Archive for the ‘Rants’ Category

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 »

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)

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 »

I love spam message titles…. It never ceases to amaze me just how stupid these people are. These are generally non-English speakers (they have to be because of the poor grammar and Chinese instruction manual English). If English is their first language – they mus be complete fcuking morons with zero knowledge of marketing…

Get this one 

“Our watch will look great even on any loser.”

Translated: “You are a fcuking loser buy my crummy imitation watch that will last you five minutes….”

That’s if you’re stupid enough to fall for this crap – and if it ever gets delivered at all….

Sometimes I long for the old days before every idiot had access to the Internet. Yeah, perhaps I’m a bit elitist here – do I care if you think that – no!

Blogs for instance sound like a fantastic idea as does social networking. Culturally they offer a great opportunity – in reality they create a huge opportunity for morons to pollute the online world with meaningless drivel to hype their get rich quick schemes and scams through affiliate links.

There’s nothing wrong with trying to sell stuff over the Internet but it seems millions of fools appear to think that if they put up masses on nonsense content – filled with affiliate links to tell you how you to (when they haven’t) make a million (from a blog usually).

Just piling in links does not mean people will either read your crap, or buy the stuff you are hawking.

Cheap domains and affordable web space from the likes of Hostmonster have a lot to answer for, as do blogger and the like. I remember the days when putting a website up used to take real time, effort and commitment. It still does – though clearly many neither realize or accept it looking at their sites.

The online experience devalues it exponentially in direct correlation with the rate of growth.

Content is not king – quality is? But unfortunately quality is dying a death…

I’m always amazed at how many people get sucked into Internet scams. There are so many of these scam ‘companies’ its unbelievable. I can only assume that there are enough vulnerable, willing newbies, still with notions that the Internet is the only place you can make easy money to fall into their traps.

Someone I know who had signed up  – and was dumb enough to think that because I knew about about the Internet I would be amazed (as often happens) – rather than see through the bullshit, introduced me to this a while back.

I haven’t laughing since, it’s called Smart Money Websites. It’s hilarious, and in the usual style of these thing full of absurd claims and stupid testimonials like this…

“I absolutely LOVE Smart Money Websites. For the first time in my life I’ve been able to do my own websites, squeeze pages, record audio, split test, Oh my gosh it’s all so easy….”

This ‘business’ was started by a “Wayne van Dyke” who claims to be a venture capitalist, supposedly involved with highly profitable technology start ups.

Problems…

1. A search on Wayne van Dyke leads only to stories about Dick van Dyke thus burying him if it is his real identity in Google (I doubt this is an accident so you don’t find the truth!).

2. If he’s so damned smart why doesn’t he name his past successes.

In the usual hard sell direct style, the text of this ’site’ if you can call it that, has lots of numbers ($50,000 is the favourite), and lots of buttons to suck you into the $1 trail.

So, what are they selling. Well,  it’s not really clear. It’s either a pyramid scheme, or they are selling pre-build affiliate marketing site. Who cares what they are selling. They prey on the ill informed.

Here’s some numbers for you – apparently this is the yearly cost of a website.

How to make your first $50K (home study course) – $297

(Reality: Chances are completely worthless if their site is anything to go by as they don’t know what they are doing!)

Hosting – $240

(Reality: $83.40 if you use someone like Hostmonster)

Site Builder – $250

(Reality: FREE, assuming they mean a basic site building package as is often bundled with hosting accounts or free to download, but they are not clear)

Email Autoresponder – $200

(Reality: FREE with any sensible hosting plan)

Split Testing – $249

(Reality: FREE, but, creating similar gateway pages runs the risk of getting you banned from Google)

Squeeze Page Generator – $480

(Reality: FREE, but, again considered as spam by search engines – follow the  link to see why you should not use them)

Ad-Tracking – $199

(Reality: FREE)

Webstats – $348

(Reality: FREE with any sensible hosting plan, or you can use a service like StatCounter)

Audio – $348

(Reality: FREE, they simply don’t know what they are talking about)

Dashboard – $1200

(Reality : FREE, probably little more than a host’s control panel or an Admin panel within a custom site which would have been purchased with the build)

Webmaster @$50/hr. x 400 hrs – $20,000

(This is my favourite, the sites I build for people don’t often take more than a few hours – if any – to look after)

Here’s the good news, you only get to pay them $647 a year for all this! The only thing missing from this to truly convince me that this was a scam was a photo of the founder on a Hawaiian beach with a cocktail in hand next to a big boat or Lamborghini  just to show how they are enjoying spending your money!

I did send them a polite (okay, polite is stretching the truth a bit) email to ask what they were ACTUALLY selling, but needless to say never got a response…

One of my pet hates are those millions of blogs out there with useless and unreadable content. You must have seen them… So often just a string of random words loosely held together and completely unintelligible.

Why? Because people get suckered into the belief that “Auto blog content generators” actually work. I’ve yet to see any sales pitch that’s convinced me. The problem is that so many are based on keywords, and a million keywords interspersed with other random words that hold them together. Even if you do get traffic and rankings from them – how many readers are actually going to switch off before the end of the first sense because they think they’ve been conned into landing on your site?

The over used phrase “content is king” is actually true. But NEVER at the expense of quality. I urge you don’t buy this crap!

We’ve all seen the hype about Twitter – my god even Oprah got into it (loved the look on her face on that show when she realized just how much she gave to charity – you’d think they were about to empty her bank account!)…

Lets face it – what is Twitter – it a means to scream out into the world stuff it doesn’t want to hear – are you really that desperate for friends…? It’s millions of people shouting out on a CB radio looking for friends (or should I say readers) but getting nothing but sales pitches back. I tested it out recently on behalf of a client. What do you get, millions of bloggers selling crap ‘following’ you.

Twitter has no substance, no longevity and is nothing more than a silly Internet fad (look what happened to MySpace). It’s not useful in any commercial sense to a small business, and it’s time consuming for very little in return. It’s nothing more than hype…

Watch it crumble fairly quickly now its got polluted (as everything does) by your get rick quick merchants , the Clickbank report sellers, and scam merchants.

Yes, you can spend all day “tweeting” (how stupid does that sound) and beg people to visit your site, and you visit theirs in return, but for one minute have you thought about the quality of that traffic? What you are getting other than sad “I´m going to be millionaire one day” bloggers – just like you – without two cents to rub together to buy the crap you are selling (they are probably selling the same crap too anyway…).

Is Twitter the new way to fame and fortune for wannabes – somehow I doubt it….

Don’t believe me? Then why not look at something like the “Turbo Cash Generator” (love the name – very catchy) – this person claim to make over $3,000 a day.. Call me a cynic – I am!

I am a web designer and have been messing around on the net long before the days of the web – my first modem was 2,400 baud. So I guess that qualifies me to have some opinion on the way things have developed over the years. I don’t purport to be a ‘guru’ on the Internet and cyber-culture (actually it’s just a bulsiht phase used by the ‘Internet marketers’ – the type that used to plague the paper classified sections prior to the digital age…), though I would guess I´m way closer to that title – which I hate – than most of the readers of this site. Disagree? I don’t care… Read the rest of this entry »