Avoid the scams, find out which Business Opportunities actually work
23rd March 2007
Filed under: Internet Marketing,Property,Seminars — Ben @ 4:00 pm

My confirmation of attendance for the Entrepreneur Weekend in Birmingham arrived in the mail yesterday and I am really looking forward to attending.

The organiser of this event is Steve Foley, the man who ran a very successful seminar in London last year called the UK Internet Entrepreneur Conference.

Steve has changed the format a little this year so it isn’t just internet marketing that is covered but also property investment.

According to the site (http://www.UKIECSeminar.co.uk) he has lined up a whole load of experts to speak over the two days, concentrating on property investment on the Saturday and then internet marketing on the Sunday.

If you are free on the 28th and 29th of April then I highly recommend you take a look at the site for more details.

Steve has fixed it so that you do not have to attend both days, you can choose one or the other and pay a reduced attendance fee.

I’ll be there both days so let me know if you are going and we can meet up for a drink and a chat!

http://www.UKIECSeminar.co.uk

Make sure to check out the Entrepreneur Weekend Seminar, I can’t stress enough how beneficial it is to get out from behind your PC and meet fellow marketers!

22nd March 2007
Filed under: Internet Marketing — Ben @ 2:38 pm

I’ve just paid a freelancer $300 (about £160) to write me 10 articles of around 500 words each on a specific topic.

Now, I do realise that it is possible to have articles written for far less and that certain websites offer to write 500 word articles for just $3 or so. The problem with buying cheap articles is that they often need to be rewritten before they make any sense!

When I purchased Mark Warren’s Ultimate Wealth Package it was funny to discover that some of the sentences in his eBooks made little to no sense whatsoever – probably the result of using cheap ghostwriters whose first language is not English.

The following is an example of the poor quality of writing present in one of his books called “Making Money with An Opt-In List“:

“Not a lot of people use email

Email marketing is one of the most effective marketing methods nowadays simply because virtually almost all people use email. Check on those email fields or blanks required to be filled up on various forms needed in processing different transactions. A person without an email address is tantamount to a person without an online home, which is one big shameful truth for this generation.”

Strange, muddled writing that contradicts itself in the first 2 sentences!

Writing articles for inclusion in special article directories can be a good way to increase traffic to a site and if you don’t want to have to do it yourself it’s easy to find plenty of people who will do it for you.

The freelancer I used is quite expensive but I know that any work she does will not need to be rewritten and will also be of a very good standard.

10 articles on a subject I know little about would take me, probably, around 15-20 hours to research and write which is time that I am not willing to waste.

Getting someone to do this work for me for just £160 is a bargain because if I didn’t hire someone, it would never get done!

If you are thinking about using freelancers on sites like Elance and Rentacoder, make sure to ask for examples of previous work before committing to using that particular person.

I got a load of truely crap articles written for me recently and had to cancel the project. This is an example of what someone wrote for me:

“Broker is there other person who is the property investment expert in the market type place. They might be helpful in this venture. Their experience and opinion is always fruitful. But the situation keeps changing time to time.”

Outsource boring stuff that you don’t want to do and projects that require skills you do not have – which could include programming, web design, article writing, keyword research, audio transcription etc.

Spend a little money outsourcing jobs so you can save time and concentrate on the things that you can do well.

It pays more to be a marketer and hire in people to do your techy stuff…

21st March 2007
Filed under: Internet Marketing — Ben @ 9:01 pm

The idiots have been out in force today unfortunately.

You see, there seems to be a selection of complete morons who continue to run automated blog comment spam software.

Today they have been posting loads of comments to this blog yet not actually realising that their comments never appear on the blog.

If you also run a WordPress blog you will probably have come across this problem; useless comments which simply point to junk sites about certain pharmaceuticals and “adult” websites.

Well, here’s a little message to anyone who uses comment spam software:

Your comments will never, ever be posted on the Biz Opps Blog. It just simply won’t happen.

I moderate every single comment which is submitted. If a comment has something stupid or irrelevant written in it, the url is added to the “blacklist”. This means that any comments containing that website address are automatically deleted without even going into the moderation queue.

Words such as viagra, cialis and other more “adult” phrases are flagged and the comments deleted straight away.

Even if your comments did somehow get onto this blog, they will not increase your page rank when it comes to Google or any other search engine. All URLs which are not include in actual blog posts have a “no follow” tag attached to them.

Good, informative comments will always be approved so please do feel free to contribute but comment spammers will be investigated and blacklisted.

20th March 2007
Filed under: General Opportunities,Internet Marketing — Ben @ 5:00 pm

Recieved an email this afternoon from Mark Warren, the creator of the “Ultimate Wealth Package”.

Nothing unusual about that you may think except that 2 minutes prior to that I got exactly the same email from “Danny”, the liar behind Danny’s Scam Review.

The whole email was an elaborate story about visiting the Rich Jerk at his mansion and going out for dinner with him. The purpose of this mailing was to promote the Rich Jerk’s new software.

Apparently both “Danny” and Mark Warren did exactly the same thing when they went to visit RJ:

“I actually know this guy and a few months ago I went out to dinner with him. Here’s what happened, first I fly out to California and rented a car….”

“Danny” seems to get out a lot.

When he was trying to sell the disappointing PDX-Factor course, he claims he went round to see Craig Richards. Of course, he can’t just “pop round” because Craig is in the UK and “Danny” is allegedly in Phoenix in the US. He also claimed that he went around to see Chris Cobb, another UK marketer.

All of it is completely rubbish, of course, “Danny” seems to be Mark Warren in disguise or vice versa.

I realise that people use pen names and it has gone on for years. The problem with Mr Warren and his “Danny” alias is that he uses this pen name to shamelessly promote his own material, creating false testimonials and making up fake statistics. He’s a shill.

Unfortunately he isn’t alone, it seems to be a regular occurrence now that certain internet marketers create alter-egos to promote their own products and appear as satisfied customers.

Their major weapon in this type of scam is domain registration protection. They can register domains without revealing who they are and con plenty of people without being found out.

That is, of course, as long as they are careful. Mark Warren is so desperate for cash that he shoots himself in the foot by sending out the same email both as “Danny” and also as himself.

It’s pathetic and gives other internet marketers a bad name…

16th March 2007
Filed under: Financial Trading,Spread Betting — Ben @ 11:08 am

Over in the US, petrol prices are up and down and the price of Crude can’t seem to keep in line with the fluctuation rate.

People are understandably annoyed with the high petrol prices (perhaps they should try buying it in the UK!)

Yesterday I received an email letting me know about a free web-based video which analyses where the Crude Oil price has been recently and where it could be going:

[link no longer active]

Check it out if you would like more information on what the big picture of Crude looks like and to help decide on whether Crude could go to $47 – or if it is going the other way.

Anyone who trades commodities simply cannot ignore Crude, it’s the most heavily traded commodity of them all.

Take a look at this web-based “YouTube” type of video and see if it helps you with your commodity trading, specifically Nymex Crude Oil futures:

[link no longer active]

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