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A business, any business, lives and thrives on numbers. For an internet business, those numbers include traffic, click through, and conversion rates, but they all add up to one number: your profit. But what numbers should you be looking at when you are evaluating a new opportunity?

The first figures we usually look at start with dollar signs. How much is this going to cost me, and how much can I make? While these are important to know, and certainly they aren’t the first numbers we should be looking at., these are the things that all too often drive us to a buying decision. Because of this, too many would be businessmen are doomed to fail before they ever get started.

You see, the marketers who are selling the opportunity are looking to make money, just like you. The difference is that they have already looked at the other information, and know that most of it is boring, especially when compared to potential profits. They know that we are greedy. We want big bucks, and we want them now!

Case in point is Frank Kern’s recent Mass Control campaign. This has to be one of the most heavily marketed products that I have seen in the Internet Marketing space in a very long time. Frank started the campaign by describing how his work has made multiplied millions of dollars in 24 hours of sale time. The campaign them went on to tell you and I that the course would teach us how he did it, so that we could apply his strategies to our businesses.

On it goes, with some (very good) videos getting released, videos that gave away information. Looking good so far. Then came video #3 (I think?). It’s titled “$36,000 in Four Days (Disco Version)”. In this video, which was little more than a testimonial, Frank gave one small part of the course to Michael Koenigs, with the instructions to follow, with no help from the master (Frank). Michael followed the instructions (more or less), and made $36,000 over 4 days, for 3 hours of work. That’s heady stuff, but is it an accurate representation of how this one strategy will work for your business? Probably not, and I’ll tell you why:

Our attention was drawn to the wrong numbers. At least the wrong numbers to base a buying decision on. We were told that Michael was going to try the technique out on three small lists, totalling (if memory serves) about 15, 000 subscribers. I know one of the lists was 8,000, but I’m not sure about the other two. He sent out the copy and paste email, and some follow up emails, and four days later is $36,000 richer. And he only worked on this about 3 hours.

However, in the video, Michael showed us actual screen captures from his shopping cart software, and here is where I got interested. It’s easy to see the dollar totals for each day’s sales, as they are pointed out to us. But scanning the rest of the page, it’s not hard to tell that his products sell for $500 to $1000 apiece! It’s not hard to make large amounts of cash when you are selling a big ticket item. The numbers that I found more interesting were the actual number of sales per list.

But before I get into that, just a quick disclaimer: I’m doing most of this off of memory, just because I don’t want to watch the video again. So if the numbers aren’t entirely accurate, you know why. They should be reasonably representative, though.

Now that we have that out of the way, here’s what I remember: from the 8,000 list, he made about 17 sales. Assuming that the price tag on that particular product is $1000, that’s $17,000, which isn’t too bad at all. But what if the product was a $20 ebook instead? That’s only $320, a far cry from thousands. Another consideration is this: 17 sales on a list of 8,000 is a conversion rate of slightly less than one quarter of a percent, which could be close to the industry average for his market. Truth be told, I have no idea, because I’m not in that market. What I do know is that a percentage that small sucks in my market. So really, I don’t know if his conversion was any good at all. Was it higher than his usual? Lower? Or about the same?

These are the kinds of things that I want to know before I’m going to invest in any business opportunity, and the sort of factors that you should be considering before laying your hard earned cash down.

Greed, or the desire to profit, is natural, and can be a critical factor in the psychology of your success. But when evaluating any business, you have to put that aside, lest your desire lead you into falling for yet another big numbers game, a game in which the big numbers only work for the seller, and not you, the consumer of said product.