Last night I tuned into Internet Marketing Secrets podcast #133, ( Web 2.0 Marketing secrets ), featuring an interview with Howie Shwartz, the King of web 2.0 traffic generation.
I hadn’t heard of Howie or his website, Conversation Domination, before, but I did get very excited about the methods and insights he revealed during the podcast. So excited that first thing next morning I started up my computer and logged straight onto Conversation Domination hunting down more juicy insights from Howie.
At $195 a pop per month and having just handed my last cent to Santa, I knew I was never going to get anywhere near the juicy stuff inside but I figured I might drop by in the hope of picking up a few crumbs somewhere.
So when I saw that I could get a $1 fourteen day trial, I was positively jumping up and down in my seat. After all, Howie had claimed in the podcast that by applying his methods I could dominate the search engines with my keywords in days, heck, even in hours! Fourteen days was plenty and who knows if I made those couple of affiliate sales, which has never happend for me yet but I now had BELIEF! I could pay for the monthly membership and hang out with Howie and the chaps at Conversation Domination learning even more great guru secrets.
So I signed up with my dollar, probably the last one on my credit card, and entered the site. Once I had declined the offer to be one of the lucky 20 people being given access to Howie’s $197 Black Hat Lab AND the invitiation to the $500 Linking Network, I got where I wanted, Howie’s private membership area where all would soon be revealed.
The first thing I checked out were the Guides to Squidoo, Hub Pages, Wetpaint and so on. I anticipated that these would be full of hidden secrets that would help master aspects of web 2.0 properties that I had never known about. I expected ‘tips and tricks’ stuff. Instead I got scanty ’set-up guides’ that told me nothing I didn’t already know. I had set up a Squidoo account and really Squidoo couldn’t make it any easier. Same goes for Hub Pages. It’s not rocket science even for a rookie.
So ok, I’m only paying $1, I’m not too upset because I move on to check out Phase 1 and Phase 2, the ‘master plan’ which will detail my ’strategy’ for dominating the search engines. I find two simple pages, neither of which tell me much more than I had already learned in Howie’s podcast on Internet Marketing Secrets. I’m getting disappointed.
One of the big pulls with Howie’s sales page for me was gaining insight into the step-by-step “Outsourcing” secrets that Howie used to grow his business. I followed his recommended link to Traffic Assistants, only to find a 404 error. Thinking there was some mistake with the link, I googled ‘Traffic Assistants’, to find a post in position #3 declaring Traffic Assistants A SCAM.
The credibility of Conversation Domination was now plummeting towards zero fast. I’m thinking what kind of reputable Internet Marketer is going to recommend a service that reeks of scam. As the author of the scam post wrote, surely if Traffic Assistants were as good at their job as they suggested, they could knock his ’scam post’ off the rankings. They’re doing it for Howie, why not for themselves?
Really, I could go on more but I will sum up with just another couple of observations. At the time of my sign-up on Dec 4th, nothing had been added to the ‘What’s new’ section since October 7th which makes a joke of the this …
We ALWAYS know what works TODAY because we have the search engines hooked into our private EKG. If Google decides to hiccup, we are counter-attacking the very same day.
See, we make money by staying 6 to 9 months ahead of the crowd. By the time some self proclaimed “Guru” releases some new “system” our members have already crushed the market and left the spoils of war to the herd.
And where’s the party? There are 1000 other members on Conversation Domination. Where’s the crowd hanging out? There are no forums, no welcome message from Howie. It feels just a little bit too lonely in there, a bit like the fist time I landed in Second Life.
On the up side, many of the video and audios are worthwhile and maybe if and when I get ‘my exclusive access to Howie call’, I’ll find that $195 a month is worth paying, but for now I can wipe the sweat from my brow, with a sigh of relief that I only paid a dollar.
So my conclusion … Ok so if it works and I’m still testing the method so the Jury for me is out on this one for now, I might pay to know this stuff. As somebody still learning, the information on web 2.0 marketing was more than insightful, but I felt it was nothing that couldn’t be put it in a $97 ebook and sold to me. I haven’t yet seen the value for a $195 a month charge for it what is there at the moment.
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I have been looking for lots of marketing info/Resources recently and yours is up there at the top of my list.