Bid early bid often. No tyre kickers. Grab a bargainnnnnnnnnnnnnnnnnnnnn

Here’s the sale criteria

- NO RESERVE – highest bid wins – if you are the only bidder and bid $1 then you win – simple

- sale closes 5pm 16th September Coonabarabran time

- offers are to be made via emailing me at domainsale at reallylongurl dot com

- these are to be sold as one lot – no exceptions

- I will invoice you via PayPal for the agreed amount

- I will push these to your GoDaddy account as soon as payment is cleared

- if you want the content on the site I will zip it up and upload for you to download (but it’s crap…really)

- if you are outbid I will notify you via email. If people start doing the “leave bid to last minute” thing then I reserve the right to continue till you tap out or you don’t answer email within 1 hour of me sending it.

- domain list

I’ll update the page with the current highest bid so keep coming back if you are interested in buying

Update: Closed and Sold!

To rectify this I have linked all of the books on Amazon, and if you feel like sending me a present then feel free to select one at random in Kindle version (if available) or paperback and send to allisonr at bigpond dot net dot au and I shall receive it via the magic of the Whispernet. I shall also thank you profusely and link liberally to your nominate website or Google+/Twitter page…or where ever.

It works for porn stars, why wouldn’t it work for me?

It was a gloomy overcast morning when I opened my email. With the taking down of Rusbot by Microsoft and others, it has been a pleasurable experience going through my email. No penis enlargement, no refinancing of mortgages, it’s been almost blissful. Before I moved to the bush I also removed myself from as many internet marketing mailing lists that i was a member of, so it’s been reallllly quiet in the ol’ inbox.

I spied an email from Trey Smith who had recently had an expensive pitch on how to develop iPhone apps (kinda sorta)

“Ahh!” I thought to myself “What is this he is flogging now? and I really must unsubscribe as there’s no value in his list”

Because I am developing an iPhone app (learning a lot and not spending 3k on a course to do it either) I was interested in Trey’s take. *sigh* My take is that his app was popular because he got his list to “take a look”, that’s not real sales, that’s back to the old smoke-and-mirrors crap.

It’s very import that I explain HOW I sign up for these mailing lists. I know most people just have a gmail account that the get their crud sent to. That’s not how I do it. You see I want to be able to see what happens with my email address after I give it to other people. If you give the same address out to everyone there’s no way of telling where a bad email comes from. If you get spam, who gave out your email (or had their mail server hacked), or who sold your details. So what I do is give a unique email address to a mailing list and have a catchall account that brings them all to the one inbox.

So here’s the first email and note the address it was sent to

So I click on the “watch video now” to see if it’s anything to do with the iphone app development because I might learn something, but alas it was not. It was an old JV he had done some time back

Now note the name of the product there, you will need to know it later.

I knew of this product because I had watched the launch some time back. I didn’t watch the video, I closed the page and went straight for the unsubscribe button on Trey Smith’s list. After all it;s nothing to do with iPhone apps and is blatant burning of list members (sickening behaviour)

Ahh it feels good to be on the do not contact list doesn’t it?

This morning was also  gloomy and overcast (it’s much nicer now thank goodness) when I again went to my inbox.

“What’s this?” I ask myself (I always seem to be asking myself things)  ”An email asking me to confirm my subscription? But I didn’t sign up for anything, let’s take a look at where they got my email address from”

Why it’s Lets Get Social’s list address….now why would this thing be wanting me to confirm a subscription I never made (nor had I been to the sell a 7 dollar report on how to sell 7 dollar reports scam page…have now though, pass me the disinfectant!) and be using the Lets Get Social email address that I ONLY used for signing up for the Lets Get Social email list.

It’s a mystery (and some MASSIVE coincidence) that I was on the page yesterday for the very site that it appears has “lost” my email address to another site.

One thing is for sure, my email address has been used without my permission to try to get me to sign up for something I did not sign up for. The only people that should  know that email address are those that run let’s Get Social.

So…whodunnit?

It all started because I noticed a simple but quite noticeable Facebook ad with the following logo

Well who doesn’t love their cat if they have a cat hmmm? I thought at the time I should take a screenshot because it seemed odd that a cat appreciation fan page was paying cash to get members. This morning it all became clear, but I will explain why in a minute.

Having my own cat fan page for the Sphynx Cat Blog I decided to give this page a “like” so i could post a link to my fan page on their wall saying that the Sphynx cat Blog also loves cats and that we were happy to be there. Yeah, I am not above a little self promotion spam if it is relevant (which makes this a you can’t play a player kind of scenario) . Membership numbers were racing up on the I Love My Cat fan page as people saw the ads, and their friends joining, and they had 2000 users in just one day…not bad at all, I wonder how much that cost?

This morning in my feed I see the following

Which takes you to

The trap has been sprung! I don’t do CPA but when I saw this I thought that’s quite clever if you pick things like kittens, puppies, babies and replicated.

And people are THANKING these people for being so generous….

Almost 2 years to the DAY I pointed out in this blog that Mike Filsaime had released a crap product earlier in the year and that getting on one of his mailing lists (again) was a huge mistake (even earlier I tweeted about his “accidental” email mistake…when everyone else was making accidental “mistakes” to get more emails in front of your eyeballs).  Coupled with stories from friends who have had dreadful customer service from him, and yes I don’t have anything good to say really about the man.  Don’t make the mistake of thinking I HATE him though, I don’t hate anyone, even people I suppose I should hate.

Then there is the Salty Droid. He has a style all of his own and one that I personally wouldn’t use, but whatever floats your boat.  His dislike of the tactics used by a great deal of the better marketed make-money-online-people (by better marketed I mean you probably know their name if you have ever looked around for who is teaching how to make money online) is the basis of the blog, but it also encompasses GED types as well. He also doesn’t come across as very likable, but who knows as that is most definitely a persona, and one who is probably meant to be tough and annoying.

I’ll single out Salty Droid from his followers, some of whom really don’t do him any favours. Some of the things they come up with are complete pack of lies, but they tell it like it is truth.  Beware anything you read in the comments because it’s mostly ego driven testosterone fueled bullshit, and bullshit that can be easily dis-proven…which is why I wonder why they do it… but there you have it *puzzled look*

So what is the car wreck?

Salty Droid has been chasing the Syndicate and has released some media that he has acquired. (sidebar – WHO records all of their conversations and uploads them and WHY?) The Syndicate (as coined by Frank Kern) includes Mike Filsaime and 11 others that you probably have heard of.  Pretty damning stuff, but still remains to be seen what is illegal activity and what is distasteful discussion that you would hear in the back rooms of any customer related business (not nice, but not illegal).

Then….

Mike Filsaime this week wrote an open letter to his JV partners that not only reeked of irony, it was eye-wateringly hypocritical. Do as I say, not as I did (but don’t do now). Being the emotional person that I am, I couldn’t help but march right over there and leave a comment that basically said (sorry you will have to take my word for this as MF has removed all negative comments from the post) “are you going to apologise for what you have done in the past, and are you doing this because of pressure coming from SD’s blog”.

Now Mike could have told me to fuck off and I would have been less affronted than I was by his actual reply. He accused me of being one of SDs “sheeple” (oh and he claimed he had NEVER done anything that he was railing against in his blog).

HOW DARE HE!  *high picthed affronted voice*

Actually I got over it pretty quickly because it showed how close MF is to being one of SD followers. Instead of acknowledging that here was an (old ex) customer who had a point and long memory, and him using the opportunity to show how he had changed; he chose to attempt to belittle and marginalise me. A low act and one his public relations agent* should have booted him up the arse for (I have no idea if these guys have a PR agent, but they seriously should be getting a group rate right about now).

So let’s close out and point at a blog post I made on the SWBN**  back in January 2009, it’s fiction but it does predate Mike’s attempt by nearly 2 years…he thought things were bad in the last couple of months – we plebs have been choking on the shit for YEARS! So please read this short,short story to see where we have always stood Liars and Thieves – Marketing Ethics

*Speaking of PR it would seem that MF has attempted to paper over some of the cracks by having his online lawyer post an “interview” with him. Comments are filled with vitriol but the damning F rating on the BBB is kind of hard to ignore.

**For the dick on SD that thinks SWBN is some part of an Ed Dale scheme, dead wrong. The SWBN was all my idea an d my business partners and I have built it all on our own  -thank you.

Sometimes the most obvious things are the most difficult to perceive.

Like last week where I was all in a huff ‘n’ puff about why was it that people all around me were forming these great business partnerships and yet none seemed forthcoming to me. Now usually my self esteem has oodles of spare to get me over rough patches but the day job is really, REALLY unpleasant at the moment and my reserves of fairy dust are low. So I said to myself, why waste time speculating… just freaking ASK. So I did.

I follow 200-odd people on Twitter and so scoured through the list and picked 24 people that I admire, respect and are go-gettin’ types. I set up a Survey Monkey survey asking 5 basic questions.

1. Would they do business with me

2. Had they ever thought of doing business with me

3. What are my strengths

4. What are my weaknesses

5. What advice would they offer me

In the first 24 hours 12 responded and in 48 hours 14 have. Which in survey terms is an awesome response ratio.

So I got answers – great answers!

You might want to give this a go too. make sure you are wearing your thick skin rain-coat because when you ask for brutally honest opinion, some of it it will sting (but only because ALREADY KNOW

The issue isn’t necessarily eating habits. In the 1970′s the average British/Australian diet was 100′s of calories higher than the current one. Exercise wasn’t “exercise” back then, it was playing outside till the lights went out; or if a teen hitting the disco and burning off the zillions of calories you consumed during the day. Worrying about weight was not something we as a society was overly concerned about.

Children today are not permitted free play like back in the day. They are ferried too and from music and ballet classes by car. God forbid letting your child walk to school – what are you? some kind of child neglecting parent? don’t you know there are thousands of pedophiles out there just dying to get their hands on your kids>!>! The calories may be fewer, but so is the activity.

These children grow up a size that they have no control over, and by the time they have control the damage is done. I was listening to an interview on ABC Radio about a 27 year old woman who had lap band surgery. She was 107 kilos and had been dieting since she was 7. After 20 YEARS of messing around with her metabolism it was completely stuffed and the only solution was invasive, potentially dangerous, surgery.  This woman has as much chance of naturally changing her size as a blck person does at changing the colour of their skin.

So I wonder whether the next time the TV starts telling you that the obese are causing damage to the health system and the economy whether you will continue to buy into the new ism.

So I did the next best thing and bought allison.co . It didn’t come as easy as the other.co domains I bought, they were simple transactions against which there was no opposition (pretty easy when you are buying for micro niches) but someone had also wanted allison.co and so the battle began.

Actually it went the way of most auctions with the person who wanted the domain dropped a bid on 15 minutes before close and I waited till 5 minutes to go and kept bidding till I topped their proxy bid. There were no further bids from them and voila!

Whether .co is weighty with Google or other search methods time will tell. Literally, new TLD have the disadvantage going up against aged domains which Google does use in their search algorithm. Good news though with Google has pledged to treat .co sites as global sites unless they have Colombian content (keep your cocaine sales to a .com if you want a bigger market).

Be Professional, Always

One thing that you will have over 99% of the people in your niche is that you are deliberately there. Most people in your niche are just following their passion, enjoying the attention and rewards that come with being a market leader and have not cultivated any kind of professional demeanor to go with that position. When someone seems to be cutting in on their action, they can get quite nasty. Alas, the least professional will get the most nasty.

Currently, in one of the niches I move in, there is discord between one person who has created and run a forum for the last 18 months, and a member of that forum that was banned for giving her professional opinion (she has years of professional working experience and is studying to formalise that experience into recognised qualifications).  She has now set up her own forum focusing on that part of the niche and is moving to become a market leader, after all she does do this for a living outside of the niche.

Rather than get snotty in her new forum and cause issues with the old, she posted her forum philosophy and went on her way building her own community. Professional.

This seems to have incensed the guy who runs the other forum and he has posted his own “philosophy” that is neither professional or pleasant.  Guess whose community is going to benefit most from which leader – a community that is lead by a true professional in the field who is not engaging in mud slinging and is sharing her knowledge, or a community that is led by a leader interested in only keeping this part of the niche “for himself”.

Because you know why you are there as a market leader, have a plan and know where you are going, then you will be able to keep your cool if a situation like this crops up for you. Have an opinion, maintain that opinion if it is something you feel strongly about, but allow others to have theirs too. Do not engage in mud-slinging, rather put on the pretend business suit and turn your attention to what is best for your followers, niche and your business (and if you are doing the right thing whatever you do will benefit them all).

Niches Are Not Ladders

If you are moving to become a leader then you really need to grasp that a niche is not a narrow ladder that only one person can be at the top of.  There is not one niche where there is a single “leader” in that field – not one – none. Sooner or later there will be someone that comes along that is just as passionate, or focussed on a slightly different part of that market, and they create their own following.  You don’t need to “bump” someone off the ladder, you just need to keep moving forward and up.

If you think there is only one spot on the top then you will be focussed on the people that are already there, and not on the community that you are building. Remember you are a professional, not a prize fighter.

One of the quickest ways to expand your following is to hook up with someone else in your niche that has a following. I talked about the folly of that first forum owner ignoring the business opportunity of working with me in a previous post .  Combine my list with his list and there would have been a larger JV playing field and we both would have profited.  No matter, I shall work with the new forum to help build and expand so I can JV there.  I don’t believe there is only one place at the top, and neither does the other forum owner. We are in it for the betterment of people like us, not to make sure we are the ONLY ones to profit from our knowledge.

Thanks to Kevin Steele for the picture