Free Laptop – My Horse

Get a clue – get a "free laptop" – and you’ll get a gazillion "free" emails that’ll swamp your inbox.

It’s confession time.

"Free" is not.

Especially when it comes to laptops.

I know a man – a very naïve man – a very silly man – a man who shall remain nameless - who decided when he saw an email offer for a free laptop that he would like to have one.

This silly person had just spent countless hours creating a new ebook - complete with audio tracks - as his own enticement for others to buy the new software he was advocating.

He figured a "try before you buy" offer was as good as it gets when it comes to gifts for newsletter subscribers - especially since he was focused on starting the world's first talking newsletter.

But he must have been in brain fade mode because.....

Throwing caution to the wind, he went after a free laptop.

He diligently followed link after link, looking for that magic laptop hiding somewhere among all those amazing offers.

All he had to do with each one was fill in a little innocuous form and click on the "next" button.

Thirty minutes later, he was nowhere near that promised pot of gold, and he was running out of time so he dropped out of the labyrinth and went back to serious work.

Now this was a work-from-home situation, and he was doing his utmost to start an internet business.

He had a free Yahoo email account, and it had been working very well for more than a year.

He had been rather careful with it too, not using it too often for anything but business and a few personal email contacts. Plus the occasional on-line purchase, which went very smoothly with his PayPal a/c.

But then he had a horse’s patooti moment and got envious of all those people who use laptops in airport terminals as they fly around the world making deals everywhere they go.

His image of himself as a great entrepreneur over-rode his common sense. Avarice reared its ugly little head. He felt that a spiffy laptop would be a far better status symbol than a cat in his lap.

So he entered a free laptop solicitation.

And in a matter of a few weeks, his Bulk folder was receiving over 100 emails a day offering everything from Viagra (which he thinks is a ridiculous innovation because he is more than happy to have retired from the stud stakes) to ringtones and Christian debt relief and credit rating checks and payday loans and real estate courses and on and on.

HUNDREDS of such emails. Many of them coyly telling him he was subscribed to their service because he had agreed to – because he had signed up with a "partner" of theirs.

What HorseEss!!

Now, stung by his own foolishness, he starts the early morning on his computer by hitting the "empty" link alongside his bulk folder.

Even so, some of this desperate email – it must be from desperate people, if they have to resort to such duplicity to try and stay in business – some of it now finds its way into his inbox rather than the bulk folder.

With a sneer of glee he occasionally designates these stray emails as SPAM – hoping the senders will be sent out of business sometime soon.

Yet he STILL gets offers of a "free laptop".

Even when he unsubscribes, some other sleazy hawker sends a similar free laptop offer within a matter of days – which gives you a clue to something really fishy under all this stink.

Unsubscribing may very well be a way of letting "them" know that you have an active email address – so they take your "unsubscribe" and milk your address from that, and use it in yet another campaign.

Do you think there is any way to prove that they do that?

Yes.

Be dumb enough to open a "free laptop" email, and you’ll find out for yourself.

Frankly, he says, this method of marketing, though it has the veneer of legitimacy (and is obviously effective because moronic people like him continue to fall for it), is really little better than that other ludicrous offer that also pervades the Internet – you know, the one from the solicitor in Nairobi or London or Podunk Anywhere who is acting for the dead head of government or the former rebel general who left a billion dollars in a bank and he needs you to help him by transferring millions to your own account.

Yeah right….

The truth hurts...but sometimes...

"free"is not free.
…
Michael Knight (CEO of www.cuddlysoftware.com ) is author of "Deadeasy Live – See How It Runs," (a review of talking ebook software) and editor of EZTALK – the world’s first talking newsletter.
http://www.cuddlysoftware.com/deadeasy-ebook-software.htm