Archive for the ‘Personal’ Category
Thursday, April 15th, 2010
Let me start off by telling you that I am not going to try and sell you anything in this post. Not only am I not trying to sell you anything, I am going to try to teach you to keep your plastic in your wallet, and your wallet in your pocket. The IM business is in a terrible state, and making an honest buck online has never been harder (I’ll clarify, making the buck isn’t harder, it’s easier than ever, but making the honest buck is harder). It seems that everyone and their dogs are trying to turn their prospective customers upside down, shaking for their last nickels, without the customer ever having time to reflect on what it is they’re being sold.
I’ve kept my nose out of IM for a while now, turning a blind eye to the promotions that hit my email inbox. I’ve been working in other fields, freelancing, dropshipping and even some offline work. I needed the time off. I couldn’t see another mention of the words “marketing”, “affiliate” and “paypal”. The word “continuity” combined with “micro”, “forced” and “hidden” made my eyes bleed and my brain vomit. Emails with subject lines such as “Your OWN Software products”, “Your 5 figure/month business”, “Your OWN membership site in minutes”, “All profit, NO work” made me want to kill someone. Seeing this crap fill up my inbox made me realise this business made me sick, not rich. I wanted to chop off the fingers that typed these messages and feed it to the people behind it. It feels like I’ve already seen it all. A new email about a new product, yet I recognize it and instantly know what it’s about. I already have it, even if the exact wording isn’t the same and they’ve added a chapter about facebook and changed the authors name.
People I have looked up to, people I have admired, people I have considered nice guys despite their Guru Status, have been exposed as lying assholes and douchebags. Some promote fraudulent products created by convicted internet scam artists, and others promote convicted sexual predators. It has turned out that some people count their loans as income in their sales letters, and some even consider their debts as income when they write a sales letter. Others refuse to honor their refund-guarantees when they cancel events, and some even try to squeeze more money out of the disgruntled customers only wanting their refunds. And just when you thought it couldn’t get any worse, it turns out that a prominent self help guru (promoted by some IM gurus – the gurus all love eachother) has been running what could easily be considered as death camps.
You are only as good as those you surround yourself with. Do you really want to give your money to these con artists and their convicted friends? Do you want your money to finance death camps?
The IM business could easily be the best business in the world, open for everyone who’s prepared to work. I hope somehow, one of these days, it will revert to that. The shady elements just need to kill eachother off. Let’s hope it happens soon.
I am going to live up to promises made in the past, and I am going to deliver the goods. I just can’t give an exact time frame. During 2010 definitely. In the mean time, what can I do for you? What tools are you missing to become the star you want to be?
Tell me and we’ll have a look at it 
Posted in Personal | No Comments »
Wednesday, March 11th, 2009
Naturally, most marketers and companies are happy to receive testimonials from their customers, positive ones as well as negative ones. The positive testimonials often get published on the company’s website, while the negative comments are used to improve products and services.
Today I noticed a testimonial on a website, written by none other than me.
The problem is I have never heard of the company in question, nor have I ordered anything from them. Never. Never have, never will. Not in a million years.
They export car parts (if I’ve understood it correctly) and stuff like that which I never use since I don’t have a car. Or even a license. Never had any need for it.
If I was a vengeful person, I would now ask the company for compensation for using my name – and if I weren’t compensated I’d immediately start a slander-campaign. That type of campaign can be pretty easily set up and get rolling, and can be devastating for a small to medium sized business. Imagine someone searching for your business on big G, only to find the first two pages of the results filled with forum posts, blogs and sites claiming your business was a fraud and used misleading information?
Not a dream situation.
But I’m not a vengeful person, so I’m simply going to ask them to remove my “testimonial” or atleast have the decency to sign with their own names.
The moral if this post is “never use false testimonials”. I’ve told you what vengeful persons can do if they find out their names have been used in places they don’t want to be associated with. I’m the only person in the world with my name (I promise you, it’s not a guess), which is the only reason I found out about it.
Truth in advertising! Remember that phrase
(Yes, I know I haven’t posted anything or been in touch lately, I’m re-organizing and re-structuring my business. There will be more reviews on a more consistent basis in the near future, since BjornSays is an important piece in my online puzzle. Stay tuned )
Posted in Personal | No Comments »
Sunday, May 18th, 2008
I know you’ve seen them, and I know you have an opinion. Everybody has an opinion on the VirtualSmartAgents. My dad has an opinion too, and I’ll get to that in a moment.
First though, if you don’t know what VSA’s are, they are annoying little popup-windows simulating a customer service representative wanting to give you a better deal than the one present on the page. The popups appear when you are about to leave the page, or atleast they are supposed to… In some cases I’ve stumbled upon, the script is set to show the popup every time the mouse pointer loses focus on the current page (as in your mouse pointer slides away from the browser window), which includes when you click a link. Not good.
The better ones won’t popup until you’re about to close the browser window (or tab if you don’t use an older browser), or hit the back button… I find these friggin scripts annoying. REALLY annoying! I wouldn’t be caught dead using them. I heard someone discussing how the “AI” in these scripts could be improved. If you ever hear anyone talking about VSA’s and AI in the same sentence, please slap them and tell them I said “ARGH!”
There is no Artificial Intelligence in the VSA-scripts (there actually is a javascript/java experimental AI implementation, but it’ll probably take several years ’til it can actually be used as a service representative), there are a set of phrases (answers) that are triggered by certain keywords/partial phrases (questions) making the VSA seem almost human if you by chance happen to type in a question and trigger the script to deliver a correct answer. Try rephrasing it and it’ll answer you completely different.
So, where does my dad come into this?
My dad is 63 years old and got his first computer in ‘96 (not counting the computer he bought for me ten years earlier). I wouldn’t go so far as to call him savvy, but he knows what he needs to know to use it for both work and fun. Popups tend to confuse my dad, but most of the time he figures out how to close it if it doesn’t seem legit. My dad loves photography, and he’s a good photographer. I set up a test-page promoting a non-existant product and showed it to my dad.
He read the sales-letter and seemed somewhat interested, but said “I’ll think about it and check it out later” after bookmarking it. When he went to hit the back-button, the VSA popped up, alongside a notification window asking if he really wanted to leave this page, phrased in a way to make him believe he had to click “cancel” to leave the page. He got a bit surprised and clicked cancel. Then he noticed the VSA “talking” to him. So he tried to communicate with it, starting with “hello who are you” and he got the standard greeting phrase, and a discount+bonus pitch. He tried telling the VSA he just wanted to go back to Google, and got the same pitch again. After a while he got really annoyed and simply closed down the browser, after me assuring him he didn’t have to buy to leave the page.
If that’s how you want to get customers, then go ahead and buy a VSA. Don’t be surprised by the large number of charge-backs and refund-requests when people figure out what happened though…
If you prefer people buying because they want and need your product, just forget you ever heard about the VSA’s – they’re not worth it.
My dad’s opinion? “If that thing was real I’d give it a head-butt“.
Take care.
Posted in Latest Promotions, New Products, Personal, Reviews | 4 Comments »
Wednesday, May 14th, 2008
The spam-story seems to have gotten a happy ending That’s great, I love happy endings
Chris (the victim of the story, so to speak) finally got in touch with Dirk – who was just as puzzled as to how, why and who these spam messages was sent in the first place. The page being spammed has been removed, although all the bounce-backs keep hitting Chris’ mailbox.
On a side-note, one of my domains got taken down the other day (covertpayments.com, the domain that host several of my products), because of a spammer.
I know who he is, as his paypal-address was clearly visible in the spam-mails, and I have full understanding why the mail was reported to SpamCop. I would’ve done the same thing. While I’m working this out with my host, I’m going to report him to PayPal as well.
So, if you’ve tried visiting covertpayments.com, you now know why it’s down.
Posted in Personal | No Comments »
Monday, May 12th, 2008
I got a disturbing comment on an old post about one of Dirk Wagners old Crazy Weekend deals, claiming that Dirk Wagner was sending out spam. After contacting the reader to see if there was any truth to this, and reading through the material provided, I decided to approve the comment. I also decided to write a post about it, because it seems pretty disturbing and very alarming to me that someone I’ve seen as a pretty decent and serious marketer would engage in this type of criminal activity.
The spam-mail in question looks like this:
Oferta que vale la pena mirar.
Pack compuestos por Software, Video Marketers Tool Kit,
Plantillas,eWriter Pro y Internet Marketing Lost Secrets entre otros.
Lo más asombroso es el precio de cada uno y como si fuera poco,
licencia de reventa a través de una replica de esta web con tu login
de PayPal para tu cobrar directamente y sin intermediarios.
Visitanos en en el siguiente link
http://www.dirkscrazyweek.com/previous.html
It offers that it is worthwhile to look.
Pack composed by Software, Video Marketers Tool Kit,
Plantillas,eWriter For and Internet Marketing Lost Secrets among
others.
The most astonishing thing is the price of each one and as if it was
little, resale license through one replies of this web with your login
of PayPal for your to get paid directly and without middlemen
Visit one another in in the following link
http://www.dirkscrazyweek.com/previous.html
I don’t know a single word of Spanish (ok, i know how to order eight beers but that’s about it), so I can’t comment on the language and grammar on that part, but the English part… It doesn’t seem to be written by anyone naturally fluent in English. This leads me to the conclusion that Dirk didn’t send out the mail, which in turn leads to the conclusion that it must be someone trying to get a quick affiliate-commission. But as you can see, it’s not an affiliate-link being promoted. The only one making a couple of bucks on this mail, is Dirk Wagner.
The way this type of spam works, is that it uses a bot-net (hijacked computers running a quiet irc-app with bot-scripts waiting for commands from the bot-master) to send out mails from innocent peoples computers, using an existing email-address in the “from” and “reply-to” parts of the mail-headers. When a mail bounces (gets sent back due to the recipient being non-existant), it goes straight to email-address in the reply-to part of the header. When it gets delivered, the unsuspecting company seems to be the sender, which can easily lead to the innocent company’s ip and domain being black-listed, which makes the delivery of legit, genuine mails from the victim company pretty much impossible to servers that use the black-lists.
With that technicality out of the way, I’ve been a victim of this type of sender-spoofing myself a couple of times, but the mails sent using my return-addresses have never promoted products by Internet Marketers, only viagra, drugs, Nigeria-scams and other well-known types of scams. I’ve always reported these to SpamCop and other organisations myself to avoid my domains being blacklisted.
Although the mail doesn’t seem to be written by Dirk Wagner or anyone working for Dirk Wagner, could that possibly be a way for the sender to disguise her/himself? “Sure, I made the money, but I didn’t write the mail!”. If Dirk or one of his staff didn’t send out the mail, why the h**l is he the one making money from any possible sales? It is well known that between 0.1% and 0.3% of the recipients of spam actually click through and sometimes even purchase. It is also well known that you can purchase a mass-send of an email to any number of recipients for a pretty low price. So if this mail goes out to 1 million receivers, Dirk stands to make money from 1-3000 visitors.
So the question is – Is Dirk Wagner A Spammer? What do you think? Have you been the victim of sender-spoofing?
Posted in Personal | 4 Comments »
Thursday, April 17th, 2008
I’ve been absent for a couple of months now (as usual), but I do have a couple of reviews and rants coming up, like a review of VirtualSmartAgent and SelfGrowing Websites.
I turn 33 this Sunday (20th of April) and you know what that means. You’ll get another one of those “I turn old tomorrow, so to celebrate I’ve decided to sell you this old piece of crap for a brand new price”… Or NOT 
Check in on Sunday for a nice surprise from me to you!
Did you miss me while I was gone? 
Posted in Personal | No Comments »
Friday, January 4th, 2008
Amazing, isn’t it?
We’re only 4 days into the new year, and I’ve already received tons of crap-promotions.
One that disturbed me especially was a sale of 7 plr products… I feel pity for anyone purchasing that package as they will run into legal problems if they use it. The sellers of that package don’t have rights to resell PLR. I know since I’ve purchased PLR to all the products myself.
It kinda ticks me off that people don’t read the licenses for the stuff they re-sell. It’s not ok to sell illegal licenses. Not at all.
How would you feel if you purchase PLR to a product, and the original author suddenly sends you a mail threatening with legal actions if you don’t take it off the market and tell your customers to delete it? I’ve had it happen… Not fun at all. Others have been sued with no warning for selling products illegally…
Don’t fall for that. If you want to purchase a PLR-package that seems to come from different sources, mail the seller and ask if he really has the rights to sell PLR licenses.
Nuff’said.
I hope you all had a great Christmas and that your New Year-parties were as great as the one I visited
I’m introducing a new feature on my blog this year. When I find something I think is spectacular and I get re-sell rights to it (if I get the rights to resell PLR, I’ll do that as well), I’ll make sure to offer it to you as well. Make a habit of clicking the Special Blog-sale link up in the right corner.
The first deal is a report called “Facebook Social Ads – The New AdWords“, teaching you how to make money with advertising on Facebook. You get MRR to the package and it comes complete with graphics (jpg and psd) and sales-material.
Let’s make 2008 a great year!
Oh, yeah, the Affiliate Marketing 2.0 review is coming up next. I’ll try to have it available by monday. I’m still trying to catch up with everything I didn’t do over Christmas- and New Year-celebrations.
Posted in New Products, Personal | 2 Comments »
Friday, December 21st, 2007
You didn't think I'd forget my Christmas gifts for you, did you?
I didn't. But this has been one long day… I went out to get the last of the Christmas presents today, and so did obviously the rest of my city. We're talking buses 30 minutes late, 45 minutes in line to pay for your stuff. Luckily for me, I have an "express"-card, meaning I scan my own merchandise, go to the register and pick out my card, and then I'm outa there I bet atleast a couple of hundred other shoppers decided today that they're gonna get that service too
Today I'm going to bring you two Christmas-related products with PLR. Here's the thing, I haven't used them myself yet, because I realised last week that it was a bit late to start working them.
Download the ebook here and the related articles here
I bet I'm going to get angry emails about giving these away :O But here's the deal. These two products are going to make me money next Christmas. And I'm going to start letting them work for me in the middle of January. You should too. And then next Christmas, we compare numbers and discuss how we did it. For free. How about it? You on?
I'm off to wrap the last Christmas present for my daughter now,
Again – Merry Christmas
Posted in Personal | No Comments »
Thursday, December 20th, 2007
What kind of Santa would only give you a short pdf-file?
I've decided I should give you something more than that. So, you get MRR to "Being Safe Online at Christmas" – about shopping safely on the internet. You can download it here.
Enjoy!
Posted in Personal | 2 Comments »
Wednesday, December 19th, 2007
I've never been a real fan of Christmas myself, but I do enjoy the chance to spend some extra time with my loved ones. That's Christmas for me The food (eating it, that is) and gifts isn't really essential anylonger, but I will absolutely enjoy to see my daughter open her gifts (especially the tri-cycle I bought for her), and ofcourse I'm going to enjoy all the Christmas-food (although I'm a vegetarian myself, as is my daughter and her mother), and especially making it… I love cooking. I love cooking for festive events like Christmas, New Year, Easter and so on. I enjoy seeing my loved ones dig in on their plates…
Although the past year has been a personal disaster, long hospital stays, illnesses in the family, and the dreaded break-up with my ex. girlfriend, I have enjoyed the past two months so much it almost makes up for it
All the emails from the readers of this blog, new partnerships, new businessventures, new income-streams … You name it!
I'm going to do my very best to keep up the speed, and keep reviewing products. In fact, I'm going through Ross Goldberg's Affiliate Marketing 2.0 right now, and I'll try to have it up before the New Year begins
Next year will bring on some changes. I'm going to let you, the readers of my blog, get a first glance of everything I release. I'm going to start up atleast one new membership site, and I have two scripts (although I prefer to see them as systems) I've been working on for ages now that will be ready in the first quarter of 2008. You will be the first to know and use them.
With that long personal rant, I bid you farewell for now, and I wish you and your loved ones a Very Merry Christmas and The Best New Year ever!
Oh, I almost forgot, here's a special christmas gift for you, no signup, no oto's, just a gift. Enjoy!
Posted in Personal | No Comments »
