Dear Assurance Plus: Gee, Thanks.

Today is the first day of NaBloPoMo. That means I will be posting every day this month. Um…that isn’t too unusual for me, is it? So why did I join? Why not? Regardless, here we are and I’m ready to go, which must mean I’m a NaBloPoMo-Ho. Or something.

Each day this month, I’ll post a letter to someone whom I believe needs to hear what I have to say. Okay, so I get it that unless they read this, they won’t “hear” it, but still. At least it will get it off my chest, right?

November 1, 2007

Assurance Plus, LLC

3644 E. McDowell Road, Suite 114

Phoenix, AZ 85008

To Whom it May Concern:

I’ve been wanting to contact you for quite some time, but have restrained myself, knowing that if I waited for the end of my year’s contract with you, I’d be able to express myself more articulately without spewing venomous verbiage which you absolutely deserve.

I’ve learned a great deal from my experience with your interesting scam company about how not to invest money like a complete moron when considering a Home-Based Business. I now know that as much as I consider myself to be an optimist, and at times, someone who is willing to take a calculated risk, one might just call me gullible a total loser. I wouldn’t disagree with that conclusion at this point, and I have you to thank for my new found knowledge and intense skepticism regarding anyone who even acts like they’re going to say there’s really such a thing as a free lunch. In fact, I have a list prepared of what I’ve learned from my experience with you, and will take this opportunity to caution everyone else share my conclusions:

1. I can be an affiliate of Amazon all by myself if I choose. In fact, I believe I am at this point even if I’ve never earned one penny as one of their affiliates. Although I’ve been an avid customer of Amazon for years, I never was interested in doing anything other than purchasing books, so I never considered looking into what being an affiliate involved. I was busy with my own career, and didn’t have time to even wonder. If I hadn’t been conned by your scam, I wouldn’t know what an affiliate was, and that many, many Internet based businesses offer that option to interested parties AT NO CHARGE. So stupid me.
2. It doesn’t cost $5,000 to build a website and host that site for a year. It doesn’t even come close to that. Especially one as lame as the one you “customized” for me. (Insert laughter here.) Oh, I forgot. I wasn’t charged $5,000 to build the site and host it. Excuse me! If I remember correctly (I don’t feel like getting out the cheesy notebook you sent which is printed in every font imaginable and how much are you paying how many people to put such a pathetic “resource” together?) Erm…if I remember correctly, the site you built and the hosting would only cost $299. I believe that is quite reasonable. The remainder of the charge was for directing “targeted traffic to my site.” I now know that your method of “driving targeted traffic to my site” is a bunch of shit, and so is your lovely company. If you hadn’t sold me a total scam, I’d never have known any of this. I’m so thankful.
3. You can only “make money in your sleep” if you’re Warren Buffett. Or Bill Gates. Or Martha Stewart, or Oprah. Okay, so there are some others, but still. I would not be one of those people who make money in my sleep. But like me, lots of people are interested in working from home because they have children, or health issues, or are just fed up with living to work and having it suck the life out of their blood and bones. So I have your slick scam company to thank for confirming what I already knew about not being able to make money in my sleep, and allowing me to do extensive amounts of research after the fact on home-based businesses and free lance jobs. Thanks so much for that opportunity. It comes so rarely in life.
4. Taking surveys on line is an amazing waste of time, and another scam. It was fun while I was involved in it last winter for a couple of weeks. But all it really did is send you to my doorstep, cause me to accumulate thousands of junk emails, received unwanted products in the mail that I had to call and cancel (which were pretty pricey) and get amazingly clever snail mail about being part of an uber secret sect of humans who have all the secrets for earning unlimited wealth. I did finally get to be a Nielson family and throw my two cents into the pot about what’s on television and whether we actually watch it. So thanks for that. But wait, if the surveys led you to me, then maybe I should be thanking the survey companies…
5. Putting up stats on the “targeted traffic” can be easily concocted. And amazingly, the stats for said “targeted traffic” just happen to be carefully geared to driving the amount of “targeted traffic” to the site that you said you’d guarantee in a year’s time — about 20 people a day. Woot! Everyone get out your party suits, and get ready to rhumba. You can have some kind of a par-tay with 20 unsuspecting clickers who most likely laughed their asses off when they saw that “portal” to Amazon and thought, “Whose lame idea is this?” when all they really had to do is just go to Amazon. Well, that would be if the visitors indicated in the stats were in fact, real people, instead of someone sitting at a computer and getting paid to click….But I’m sure you weren’t doing that, right? Nah…..So thanks for helping me learn all of that as well.
6. Being the completely vindictive person that I am, I could have actually used this opportunity after I learned so much, to make something of it. Maybe. But I’d have to be a barracuda to pull that off, and I’m just not wired that way. It did occur to me that if I did try to make something of it, I’d only be making money for you. And because you already had made so much money from stupid me when I simply gave it to you, I felt that you would be satisfied with what you already had. So that sad “portal to my wealth” with “targeted traffic” ready to spend money and who will earn me money even if they don’t spend any money, has just been sitting there for about 10 months now, earning you nothing more.

In conclusion, I’d also like to thank you for giving me back $1,000 when I suggested all of the above to you on the phone that day. It’s only a drop in the bucket, but still, it’s $1,000, and even though it’s my money, and you really didn’t do anything, I’m still grateful.

Good luck to you and your parasitic organization. I hope that locusts swarm in and around your immediate vicinity and that you are plagued with destructive spam and hard drive destroying worms you have success in educating other people sooner than you’ve educated me about how not to make money in my sleep with a home-based business being an affiliate of a company I could be an affiliate of if I wanted without spending money.

I am forever grateful.

Sincerely,

Me.

p.s. And I have two of my own sites, now, too. So I guess I have you to thank for learning about how to do that, too. Sort of.