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Gevril and Haurex Italia dinner during Baselworld in March 2011 with Larry Brauner standing in the background.
Baselworld 2012 March 8-15.
May
6
The SpiderWeb Marketing System Review and Forum
Filed Under Alerts, Home Based Business, Networking and Marketing Strategy, News, SPAM | 148 Comments
History Repeating Itself
Reading Down to the End of the Comments is a MUST !Pay It Forward for Profits, a quasi downline club pretending to be a funded proposal, collapsed last year. I hoped people would learn a lesson from it.
Members were funneled into marginal programs such as GDI and Empowerism for the sake of the income streams they provided — and perhaps too because the Pay It Forward founders had a prior interest in those programs. Members had sought to promote their primary businesses when joining PIF4P, but that idea typically got lost in the shuffle.
As Diane Hochman used to teach in My Private Classroom webinars, marketing systems are simply not sustainable. They implode once a large enough number of users adopt or tout the system.Rather than develop or teach systems and shortcuts, Diane Hochman and I teach key leadership skills and offer excellent social media marketing training.
After all, isn’t it better to invest a few months to develop strong marketing and communication skills that will serve us a lifetime than to invest the same effort in a system that might make us a few fast bucks if we’re lucky?
It’s not good to rely solely on a marketing system to build a business, but when the system itself is the product, as was the case with Pay It Forward for Profits, then the ultimate end comes quickly, usually within a year or two, and the program is completely wiped out.
Unfortunately most people don’t learn. They blame their result on bad luck or external circumstances and jump on one of the next bandwagons to come along.
As Alexander Pope said, “Hope springs eternal in the human breast,” and new marketing schemes appear every week.
Caution Recommended
What’s astonishing about The Spiderweb Marketing System is how closely it resembles Pay It Forward. When I signed up and looked inside, I could hardly believe my eyes. There was GDI front and center, just as it was in PIF4P.
That’s where the automated blogs are set up. Global Domains is the first paid component of this free system.
Hmm. Did I just say that?
I guess the system isn’t free. Users buy overpriced web services for $10 per month from GDI in order to use The SpiderWeb Marketing System.
When you get to the Direct Matches* sign up, you really can sign up for free. However, if you do, you won’t be able to implement the Direct Matches piece of the traffic system — better pay another $10 per month for that. I think I’m beginning to see a pattern here.
Ever hear of bait-and-switch?
Sorry. Let’s call it upsell.
There are multiple income streams — some pretty good. And there’s no made-up story about funded proposals like with Pay It Forward for Profits — also good. However, I wish they were up front about the cost. Spider Web is not a free system.
Many people will join Spider looking for multiple streams of income, but instead they’ll find themselves saddled down with multiple streams of outgo.
Oh, there is one other thing. In addition to clogging the Direct Matches MyMail system with spammy messages, The SpiderWeb Marketing System is a proponent and proliferator of automated blogs.
An automated blog is a system generated blog. The system creates the blog and pumps posts into the blogosphere faster than you can say “global warming”.
I just though of a name for this new phenomenon, it’s a blog infestation.
Okay. Needs some work. Give me some time. I’ll think of a better one.
All kidding aside, I can’t understand why somebody would want to spend hours spamming members at Direct Matches and Yuwie while polluting the blogosphere on auto-pilot.
There’s a moral issue too which I hope to discuss in detail in a future post. For now, consider this. When somebody visits a blog, they assume that it’s the journal of a real live person — not the fiction of a computer program. How can this type of impersonation be right?
Kimball Roundy, creator of the Spider System, has given us something interesting to watch. We’ll get to see how Google and the other search engines cope with his quasi-blogs and how visitors react to them as well. We’ll also get to see if automated blogs are really scalable and if a substantial numbers of people actually make money with them.
Meanwhile please be careful. If you see a low hanging spider web, duck!
Speaking of ducks, if it walks like a duck and quacks like a duck, then it’s a duck. I wish we could still say that about a blog.
*Direct Matches happens to be one of my favorite social networking sites. Too bad it’s going to be overrun yet again with spammers. I was so relieved when Pay It Forward fell by the wayside. Now I’ll have to put up with another wave of spamming for a year or so until The Spider Web Marketing System runs its course.
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Tags: Diane Hochman, Direct Matches, downline club, funded proposal, Kimball Roundy, multiple income streams, My Private Classroom, Pay It Forward for Profits, Scam and Ripoff Alerts, systems, The SpiderWeb Marketing System, yuwie
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May
1
Social Media Sites List
Filed Under Search Engines, Social Media and Social Networking Sites | 8 Comments
Seth Godin’s Web 2.0 Traffic Watch List
My interest in social media has evolved substantially over the past year.
My love for social networking sites is not something new, but my appreciation for blogging and social bookmarking sites certainly are.
As I mentioned in my recent post, Social Networking Site Catalog, “I launched this blog to share my passion for online social networking and my experiences at social networking sites. I never intended to assemble a catalog. There are already too many good ones out there.”
One of the world’s top marketers and author of marketing books, Seth Godin, provides a catalog of 952 top social media sites, Seth Godin’s Web 2.0 Traffic Watch List. It can help you know what’s hot and what’s not.
Here are the top ten from Seth’s list as I write this:
- youtube.com
- myspace.com
- orkut.com
- en.wikipedia.org
- ebay.com
- facebook.com
- fotolog.com
- flickr.com
- friendster.com
- photobucket.com
Put content in the right places, and you will attract other users and search engines like a magnet. If you’re into marketing, that’s exactly what you want.
How do you use social media?
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Tags: article submission, Blogging, content sharing, Diane Hochman, Larry Brauner, marketing books, My Private Classroom, online social networking, search engine marketing, Seth Godin, social bookmarking, Social Media, social media marketing training, social networking sites, Statsaholic, Web 2.0 Traffic Watch List
May
1
Zion 5 Alert
Filed Under Alerts, News, Social Media and Social Networking Sites | 3 Comments
One of the social networking sites I’ve used recently is Zion 5.
I’m writing this post to let you know that the site’s founder Darren Merrett did not pay me my Pro commission for March despite several attempts to contact him late April.
I think it’s fine to use the site as a free member or even as a Pro Member as long as you don’t care about receiving your commissions.
If there are new developments, I will let you know.
Don’t miss any posts. Register, it’s easy, or subscribe to my RSS feed!
Tags: Darren Merrett, Scam and Ripoff Alerts, social networking sites, Zion5
