Hey, what’s going on?
Welcome to the Doug Show. I’m Doug Cunnington, and today we’re gonna talk a little bit about how to identify a. Scam some questions that you could ask yourself. Hopefully I got the music a little bit lower last week. I had the levels a little bit off and the music probably blasted through a little bit louder than what I was hoping for, but I think it’s, uh, more appropriate today.
Hopefully I’ll have some new tracks, uh, that I can put on for the intro and outro music as time goes on, but we’ll. See, we’ll see. I, uh, I’ll probably be working with my buddy Tyler A. Little bit on, , putting something together. He plays a drum, so it’ll fill it out a little bit more. Last week while I was in Yellowstone and I recorded the episode that came out last week, um, like the, the week before, I don’t remember.
Basically, I’m pretty sure I talked about how. It was a random episode, but I also talked about how I was like, I don’t know if I’m gonna actually do the, um, calling out the scammers online, because those folks have a lot of time and they, uh, they may not be ethical anyway. So if I call them out, it could actually be a real hassle and problem for me.
So instead of that. I decided maybe it would be good to give you more sort of universal, uh, skills and ideas on what you should spend your time on. So I’ll do my best. I came up with a handful on my own and I also consulted, uh, Jim and I briefly, and I think you could do the same Whatever AI tool you like to use, you could.
You know, put in information details about whatever you know, uh, idea or in air quotes, business opportunity. You’re reviewing to ask some critical questions to help you understand if it is a scam, maybe the downsides, the pros, and the cons of what it is that you’re looking at. Before I get into the details, like I said, I was out in Yellowstone for a few days, a trip with my dad.
Super fun, very quiet. It was interesting ’cause I’ve been to Yellowstone a lot of times in the past, but. I am pointing at my phone. I had my, my phone in in the past years, you know, you were able to get some cell phone reception in certain areas of Yellowstone. It’s a very large park, so sometimes, you know, you’re in a spot where there’s no cell phone service at all.
Actually, most of the time you’re not. But some of the lodges have, um, number one, they have wifi. Not too many of them, but some of them do. And. You can hop on there and at least like check your emails or stuff like that. Some areas you actually do have cell phone reception, and I saw people taking calls and checking their emails and stuff, but generally the speeds are gonna be way, way slower.
And it turns out I basically didn’t have any cell phone service, which was great. So I switched over to Mint Mobile, maybe like a year and some change ago. It’s on the T-Mobile network, which apparently doesn’t have very much coverage in the Yellowstone National Park area. So I was like, disconnected, couldn’t get text.
My dad had, uh, at and t or he has a at and t, so I would tell him to, Hey, shoot Elizabeth a text to let her know like we made it to our next destination. Everything’s fine. Anyway, great trip. Pretty much unplugged. I did log on to the wifi in the Canyon area, which is like the newest lodge area that they have, and that wifi was actually reasonably fast and I just hopped on so I could make a call to Elizabeth just to check in, but was really nice to unplug for several days.
And yeah, I mean, I. There’s, there’s no replacement to not having the phone vibrate or whatever and, and bug you. One cool thing, I didn’t have the, you know, the phantom vibration in my pocket. That happens sometimes when you like, don’t have your phone with you and all that stuff. I did bring my phone with me everywhere since it’s a good camera on there.
So took a lot of photos. I’ll, I may put together, uh, a little bit of an album, maybe some, some new photos over there on. The print on demand, uh, site Red Bubble. It was perfect weather. Got some great photos out there. Okay, so quick recap in case you missed previous episodes. But essentially I chatted with some friends, um, over the last couple, uh, weeks and I was like, oh man.
It looks like there’s some scams out there. I can’t believe people are selling these products. And each of those people thought I was talking about a specific person. I was being more general. I thought of one or two people, but I was being more general and they were like, is it this person? And I was like, no.
They both named different people. So they have also seen like scammy things out there in the world, especially in the wake of all the niche site and content site world. Shout out to Alex Cooper at WP Eagle. He did a really cool, um, update. Like, where are they now? With, I don’t know, six or eight different content site, niche site affiliate marketing people that were prominent in the space, and I think it was like two hours and 20 minutes or something like that.
So I, I’m in the middle there. It was interesting to hear, uh, from everybody and good to get the update from everyone. I’m only part of the way through, so I need to, you know, catch up and make sure I watch the rest of it. But there were a few, um, things on there that I’ll reference later, but I’ll, uh, remember to link up to that.
Pretty cool to get an update out there. But the interesting thing is there are, you know, people that. Have an audience or they’re still building an audience or whatever, and then they’re selling kind of crappy products. So that is just out there. That is the nature of make money online and, you know, people are selling a dream.
So a few questions that you might be able to ask yourself, man. So let’s rewind and think about the, the first time I. Discovered the make money online space, and you’ve heard me mention it before. So I found smart passive income back in 2013, and I started, at the beginning, I was actually not looking for anything specific.
I was just like, oh, this is, uh. You know, a top chart business podcast. I will check it out. The funny thing is I went over to Smart Passive Income and I went back to the very beginning and you can see those early episodes in this, um, smart Passive Income Episode one, the Intro and What to Expect. July 19th, 2010, so 15 years ago.
Pretty insane. And I remember like going through. I remember some of the names, right? So episode two, late night internet marketing with Mark Manson, Mason, sorry Mark Mason. I was like, that’s not right. So, and he had Mason’s world, which if you go to mason’s world.com now it’s clearly like a, um. Someone bought the site.
It’s like a bullshit site basically. So if it says pioneering digital business growth and it mansit world enterprises, we specialize in e-commerce solutions. It’s clearly like a link selling thing or something fake. I, I don’t know what it is, but if you go to, like, if you try to click about, it doesn’t really give you much information.
It’s just like generic and weird from what I could tell. I could be wrong. Actually. I tried to click on this earlier and it didn’t go anywhere, so I’m not sure what’s going on. That said, if you do go over to the services page, it’s a loam, ipsum, like not real information in here. So it does, it does indeed seem fake to me, but I’m not a hundred percent sure what’s going on there.
Back on topic, when I first found smart. Passive income. I thought this totally seems like a scam. But then I, I went through and I was like, well, maybe it’s not, there’s enough people here that make it sound like it’s legit. And eventually, of course, within six weeks or so, I had launched like one or two sites and I started dabbling because I think I had put in the time as far as like listening to episodes and it made me think there’s something to this, even if I don’t understand all the details.
Pat seems like a nice guy. Pat Flynn seems like he’s, um, being truthful even though some of the people he had on May or may not been. Like, um, sharing scammy things. I think if you go back now, it would sound more scammy back then. Totally fine. And, and again, I found this in 2013, so this was, you know, two to three years old by the time I found it.
And internet marketing moves pretty fast. So essentially I was learning stuff that was a little bit outta date, but not completely wrong. And very quickly, I mean. Devoured the content fast. So I was listening to, you know, I don’t know, five, six episodes a day. Just kind of going through it, noting people that seemed interesting and I would go listen to their podcast or re-listen to the episode and do more research.
Blogs were big back then too, so I would like go to their blog post, but I thought this stuff was a scam early on. I was like, this seems too good to be true. It doesn’t quite make sense, but. Eventually I was like, well enough people are talking about it. I will give it a try. There was enough sort of proof out there.
So a few things that you should ask yourself. I mean, you’ve heard people say it and you probably know it, but if it sounds basically too good to be true in a few different ways, it’s probably not true, right? So if it sounds a little bit too easy. Then that’s a red flag. And related, if it sounds like you can, you know, reach success really fast, that’s also a bit of a red flag.
So too easy, too fast. Again, also related, and these are just things that are excessive, right? So if you, it basically, if it’s like numbers that are so big, like revenue numbers that are. Insane and very fast and very easy. Something is a little bit off. You may not know which one of the things is off, but something is weird, right?
And I’ll, let’s talk about it a little bit more, right? So you will hear things that are. Pretty easy, right? It’s like, oh, I just spend, um, you know, 15 minutes a day. And I’m thinking of, um, Alex’s interview and I, again, I haven’t watched the whole thing, but he was talking to our friend Carl Broadbent, and he.
Has been spending time on TikTok, so he is making a lot of money on TikTok. I can’t remember if he was sharing the exact numbers, but it was I think hundreds of, um, dollars per day. And he referenced other people that he knew that are making, you know, 10 k plus. And several people that are making like huge amounts of money on TikTok via, I’m not sure of all the mechanisms, so I, I won’t butcher it here, but on TikTok and Carl, who again is my friend, he’s telling the truth.
I believe what he’s saying, but he’s saying, Hey, I’m only spending, um, a little bit of time. He actually told a story, he was out golfing and basically that was the day that he was, you know, making record income on TikTok. Right. So it’s not to say that he isn’t spending a short amount of time, but one thing that is baked into it that maybe we don’t consider, especially if you’re just um, getting started is Carl’s been working online for years and he has been working on, um.
Amazon influencer. So he learned how to do short form video where you have a review. So it’s like Carl has a lot of skills that he’s developed over the years that help him do this and for him to come up to speed much faster. So if it sounds too easy and people are like, oh, actually, good example. Right?
If I, if I just. Started a new podcast in a different space and said, Hey, you know what? It’s super easy to do a podcast. I publish 10 episodes and it’s blowing up. Well, I’ve been working online for 10 years. I’ve been doing a podcast for six. It’s not like I’m coming with no skills or knowhow or a network of people.
Like there’s a lot of things baked in. So if I just show up and I’m like, Hey, I was able to start a brand new podcast in YouTube channel and it blew up. Well, I have a lot of reps in, so keep that in mind. It might not be, you know. Specifically bullshit. It’s just like, well, someone isn’t, it might not be that they’re withholding, but someone isn’t giving you the full context, or you do not yet understand the full context of what they have as far as skills or network or something else.
So if it sounds too easy, then it probably is
a related idea around this is if it actually is easy, right? ’cause sometimes it let you know what, for the sake of argument, let’s say TikTok is very easy. Let’s say it is very profitable. And let’s say you basically could show up with no skills and start earning the 10 KA month in a one month or whatever.
So for the sake of argument, let’s say it actually is easy. You can get massive results and it is fast. The downside of that, while it sounds sexy and you’re like, fuck yeah, let’s do that. Let’s do the easy thing. If it’s that easy for anyone to come up and do that, and if you’re able to with no prior skill and you could just show up, start.
Doing whatever the business model is. That also means that anyone else could do that too, which means there’s a huge amount of competition and someone will , step over you, take your spot. So if it’s that easy to do, then anyone can do it. Anyone will do it, and there will be a ton of people and a ton of competition.
So at some point. Probably fairly quickly. That easy, uh, fast, like high level of results, those are gonna go away because there’s way more competition. So if it’s easy at the beginning, some people get the timing right and they just, they end up in a great spot. But maybe that. Timeframe of the opportunity is short because if it’s so good and so easy and so fast, there’s going to be so many people trying to do it, it will become saturated.
So one of the other things to think about, and I, you know, it’s kind of baked in if something doesn’t quite seem right, it doesn’t matter like what the issue is. Like if it doesn’t feel right to you, then. That is enough to question it and stay away from it. So, quick example, I sold my truck via Craigslist a few months ago, and there’s a lot of scammers on Craigslist.
You know, you put your information out there, you start getting messages, you start getting emails, and there was one person who seemed extremely interested in my truck and they wanted me. To pay them or not pay them directly. They wanted me to get like a title check for my truck on a paid website. They said, Hey, I just wanna make sure it’s clean.
Which, uh, hey, they’re doing their due diligence. Hey, I wanna make sure it’s clean. Just go to this website and get it and then send it to me. And then I’ll know that, you know, we can do this deal. And I didn’t know what the scam was. In fact, I told my wife about it and she was like, well, what were they trying to do?
Was it really a scam? And I’m like, I don’t, actually, it doesn’t matter. What the scam is, or who’s getting the money or whatever the mechanisms are. It’s obviously like something’s off on that because you can get a free title check and I just sent them the links. I’m like, Hey, go here. You can check it out yourself.
I actually did it just now. Uh, here’s the PDF, so you could take it or leave it. If you want to get the fucking $27 one, then pay for it yourself, dude. Um, and. Again, I didn’t know what the scam was. I just knew I shouldn’t have to pay money to sell my truck. It’s fucking stupid. Right? This, that’s the one I sort of forgot about.
Like I, um, went over to Gemini and I was like, Hey, I think I just asked about how to identify a scam. What questions should I think about if. Um, there’s some offer and I don’t, I don’t know if it’s real or not. So there were a handful of pretty decent ones in there. The one that I forgot specifically is like, if you have to pay upfront for something that should be a red flag.
It doesn’t mean it’s always, um, a scam, but you know, if, you know back in the day when we were starting websites. Well, you have to pay for hosting, but it’s not like you’re paying the person that’s telling you about it. You’re paying a hosting company, so like you might have to pay for hosting, you might have to pay for like a WordPress theme.
You don’t have to, but there’s some infrastructure things that you have to consider. But one of the big ones, you know, if you think about, uh, MLMs or something similar, not necessarily a pyramid scheme, but. Let’s be real. Those are pyramid schemes, right? If you have to pay for, say, $500 of training materials, and then products that you have to sell, seems a little off, right?
Like if you have to pay a lot of money upfront, probably not legit. The caveat is if you are paying for services or infrastructure, like I mentioned, maybe that makes sense, but you’re not directly paying the person. But if I was like, Hey, there’s this great way to earn money on, um, Instagram reels, but what you really need to do to make this work is buy my editing software that, you know, solves this problem right.
I mean, seems a little weird, but that was, um, kind of a handful of the products that I bought back in the day. So I’m thinking of some of the link building software and. Again, it’s if you’re a long time listener, you’ve heard a similar story where I think I got some link building software and it cost, I don’t know, 500, $600 or something like that.
And I watched a bunch of tutorial videos and I bought it via the affiliate link of those tutorial videos. And the guy was like, this is how I build these multi-tier links. And you could do a link pyramid, and you could do a link wheel and all this other kind of stuff. That we would do back in the day.
And truly it was automated and it did that stuff. However, uh, turns out it was probably just useless. And at the time that I bought the software, I mean, I don’t think those strategies were working for longer than like a few weeks or so. Now again, if you rewind, you go back to 20 10, 20 11, maybe. Maybe those link wheels and link pyramids were working really well and I kind of believe maybe they were, uh, one of the early posts that I went to over on Smart Passive Income was about like the link building strategy.
That Pat used for his sites and you know, we’re, I think it was written in like 20 11, 20 12 or so, and I was reading it and implementing it in 20 13, 20 14, and it would work for a short time, but Google was way more sophisticated. So I ended up getting, you know, manual penalties and all this stuff, but it was like, yeah, you just hop over to Fiverr, you can order this uh, link wheel, link pyramid thing, and it costs five bucks.
And um, yeah. That’s how you rank on Google. Yeah. That’s a long time ago now. That’s almost 10 years ago, but it just. Yeah, it just wasn’t quite, quite right at the time I was doing it. So if something doesn’t feel right, if it sounds kind of scammy, then it probably is like you don’t have to know exactly what part of it is bullshit.
If it seems a little bit like bullshit, it probably is one thing you can do is um, check around with people that you trust. You might be able to find them online. Although, I’ll tell you while I consume a lot of YouTube, YouTube is a place where, well, people are trying to get views and clicks and that sort of thing, so they are, they’re incentivized to do things sort of in a weird way and.
You can’t always, you can’t always trust the information that you find. So if they, you just ask yourself or like, are people incentivized to tell you a certain thing or not? So you have to find independent folks that can give you that information moving on. Two other things that you can think about and.
One is just high pressure. So if it’s a high pressure sales thing, and I’ve been on a few different calls in the, in the past, ’cause I, I took courses, right? So I took courses and there were, there’re these fucking high end mastermind groups, which I’m not saying those are scams, like some people can get a huge amount of value, but for me at the time I was like, there’s no fucking way.
So I won’t mention who, but there were a couple. People where I was like on, on their high end, um, sales, high pressure calls, and basically small mastermind group. Like I would be working directly with the person, um, like the figurehead, the, the founder of whatever company it was. And they, you know, basically I took their courses and I was.
Fairly successful in their courses. So I would like take their course did really well. I was a testimonial or I provided my, my results and stuff. So I was a person that they were like, okay, well we could try to sell to this person and I got a lot out of their previous courses. But you end up on a phone call and.
The high pressure was often related to scarcity, so high pressure and scarcity. If it’s artificial scarcity, that’s one that you know, it’s, they’re trying to force you to make a decision, and that’s usually a sign that. That always ’cause scarcity is effective in marketing, but at the same time, it’s like, if it’s high pressure and scarcity, it’s like, okay, look, I, I don’t wanna be in a high pressure situation here.
So anyway. The mastermind groups were like, I think one was like 20 5K, and the other one was like 35. And I was like, get the fuck outta here. That’s, that’s so much money, dude. That’s like the cost of a car. I declined, uh, respectfully. Um, but essentially it was like, Hey. Uh, we have to make the decision today or like within 24 hours, like, I’m closing the doors, we’re only gonna have 10 people in here or whatever, and it lasts for, you know, whatever.
A quarter, usually pretty quick. Again, people can get value out of it, but at that stage I was like not interested in that. I think I was interested in. Staying where I was at. I wasn’t trying to get to seven figures or eight figures or anything like that. I was like, this is cool. I will cruise where I’m at and I don’t need to reinvest in myself in that way.
It in the long run. It worked out fine, but that’s something to look out for. And I think it depends on the industry, right? ’cause I know there are some like high level masterminds that are, especially around real estate, that is another scammy industry. It, it’s make money in real estate. I mean, it’s the same kind of deal, but there’s a lot of those kind of, um, high level.
Mastermind groups in, in that area too. Again, you can get value from those, but it was just, it stuck out in my mind because it was such a huge amount of money and it, like for me, it didn’t make sense. Again, for some people, if they have bigger ambitions, I mean, you can learn from other folks, so there’s nothing wrong with that.
Okay. The summary though is if it’s high pressure and there’s some artificial scarcity. Something weird is probably going on. So quick recap.
If you have to pay upfront, especially a large amount of money, that’s kind of weird. If something is too easy, if it sounds like you can get extremely fast results, if the results are really massive. With no skillset or prior, um, knowledge or anything like that. Also a red flag. And finally, if it’s high pressure or there’s some kind of weird like scarcity where they’re like, you have to order this right now.
You, you really need my software and I’m closing the doors really soon and I’m not gonna let anyone else get the software. So if you want to take advantage of this, you gotta do it right now. Probably a little bullshit in there. So. And quick note I want to emphasize, so I mentioned Carl earlier. Um, and I don’t, I, I think I, I believe what Carl is saying and I, I don’t know that, I mean, he’s not like trying to teach or sell anything as far as I know.
But, you know, he was talking about like, Hey, I started working on TikTok, uh, in the last couple months and he’s earning a huge amount of money in. Totally possible. The thing to remember is like he had a lot of skills ahead of time, and the other risky thing is like. Not necessarily with TikTok, but with any opportunity.
If anyone can show up with no skills, get huge results in a short amount of time, that means that anyone can do it and anyone will do it, and then you end up with a more saturated market. It doesn’t mean that you shouldn’t or can’t participate in earning money there. It just means, yeah, it’s gonna be a short-lived situation.
At least that’s my take. If people disagree. Uh, let me know in the comments or shoot me an email feedback at Doug show in an upcoming episode. I actually got a question from a former student and roughly, you know what? I don’t have the email up, so I’ll just paraphrase. Essentially, he was in a spot where he doesn’t think that his efforts blogging are going to pay off in the future.
And he’s like, ah, is blogging what I should spend my time on? Which I don’t think he’s caught recent episodes ’cause I was like, don’t do content sites. So that is one thing to remember, but I’ll talk about it. I’ll actually answer his question sort of at length and former student, he was making I think a few thousand dollars per month for a decent stretch.
But through the helpful content updates, um, it dropped. And I think his revenue is down and sounds like his, um, savings are dwindling and he needs to work on something. He’s an international guy, so I think, um, he has other different constraints than people in the US specifically, or, uh, potentially Canada.
I can’t remember where he is at, but, uh, international and there’s some other, um. Things to consider with that, but I’ll talk about it and I mean, if you’ve been listening for a little while, I think you probably heard the punchline a couple times, like probably not blogging. There’s opportunities out there, but it’s definitely not as clear as it was for some time.
And I mean, just, I’m not gonna answer the whole thing now, that would spoil the whole episode, but I mean, I generally would not be working. I wouldn’t be trying to develop any business or side hustle where I have to interact with. Um, like Google Search, it’s proven to be, for me a. Google is a poor partner in the search area, and I think the writings on the wall.
We’ve had a couple years of such volatility that, um, I can’t imagine unless you’re, I mean, if you’re running an SEO agency or like everything that you’ve worked on is built around that, then you may have to figure out how to pivot harder or, I mean, some small businesses still need SEO help, right. Local businesses, I could see that.
But if you were doing what we were doing before with niche sites and content websites and all that, I mean, move on to something else basically. So that’s it for today. Thanks for, uh, checking in. Be sure you’re on the email list. You could follow the link in the description to make sure you get the emails that I send out when I ask questions, um, or need show ideas.
That’s where I send it and. I think that’s it for today. Let’s get this music going again.