Wednesday, June 20, 2007

The Carlos & Lupe Traffic "Scam?"

If you're one of the tiny percentage of people who've suddenly heard of Carl Garcia and his wife, Lupe, count yourself lucky to find yourself at this blog. These two have managed to send millions of hits to their websites over the past several years, not using search-engine traffic. And, according to their videos, they have been making $5 million a month. Alas, the reality behind this stunning success is not as attractive as it seems.

The Garcias have a site called Traffic Tactics, where they will be releasing products to teach their methods. These methods appear to be complicated to learn, but the results promise to be far more spectacular than the highly complicated search-engine optimization. SEO is incredibly time consuming, and as the Garcias show, the yield is miniscule compared to the traffic sources they use - this fact alone is important to know, as it puts Google into a whole new light.

There are several problems with this model, however. Firstly, few people will be able to reproduce the Garcias' success, even in part, without obtaining sufficient credit. Do many people even know what are "trade references?" Also, risking that sort of credit is like gambling or trading commodities - can you afford to lose it? Because if you don't have a product that will take off, such as what the Garcias have been pushing, you will lose your shirt.

The reason the Garcias are showcasing data from 2004 and 2005 - an eternity ago in internet marketing - is because these are their best products and promotions. These products were pretty scammy, from what we can tell. The "cable boxes" Carlos refers to are allegedly descramblers that didn't work; nor did the diet patches, which is why that site has disappeared - and why there have been lawsuits against the Garcias.

As many know, online marketing tactics and products go out of date very quickly, and once a bunch of people jump on a bandwagon, the novelty factor and potential for making money are lost. In reality, it appears that the Garcias flew too close to the sun, burned out and crashed, and it's possible that their recent promotions are designed to help replace the income they lost when their previous products fizzled out.

The skinny on this system is not good for the average person - take a look at Eric Holmlund's blog on the subject.

2 comments:

Rowena Cherry said...

Great blog.
Thank you for the information!

Sincerely,
Rowena Cherry

Anonymous said...

I second that. Thanx.

I hope you guys are going to be around for a while!