Last year one particular advert appeared in the Sunday press business opportunity classifieds pretty much every week.
The little ad always said something like:
EXTRA INCOME
£250-£1500 a week p/t!
EXCITING NEW OPPORTUNITIES
FREE INFO no obligation, leave details
0800 458 xxxx (24hrs)
http://www.nhbusiness.co.uk
For weeks I skipped past the ad without giving it too much thought but for some reason or other in December 2006 I decided to visit nhbusiness.co.uk and “order” the special report.
The site has no indication of what it is all about but I was curious so I put my name and address in anyway.
A few weeks later I received a small A5 sized envelope through the post.
It was the “January 2007 Special Business Report” and promised to reveal the “latest high-earning business opportunities available in the UK“.
The report consists of 3 A4 pages of advertisements for various biz opps – 22 seperate adverts in all.
These cover a variety of different business ideas but there are some familiar faces who advertise in this circular.
First off we have Simon Stepsys or, rather, “Simon Step$y$” – his spelling, not mine.
Simon was a heavy-hitter in the Prosperity Automated System pyramid scheme which was massive last year until it was dissolved by the Securities and Exchange Commission in the US (see the main site for details).
Nowadays he seems to be advertising some kind of co-op marketing scheme which I didn’t bother reading about.
Another familiar face is Julie Wilson who also promoted PAS heavily last year in the national press.
On her website she says:
“Basically for 10 years I chased the MLM dream, striving for that elusive residual income and great lifestyle that all the hype makes you believe is within your reach. I don’t think I ever earned more than £750 a month, and that was a good month!”
This contradicts her classified ad in the Sunday Times of 14th May 2006 in which she promoted PAS by suggesting you could earn £1,600 per day.
Chris Cobb is here as well, advertising his “Automated Income Stream Start-Up Kit valued at £1,497”.
Then we have adverts for Kleeneze, VWDirect, Tiscali Networks, various nutritional supplements, “£25 for every sold sign you see”, greeting cards sales, fuel saving tablets and other MLM related opportunities.
Nothing really interested me at all here, least of all anything offered by people who participated in the PAS scam.
Wonder if they ever paid any money back to the people in their downlines who lost thousands of pounds by joining the Prosperity Automated System?
Hope it gets better next month.
Hi Ben
Re – NH Business and their advert
This company is a bit of everything, list builders, Advertising middleman and advertising source.
They generate lists by advertising in the national press as you described.
You can rent their list for a direct mail campaign and even for an email campaign. They do a co-op advertising scheme i.e. your ad gets sent in a newsletter style with several others (that is what you received).
You can also use the company to be a middleman for you if you want to advertise in the press. The premise being hat because they do this all the time – they can negotiate better rates for advertising.
They can also deal with all the different press on your behalf (a single point of contact if you will), obviously for a fee. If their fee is less that what they can save you off the rate card then it’s probably a good solution.
I can also see a benefit if you are placing loads of ads in different papers, it saves you taking loads of phone-calls.
I’ve never actually used any of their services myself, but researched them last year for a project I was going to run which didn’t come off.
Regards
Comment by Barry — 19th January 2007 @ 3:39 pm