There are thousands of questionable products and services online. Most of them will have very convincing sales pages and videos to make you believe you are buying something wonderful when in reality, you are throwing your money away. At some point we all get caught out with a fake or low-quality product – it is part of our online “street smart” learning curve, I guess.

In this review, I will show you some tell-tale signs that will help you identify fake Internet marketing products. I hope to help you spot the next dodgy marketing product before it is too late!

Fake Testimonials

The first way to identify a fake product or service is by taking a look at their testimonials. This used to be a great way to instil trust and believability in a product, and it still is, but only when done right. The problem with these fake testimonials is that they can be purchased on places like Fiverr.com for, you guessed it, $5!

Of course, these are all great value and those guys do a fantastic job but the products that they unwittingly end up endorsing, to be fair, are very low quality and sometimes fraudulent.

More often than not, if you search through the listings on Fiverr.com, you can find the same people doing testimonials for a majority of the low quality and fake service within the marketing niche.

If you are not sure next time, I suggest you check it out for yourself.

How To Tell If A Testimonial Is Real?

In the screen shot below are a couple of examples of real testimonials from HumanProofDesign;

What you will notice with these is that you can actually go to their websites and see who these people are. I checked out these websites, and I can see that these testimonials are real because the blogs in question are active, long-standing and have a good Page Authority in Google.

There is a certain amount of due diligence when it comes to checking if a testimonial is real or not.

In any case, if you find a product that has testimonial but they do not give any sources of who these people are then don’t believe them. This is my personal opinions anyways. Any person who is willing to put their name on a product and endorse it would also leave their website URL, don’t you think?

Over The Top Profit Claims

Almost all products which tease you with screenshots and “behind the scene footage” of their profits are lying to you. There are not many genuine and honest Internet marketers out there who would, in all good faith, use their own profits to convince you to buy the product – why? Well, any affiliate marketer worth their salt knows that past results do no generate, or guarantee, future profits.

Whenever you come across a new product, and they show you past profits and say “Hey! Look how much you can make!!” Then you need to be careful because you will find that most successful online bloggers and marketers do not share this information, ever!

What you will find is this; These figure that you are shown are real, in some cases, but the numbers you are shown are from an older product launch. So, what these scam artists do is they take an old screenshot and attach it to a new product and say “Hey! Look at how much money I am making!”.

They sell you a product which is doomed to fail, then use their profits as proof that they made a lot of money for the next product launch.

If you see screenshots like these on a sales page – close the browser and move on, they are lying to you.

Exaggeration Of Time Scale

Another sign that a product is low-quality or fraudulent is the time scale they promise you a return on your investment. Once again, no self-respecting product author will EVER guarantee positive results within a certain time scale – unless you are talking 6 months or more down the line.

If anyone you come across promises you that you will see results withing days or weeks, then that is a big “No, NO!”. This is simply because making money online, with any method, does take time.

Sure, you can become a writer or do small tasks and get paid immediately but to create a long-term and consistent income takes months – and those are the lucky ones. An average Joe, proceeding at a normal pace, is looking at 12 months or so.

So once again, if you come across a product online which promises you “$1,000 per day within 30 days”, run away!

Making Promises No One Can Keep

Making promises they can’t keep is another easy tell-tale to look out for. Statements like;

• “Guaranteed No.1 Google Rankings”
• “Have 100% unique content added to your blog, automatically!”
• “Guaranteed to double your traffic!”

How can anyone make statements like this and stand by them? They don’t know who you are, what website you have or what your situation is. So, how can any of these statements be even remotely true?

If you are ever promised any kind of results, be wary, because logic dictates that no one can guarantee anything – especially with Internet marketing.

Other Angles To Be Careful Of

Fake Review Sites

There are a lot of fake review sites which promote a lot of fake and low-quality services. The unfortunate thing is that a lot of them do appear to be real – because they are. They are regularly updated and have a lot of good content. The only problem is, they write good content for bad products.

With these kinds of websites, there is not much I can help you with because they are and look genuine. Also, the services they promote, even though incredibly low-quality, are legitimate products and services.

However, there is one thing you can do here. 

If/When you click on a link to a product, based on a review, and you are sent to a sales page which ticks a lot of the boxes I mentioned before, such as;

• Flashy sales video.
• A lot of screenshots of potential profits.
• Making incredible promises of wealth.

Then stop and go back to the review site that sent you there and have a look at some of the other products. Chances are most of them will be the same. If this is the case then just leave the site and try and remember it for next time.

Bogus E-mails

This one is very simple. If you get an e-mail from someone who you don’t know, offering you a chance to make money with a great new product, just don’t bother. Don’t even click on the link.

Unless you know the person and remember signing up his/her newsletter -never open any links from random, unsolicited e-mails.

Seemingly Positive Endorsements

This one is SO hard, and it only appeared on my radar recently. Sometimes you can have good quality and reliable services that you use on a daily basis that, so some weird reason, promote very low-quality products within their content.

All the major websites will use some kind of Adsense or content-style ad platforms which are placed on websites in the form of;

• “Related Articles”
• “You may also like;”
• “More articles like this”

These can be very deceptive because these are links to pages and products which are NOT endorsed by the website owner, on which you are browsing. These article topics are generated by an ad company and the websites which place them within their content get paid per click.

This means that you can be on a website you know and trust, then get sent to another article on a different website where you may end up buying something.

You will see a very small text in the corner somewhere saying “Sponsored” or “Ads By [company name]” – they are very sneaky that way.

In this kind of situation, all I can say that you have to ALWAYS be on guard. You just don’t know where you will end up and if an Internet marketing product you think is being endorsed by a reputable company comes at you then you need to be ready for it.

Over All Advice.

I hope the information I have provided here will stand you in good stead when the times comes and you are facing a sales video you are not sure about. Always be on guard and use your common sense. If something seems to good to be true, then it probably is!

If this article helps even one person identify some fake internet marketing products, then I am more than happy. Please leave a comment below if you have anything to add to this list!