Joel Comm’s AdSense Secrets 4.0 Scam?

April 29, 2008

Welcome guys, I’m sure most of you have heard of Joel Comm’s release of his AdSense Secrets 4.0 an updated version of his last AdSense Secrets book. Well since it’s release a lot of controversy has been going on, a lot of people have been saying it’s a scam and it just rips people out of their money. I did my research like always and came to find out about a little incident that occurred with this “AdSense Secrets 4.0″ book, which just by chance happened to include pro blogger Darren Rowse, Author and Publisher of Problogger.net

The altercation which was more of a misunderstanding damaged both parties an awful lot, let me brake down what took place…Darren Rowse wrote a post on his blog on Joel Comm’s release of his new book AdSense Secrets 4.0 and he also recommends it, but not only that he also advises his readers to skip the sales page. Now this was very unexpected coming from Darren as he has an excellent reputation and is well known as one of the top bloggers on the net.

Here’s the problem, Joel Comm has a very long sales page which is why Darren advised to skip it, but the problem was the book is $9.95 but comes with a recurring charge for an exclusive newsletter which is mentioned about 3/4’s down the sales page. Most of the people who purchased never read the page and were furious when they later found out about the recurring bill. This is when accusations start to come into place, everyone starts to point their fingers. Darren Rowse stated he himself was not aware of that and apologized for all the confusion, he also updated the post to make sure future readers wouldn’t be confused. As far as Joel Comm, he wrote a public apology which I linked to in the past, but is no longer available.

Although he apologize I think Joel didn’t have to, it was very nice of him though. However in my opinion Joel did nothing wrong, he clearly stated everything in his sales page. It’s peoples job to read it. What he did was actually a well known marketing strategy done by many Internet “gurus” which most people dislike, I myself despise the tactic but it is marketing 101 and this is the Internet and you have to read the fine print before you purchase anything online. Joel’s last version of the book did actually very well in sales and it sold for $97, and was a good read and had good ratings.

In conclusion advising your readers to “skip the sales page” is not a very good idea, and can cause altercations similar to this one. When recommending something to someone else, you must simply do that “recommend” and not encourage or instruct anything further unless you are 100% positive of the outcome.