27 responses so far ↓

• Mike // Oct 10, 2006 at 7:32 pm

  Splork ol’ buddy,

  I was waiting all day for this one. You crack me up

  I bought the original IAT because I was a happy customer of the adsense books but have yet to use them.

  It was at that point in time that I found your blog and after reading you review of IAT along with your other posts as well as the PLR fiasco associated with them that I took a look inwards and made a change (seriously).

  I unsubbed from most newsletters and I doubt if I will ever be a customer of the aforementioned guburuski again. Also, my eyes were opened into the incestuous nature of IM.

  I firmly believe that most of these people don’t give a crap about your success and I am seeing more and more of this type of backlash on some of the better quality forums and pretty soon it’s gonna bite some of these people you know where.

  There really are some great genuine people that will help you and even though some of them might have a product or two to sell you they do care about your success. I think you know who some of these people are as we seem to frequent the same places online.

  KEEP STICKIN’ IT TO THE MAN,

  Mike

• Splork // Oct 10, 2006 at 8:26 pm

  Yea this business is crazy. There is nothing like it anywhere. Of course the crap I grind could be your prize. I’m critical of all this stuff but sometimes I wonder if I will miss the one thing that will make a difference in what I am doing. Up until The Master Plan and recently Project X, I didn’t read an ebook that I thought was worth the money I paid. I dropped two private label memberships before I found PLRPro, which I totally enjoy. I was a member of other high profile memberships sites before I discovered Affilorama which I find to be a good bargain (hope those paying monthly feel the same way too. Should have got in with the lifetime when they could).

  And you know what is cool? PLRPro and Affilorama have partnered on some videos. Affilorama and Charles (TMP) are working on some things too. And I think PLRPro and Charles may have something in the works as well. I’ve been circling around those guys for the last few months. It’s cool that the sites that I like are working together. How much more value do you think that gives me?

• Mike // Oct 11, 2006 at 12:54 am

  I didn’t know about PLRPro and Charles. Cool.

  Jeff from Rapid Nich Websites is working with Charles and Russell from Themezoom and Charles work together and when this all gets thrown together I think 1 + 1 might just equal 3 (or maybe 4 or 5).

  I am seeing a lot of people talking about LSI lately and these are people that I trust so I think the race is on. In fact, one person said he missed the page generating boom because he didn’t want to do it and he probably could have retired if he would have jumped onboard. He thinks this whole silo/theme/LSI dealeo is akin to that and there is gold in them thar hills awaitin fer ya.

  I think we are in a good place right now if we listen and learn and execute.

  Also, the overall buzz on the forums today is that the “Doctor is not in” when it comes to credibility and he is way low on the old trust-o-meter with many folks.

  Mike

• Splork // Oct 11, 2006 at 4:01 am

  Yea man. There was a thread with Marc where he said they (maybe he meant himself) were working with Charles with the articles. At any rate the fact they are talking can’t help but be a good thing for us.

  Execute. Yep that’s it. It’s what I don’t do enough of nor right.

  RNW. I like Jeff. He’s a straight up nice guy. He’s quality. I just didn’t care much for RNW. I haven’t downloaded the newest update or whatever. I just find XSP to be a much better product to use. If they get the theme/silo thing going I may revisit it.

  Speaking of Charles, did you see that new mini report he released on keyword reearch? Only cost $10. It’s short and sweet.

• Dennis // Oct 11, 2006 at 6:21 am

  Hello Gents,

  Just got through spending about a half an hour reading some of your latest and greatest posts. I landed here after searching on Google for “joel comm instant adsense templates”. I, like many other folks got one of the emails today about the new release of IAT. So, instead of pulling the ‘ol wallet out like I normally do so quickly after reading the hype on the site and being excited, I decided to do some research instead.

  I will tell you that because of the posts and material that I have just read on your site, I will not be purchasing IAT. Thus you have saved me $200. Thank you!

  I have just been burned too many times on these deals and am finally learning. I don’t know what is up with those huge sales letter pages, but they really do get you excited. However, they practically never deliver.

  That doesn’t really solve my overall problem though, which is trying to figure out where to get started. Yes, I am more or less a newbie when it comes to Adsense sites. I’ve known about it for years, but have struggled in getting anything going. Like I said, I have purchased a lot of these packages but they never work like they say they are.

  Any advice you can offer would be greatly appreciated. I am not looking to get rich quick or even get rich at all, but a few extra bucks coming in every month would be really nice. I’ve only ever received one check from Google Adsense, all for a whopping $27 (a couple of years ago).

  Thanks again for detracting my enthusiasm for Mr. Comm’s latest IAT offering. I can’t really afford it right now anyways.

  Keep up the great blogging!

• Roger // Oct 11, 2006 at 9:19 am

  Hi Splork,

  No surprise to see you have strong feelings about this one!

  You may remember I first posted here when you bought the ‘original’ (sic) templates pack. I’ve just converted one of my older sites into a blog. I made a post about this product in a forum today, which turned into quite an epic rant!

  So I’ve posted it on my blog and put a link back to you here. Please take a look at -

  http://www.exrat.com/index.php/2006/10/11/rants/adsense-templates-no-thanks/

  PS - if you go to the forum in question (a different one this time), perhaps it might be better to avoid what happened last time we teamed up for a forum rant! That WAS epic.

• Splork // Oct 11, 2006 at 1:01 pm

  Dennis, there are times to spend money and times not to. I think you made the right decision on this offering. Others may disagree. If I were you I would go to SEO2020 and pick up “The Plan”. It’s free and a good read. There are also some good articles there you may want to read through as well. It’s a good place to start and get yourself grounded.

  I don’t do as well with Adsense as I do with affiliate programs. If you would rather test those waters you should check out Affilorama and start with their 6-part free email series.

• Dennis // Oct 11, 2006 at 2:59 pm

  I agree Splork. There are definitely times to spend money (invest) and times not to, as long as you put the purchased package to the test. My problem is that, many times when I have invested, if I do not see fairly quick results, I lose interest very fast and stop working on the project.

  I simply do not have the time to work on things that will not bring in an immediate paycheck. I have too many bills and my family counts on my regular income too much. I am a web / software developer by trade and have a few good clients that I bill fairly decent rates to.

  With that said, passive / recurring income always intrigues me. It is always in the back of my mind that I should be working on it. However, all too often, my regular client project load usually ends up exhausting all of my time and energy and that is why I am essentially still at ground zero.

  I am fortunate that I work at home. I live in a very nice house. For that I am thankful. But I always think that I should be building my VRE empire in what little spare time I have. I just need some good base roots programs to get going with.

  I run my own servers so hosting is never an issue. I could throw up a hundred sites with a script overnight, but we all know how much of a waste of time that is in the long run.

  I will continue to frequent and post to this blog, which I am thankful that I have found. I definitely appreciate your feedback and referals to these other base programs as well, which I am going to check out.

  I am also intrigued by this one guy’s quest to turn $150 into $15k in a month. I still have yet to read through his blog to see everything that I did, but I am sure there is something worth pulling out of there. $15k per month is about what I need to be pulling down, which I am currently more or less doing, but it’s the hard way through blood, sweat and tears charging as much for my time per house as my clients can afford (between $85 - $125 per hour).

  Thanks again for this blog! I look forward to continue reading and posting!

• Splork // Oct 11, 2006 at 4:12 pm

  Dennis, sounds like we are in the same boat. My job allows me to live just fine but the passive income/online business is just too interesting not to try. I have all kinds of time issues with kids, work, other hobbies. I try to build as efficiently as I can. If I am building websites I use Wordpress or more likely XSitePro. What I have been doing lately is writing articles for affiliate income ala bummarketingmethod.com. It’s free as well and may give you an idea.

  Thanks for reading.

• NameHead // Oct 11, 2006 at 7:44 pm

  I’m somewhat bummed about the past practices I read here about Joel Comm, Eric Holmlund, InfoMedia, Inc.

  As you can see from my site it’s kind of a messy sandbox. When I looked at it today I see one of my feed samples about the big launch. I took a look at it and then moved onto the vaguely familiar looking super long, testimonial laiden sales page with coupon and everything else imaginable. I also have always been suspicious of the today only and dated stuff like this. I ammume it’s often dynamicly generated and kept looking honest by IP or cookie tracking.

  Anyhow I noticed the “Adsense Code” and realized it was the author of that book (which I have not read) selling this stuff. I considered that the feed and other references I found also seemed to ligitamize the limited time aspects of the sale so I began to ponder a bit more.

  As you can see from my site, I’m no pretty designer. I write all the web stuff in VEDIT ( http://vedit.com/ ) and try for W3C & accessability compliancy as my primary focus — and like to know how stuff works. Magic box software that spits out webpages always seemed to turn out nasty gunk that was hard to follow in a plain editor.
  I figure the templates will be a pleasant change and their W3C compliancy is a plug in my book. I’ve looked a fair amount for premade templates, CMS and helpers to get my sites rolling along a little better. It seems very hard to come up with compliant stuff and thus I resort to VEDIT again. At least the templates will help me back-engineer them into what I want if need be.

  I decided to investigate more super special offers (bonus software, etc) and the HyperVRE looks interesting but the site looks awfully familiar and testimonials from friends/cohorts (Eric) seems kind of funky. Matt is on the VRE template site too.. It’s like link trading I guess with these guys. Although the brass ring of a site helper is something I am always scratching for, these seem to just get too locked in for me.. Note that I have not tried XSite or HyperVRE. So far the closest thing I can find to satisfying me as well as VEDIT is probably going to be HTML-Kit. Shoot, which I had though about this before rinsing out my paypal account on that second batch of templates! Oh well.. I’m not broke yet!

  Anyhow, I had the money burning a hole in my paypal account and took the plunge, despite the “NO REFUNDS” disclaimer. Upon dropping the $197 on the stuff I got an extra special 1 time only super bonus offer for 150 *MORE* tempates and stuff for a mere $97. Well I had half of that still in the paypal account and could cover the rest with my bank via paypal. I figure if I am going to be hosed, fighting for an extra $97 isn’t going to hurt my position. Frankly I am sure they will deliver and I will gain from my investment. I’ve never spent anything on this sort of stuff before. If I am going to get a bad taste in my mouth from my only purchase, it may as well be from someone who is near the top of their game. Well, wouldn’t you know it.. After dropping the additional $97 there was another super special 1-time offer that I could get for dollar! However it was a subscription sort of service that would cost much more monthly (later), and I can’t stand but so many reoccuring kind of bills, so I passed on it. Shucks, I’ll never find out if there was any more offers since I finally decided to stop buying.

  So, I got a grand total of $303.95 in this gig.. $9.95 for S&H of the CDs/DVDs — supposedly the second buy for $97 is on a DVD I think.

  Now that I am $300 poorer I got 4 emails about this.. One for each order via Paypal & InfoMedia. I guess it’s a done deal and all that is left is to wait for the stuff then begin my tedious dig through it all. Geesh, and I HATE reading books on the monitor. This, if I decide to print any of it, will cost me another $300 in ink for my printer! heh.

  Well, the price went to $222 now according to my visits. If anyone can confirm that it’s -really- changing and not just some sort of personalized thing I’d be interested to know. Heck, I even began to wonder if Oct 10th was actually the REAL first day of the campaign. Considering the previous day & price is removed once it scrolls to the next price..

  In conclusion, due to my relative ignorance, and lack of photographic memory I anticipte some positive stuff from the investment. I’m a pretty frugal spender normally. This amount of change going for a couple/few CDs is absolutely based on the well honed marketing skills of Joel Comm. The site really is alluring although I can’t stand the looks of that style site. Reminds me of commericals and parking pages. Ugg.

  NH

• Splork // Oct 11, 2006 at 7:59 pm

  Let us know how it goes for you. Hopefully you will get something positive out of it. But I think for someone who can code via vedit it may be a bitter pill to swallow.

  Thanks for reading.

• NameHead // Oct 11, 2006 at 9:07 pm

  Will do.

  I am hopeful about it. From my standpoint it’s package aspect is a benefit. I’ve read some free ebooks and while they probably all regurgitate some of the same, common sense information there are some that surly will have insightful info from someone who know alot more than I do. In a nutshell it’s probably a more cohesive (as a focused set) and better value than buying ala’cart ebooks.

  I’m okay with photoshop but I can’t draw. Having the right to use the images (and templates) without rights issues has a certain comfort benefit. I’m a pretty good eye with a camera though. Problem is the production time of shooting pictures and cobbliing something up with photoshop takes a bit of time.

  It does sound like the HTML templates will have some tags in them to make the KaleidoSite tool work. Might actually be something I adopt if it works okay. Tweaking css by hand can be a little bit of a pain. A front end to ‘map’ the css to the html (which is what KaleidoSite seems to be) might turn out to be of great value for hand coders.

  I presume you (Splork) are referring to gunk in the html? why it might be a bitter pill.. It seems that the ‘plain’ templates might have little more than some hooks for KaleioSite. I expect that will maybe some sort of special commenting tags or class IDs. If nothing else, and I don’t discover any use for any of the software I’ll only have to strip the krud out once per… err, times 350 or so. hehe Actually Vedit will do any and all files in a few seconds for me. No biggie. Fantastic macro language in Vedit.

• Mike // Oct 11, 2006 at 9:10 pm

  The previous installment of IAT was a let-down for me (and I got that free from the PLM dispute). This offering won’t be different. I totally stayed clear of this one.

  Thanks for the honest and insightful posts.

• Chris // Oct 11, 2006 at 11:00 pm

  Splork,

  I hope you don’t mind me asking, but have you made any sales using the bum method yet?

  After reading APX I am going that route for now, because it doesn’t take any up front capital.

  Let me know your experience so far.

  Chris

• Dennis // Oct 11, 2006 at 11:46 pm

  How much does anyone want to bet that these guys, in the end, are making A LOT more money from their 50 yard long sales pages than their Adsense revenue or whatever it is that they happen to be selling. That is the REAL bussiness that they are in and I am really starting to see that. It is much easier to sell a $200 product that promises the world because there are so many desparate people out there than it is to make any significant amount of money with Adsense, especially given how much time it takes to set it up right.

  Again, I have learned my lesson and am back to the mindset that the days of making easy money on the internet are LONG gone. It is a real business and there are no legitimate get rich quick schemes (not that there really ever were) that will get you the easy dollar. Hard work, patience, consistency and a solid game / business plan are where it is at.

  I am with you on the affiliate stuff Splork! I have made the most money off of affiliate programs, you just have to stick with it.

  Back to work!

• Splork // Oct 12, 2006 at 12:36 am

  Chris, naw man I don’t mind you asking. I have no ego with this. I haven’t made anything yet. The first week after reading Bum Marketing I put up one article a day for the week. Last week work kept me from doing much of anything. After reading PX I realized one a day wasn’t going to work. This week I’ve got 2 a day written to GoArticles, EzineArticles and Rumorist. So basically I feel it’s too early. I think after like two months if I have 60 articles sitting out there and haven’t made some cash then I’ll have to rethink it.

  I’m trying to find affiliate programs that I can match up with PLRPro. I even take PLRPro’s suggestions from the article packs. I take the article and completely rewrite it. When I put my mind to it I can get it done in about 20 minutes. I just find it a drag to do.

  I’m heartened by the amount of traffic I’m getting from the articles. They are getting picked up. They are being read at the article sites. I’ve known that articles were important but this really affirms that for me. I’m staying the course.

• Splork // Oct 12, 2006 at 12:42 am

  Dennis, these guys make a ton on their products. Lessons can be learned as we probably all should aspire to that. I also have litle doubt Comm is making a ton off Adsense. But I have huge doubts that he is doing it himself. Ha, I bet he hasn’t built an Adense page in months. He probably tells his staff what and how to build and he’s off making his next JV project. Pure conjecture on my part, but I don’t think most of these guys make $23K a month doing it themself.

• Reddiance // Oct 12, 2006 at 2:08 am

  You forgot to mention that you can buy great templates (hundreds of selections) at monstertemplates.com. Or, you can subscribe to another service at http://www.boxedart.com for something like $49/yr, and they have tons of templates, graphics, etc.

  The kind of stuff that Joel guys sells is for total newbies that don’t know where to go on the Internet to get quality stuff. Total newbies or lazy people that don’t want to do the research.

• NameHead // Oct 12, 2006 at 7:31 am

  No doubt that Joel is at the 2nd or 3rd plateau of his success. Not much different than the people peddling the real estate plans and other money making plans. They all did the grunt work long before they could sell their experience and offload the grunt work to others.

  I have to say, the Adsense Code, taking advantage of the success of the Davinci Code is pure genious IMO. I seriously doubt that anyone can sell magick, nor expect it. However, there is truth in that to become successful in capitolism doing and learning from those who attain it is worth the time. By the same token it makes no sense for someone who is proud and successful to shoot themselves in the foot by delivering common knowedge in place of what they build up in buyer expectations.

  I’m not trying to defend the package or the man, I know nothing of either, and if I think it’s crap I’ll still get something positive out of it, if nothing more than knowing if I’ll ever patronize a GURU again. I have no problem at doing the work and spending the time as I’ve been doing.

  I’ve looked at templatemonster before along with a dozen or so other galleries out there — and about a hundred people re-selling monster templates.. Yet another bunch of monkey see monkey do antics. All stuff spun out of dreamweaver or somesuch. All very pretty and that is the name of that game I guess. I do think I came across a couple W3C compliant templates somewhere but very slim pickings. Same situation at boxedart.. Lots of pretty stuff but WTF would I want to pay $50 to ‘join’ so I have the honor of buying from them. I’m about as sick of being a friggen member of this-n-that. Bottom line on the templates, if Joel delivers the W3C compliant templates as promised, the package is on it’s way to being worthy of my money.

  Problem is with all the people peddling the same crap on the internet it’s like a bunch of lemmings following someone around. This guy at least isn’t a follower in that sense AFAIK.

  Frankly I have no intention of placing my financial livelihood at the mercy of google or any other consumer parasite outfit. I don’t need any of this pimping advertising and downloads business to float my boat. I just want to keep learning as I go and perhaps make the servers and other expenses pay for themselves. If they don’t no big deal.

• Splork // Oct 12, 2006 at 12:32 pm

  It’s why I use XSP or WordPress. Just modify them myself. I’m not clever enough, or have the inclination to bother creating from scratch. But with these two programs it’s simple enough to modify.

• NameHead // Oct 12, 2006 at 6:24 pm

  The XSP and HyperVRE sounds nice and I did looked closer at them both — as close as I could without trying them. I may fire them both up on an off-net machine to see if they even function. Who knows what kind of marketing junk could be hiding in IM fanatics’ products. I have no evedence of anthing, but do know some people will stop at nothing for a dollar.. like the crawlers that suck up public whois information and resell it to -MEMBERS- ugg.

  Ahh well. Enough speculation and oral diarrhea about JC and Co. It’s not like they need any additional coverage on the web. I’m out of here. I’ll drop back perhaps to post some final comments about my feelings for the package once I get it and pick it apart.

• Splork // Oct 12, 2006 at 8:15 pm

  XSP doesn’t come with the package. Some version of HyperVRE does. Whether it’s the gold or the free version I wouldn’t know. I bought the paid version of HyperVRE and asked for my money back. Didn’t care for it.

  Love XSP. Have been a happy owner for over two years now I think.

  Later. Let us know how it goes.

• NameHead // Oct 22, 2006 at 1:20 am

  Well.. I got the products on the 20th as expected. Still laughing my a$$ off at your initial blog on this.

  To be fair, I will say that the templates are all there. It’s what was advertised AFAIK. I watched all the videos and did learn a thing or two from them however a lot of the videos content is basic copy/paste and html manipulations. The tidbits of html gunk that were helpful simply boiled down to affiliate link locations. They covered operation of some of the few programs that are available on the CD, which was mildly useful. At this point it’s unlikely that I’ll spend anything for upgraded or non-included programs like XSP. The one program I had hopes for will not run on my system since I don’t need or want .NET on it. I have no clue why someone would write a simple program like Kelidosite or whatever and require the .NET snarl. Only thing I can think of is it’s for some sort of phone home or is spyware. I mean my god, the thing is just supposed to change the color codes AFAIK.

  HyperVRE looks pretty cool in the video but I am not going to be cobbling my sites together with it. I’m just too hard headed to hand over code creation to a program like it or XSP.. EVEN if it saves me time and makes more profitable pages, sooner. I’ll just resort to learning what special things they do and do it myself.

  I realize it was supposed to be niche markets but some of these are a bit much, and there are several alarmingly similar templates. One is about a lake somewhere I’ve never heard of, one on toenail fungus. Well I hope someone out there finds those useful. I suppose though that is my problem.. I’ve not yet broken over from doing things I like to doing things just for money. Heck, getting a suitable domain and posting up a toenail fungus website with all it’s monitization stuff may be killer for making money! Problem is I have no real desire to maintain such a site, looking for information about such stuff. Probably my $$ loss though.

  Although I have not completely examined all the templates I did notice very quickly that none of the squeeze pages are valid XML or HTML. The validation began and ended with the templates apparently. Probably no big deal to clean them up but it would be nice if something as simple as these squeeze pages were validated just for the hell of it. The noobs who don’t care about spagetti code won’t care but it’s my belief that if your site is most accessable it is also most digestable by both more people and search engine crawlers.

  While browsing through the templates it occured to me that many of them may be taken from the personal photo albums of the crew. Now, what can I say, going on vacations from the previous IAT revenue and selling the photos from it with a few HTML skeleton variations, for some $400,000 ain’t a bad gig.

  Splork, your insight from earlier:

  “..someone who can code via vedit it may be a bitter pill to swallow.”

  Has merit to be sure. Nonetheless I have never used a template from anywhere before and with further examination them I may learn something. Right off I’ve not even dug into XML, I’m still using HTML 4.01 for everything. If nothing else, this could be the thing that pushes me into learning about XML finally.

  I’ve got no hard feelings about the purchase. If I decide it’s just too much directional change for me to use these templates the whole package on ebay might actually be a money maker for me. lol

  I’m not interested in justifying the $300 for a few ebooks if I just can’t bring myself to use any of the templates.

  NH

• Brian Dorgan // Nov 3, 2006 at 6:30 am

  I ordered this set too and was a bit skeptical. I’ve seen a boatload of offers this year, but this one really seemed to pack alot of punch for the investment. My templates arrived and I was glad to see that the training videos were actually useful. I’m still going through everything, but I have to say this. out of all the guru-promoted cr@p I bought this year, this one actually provided what I paid for. Rare, but true.

  Brian

• Marcos // Nov 5, 2006 at 7:04 am

  I would like to thank everyone for being so candid. I ordered the second set of IAT, AND the bonus/extra volume and just to make sure I didn’t miss out on anything, ordered the monthly IAT subscription for good measure. After reading this thread, I cancelled the subscription before it actually got to bill me (at almost 90 bucks I might add) thinking, “I just got 300 templates twelve days ago, from which I have only been able to use about three. What in the @^$# am I going to do with 100 more mediocre templates every month?????” As for the total package, I can only say I’m glad it didn’t cost more than what it did because it is only worth about a hundred bucks, seriously. Tonight, I will also be unsubscribing from the Joel Comm/InfoMedia mailing list as I have grown quite tired of his relentless assault of JV sales emails. In this regard, I think Mr. Comm lacks tact and after a while, it becomes apparent that he is working more with certain would-be online marketers desperation versus intelligent people who simply might be interested in a decent money-making opportunity. It’s a good thing he ‘outlawed’ refunds…otherwise he probably wouldn’t have made much of a profit off of IAT at all!

• Jeff // Jul 2, 2007 at 8:31 am

  Ok, here is a nice little but very honest comment.

  IAT is NOT worth it .

  I bought it and it was just not worth it. Actual worth? Something around $50-100. No more…

  One of my big regrets.

  And Joel is a very prolific emailler…Geez, I cannot stand his emails almost every day!!!

• ybboss // Jul 2, 2007 at 6:27 pm

  jeff if you cant stand the emails, you can list his email as junk. I did that as I shared your same feelings abt the incessant emails from him. The junk filter must have done a good job, I havent seen his emails since.

  Like splork, I too bought the IAT1 and wud have asked for refund if it was allowed. In fact I paid $297 for the stuff, that’s right that’s the premium edition. I tot it shud costs $40 to $50 at most.

  Till then I was sucker for the latest hype, but with that my turning point for reading and purchasing Guberu’s overpriced and overhyped stuff was settled. Now I dun read emails like that anymore and I did not buy anything else afterwards. Splork commentaries and rantings have made me more aware… cheers

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