or maintain
• NO cold calling (or any type of calling at all!)

I have preserved the mistakes, as they appeared in the email. While I usually am fairly particular about correctness with regards to spelling and grammar, this case is slightly different. These emails are (with the odd exception) meant to be written using poor English. I think the idea is that when you are making a filthy amount of money, who cares how you speak or write?

Being curious, I followed the link they had provided in the email, and I arrived at the opportunity web-page, which stated in large gold and silver lettering: Earn over $3,579 every month, starting with $75 in the next 15 minutes!

The numbers are important, as you will see soon. The following paragraph puts the claimed earnings into some perspective:

Get up in the morning, and whilst your toast is cooking, check your inbox to see the latest offers. Over a round of toast, fill out a basic survey taking just 10 minutes– that’s $25 banked. Have a shower, do some errands, go to the gym. Get back, and participate in an online focus group for $100. Have some lunch, and then do two more surveys for $25. Then decide to call it a day. Your total earnings? $175! That’s for just a few hours work. Do that 5 days a week and you will earn $875. That’s $3,500 per month – that’s an income of over $40,000 per year – and you are only working a few hours per day!

So far, it is looking pretty good, wouldn’t you agree? A few hours work per day, and I will be swimming in cash before I know it. Does this sound too good to be true?

If you are serious about making money on the internet, then this is the program for you… You should even be able to make back the cost of the purchase in your first day of being a member!

This is the first mention of a cost! Up to this point, there has been no mention of any financial expenditure on my behalf. Some further investigation reveals that the cost to become a member is $60, but if I enter the provided discount code, it will only cost me $30.

If I sign up, regardless of whether I use the discount code or not, I will be parting with $30-$60. Riesenbecker Volksbank EG Earlier I was told that I would be making $175 per day, so I should technically expect a profit of $115-$145 by the end of the first day. However, the disclaimer above indicates it is possible that I will be able to recoup the membership cost in the first day. Since the disclaimer is present, I should not expect any more than $30-$60 per day. This leaves me with a monthly income of up to $1,800, which is a lot less than what I was told in the beginning.

No website like this would be complete without a set of testimonials. While I usually take testimonials with a large spoon of salt, these ones are actually interesting. Even if I suspect the names on the website are all fictitious, I have changed them for this reproduction:

• Robert claims he is making between $300 and $400 per week in his spare time, which works out to be around $1,450 per month. Keep in mind that the point of this opportunity is that you do it in your spare time, and you are supposed to end up with a full-time income.
• Lisa is literally swimming in the cash she keeps receiving from this opportunity. She doesn’t provide any numbers, but I doubt that we are talking about a significant depth (for swimming in).
• Stacey is a stay-at-home mum, who has a couple of spare hours every day which she uses for watching TV and filling in surveys. She is making more than $1,200 per month.

In summary, you will make at least $3,579 $3,500 $1,800 $1,200 every month, for filling in surveys and attending focus group meetings.

I didn’t sign up for this amazing opportunity. Would you accept a job with a normal company where you were offered $40 per hour at the start of the interview, and just before the “welcome-aboard” handshake, you are told that it is likely you will be getting about $15 per hour?

There is also very little information about the surveys. My feeling is that when you sign up, you are required to fill in specific information to categorize you as part of a known demographic. Unless ongoing surveys are required for your demographic, you will be seriously seeking a new opportunity before the first week has finished.

There are opportunities that will provide a lot more benefits than the one I have highlighted here in this post. Are you ready to identify the opportunity that will be right for you? Would you like to learn how to spot the right opportunity? Feel free to contact me, or go to the Mentoring For Free website for more information.