Monday, November 24, 2008

A little light relief.

G'Day folks, just solved an interesting puzzle.

I was sent an email today with a password protected spreadsheet attached which I will upload here tonight.

There are a number of clues to work out the numerical password. Once you have worked out the password you can unlock the spreadsheet and add your name to the list of people who have worked it out.

I found a couple of people in there I know which is interesting. There must be several hundred copies of this floating about the internet by now so I have put a link to this post in the spreadsheet as well for the solvers to add a comment, if they wish.

I think the progress of the spreadsheet from me should be most interesting. Anyway, good luck with the puzzle if you downloaded it from here and welcome to the ranks of the solvers if you got here from the spreadsheet.

By the way, I know how easy it is to crack password protection in excel as there is really no protection at all. So don't, OK, just solve it properly.

Cheers

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Sunday, November 16, 2008

Hey, I got Analytics working properly...

And I can now see that I really do have some visitors here. Welcome.

That seems really weird actually, saying welcome to visitors after all the previous posts when I thought I was talking to myself. It now confers some responsibility to me to actually say things that might be useful, damn, talk about painting yourself into a corner.

Revisiting a previous post about an inter net marketer who shall continue to remain nameless and a dodgy redirection stunt he was playing, he now has one of those crappy fake 'live operator' scripts running which offers a discount but not for the affiliate.

I have actually had a gutfull of the stunts so here is the good news. Stuff them, if you really want to buy a product and you can find it in Clickbank then create your own link and buy through that. Check out the discount by moving your mouse outside the page, like you were going to close the window (this triggers the script) but make sure that when you land on the sales page that your affiliate name is on the bottom of the page so you get the rebate.

These days I only buy through someone else's link if I think thay have actually provided some value or that have a bonus I want. I have no desire to reward people who I think are just "flogging" products.

You can be confident that the owner of the product still makes their normal cut and are happy with that, it is only the crooked affiliates who get done, and they deserve it.

Keep up the good work, there has to be money out there somewhere.

In closing, well it just occurred to me that you might be interested, I have found that there are many of the Gurus who don't tell you the whole truth about how they generate their traffic. I found a forum, where there are some intersting names, that deals exclusively in what some would call black hat marketing.

I don't call it that, it is all marketing. Search engines may not like some of the methods used but since they continually manipulate the results to suit themselves, I don't have any problem in playing their games back. Apparently, neither do some quite big names. I won't name them because many of the others may be doing similar things and, unless you name them all, naming some wouldn't be fair.

That probably came as a surprise to you but it's true, they don't always tell you the truth.

The other thing that you'll probably be intersted in is that the only way to make money online is to provide a wanted product or service to a constant stream of targeted visitors.

There are some bits that make a difference to the conversion rates but that is pretty much it. I plan to expand on that after I have reviewed everthing else I have written here so I can at least have some semblance of continuity and credibility.

Cheers for now.

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Saturday, November 08, 2008

And yet another call...OmniBiz|Vanuity|Education Sales and Marketing, all Scammers

I didn't post it here but the week before last I had another call from Joe Sever, again in the morning before work and I told him about being blacklisted and asked why he called me.

He than claimed that he hadn't called am and that another comapny was using his name and that he was now very angry.

I must be all kinds of sucker because I sort of believed him. I asked him to email me so I could email him the contract that I had originally signed with Vanuity.

Thinking about it later I realised that he was BSing me and that I wouldn't be getting either a call from him on Saturday or an email.

I wasn't proved wrong this time. He didn't email or call.

This morning I had a call from someone else who claimed to be working with Google Snatch. He also dropped Joe Sever's name into the introduction.

Now I have had a fairly tough week and was in no mood to put up with another bloody salesman type so I was very short with him. I asked him who he worked for and he told me Google Snatch, I said he didn't and asked again who he worked for.

Finally he told me that it was Education Sales and Marketing - the crooks.

I then informed him that I had been put on their blacklist and they were not to call me. He asked why and I told him they were crooks and that I wanted nothing to do with them.

Typical salesman, he tried to argue the position and said that I had signed up for their program by buying a book online. Watch out for this ploy, they have all tried to use the "but you asked for this" line. Not true, buying a product online is not an invitation to be upsold by a scammer.

Do this from now on. Use any sequence of numbers which comply with the phone number pattern ie 1234 1224 rather than your phone number. Leave out part of your address so you can't be tracked. Unless you are having a physical product shipped to you they do not need that information and have no right to it.

They also all work on the "but I thought you wanted to make money online" routine. My answer to that today was "Yes I do, but not with you".

Ultimately today I got rid of him by telling him that I had had a tough week and that I had no interest in being harrassed by him. This is actually true, this has been the toughest week of my life and I really wasn't in the mood to play games with them. Otherwise I might have kept him on the line for sometime and got through to the supervisor again so I could get him p#$%^&d off with me a second time.

With luck they'll never call me again. If not I think I'll have a recording device available and post the audio here for fun.

Short post today, I'll conclude with a warning. Do not put your phone number on any form unless you really have to, do not put your full or accurate address on any form unless you have to, do not bother to talk with anyone who calls you and offers to mentor or coach you to make money online unless you personally know them.

You have been warned.

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