I've Tried That - We lose money so you don't have to!

Can you make money from home simply by mailing out postcards? How about by mailing envelopes? We’re looking at a couple of programs to sign up for, including moneyformailing.com. We’ll give you the inside story.

I’m skeptical, though. The site is full of red flags. For example, the main page is long on hype, short on detail. If you read it you’ll discover that you can be your own boss, earn as much as you want, get checks every week, say goodbye to money problems, and maybe even get your own pony! (Ok, I might have made up that last one.)

But what will you be doing to make all of your dreams come true? Mailing postcards and brochures from home. When someone you send mail to returns a postcard to the company to sign up for an offer, you get 50% of the sale. That seems straightforward, Joe, so what’s the problem? The problem is the questions they don’t answer:

• Where will I get the addresses to mail things to? Joe’s theory: you’ll have to buy mailing lists.
• What are the postcards and brochures promoting? The main page doesn’t tell you, but you can find it if you dig for it. They promote work-at-home programs, including…waaaiiit for it…mailing from home!
• How many postcards are typically sent to make a sale? I don’t expect they would ever tell you this. But let’s compare it to Internet marketing. In that world, 3% conversion is an okay result. That means that for every 100 people that see an offer, three will make a purchase. So let’s say you’re going to send out 100 pieces to make a sale. 100x.35 (first class postage) = 35.00 in postage alone. That’s not including the value of your time to prepare the mailings and send them out. You’ll have to make a $35 commission per 100 mailings just to break even, and I doubt that’s possible.

But those unanswered questions are not the biggest red flag for me. It’s this:

Q: Why don’t you just mail the postcards?

A: We do! We mail as many postcards as we can every day! We’ve been making six figure incomes for years mailing these same postcards. But the demand for these offers is so big that we cannot reach this ever-growing market by ourselves. We have a small office with under 15 employees and more than 500,000 postcards to mail out at any given time. We need your help to get them out!

I call B.S. People who are making six figures through direct mail use mail processing equipment. 500,000 pieces is nothing for the right machinery. Also, when a business has too much work, it hires enough employees to get the work done so it can make more profit. It doesn’t issue an open-ended invitation for everybody who can operate a mouse to come join the industry. Unless, of course, it’s trying to sell something to everyone who can operate a mouse.

Also, it’s not that “demand for these offers is so big” that they can’t do it themselves. It’s that they have to flood the country a foot deep with junk mail in order to find the few who will read the card and then sign up for an offer. And the more people who send out cards, the less expense for them and the more money they make. It’s a win-win! Or at least it would be if it works.

All this is speculation, mind you. Maybe I’m wrong and it really is as easy as they say it is. We’ll let you know.