Here’s a brand new tool which helps you ruin a usually great experience for thousands of internet users.

If you’re too bone-idle to actually visit a forum and post messages and interact, there’s no need to worry anymore!

Rod Beckwith and Jeff Alderson have been hard at working creating a new forum-spamming software program called Forum Equalizer.

And it’s yours to use for just $77 at … (no way am I sending them any traffic)

Like email and blog comment spam before it, forum spamming is hated throughout the internet. There is zero justification for posting adverts or automated messages on a forum for one simple reason:

Forums are for interactionAnyone using Forum Equalizer to post messages is extremely unlikely to ever go back and post follow-ups to the replies. People will be duped into posting answers to questions that only exist so a signature can be shown.

The “benefits” of using this software according to Rod Beckwith are:

“Submit your comments and questions to an ever growing list of over 2010+ forums to flood your site with quality backlinks”

Or get your site blacklisted by Google and have you host and domain registrar have severe words with you…

Google aren’t stupid, they will have people working on countering this automated forum spam – and you can bet that offenders will see their websites drop out of the search engine results…

“Get your website (and expertise) in front of tens of thousands of eyeballs”

Or, get your name out on the web next to the words “renowned forum spammer”. There are no winners who use this software.

Forum moderators will have an increased workload, readers will have to wade through a load of junk posts to get valuable content and anyone who uses this Forum Equalizer software will end up losing business, if not more…

“Get detailed reports of how your submissions went”

Maybe you do, maybe you don’t… what I would like to know is: do you get detailed reports of how many forums banned you?

There’s plenty more from Rod Beckwith and Jeff Alderson on the sales page of Forum Equalizer but I’m not going to give you a link because I refuse to give them the one-way link which they want so much…

My recommendation – AVOID

I’ve recently been having a clearout of my bookmarks and struck upon something quite sad.

Over the last couple of years I have collected hundreds of bookmarks (or “favorites”) for lots of different websites.

Mostly these are blogs or new start-up sites where the publisher is new and fresh to internet marketing and is having a real go at making some money and building a business.

In a lot of cases they go from a standing start to creating lots of new and unique content over a couple of weeks. For this reason I bookmark their sites because I want to hear more about their experiences and find out how well they are doing.

The problem is, they put loads of effort in over the first month or so… and then quit!

It’s a real shame (and quite frustrating) because I specifically bookmarked the site or blog so that I could go back time after time to see their progress.

For example, one young lady from London set up a site where she was aiming to pay off £10,000 in just one year.

Her story was that she was sick of being in debt and wanted to do something about it. Her site got press coverage and she even had someone promise to match whatever she made and donate it to charity.

She kept up with it over the whole year and, although she didn’t quite make £10k, she did very well and paid off a large chunk of her debt.

However, the challenge ended on the 15th August 2006 and she wrote in her online diary on the 14th promising:

“I’ll write a lot more in the next couple of days”

But there has been nothing since! Talk about leaving us hanging 🙂

Check out One Girl, One Year at http://www.OneGirlOneYear.co.uk (opens in new window)

A second example is a very interesting blog called “The Internet Marketing Novice”.

This blog had excellent ranking in the search engines for some good IM keywords and was being updated very regularly.

Carl, the blogger behind it, had decided to have a good go at internet marketing and was documenting his progress nicely.

However, one day it just stopped… dead…

After 6 months of excellent, unique content and posts, the blog just stopped.

I keep on going back to see if there has been any change but nothing has been written since July. I even went so far as to email Carl and ask if he was going to update it again but I haven’t had a reply!

Check out The Internet Marketing Novice Blog at http://carlmorgan.blogspot.com/ (opens in new window)

These two examples are two of the best I found on my search engine travels but there were plenty more. Of course, there could be a very valid reason why these people quit or stop posting. It could be personal circumstances which prevent them for carrying on.

Or, it could just be a lack of enthusiasm.

It’s a shame though because a lot of them had the right idea and probably quit just before the big pay-off. It’s called Sod’s Law…

Received an email yesterday which informed me about a new set of DVDs which have just been released.

They feature footage from the UK Internet Entrepreneur Conference which was held in London in October 2006.

I read the sales letter and decided to buy because there are a couple of speakers who I have read about but never seen live in a seminar.

The line-up is impressive – Peter Woodhead, Gary Vurnum, Mark Vurnum, Neil Stafford, Simon Coulson and more – all UK-based internet marketers who have made a great deal of money from their online empires.

The DVDs have been released with a special discount for the first 100 sets sold.

To be honest, I purchased because I remember the attendence fee being a great deal more that the price of the DVDs…

I will post my thoughts on the footage once it arrives later this week.

In the meantime, you can read the sales letter by clicking below (remember that the first 100 sets are offered at a discounted price):

They say that no publicity is bad publicity and this seems to be true for the “Rich Pom” – a Rich Jerk clone who is offering a get rich quick scheme down in Australia.

According to a thread on the UK Net Marketing forum (great UK based IM forum – [link no longer active]), this marketer has been featured on an Australian TV programme called “A Current Affair”.

On his site (therichpom.com) he claims to make $90,000+ per month and will show anyone how to do the same if they are willing to pay him $79.

He includes “proof” of his earnings by showing screenshots of his Clickbank and PayPal accounts from June 2006. Here’s the first image from his site:

Two minutes ago I logged into my Clickbank account, saved the HTML and then doctored it to give the following:

Moral – don’t believe that a screenshot tells you the whole story, they can be easily doctored. That includes PayPal screenshots, bank statements, Clickbank account screenshots… anything.

The Rich Pom’s sales copy contains one page called “Sound Like A Scam?”

It is on this page that he asks:

‘Would I be on YAHOO NEWS as “Number One Work From Home Website in Australia” if this was a scam?’

He then gives a link to a Yahoo News page where a Press Release has been published. And it is a very one-sided press release at that.

The Press Release states:

‘The Rich Pom Becomes Number One Work From Home Website in Australia, According to Alexa Internet Traffic Rankings’

OK, lets take a look at the Alexa rankings for therichpom.com:

Traffic Rank for therichpom.com:  414,161

Another famous entrepreneur who offers business opportunities in Australia is Ed Dale, whose site is undiesipack.com. Is the Rich Pom trying to say that he is more popular that Ed Dale?

Ed’s Alexa rankings for undiesipack.com:

Traffic Rank for undiesipack.com:  317,102

So, the Rich Pom is clearly lying about being the number 1 “Work From Home” website in Australia as just one of Ed Dale’s websites beats him hands down.

Who is the Rich Pom?

He isn’t brave enough to give his name on his website but the Rich Pom  website is owned by Chris Dutton of Frenchs Forest, NSW (New South Wales?)

I’m not willing to put any money into the “Rich Pom’s” pocket so I won’t be buying the package. From one report I read, he delivers it as a Word file – very professional… not

My advice – AVOID

As I have previously mentioned, I am on a lot of business opportunity mailing lists and so I receive loads of sales letters through the post.

This week I received a letter from James Rhodes telling me that:

You Can Make Big Money Part-Time From Home With This Amazing Turn-Key Internet Business!

In the envelope I received a two-sided A4 letter, a small order form and a leaflet, all showing me that I could have “2 hot web sites on the internet” for only £150.

I would also be protected by a 100% money back guarantee.

The whole sales package came from a company called Fast2Net who operate out of London but who are apparently an off-shoot of a business created in the US.

For my £150 (usually £445 but I got a discount of £295) I would get a choice of two passive income producing websites featuring either:

Books, software and music,

“Women’s” goods,

“Adult” goods or

Casino/gambling sites

I logged onto Fast2Net.co.uk to find out exactly what these websites looked like.

The first, a CD store at Go2emedia.co.uk seems well designed but doesn’t seem to rank particularly highly in any search engines and also has a rather poor ranking at alexa.com:

Traffic Rank for go2emedia.co.uk:  1,116,903
Speed:  Very Slow (90% of sites are faster)
Online Since: 04-Apr-2001

So, this is a flagship site for Fast2Net but doesn’t seem to attract many customers and is also flagged as being very slow.

The same was true of the “Women’s” store, 4her2shop.co.uk which had a rank of 1,386,660, loaded slower than 92% of websites but had been online for the same amount of time.

If these are Fast2Net’s examples of how good their customers’ stores can be then I am staying well clear of this one. These statistics are not very impressive whatsoever.

Another problem with the Fast2Net opportunity is that you barely get any time to test how well your sites will perform.

They say that you will have 2 sites up and running with 24 hours. Fine, no problems there…

However, the “100% Satisfaction, Money-Back Guarantee” is valid only for 7 days after you have ordered and therefore just 6 days after having your sites set up.

If I were to build a site and test it properly, I would need at least 30 days before I made any decisions as to whether it was performing or not.

7 days is woefully inadequate.

I won’t labour the point but this promotion didn’t get my heart racing or have me tempted to get my wallet out. The leaflet carries two quotes from Declan Dunn, a successful affiliate marketer. They are just generic quotes though and do not relate at all to the Fast2Net opportunity. They are certainly not a testimonial for Fast2Net.

Out of sheer curiousity I ordered Fast2Net’s accounts for the year ended 2005.

I won’t pretend that I can read balance sheets and make any sense out of them but the extremely negative six figure number next to “Profit and Loss Account” didn’t look good to me.

I’ll stick to creating my own websites thanks – or outsourcing the work so someone else does it for me!