Archive for the ‘Rants’ Category

Don’t touch Qapacity, they do not keep their word!

Looking around recently for anywhere that was offering a free Facebook advertising coupon (I thought it time to test the water), I came across qapacity.com. Qapacity were offering a free coupon for the region in which I live – so I thought, why not. Lets give them a try – it actually looked like quite a nice site and I thought a profile might be useful for backlinks.

So, I registered an account – fine, no problems, filled part of the profile in, and linked to my Facebook account as per the conditions of the offer. The site then tells you it would be a couple of days before receiving the coupon. Nothing, so, as per their instructions I mailed them to ask where it was. This was the email exchange that followed… Read the rest of this entry »

Perhaps its just me… But I get really hacked off when people use my name in what is, to all intents and purposes, a fake testimonial!

This is exactly what Facebook are doing with their ‘friend finder’ !

No doubt you’ve seen it as you’ve been around on Facebook – it’s been showing up regularly near the top right of the screen for quite some time now. It sits their saying “X and Y have found friends using…”

I’d never really given it much thought until last week when I accidentally loged into someone else’s account on a shared PC, only to see my name there telling them I’d used ‘friend finder’ to successfully locate friends on Facebook… Read the rest of this entry »

Anyone who knows me will tell you I’m no fan of Twitter. It’s a pointless mass of white noise in my opinion.

But – if you’re the kind of sad individual who values quantity above quality – here’s a tip for you…

I play with Twitter – (only because I hate it so much, and as research for posts like this). Overnight I got 200+ new followers, and they are still coming in at the rate of around ten to twenty  an hour.

How? Very simple, just add the ‘big name’ Internet Marketers to your Twitter account.

If you don’t know who they are – they aren’t hard to find. You probably already have mails from the likes of Eban Pagan and Yaro Starak in your spam folder, having been ‘tempted’ into subscribing to their mailing list to download some free useless information in the past…

Your new followers will for the most part be generated by bots, and be of no use whatsoever – and are only from sad ‘get rich quick on the Internet’ types – but it’ll up your numbers.

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!