My true story about a very expensive lesson, a refund I never got, and the six months that followed.
Part One: The Invitation.
It started, like some of these things do, with an an inheritance that I decided to invest in my future dream of online business success?
I’d been dabbling in online business for a while by early 2020, reading enough to be dangerous and not quite enough to be dangerous in the right direction. So when I applied for in-person training event with Simon Coulson’s Internet Marketing School, I was interested rather than suspicious. This wasn’t some faceless funnel promising a Lamborghini by Friday. It was a real seminar, in a real hotel, near a real airport, run by a real person with a real company — the Internet Business School. I had seen Simon Coulson a few times before in one of those weekend free seminars with many other famous successful online millionaires selling their products at the end of their 2 hour “how I maxed out all my credit cards to how I got rich?” Similar story with almost every speaker?
The pitch from Simon’s sales team was simple and, on paper, reasonable: three days of intensive, in-person training. Not a recorded course. Not a PDF. A room full of people who wanted the same thing I wanted, learning from someone who’d apparently built a business doing exactly this.
The discounted price I paid was £4,700 but most people paid £8000. I guess I helped make up the required numbers?
I want to be honest about something before I go any further: I paid it. Nobody forced me. I made the decision, I handed over my debit card details, and I booked the same hotel near Heathrow for one night and three days in March 2020. If you’re reading this because you’re considering a similar course, or because you’ve already paid for one and you’re wondering whether you made a mistake, I’m not writing this to tell you that spending money on education is stupid. I’m writing this because of what happened next, and because of what I did about it afterwards — which, it turns out, mattered a lot more than the money I lost.
Part Two: The Room.
I remember walking into that large hotel room and doing a rough headcount. About 150 people, all dressed, some slightly too smartly for a training course, all carrying the same nervous optimism you get when a room full of strangers has just made the same expensive decision you have. Some had flown in. Some had driven for hours. Everyone, as far as I could tell, believed the same thing: that over the next three days, we were going to be handed a complete, detailed system for building an online business that could start earning regular money.
That’s what the marketing sales team had told us, in one way or another. Not “an introduction to the concepts.” Not “the first step on a longer journey.” A system. Something you could take home, plug in, and start using. In fact they said by day 3 we would have the blueprint we needed?
Day one was fine. A bit high-energy, a bit heavy on hype, but nothing that raised alarm bells. We covered ground I’d already seen in free YouTube videos and blog posts — the basics of affiliate marketing, the idea of building an email list, some talk about traffic sources. If you’d never encountered any of it before, I could see how it might feel like a revelation. For me, it mostly felt like things I already knew, repackaged with better slides and a live audience. But for some people that introduction was appropriate?
Day two was more of the same. Still nothing that felt like it was worth £4,700 on its own, but I told myself there was one more day to go, and that the real substance — the actual system — must be coming.
Part Three: The Upsell.
Day three is the part of this story I still think about.
Instead of the detailed, practical system we’d been led to expect, day three afternoon was the introduction of an entirely new offer: a £27,000 mentoring programme. This, we were now told, was where the real training happened. The £4,700 I’d already paid hadn’t bought us the complete system after all — it had bought us three days that functioned, in practice, as an extended sales presentation for something dramatically more expensive. They trapped 150 of us into the room to upsell their £27,000 real course?
I looked around that room and I could see it land on other people’s faces the same way it landed on mine. A kind of slow, sinking recalculation. We had turned up believing we already owned the thing being sold to us. Now we were being told the thing we actually wanted was £27,000 more to spend away. Yet some people maybe 6 or 7 rushed to the front to buy?
Here’s the detail that still gets me, all these years later: most of the room paid something. Not the full £27,000, in most cases, but I understand the majority of those 150 people ended up parting with amounts up to £8,000 on top of what they’d already spent. Whatever was happening in that room — the pacing, the social pressure of 150 people making decisions together, the sunk-cost feeling of having already paid £4,700 and not wanting that to have been “wasted” — it worked. It worked on people who, a week earlier, would probably have told you they were far too sensible to be talked into spending five figures on a training programme that was actually a 3 day sales fest?
I didn’t buy the upsell. I’ll admit part of me considered it, in the moment, surrounded by the momentum of the room. But I went home with my £4,700 plus hotel costs spent, no system in hand, and a growing sense that I’d been sold something quite different from what I’d been promised. The only truthful thing they kept to was the subsidised £5 a night for the hotel not including food and drinks?
Part Four: Trying to Get My Money Back.
I’m not going to pretend I handled the aftermath perfectly, because I didn’t. I paid by debit card, not credit card — a decision that, in hindsight, closed off options I didn’t even know existed at the time.
If you’ve ever tried to get a refund from a company after a big-ticket purchase that didn’t deliver what was promised, you’ll know the shape this takes. I raised the issue. I explained that what we’d been sold — a complete, detailed system for building an online business — wasn’t what we’d received. What we’d received was three days of largely available-elsewhere information followed by a pitch for something far more expensive. I wasn’t the only one who felt this way; I know others in that room with me felt exactly the same, and some of them raised it too.
We were all refused a refund. As, from what I suspect, were most all of the others who tried.
Looking back on it now, with a few more years of experience and a much better understanding of consumer protection than I had in March 2020, there are things I’d have done differently. I should not have paid by debit card rather than credit card, which meant a Section 75 claim was never available to me — that protection only applies to qualifying credit card purchases in the UK. A chargeback through my bank would have needed to happen quickly, within a matter of weeks of the transaction, and I didn’t move fast enough on that front. By the time I properly understood my options, the practical windows for a debit card chargeback had likely closed. I suppose a part of me believes with the information we received and a book of contents would be enough for me to start? I was wrong again?
There was also the question of what UK consumer law actually says about this kind of situation. The Consumer Rights Act 2015 and the Consumer Protection from Unfair Trading Regulations both exist to deal with exactly this scenario — where the marketing and sales presentation create a set of expectations that the product doesn’t match, or where important information is withheld or misrepresented in a way that influences a buying decision. Whether any of that would have applied to my situation legally is something I genuinely don’t know; I’m not a lawyer, and I never took it that far. What I can tell you is what any reasonable person in that room would have believed, based on the marketing: that £4,700 bought a complete system. What we got was an introduction to a bigger sales pitch.
I want to be fair here, because it’s important to me that this doesn’t read as one-sided score-settling. The Internet Business School has, from what I can see, a large number of satisfied customers. There are strong reviews on Trustpilot from people who found genuine value in the training and the ongoing support. Plenty of the “internet marketing guru” industry works this way — an introductory event that teaches broad concepts, much of which is publicly available if you’re willing to put the time in yourself, followed by a funnel into more expensive coaching. None of that is automatically dishonest. Lots of legitimate businesses use tiered offers and front-load a lower-priced entry point. The question that matters, for me, is whether the marketing accurately represented what you’d receive for your money, and whether the experience delivered value that a reasonable person would expect for the price they paid. In fact before handing over my payment I asked that specific question and was assured it was? They lied.
For me, on that occasion, it didn’t. And I couldn’t get my money back.
Part Five: The Drive Home.
I remember the drive home from Heathrow more clearly than I remember most of the actual training. There’s a particular kind of quiet that settles over you after you realise you’ve made an expensive mistake — not panic, exactly, more like a slow, heavy recalculation of your own judgement. I kept running the numbers in my head. £4,700 was a serious amount of money to have handed over for three days that mostly told me things I already knew, capped off with a pitch for £27,000 more.
I had two choices, as far as I could see. I could write the whole thing off as a loss, feel bitter about it, and quietly give up on the idea of building an online business — which is exactly what a lot of people do after an experience like this. Or I could take the anger and turn it into something useful.
I chose the second option, though not immediately, and not out of some noble instinct. Mostly it was stubbornness. I’d spent £4,700 to learn how to build an online income, and I was determined that money wasn’t going to be the end of the story. If a £4,700 course with a £27,000 upsell couldn’t hand me a working system, I decided I was going to find out whether it was actually possible to build one myself — using tools that didn’t require me to re-mortgage anything.
That decision is really where this story turns into a different kind of story.
Part Six: Starting From Nothing (Again).
I gave myself six months. Not because six months is a magic number, but because I wanted to genuinely test the idea rather than dabble at it for a few weeks and declare it a failure. If I was going to prove — to myself, more than anyone — that you didn’t need £4,700, let alone £27,000, to start an online business, I needed to actually build something and see whether it worked.
The first thing I had to get honest with myself about was cost. I’d just been burned by an offer that implied you needed to spend big to get anywhere, so I was determined not to repeat that mistake in the opposite direction by pretending everything could be done for literally nothing. That’s not quite true, and I think it’s important to say so plainly: most of what I built uses tools with genuine free tiers, but “free to start” and “100% free forever” are not the same claim, and I’d rather be accurate than catchy.
Here’s what I actually put together over those six months.
Building the list.
I started with AWeber, using its free plan to build a proper landing page and an automated email sequence. This became the backbone of everything else. Rather than trying to sell anything directly and immediately, the landing page offered something free: sign up, and you get access to a course delivered automatically, one lesson at a time, through a follow-up email sequence. People joined because they wanted to learn, not because they were being sold to on the first contact — which, having just sat through three days of exactly that kind of pressure myself, felt important to get right.
Driving traffic without paying for ads.
The second problem was traffic. Without an advertising budget, I needed ways to get in front of people that didn’t cost money, just time and consistency.
Pinterest turned out to be a genuinely useful, and genuinely underrated, channel for this. It behaves less like a social network and more like a visual search engine — pins have a long shelf life compared to posts on most other platforms, and they can keep bringing in visitors for months after you’ve created them. I built out pins around the kind of high buyer-intent keywords people were already typing into search engines — the sort of searches that suggest someone is close to making a decision, not just browsing.
YouTube was the other major channel, and I went the faceless route: videos built around scripts and research rather than needing to appear on camera myself. This mattered to me for practical reasons — it let me produce more content, faster, without needing studio equipment or the confidence to talk to a lens for hours. I focused the same way I had with Pinterest: keyword research first, aimed squarely at what people were actually searching for when they had buying intent, not just general curiosity.
Facebook groups aimed at affiliate marketers added another layer — a place to share content, learn what was working for other people doing similar things, and occasionally find promotional opportunities.
Learning to use AI tools properly.
This was still 2020 when I started, so the AI tooling I have access to now didn’t exist yet in the same form. But as tools like Claude and ChatGPT matured over the following years, I folded them into the workflow for research and script generation — using them to speed up the process of turning keyword research into actual content, rather than as a replacement for doing the research in the first place. Of course I always edit before posting.
Building an actual website.
Eventually I also built ClickRoamer, a WordPress site, because at a certain point relying entirely on other platforms — platforms I don’t own and don’t control — started to feel risky. A website is something you own outright. Nobody can change the algorithm on you overnight and wipe out your traffic. It wasn’t essential in the earliest stages, and I don’t think it needs to be essential for someone just starting out either. But once there was some income coming in, it became worth the modest cost of hosting and a domain.
Part Seven: Being Honest About What “Free” Actually Means.
I want to pause the story here, because there’s something I got wrong in the early days of talking about this system, and I think it’s worth admitting rather than glossing over.
I used to describe what I’d built as a “100% free system.” It’s a catchy phrase, and there’s a kernel of truth in it — you genuinely can get started without paying anything. But it isn’t strictly accurate, and after everything I’d just been through with a company whose marketing didn’t match reality, the last thing I wanted to become was someone who did the same thing on a smaller scale.
Here’s the more honest picture:
- Pinterest — free to use, full stop.
- YouTube — free to create a channel and upload videos.
- AWeber — has a genuine free plan, with limitations that kick in as your list grows.
- VidIQ — has a free tier, with paid upgrades for more advanced features.
- InVideo — a limited free plan exists, but it comes with watermarks and restricted features; the paid tiers remove those.
- A website like ClickRoamer — visitors reach it for free, but running it involves hosting and domain costs.
So the accurate version of the pitch isn’t “everything is free forever.” It’s something closer to: you can start with genuinely free tools and free accounts, prove to yourself that the model works, and only pay for upgrades once your results justify it. That’s a less punchy sentence, but it’s a true one, and after March 2020 I care more about true than punchy.
Part Eight: What This Became.
Six months of consistent effort turned into an actual, functioning system — not a get-rich-quick scheme, not a guaranteed income machine, but a genuine, repeatable process: build a landing page, capture interest with a free automated course, drive free traffic through Pinterest and YouTube using proper keyword research, nurture that audience by email, and only introduce paid upgrades once someone had already gotten value for free.
Eventually I turned the whole approach into a structured, twelve-week course — I call it the AI Powered Affiliate 2026 System — and I give it away for free, delivered the same way my original system was: through automated follow-up emails after someone joins my list. It walks through the same tools I actually used to build my own business: WordPress and Hostinger for the website: https://clickroamer.com, AWeber for email, Canva and InVideo for content, VidIQ and Rank Math for optimisation, and AI tools for speeding up scripting and research. I also run TubeWealthSJV, a YouTube channel built on the same faceless-video, high-intent-keyword approach I used from the start.
None of this was fast. I think that’s the part people most want to skip past, and it’s the part I’m least willing to skip past, because it’s the part that would have actually helped me in March 2020 if someone had said it to me plainly instead of selling me a system that didn’t exist.
Part Nine: What I Tell People Now.
If there’s one thing that Heathrow hotel taught me — aside from a fairly expensive lesson about reading marketing more sceptically — it’s how much damage is done by promising outcomes instead of describing a process.
So here’s what I actually tell people who go through my free course, and I mean every word of it:
Most people who start this will earn nothing. Not because the model doesn’t work, but because most people don’t complete the full twelve weeks, or they complete it and then expect income to appear within days of finishing, rather than treating the following six to twelve months as part of the process. The people who do see results are, almost without exception, the ones who kept going after the course “ended” — who treated the twelve weeks as the start of the work, not the whole of it.
I don’t say “this system will start earning you money,” because I don’t know that, and neither does anyone else who tells you that about their course. What I do say is something closer to this: this is one practical, low-cost way to build an affiliate marketing business using tools that are free to start with. What you get out of it depends on your niche, the quality and consistency of your content, and how long you’re willing to keep going before you see a return. For most people who stick with it, that return takes somewhere between six months and a year to properly show up — sometimes longer.
I think that kind of honesty is, ironically, more persuasive than the alternative. Guaranteed-income promises are exactly the kind of thing that got me into that ballroom near Heathrow in the first place, and exactly the kind of thing that turned three days of my life into a very expensive introduction to a sales pitch. I’d rather tell you the truth and have you believe me than tell you what you want to hear and have you end up where I ended up: out £4,700, refused a refund, and having to build my own way forward from scratch.
Part Ten: If You’re Where I Was.
If you’ve read this far because something similar happened to you — a course, a seminar, a coaching programme that promised a complete system and delivered an introduction plus an upsell or several — I want to leave you with two separate things, because I think they matter separately.
The first is about the money. If it happened recently, look into your options properly and quickly: a credit card purchase gives you Section 75 protection in the UK that a debit card simply doesn’t, so how you paid matters. Chargebacks have time limits, so speed matters too. And gather your evidence while it’s still easy to find — the sales presentation, any emails describing what the course would include, the agenda, brochures, and any notes you took at the time, especially anything where a trainer described something as being covered “in the bigger programme.” Whether any of that adds up to a legal claim is a question for someone qualified to answer it, not for me. But it’s worth finding out properly, and quickly, rather than assuming — as I did — that there’s nothing to be done.
The second thing is about what comes after, and it’s the part I actually have something useful to say about. You don’t need £4,700, and you certainly don’t need £27,000, to find out whether an online business is something you can build. You need a genuine willingness to learn keyword research, a free email tool, a free landing page, patience measured in months rather than days, and a realistic understanding that most of the “system” is really just showing up consistently and getting slightly better at it every week.
That’s not as exciting a pitch as the one I was sold in that hotel ballroom. But it’s the true one, and it’s the one that actually worked for me.
If you want to see the free course I eventually built out of all this — the AI Powered Affiliate 2026 System — it’s available through the same kind of free, automated email sequence I describe above. No £4,700 entry fee. No £27,000 upsell on day three. Just an honest twelve weeks, and the truth about how long it usually takes after that. Link to my Landing page. Subscribe, leave a comment, like and share this article if you got real value from it? Thank you, see you in the next one I post about my system.