Recently I received an email from a subscriber asking about Andy Shaw’s property related business opportunity.

It read:

“My interest has been aroused by all the din going on about the subject matter. Just checking what your honourable view is on this chap.. His book on ‘PROPERTY’ is apparently selling for £20.

Will it be DEAL or NO DEAL?”

Like probably a lot of people who have ever subscribed to a biz opps email list, I received several emails about Andy Shaw’s book over the last week.

He managed to get a lot of people to joint venture with him and promote this opportunity

(I have a suspicion that he went to a seminar – could’ve been Steve Foley’s UK Internet Entrepreneur Conference – and mingled with loads of other entrepreneurs. Seminars are an absolutely brilliant place to organise JVs)

The sales letter interested me so I sent off for the book which was priced at a reasonable £20 + P&P.

Now, Andy has very cleverly set up a range of upsells, cross-sells and back-ends to this very reasonably priced book. The first one you are offered is a discount on membership to his website.

Usually £40 + VAT per month, you are offered access for a full year at a considerable discount.

However, with the book you do get 60 days’ free access to the site so you can see whether it is for you.

I’ve only had a quick look around the site but it seems to be quite good, it’s well designed with a lot of information. The forum seems to be quite busy and Andy is also ever-present there answering questions and giving tips on all kinds of subjects.

When you pay for the book, you actually sign up for the membership site too so please be aware of this!

Basically, if you do not want to stay as a member, you must email to say that you want to cancel your membership and you will not be charged. You need to do this within 60 days of ordering.

But what about the book?

Well, I received this quickly and I was very impressed with it. It oozes professionalism with its slick design.

I guess I’m so used to buying eBooks that I am overly happy that Andy has actually had his system published as a “real book”.

And it’s not a quick read. It runs to well over 400 pages so I’m afraid it’s going to be a while before I can give an opinion on the content.

I read the first 40 pages or so on the train this morning. Andy sets the scene by describing just how he started in the property game and how he pretty much went crazy buying up loads of properties in a very short space of time.

Give me a couple of weeks and I will let you know more but first impressions were good and I get the feeling this will be a great read for anyone interested in property investing (that’d be the vast majority of adults then!)

James Jary’s “DataKing1.com” opportunity was widely advertised throughout 2006 in all the big biz opps newspapers.

An advert also appears in one newspaper today starting – “Copy This Plan £10,000+ Per Month”

It looks like some kind of horse racing betting system or rather a horse racing laying system.

James has blatantly copied the adverts of a very well-known biz opp publisher in order to try and make sales of his CD.

As you know, I’m no expert when it comes to horse racing so I’m not in a position to help here but one keen reviewer sent the following review:

“Ben,

You asked for comments on James Jary’s offering called dataking1. I sent off for the material just prior to Christmas 2006. When the CD arrived it was blank so I sent an email to James and in fairness to him he did call to offer apologies and said he would send another copy.

When the CD arrived I found that there were 3 pdf files on it. I was somewhat surprised to see this as I felt it would have been a lot easier to make them downloadable thereby making them much quicker to get. When I queried James on this he said that if they were available as downloads it would not be easy to honour the money back guarantee, a view I later thought somewhat strange as there are software applications that would lock someone out after a certain period of time if necessary.

Anyway, forgetting that I proceeded to review the CD contents and was immediately disappointed with what I found. Each pdf was badly organised, poorly drafted and frankly difficult to understand. Before I sent the CD back for a refund I emailed James with some comments hoping that he would pick up on my dissatisfaction and take on board some of my suggestions.

His reply was vague and written in a rather ‘take it or leave it’ manner. So, the CD is currently in an envelope waiting to be posted back for a refund. The silly thing of course is that if he’d taken some time to create files that actually showed by way of screen shots and examples just how things work I wouldn’t have an issue. His loss I guess but I wouldn’t recommend anyone forking out for this unless they are very au fait with Betting exchanges and types of wagers that can be placed (if that’s the case they probably wouldn’t gain anything from the info anyway).

Regards

John Murphy”

John runs a great blog called Online Investing to Earn Money. It’s a great read and updated regularly so it’s highly recommended you take a look!

Yesterday I mentioned in the free Business Opportunity Email Newsletter that Streetwise Publications have been advertising the new Terry Wilson manual called “How to Make £1,000 Before Breakfast” in the national press.

Two subscribers wrote in to provide quick reviews of this product. Their comments are given below:

Subscriber 1:

“Not a major review, but I bought this package and returned it. I am also a subscriber to Andrew Reynold’s Cash on Demand and found that there was nothing in “How to Make £1,000 Before Breakfast”, that I had not already learned from Andrew five-fold.

It has loads of stuff in it and for the price I feel it is good value”

Subscriber 2:

“I just recieved the Terry Wilson ‘£1,000 Before Breakfast’and was shocked to find that it is EXACTLY the same content WORD FOR WORD as Stuart Goldsmiths REAL WEALTH monthly manuals from his REAL LIFE course. So it seem Stu has done a deal with Streetwise who have truncated his 12 part course into a manual.

Just thought it might be woth mentioning to subscribers”

I had a feeling that Stuart Goldsmith had contributed some content…

For more, see:

Terry Wilson, How to Make £1,000 Per Day Before Breakfast and StreetWise Publications

Last year one particular advert appeared in the Sunday press business opportunity classifieds pretty much every week.

The little ad always said something like:

EXTRA INCOME
£250-£1500 a week p/t!
EXCITING NEW OPPORTUNITIES
FREE INFO no obligation, leave details
0800 458 xxxx (24hrs)
http://www.nhbusiness.co.uk

For weeks I skipped past the ad without giving it too much thought but for some reason or other in December 2006 I decided to visit nhbusiness.co.uk and “order” the special report.

The site has no indication of what it is all about but I was curious so I put my name and address in anyway.

A few weeks later I received a small A5 sized envelope through the post.

It was the “January 2007 Special Business Report” and promised to reveal the “latest high-earning business opportunities available in the UK“.

The report consists of 3 A4 pages of advertisements for various biz opps – 22 seperate adverts in all.

These cover a variety of different business ideas but there are some familiar faces who advertise in this circular.

First off we have Simon Stepsys or, rather, “Simon Step$y$” – his spelling, not mine.

Simon was a heavy-hitter in the Prosperity Automated System pyramid scheme which was massive last year until it was dissolved by the Securities and Exchange Commission in the US (see the main site for details).

Nowadays he seems to be advertising some kind of co-op marketing scheme which I didn’t bother reading about.

Another familiar face is Julie Wilson who also promoted PAS heavily last year in the national press.

On her website she says:

“Basically for 10 years I chased the MLM dream, striving for that elusive residual income and great lifestyle that all the hype makes you believe is within your reach. I don’t think I ever earned more than £750 a month, and that was a good month!”

This contradicts her classified ad in the Sunday Times of 14th May 2006 in which she promoted PAS by suggesting you could earn £1,600 per day.

Chris Cobb is here as well, advertising his “Automated Income Stream Start-Up Kit valued at £1,497”.

Then we have adverts for Kleeneze, VWDirect, Tiscali Networks, various nutritional supplements, “£25 for every sold sign you see”, greeting cards sales, fuel saving tablets and other MLM related opportunities.

Nothing really interested me at all here, least of all anything offered by people who participated in the PAS scam.

Wonder if they ever paid any money back to the people in their downlines who lost thousands of pounds by joining the Prosperity Automated System?

Hope it gets better next month.

Until very recently I had a comment submission form on the main website (www.BizOppsUK.com). This meant that anyone who wanted to contact me, whether a subscriber or a new visitor, could send me an email without knowing my email address.

It’s never a good idea to put your email address on a website because there are automated bots which trawl the web “harvesting” email addresses – it’s basically where they get the addresses that they spam constantly.

My comment form was a bargain buy, a young Eastern European programmer created it for me for just $4 after I posted a request on www.Rentacoder.com.

However, things turned sour recently when a comment form spammer found my site and started to send messages through the form. The worrying part of it was that he was also trying to use my site as a “relay” – a server of sorts which would help him spam hundreds of email addresses.

Luckily I caught it quickly and disabled the form. This created a problem – people couldn’t email me quickly and easily from the site.

This week I found a great little script which has allowed me to put a new “helpdesk” on the site.

If you want to contact me for any reason – to ask a question, submit a business opportunity review or make a comment on anything about biz opps – you can simply open a “support ticket” and I will be notified via email immediately.

To check it out, go to the following web-page:

BizOppsUK Support Desk

And click on “Submit a support ticket“.

I will aim to answer all queries and questions within 48 hours.

(Let’s see the spammers try and use that to send emails!)