@TimCohn | Author Tim Cohn's Blog

I got a call from a woman in a rural part of my state inquiring about a product she had bought.

Since I don’t sell to consumers directly, I knew she had the wrong number but decided to try and help her anyway.

After several rounds of questioning, I determined she had reached me because the company she bought from had a similar name as my business.

I asked her if the company was located in our state and she said no – it was located in Wisconsin.

I asked why she called my number she said because the names were similar and because she thought she might be able to reach a branch of the Wisconsin based company here locally.

I then spent several minutes convincing her I had nothing to do with the company and asked her where she bought their product from.

She answered – online.

I then asked for the web address of the business.

She gave me a couple of incorrect domain addresses and then finally produced the correct domain.

I won’t publish the domain address here because I don’t want my site to show up for any searches for their similarly named business.

Typing in the address brought up the following page and product offer:

Mailing Brochures From Home

Yep… the stuffing envelopes / mailing brochures business “opportunity” is alive and well – it has just moved online.

Unbelievably and in the age of instant access to information – businesses like the one above are still out there plying their wares.

Seeing the website confirmed what I had expected throughout the duration of the phone call.

I decided I would see if I could find a phone number behind the website and did.

I also discovered the same company had over 1,000 domains all apparently selling the same business opportunity.

I gave the caller the phone number and suggested she call it.

Whether she called it and reached anyone – I don’t know.

Whether she learned anything either – I don’t know.

However, I did learn something from her call – one of the oldest offline “business opportunities” around apparently is alive and well… online.

Tags: Business Opportunity

This entry was posted on August 19, 2010 at 4:29 pm and is filed under Business Opportunity. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.