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):

If you subscribe to the Free Business Opportunity Email Newsletter then you may well have read that the best comments on this blog in November would win one of 3 prizes.

In the end the following comments won the prizes:

1st Prize – John’s Review of Matt Shaw and the Fixed Odds Trader Service

2nd Prize – Baz’s comment on Is this the way forward for internet marketing? I hope not!

3rd Prize – Katie’s advice about paid online surveys on the following post: The Dark Side of Online Paid Surveys

Thanks to everyone who entered,

Ben