We are all being deluged with email after email promoting one-dollar trials of a continuity program. Sometimes every tried-and-true stale program of the promoting guru and his collaborating networkers is tossed in gratis as bait.

So should you bite? After all, he’s giving you the kitchen sink for a blink. What have you got to lose, right? Or for you positive thinkers, “What have you got to gain?”

Success is a process, not a particular product. Your cyber shelf and mine are lined with well-intentioned trial products collecting dust and choking our hard drive over time.

This stark truth has led me in recent weeks to start organizing these materials so that I can choose which of them to keep and devour (immediately) and which of them to send to the cyberbin in the sky.

Quite frankly, some of these programs have tons’ of doable, profitable ideas that are just screaming to get done. Most of them, however, are worthless unless you have a coach to help you understand how to implement the strategies or unless you buy their costly platinum or gold continuity programs.

Ugh! In the final analysis, most of these cheap introductory offers are quite costly. Why is that?

That $1 trial with the bonus balloons is a time bomb clicking. They will automatically renew after a one-week or one-month trial period without notice.

Quite a few opportunity seekers, jumping from one great deal to the next, forget the deadline and suddenly receive a notice of billing for the recurring program they bought for that measly buck. While getting your money back is possible after you bitch to their billing department about having innocently forgotten the deadline, it’s a time-and energy-waster you and I should avoid.

More insidiously, there is something terribly flawed – perhaps unethical or illegal – in renewing a first billing without first giving a reminder to the trial subscriber that his/her trial subscription is about to be converted to a full-paying one.

Certainly, such a notice would affect the bottom line of the promoting marketer moderately or even drastically. The trial purchaser would realize he hasn’t even cracked open the ebook or system he so enthusiastically and desperately desired a month past. More than likely, he would cancel the subscription before it reached the recurred billing stage and release a sigh of relief that such a notice was in place.

The scourge of online marketing has been the tidal wave of marketers using this trial offer paradigm without notice that trial subscriptions are expiring. In any given month nowadays, I will be tempted by more than a dozen enticing offers of both notable and obscure marketers with a slick sales letter to lure me in.

Despite my fears of forgetting the recurring billing cycle, the idea of getting the marketer’s entire kitchen sink for a measly buck can cause me to throw caution to the wind with a wistful, “Oh well, what the hell for a buck?”

The time is upon us to move from being a victim or sucker to understanding the real problem for many people. We want to make money quickly with a minimum of effort and so we buy or try anything that touches those buying buttons in us.

Indelicately said, we are moronic, directionless puppets on strings without a flyspeck of a marketing or life plan to guide us wisely.

More thoughtfully stated, “Shouldn’t these continuity program shams be a wake-up call to us all that we can design and direct a life of our own?”

Regulatory bodies could and should stop continuity programs, but it is up to each of us to know what is in our best interest and discard the rest, even if it only costs a measly buck for immediate participation.