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They're out there waiting for you right now

Sometimes the sheer stupidity of some people just amazes me. Just look around you as you head for the mall or go out for a night of hitting the bars and clubs and you will see people doing the silliest things ... and then wondering why they got hurt.

Even on the Net people do stupid things. The early Nigerian email scams were incredibly obvious yet people got suckered in by promises of wealth belonging to long lost and long dead relatives. Even today when those scams are much more sophisticated and the scammers actually do some research on their targets before they hit them it's still obvious that they're scams but people still get suckered in.

Recently here in Australia one guy who had lost two houses, a farm and all his life savings to the scammers ... and had even been part of a police investigation that nailed some of them ... admitted on television that he would still be tempted to send them more money because there just might be something in what the scammers were offering.

Now I don't know what else he needed to be shown to make him understand that he was dealing with scammers but obviously the plain truth was not enough for this guy. But he's not alone; police investigations here have found that many people who have been ripped off to the tune of hundreds of thousands of dollars still keep on sending cash just in the faint hope that one day the illusion they have been offered might somehow turn into reality.

So I suppose that it should come as no surprise to me, or anyone else, that the Net is filled with equally dumb people. In fact, if the Net has turned the world into a global village then it has unleashed all the village idiots and there were a hell of a lot more of them than we ever realized.

Just to prove it, in case you didn't believe it already, I give you the story that came out last week about a European IT firm. They ran an Adwords ad that pointed to a website who's URL should have been a dead giveaway. I mean would you go to a domain with a URL of drive-by-download.info that clearly displayed that URL in an Adwords ad?

Would you go to that URL when it appeared in an Adwords ad that clearly offered to infect your computer with a trojan that used the words 'Get infected here'?

It seems that Adwords ad ran for about 6 months and during those six months 409 real people clicked on the ad.

That reminds me of something that newbies in this industry were once taught as a way of getting even more surfers to move through to your sponsors. The thinking went something like this.

Every surfer who is out there surfing a porn site is looking for freebies. They want all the hardcore movies and all the great explicit images without having to pay for it. They spend hours searching the Net looking for free stuff and lots of them will scour every page on every site looking for every free image or movie clip they can find. Some are convinced that many sites have a secret link that will take anyone who clicks on it to some great porn that the webmaster who built the site is hiding from them.

Of course you and I know that that's all just a load of crap and there are no secret links that can take a surfer into all the hardcore stuff that he can't find in the obvious places on your site. But it seems that the surfers don't know that and so newbies used to be 'taught' to lay a little 'trap' for those surfers.

The idea was to build a normal four page free site but to add quite a lot of empty space to the bottom of one of the pages. If there was going to be a hidden link then you really had to bury it several scrolls down the page. When you had decided that you'd made the gullible surfers scroll enough you would add a link in small but readable text that read 'Don't click here' and that would point to your sponsor ... or anywhere else you wanted to send gullible surfers.

Of course, that all sounds like a load of rubbish doesn't it? Something like that would never work would it? No one would be so silly as to scroll down through huge amounts of empty space and then click on a link that said 'Don't click here' would they?

You might not think so but I can tell you that surfers did exactly that. The numbers exiting on the site via that link was never huge but it was always enough to show that there are some very gullible people out there who will do anything you tell them not to do.

Now I wonder how you can incorporate that concept into today's adult marketing?