The Get Rich Quick Artists

[cyfishy]

The thing about Second Life that probably garners the most hype is the fact that people can, conceivably, make actual cash money from it. This is one of the reasons that my business partner is so eager to get our store going, having met others who are actually making a modest income off of making and selling things in SL.

So somebody posted this forum thread asking about a site called metafortune.com. Having fallen for a few "Make Money At Home" scams back in my desperate college grad days (I still keep them in my filing cabinet to remind me) I was able to parse the ad and cull the puffery from the facts. It looked like the guy was selling an e-book on how to set up a store in SL. Well, no harm in that, really, though the income expectations were perhaps a little overstated. The one testimonial on the page claimed that someone had been able to buy a car with their SL income, but what kind of car they bought is a little hard to gauge from the photo, and chances are it just means that they're pulling down enough cash each month to cover the car payment.

But a few hundred bucks is nothing to sneeze at, so what the hey. And the e-book was only $7.99 (that's US dollars, not Lindens) and I figured it might have some tips and advice that I hadn't thought of, for when we get Social Butterfly launched.

So on my lunch hour I went to my house, made the PayPal payment and downloaded the e-book. And opened it. And read it. In its entirety.

It was only twelve pages long. Twelve. Pages. That's not an e-book, that's an e-pamphlet. It was double-spaced, badly written and in some cases, just plain WRONG. (Buy First Land and sell it for a profit! Um, yeah, that's great, except for the fact that they got rid of the First Land program precisely because of so many people doing that.)

The only things I learned that I didn't already know were (a) that affiliate links pay L$2000 (though the book doesn't mention that the referred person has to upgrade to premium for you to get paid) and (b) apparently setting up a MySpace profile for your avatar (which I'd been vaguely thinking about doing anyway) is a great way to get traffic to your store.

Everything else was stuff I already knew. And it's so confusingly written that somebody who has no clue about Second Life will be completely lost. There's a half page on renting land for income, well and good, and just says airily "search SL for a rental box" and offers no help on, say, how to set the thing up, how to set properties on your land so it doesn't become a massive sandbox griefer haven, or any of that.

There's one page spent recommending getting your business 'verified' by a BBB-like organization. It offers three examples--The Better Business Bureau, TrustE, and talksecondlife.com. Now, the first two are for actual businesses--to my knowledge, they don't even deal with SL-based businesses. So that leaves talksecondlife, which is specifically targeted, obviously, to SL businesses.

Now the punchline: the founder of talksecondlife and the author of the book are one and the same--one Jacob Roundel. Yet the book acts as if talksecondlife is simply this nifty service that he stumbled upon and, wow, it's served him so well.

Oh, and purchase of the book includes a 'free' Business In A Box, which turned out to be a furniture store of middling quality. And it doesn't even seem to have been created by the author of the book. I really don't see the point of reselling things from a Business In A Box, myself, considering that anybody else can buy your entire inventory from the same vendor you bought yours from. (The only other Business In A Box I've bought was a batch of dresses for L$250, only about four of which were worth wearing, but those made it worth the $L250 to me.)

So, yeah. Eight bucks down the drain for nothing more than a good laugh. Go figure.

EDIT: Okay, give the guy points for this--I demanded a refund on the forum thread and I just got every penny I spent PayPaled back to me. So it's now just a good laugh.

EDIT2: Oh, my word, it gets even funnier. He's selling the site. He put it up for sale the day he put that link up asking about it. I wonder if he's worried about revenue going down since word got out about how shite it was?

EDIT3: Some four years later, the original author has asked that his RL name be removed from this post, on the basis that he sold the rights to the book ages ago and is no longer in SL. I have, with some admitted reluctance, assented to his request.

Comments

[kherber.livejournal.com]

Does Myspace advertising work? Is there much of a SL presence on Myspace?

[cyfishy.livejournal.com]

I haven't the faintest notion if it does. Actually, his point was that there isn't that much of an SL presence on MySpace (though there are, indeed, MySpace profiles for avatars--Miles has one, for example) and therefore SL is a novelty there. Which means it's a great way to get new people into the game via affiliate links, which means cha-ching for you if they go through your affiliate links. I'm guessing you'd have to link your avatar profile to your 'regular' profile (if you have one) in order for that to be much use.