I received a case study today, from someone whos I added myself to – a former “friend turned ‘get rich quick’ on the Internet blogger”. You know the type – I talk about them enough here! This person has gone down the usual ‘I’m a guru’ route, selling people freely available information and advice…

If you’ve read much of this site – you’ll know the thing I really hate is people who lie and cheat unsuspecting newbies out of their hard earned cash. This case study, boasting about how successful his content blog was, is full of unsubstantiated claims. He claimed massive use (far beyond anything that could be expected for the niche), without having the courtesy or good sense to back it up with even a screen shot of his stats.

Click to enlarge in a new tab

He was very clearly over-stating his income from the site, the sales of his useless ebooks, and – this is what really pssied me off – his earnings from Google Adsense. In truth, he didn’t actually state his Adsense earnings – he did, however accompany the text with this image…

Perhaps at best it is misleading, it is designed to mislead – of that there is no doubt. But I say, in not saying it isn’t his – it’s downright fcuking dishonest. I’m sure you won’t be shocked to hear that the author’s day job is running a real estate agency!

So, what does it suggest – that he made $332 today, and $288 yesterday. No he didn’t!

How can we tell… Read the rest of this entry »

One of the joys of a website like this is that I get to say whatever the fcuk I like… And I get to have some fun at other peoples expense. The site I’m going to review here is one thoroughly deserving of this. One of the worst sites I’ve seen in a long time.

What drew it to our attention? Well, the owner left a pretty snide comment on the site of a friend of mine – a young guy from England who recently set up a blog aimed at the male market – you know the kind of thing, along the lines of the ‘male interest’ magazines seen all over the world – girls, cars, sport and just the stuff that guys like. Nothing wrong with that – at least he isn’t another “I know fcuking everything even though I’ve been on the Internet for two minutes I can tell you how to get rich quick if you send me some money” type….

Here’s the comment

Juvenile and pathetic as only a site called blokebuddy could be – scared of women then huh? Not too hot on English either, ’spending there time’ should be ’spending their time’ by the way.

To be honest I think the owner of the site the comment was left on may well concede his grammar is not always perfect. However, knowing his blog – he is a bright guy and has some interesting and informative information on the site… And, in terms of design and navigation – it’s a pretty good site. It’s a big market and a sensible choice of content for a guy who’s interested in – well – girls, cars, and other stuff guys are interested in… If you’re a ‘regular guy’ Bloke Buddy is well worth a visit. Read the rest of this entry »

Earlier today I was asked by a friend to check out whether a particular website was a scam – it happens a lot!

Whilst looking into the site in question I stumbled on a link to peoplestring.com – a social networking site. Nothing new there I hear you say! Thousands have sprung up on the back of the success of MySpace, Facebook and Twitter… But this one is different – it’s free to join and they claim that they pay you to attract people to, and use the site.

The only immediately apparent catch is that you have to accept a certain amount of junk mail. Not really a problem, getting it sent to a Hotmail account or similar will minimize that inconvenience. The principle is that you get paid for recruiting new members and there’s also an ‘upgrade’ (you get a percentage of if people buy that from your links) – which entitles people who pay $200 to a larger stake in the profit share they describe, which is based on their advertising revenue (this I wonder about when Facebook and Twitter are reportedly losing money on a daily basis!).

It’s all very MLM, and seems very ’spammy’ with your ‘make money on the Internet’ sharks… But – the key thing here is it’s free! I like free! So, I’ve signed up to see if what they say is true… I’ll be back to report on if it works or not…. If  you’d  like to help with my ‘experiment’ click here and join….

1. start yet another ‘how to make money on the  Internet’ blog – the Internet needs more of these about as much as the world needs another real estate agent.

2. get upset when people like me write about you. You’re website is in the public domain. If you spout bulsiht or are trying to scam people it will get noticed.

3. go around telling people that Twitter is the future of the Internet. It’s not – and you clearly are not smart enough to  understand the agendas of the Social Networking sites!

4. start talking about the big names like Daren Rowse and John Chow in your blogs like they are personal friends – you are fooling nobody – you are nobody.

5. pretend to be an expert when in reality you are nothing but a newbie selling Clickbank crap or spurios ‘training’ on things you don’t understand yourself – do you really think anyone believes the fake earnings reports and pictures of you infront of someone else’s Ferrari…?

Ask yourself this one simple question before you start a blog. If the answer is yes - as in this case - don't waste your time...

I found this on a forum recently – it’s hilarious (and at the same time instils pity)  – but so fcuking typical of the kind of crap that invests the Internet like a virus these days…

I am new in this business, I sincerely do not know what to do from here. Well I was able to post two articles titled “How to make money online without a dime” and “How to make money online on my site.

How do I attract traffic to my site and what do I need to do to improve my site?

Now here’s someone who needs to give up the notion that they are going to become a millionaire blogger – right now!In fact I’d go further than that – here’s someone who just needs to give up any notion of making any money from a business of any kind ever….

If you are reading this and don’t understand why I have said what I have – perhaps you ought to think about giving up too…!

(I did look for an address for their blog  to rip it apart but they hadn’t even had the good sense to include it in their forum profile)

After my recent post about a ‘get rich quick’ scheme encouraging bending the rules of Google – a site called googlestreak.com (the link is to the original article rather than of course what I consider to be a poorly presented scam) – I actually received a reply – to his credit – from the site owner – but he failed to follow through.

The article was about how having spent as much as he did on Adwords he had managed to include a really stupid typo. He came back in a comment claiming this to be ‘clever marketing’ which did give me a laugh. The site I see his ads appear on is a regular visit for me. Guess what? I haven’t seen the same ad since!

His current offering now is spelt correctly – and his tower includes (very appropriately) a picture of clowns.

I keep saying it – Brian, my offer still holds – I am willing to eat my words if you let me review your scam proposition and it actually works!

Click here for the original article and comments

If you know me, or if you’ve read much of this site you’ll know that I have have an intense distaste for ‘get rich quick’ schemes and all those morons out there trying to pitch themselves as an ‘Internet Guru’ with little or no knowledge of the Internet or indeed business of any kind (or often with failed business careers behind them).

This is NOT my car - much as I wish it was!

There are a few people out there doing ‘make money from blogging’ thing really well and with a genuine desire to help others. And for each one of them there are a million imitators cutting and pasting their content, who are quite prepared to lie and cheat you out of your money for bogus ‘courses’ promising to mentor you into making millions just like them – they haven’t made millions yet, you are their best hope. Their sites are illustrated with pictures of Ferraris, big houses and screens shots of massive Google Adsense or Clickbank payment screens (the names always blocked out in an attempt to make you believe it’s actually theirs – trust me its not).

Read the rest of this entry »

Don’t always believe the stats web publishers quote when trying to persuade you how busy their sites are – there are some dishonest publishers out there…

Firstly let me point out categorically that I NEVER employ this (or any other underhand) technique. The stats quoted here come from a project I have under development and this was done purely to illustrate this article.

If I was trying to sell you advertising or an affiliate scheme of some sort, this would look pretty impressive wouldn’t it? Really, it’s not. It’s a very simple deception technique used by unscrupulous web site owners.

Now – how did we take a site from 16 page views to over 9,000 in less than 48 hours? Read the rest of this entry »

In recent months I’ve become a fan of Fotolia stock library…

One of the biggest problems with a blog can be finding suitable illustration for your articles, or for use in a custom template. Having waded through many an on-line stock library in the past I always seem to end up back at Fotolia which must have one of the biggest collections  – approaching 7 million photographs.

Prices for images suitable sizes for use on the web start from 2 or 3 dollars.

Most of the images are of very good quality due to a human based approval system

So – no need to steal photographs any more. It only costs a couple of dollars to avoid breaching copyright laws!

We run a number of WordPress blogs, all of which have custom templates. There are two ways to create custom templates, we used to do it the hard way in the PHP code – now we do it the easy way using Artisteer.

Artisteer is an incredible tool – a WYSIWG design editor, and really simple to use – it’s saved us many hours of time creating new blogs. And, even better it’s not just WordPress it works with! Artisteer designs can also be exported as templates for Joomla, Drupal and other formats.

If blogging is your thing it really is worth exploring at just $129.95 for the full professional version. This gives you access to updates and support for a year from purchase. Visit the site and give the demo a try – you wont be sorry.

(If you really don’t want to do your own design, we can also provide custom templates)