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I’m Not Buying the Biggest Firesale

November 18th, 2008 · 11 Comments

Surprise, I’m not spending my money on The Biggest Firesale. This shit is just going to have to burn without me. $97 will get you 100 products and services. Who in the hell will have enough time to use more than one of the offerings? And if the stuff is worth $9,670, then why are they not charging $9,670?

Ok, for $97 I am 100% sure you could get your money’s worth out of this crap. There has to be something from each package that can help you in your business. I just won’t be spending my money to find out. I don’t want to be overwhelmed with more shit than can fit on my hard drive. Honestly. I’d prefer to buy 10 domains for the money. Actually, given a choice of licking a cactus or spending $97 for this I’d rather bleed out from my tongue.

100 products for $97. Do you think maybe that there is a lot of IM shit out there? This isn’t a firesale. It’s a lit match. You’d need a raging inferno to burn through all the IM crapola out there. I don’t know what the marketers get out of this. I suppose they get email addresses for stuff that they couldn’t sell otherwise. Or is old. Or never worked. Yep, it’s a big email collector. The money is in the list. All the newbies are going to sign up for this treasure trove of trash and give up their emails for further spending opportunities.

I’m sure there is some value in some of these products. For those that purchase and get something out of it, good for you. I won’t be a buyer.

Oh and if you click away from the offer that annoying fake chat window will pop up. You know the one. Where you think a hot operator has a deal just for you? Well she has a discount waiting for you if you don’t want to purchase at $97. She’s willing to sell it to you for…$97. That’s right. You can either buy it for $97 retail or get your discount from “Britney” and pay $97. But don’t wait too long. The price goes up in December then goes away forever on December 12.

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I Don’t Make Money Blogging | I Like Storestacker

November 17th, 2008 · 8 Comments

Blogging sucks. I make very little money on my blog sites. You know, those sites where I write articles and hope people click on Adsense or an affiliate banner. Nope, I don’t do so great with them. But I do fine with blogs and datafeeds. StoreStacker sites. Ebay widget Blogger sites. XSP sites. Even stores hanging off a main blog.

So I spent half of this past weekend building StoreStacker stores. The other half was spent with my daughters at their softball parties, swimming and watching stuff on TV they wanted me to join them in. At least half the weekend was supremely enjoyable.

I’m sick of niche blogging again. I’m even tired of building XSP sites too. So I decided to drop a bunch of stores on to the Web. I used both domains and subdomains for this little exercise. I went to top seller lists (like Ebay pulse) and started building stores on stuff people seem to have an interest in buying. I stacked stores. I used Overstock, Ebay, Amazon and Clickbank products. I created various category listings and added products to them. I set up my cron jobs so I will have an ever changing catalog of goods on these sites. I used RSS feeds and YouTube videos to create a different interest in the site. These are all plugins that you can use within Storestacker. It effing rocks.

This holiday season is bound to suck. The economy has started to reek. I don’t know if people are going to buy shit for Christmas. Half of 2009 could suck equally as hard. I’m not building for 2008. I’m building for next year when the economy will turn and people decided they aren’t going to do without for two years in a row. By that time my stores will have aged. I’ll have bookmarked them. I’ll have written articles and submitted them to Article Marketing Automation. I’ll have commented on blogs and anchor linked back to them. And hopefully I’ll have tons of pages indexed.

Those stores hanging off a blog? Well, I’m letting AMA populate those blogs with articles. If they aren’t rewritten at least 70% they most likely won’t get posted on my blog. You can bet I link from those articles to my store. Mostly I hope people click straight to the store and bypass the bullshit niche articles, but if they find the article in the search engine they’ll still see a link to click to go to my store.

I like building Storestacker stores. I want commissions. I do not want Google click scraps. Want to see what’s what? I decided to build a Storestacker store and put the link up. I went out and got some free hosting and built a store on something I could care less about. That way you could see what I was doing and people with an ax to grind wouldn’t be able to eff with sites I am personally hosting. This best coffee makers site took about 45 minutes to build out, including signing up for hosting. The products are from Amazon and Overstock. I can’t get to anything related to Ebay (i.e. campaign number) at work so items from there are not included yet.

Many of you might turn your nose up at the design. Maybe some will think it’s too thin. All I know is it’s a vehicle to get people to click over to make a purchase. I think it presents the products well enough. There are a bunch more templates I can use. And if you are handy with Smarty then you can edit and build templates until you create something that you like. On most of these stores I’ll add Clickbank products, an RSS feed and a few You Tube videos to thicken it up. If I really get motivated I’ll add a few static pages to the site as well.

Maybe I’ll just keep on building these out on free hosts. It’s risky of course. Have to be prepared to lose everything when/if they close down (Storestacker lets you save your store config in a tasty XML to redeploy elsewhere if needed). Maybe I shouldn’t have mentioned this at all. Then again none of you are going to spend $100 for Storestacker anyway. And the few that do, survey says that most of you won’t deploy the software anyway. And for those couple that builds out stores, I doubt our paths will cross. There is a lot of shit out there to try to affiliate market.

I’d rather build 100 stores like this on free hosts and self hosted sites than build a ton of niche blogs on Blogger and try to collect Adsense. With the cron job the search engines will see a never ending change of products getting populated to the store. I guess at least with blogs I can rely on AMA to populate them when I’m lazy.

So now that I have a means of getting my niche blogs written without me having to do it (AMA). And I have stores that are dynamic and require no maintenance once built (Storestacker). I can now spend time getting backlinks through article writing (AMA again), bookmarks with the lovely new BMD version 4 and comment links on other blogs.

Hope all this makes sense. Thanks for reading.

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I’m Not Buying Google Ambush Either

November 11th, 2008 · 9 Comments

Here’s the thing: I just don’t care to try any money making tools anymore. I honestly have no idea if Google Ambush works. I hope everyone that buys it makes millions of dollars an hour getting people to buy the shit that is offered at Crapbank. I’m just too grumpy to try it out or care. The cost is $67/month. Not exactly a large sum of money. And the joy is you can try it out for 60 days and get your money back. What’s not to like?

Well online marketers have discovered people don’t like to cancel stuff. It’s a very bizarre dance. People join these memberships and don’t apply the goods to help them make money. Or the membership is crapola. But they won’t quit because they are afraid they will miss something or they like to hang out in the forum and yap or simply be a part of the cult. I’ve joined memberships where I’ve asked to cancel after a couple of weeks and the owner blasts me for wanting out. I always ask for refunds if the offer is junk. I don’t think many people do. But I’m at the point now where I think most stuff is just junk. Google Ambush may in fact be fantastic. But it’s predecessors have jaded me to not even care or try to see if it can be different. Nothing personal against Google Ambush. It just happens to be the latest Crapbank offering that hit my spam box. I simply don’t want to bother even signing up despite the generous money back guarantee.

I’d like to know from someone who is using it during the beta program if they made $2K a day with it. I’d like to know if someone made $100/day with it. Or did the beta testers simply wait until the release date so they could send a blast to their email list for commission collections? It’s a juicy affiliate program. Recurring commissions. I like those too. But I haven’t read anywhere except from the salespage that money was being made hand over fist.

You could write on your salespage that you have proof that a wheel was round and I’d still question if the results were real. Testimonials in my mind do more harm than good. They never indicate, “dude I’ve been using your service for the last 30 days and have banked 7 thousand George Washingtons”. It’s always, “JD, you’re brilliant. This program is a godsend and will help me make money. I can’t wait to deploy it across my websites.” Really Skippy?

Yea I know I sound bitter. I simply don’t believe anymore. Time was I’d try out anything to see if it worked. But as time wore on I realized they didn’t work or simply didn’t work for me. I’m tired of spending my money on all this hubris floating around IM so I don’t and I guess I have nothing better to do than to write a post and say as much.

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