I have a feeling most of you hear are familiar enough with dieting that you don’t buy into all the hype, but I perhaps this information will be valuable to some of you. I’ll start by talking about a current set of events. I’m sure all of you have heard of the “acai berry” diet pills that have been spreading across the internet like wildfire lately. If any of your email addresses happen to have been sold to a diet pill salesman, you’ve probably gotten a few emails trying to promote these acai berry pills.

How did this acai berry craze get started and why is there so much hype? It got it’s big boost when Oprah featured the acai berry on her show as the #1 “superfood”. Some clever yet deceitful marketers thought they could use this to their advantage by selling a diet pill centered around the acai berry and advertise it as being “featured on Oprah” and “endorsed by Dr. Nicholas Perricone”.

The truth is that neither Oprah nor Dr. Perricone ever said anything about the acai berry having any weight loss properties. But that didn’t matter. They knew that it would still sell. But having this fake “endorsement” from Oprah wasn’t enough. They also decided to give away “free” trials of the diet pill to get more people to try it. The problem with that though, is that since it doesn’t really help you lose weight, nobody would order again after their free trial.

How did they get around this?

They got around it by using another deceitful marketing trick. If you read the fine legal print on the page where you sign up for your free trial, you’ll see that by getting a free trial, you are agreeing to sign up for an automatic rebill each month for a resupply of the product, unless you cancel before the free trial period is expired. Not many people read the fine legal print, I know I don’t, so most people didn’t think to call up and end their free trial. Then, when their credit card was billed for the $80 resupply, it was too late to do anything about it. Not only that, but even if you did try to call and cancel your order, you were often met with a busy signal or sent straight to voice mail. It was very hard to get through to an actual person on the phone.

But EVEN THAT wasn’t enough.

To promote the diet pill even MORE, they started an “affiliate program”. They paid “affiliates” (who are basically the same thing as salesman) up to $30 or more for each person who the affiliate got to sign up for a free trial. Anyone can become an affiliate for these acai berry diet pill manufacturers. All you have to do is sign up for the program and then start sending out links to their webpage with your account name attached to the end of the link so they can track it. That way they know, anyone who visits their site from a link that has your account name comes from you, so if they sign up for a free trial, they know to pay you the commission. Usually salesman only get a % of a sale. When you buy a car, the salesman might get 2-3% of the price. But these acai berry manufacturers were paying salesman 600% of the sale price! (free, but $5 shipping) This high of commission is practically unheard of because usually companies can’t make a profit by giving their salesman MORE money than the company is getting paid for the product. BUT, because each customer is automatically signed up for a monthly rebill that very few people cancel from, that’s why the commissions are so high. And these high commissions draw salesman like crazy. There are literally tens of thousands of affiliates (or salesman) trying to sell these acai berry diet pills. And since there is so much anonymity on the internet, these salesman are willing to do anything to get that commission, including lie and deceive. Let me show you a few examples.

You can find sites like these by just guessing. Just type in some girls name followed by “weightloss.com” or “dietblog.com” and you’ll find hundreds of sites like these. They are all made by salesman who found out that these are effective ways of playing on peoples emotions by trying to get people to trust them to get them to sign up for a free trial. Anyway, I think I am beginning to rant. I’m sorry this post is so long, I just feel like I have to let people know the truth. I have an insiders view into this industry and it makes me sick to see what all goes on.

And it doesn’t stop with diet pills either. It happens with every product sold online. Belkin makes internet modems and routers. They were PAYING people to write fake positive reviews about their products on sites like Amazon.com. Really the only way to get honest reviews online is to visit heavily moderated forums and listen to people who have built up a longstanding reputation with the site.

The only way to find honest reviews of diet products is to visit a heavily moderated forum with a close-nit community. Visit Best Diet Pill Reviews.org and submit your own reviews of any diet pill or plan you’ve tried so that we can build a community focused on weeding out spam and advertising and get straight to the facts about dieting and weight loss.

I hope this article has opened your eyes to the tricks employed by online marketers. It’s a sad state of affairs, but when it comes to online product reviews and suggestions, caveat emptor (let the buyer beware) has never rang more true.