Bjorn Says

Virtual Smart Agents … Smart To Use?

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 »

Dirk Wagner Is NOT A Spammer

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 »

Is Dirk Wagner A Spammer?

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 »

What’s up Doc?

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 »

It’s 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 »

Nope, I didn’t forget :)

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 »

Another Gift for you

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 »

It’s almost Christmas :)

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 »

John Reels’ Sales Bully

It seems to me like SalesBully will be all about psychological tricks to persuade people into buying your stuff. There’s no secret to the fact that you can make people buy your products by instilling some fear into them by telling them that they will fail miserably in their ventures without your product, that they will go broke or die if they don’t start using the tactics in your guide/report and what-not.

From what I can make of the salespage, John does this by presenting you with a number of “facts”. Like how they used the system to sell out their last product, “GoTryThis” in 7 days, how everyone who tested the system increased their conversion rates by up to 400% (or something, i didn’t really take much notice), and how, basically, you will be overrun by your competition if you don’t buy it.

He uses a bunch of javascript and css-tricks to instill a sense of urgency, and tells you that just because you’re you, you can have this fantastic, “can’t live without it, don’t leave home without it” product for only $177 instead of the real price $297.

I’m not falling for that. There are lots of great guides on how to persuade visitors into buying, and if I buy those I won’t have to shell out $177 and give John my ftp-details.

If you purchase his system, tell me how you liked it. Hopefully it’s more unique than GoTryThis “blackhat” (overpriced piece of junk)

Posted in Latest Promotions, Personal | 7 Comments »

I need some input on this …

I recently registered 2 new domains. One of the domains is going to be used for a hosted link-cloaking and redirection-service, and the other is going to be used for a new product I’m working on. The product is - you guessed it - a link-cloaker/redirect script with a few new and neat features (not at all like the old give-away product myAffiliateLinks).

I need some help in deciding which domain will be used for what purpose.

The first one is: hereisthelink.com
The second one is: seethislink.com

I’ve already started using hereisthelink.com for my affiliate/promotion-links, but I still haven’t been able to decide whether I should use that domain for the hosted service, or for the script.

Please help me decide. I would really, really appreciate your input on this. Just leave a comment and tell me whether the hosted service should be run from 1 - hereisthelink.com or 2 - seethislink.com

Thanks!

Posted in Personal | 2 Comments »