Posts Tagged ‘internet marketing’

How to Respond to Criticism with Integrity: A Lesson from Scott Sonnon

Sunday, December 12th, 2010

I admit it—I have a bad habit of picking fights with authority figures to test whether they have integrity or not. But this is the first time someone I’ve criticized in the personal growth world has actually responded with maturity and integrity in a way that felt satisfying to me.

My bad habit probably stems from having numerous authority figures as a kid lacking integrity or even basic intelligence. In middle school I was often bullied and the teachers and administrators were totally unresponsive to my pleas for help. My parents were loving, but didn’t understand the extent to which I was harrassed verbally and physically all day, every day—from the time I got on the bus to the time I got off the bus at the end of the day. During my 6th grade social studies class, a classmate of mine literally spit on me the entire class, every day, and I couldn’t get him to stop or the teacher to stop eating donuts, pause the movies he played for us every day, and listen to me. So one day I fought back. (more…)

WARNING: Motivational Speaker Tony Robbins is Launching New Get-Rich-Quick Internet Scam

Friday, August 28th, 2009

Personal Development guru Tony Robbins is known for his infomercials in the 80′s advertising his “Personal Power” motivational audiotapes, as a “life coach to the rich and famous,” and his appearances in movies like Shallow Hal.

Robbins, who has over 1.2 million followers on Twitter, has recently released a couple of videos on his “training blog” interviewing internet marketers Frank Kern and John Reese. What most people watching these videos don’t realize is that they are highly-manipulative advertisements, almost certainly for an upcoming get-rich-quick-on-the-internet product–the field of expertise of both Reese and Kern. (8/30/2009–Confirmed: this is for a $67/month CD, DVD, and manual course called “The New Money Masters.” Also confirmed is that Irwin F. Kern (aka “Frank Kern”) was successfully sued by the FTC in 2003 for $634,222.45 for running an illegal chain marketing scheme on the internet called ”Instant Internet Empires.”) (Update 9/10/2009: From 1:00-1:20 in the first video, a new segment has been spliced in where Robbins mentions the product. This was NOT in the original version for the initial product launch, and no note has been included as to the change, thus attempting to rewrite history. The original videos and comments are still on hidden blog pages not accessible from the main http://tonyrobbinstraining.com, but two new pages have been added with the new, spliced videos. The original comments included many people asking what these videos were about, for there was no mention of a product.)

Creating hype before the launch of an information product is a cutting-edge sales tactic that Frank Kern and John Reese both promote in their products. Here’s how they do it:

(more…)