Glenn Canady’s Gorilla Website Marketing & Zeus
I mentioned in an earlier post how annoyed I was when I purchased Glenn Canady’s Gorilla Website Marketing ebook. The pre-sales information leads you to believe that you can get a million hits and a page 1 ranking in the search engines in 90 days without having to spend any money. Technically that may be correct, but in practice, without buying software, such as Zeus, to help you find potential link partners you are going to have a virtually impossible task on your hands. Even with Zeus it will take some time. As I mentioned in my previous post, Glenn Canady’s ebook is around 50% about Zeus, how to use Zeus, and Zeus tips. So to say that you don’t need any other software may be technically correct, but it is also a highly misleading claim.
Well, now I was on Glenn Canady’s Gorilla Website Marketing Course and my marketing sessions would be coming up shortly. I wanted to make sure that I got as much out of them as possible, so I downloaded the free version to try and get to grips with it.
I’ve got to say that Zeus is not going to win any awards for it’s looks. It has got to be one of the ugliest bits of software I’ve used in a long time. I think it has tried (and failed) to have an Outlook style interface. It just looks clunky.
One nice thing about the software though is that it has a number of ‘wizards’ to hand hold the new user through the necessary steps to getting Zeus set up and in a position where it can start finding potential partners for you. Zeus is unlike a lot of the other reciprocal link programs in that it uses a spider, similar to search engine spiders, to find sites, crawl them, and store all sorts of data about the site in a database.
Before the spider can go off looking for you it needs to be trained. You need to go through the training process which gives it 100 keywords that would be relevant to the sort of sites that you are looking for. Obviously, you want to give it words that ideally would only be found on the sites that you are looking for, and not just on any old site. It operates by a scoring system system, so you can assign a value to the keywords and the very exclusive ones would score highest, and you can give negative values to words you don’t want on the site to try and eliminate those sites.
In practice it takes a bit of work to get it fine tuned, but when tuned the spider should run and run and come back with lots of relevant sites where you could potentially ask for links. Well thats the theory.
It’s recommended that to start with you only let Zeus build up 50 sites in the database, then look at what it has found and fine tune you keywords and adjust scoring if necessary.
I had downloaded the free version, as my marketing sessions had not yet started and I had not been given a key or a link for the professional version of Zeus. I’ve got to say that I had all sorts of problems. If it could go wrong it did go wrong. The software seemed unstable and unreliable, and it just would not work properly. Let me stress here that I was using the free version. I could not get it to work properly, but other people use it with no problems.
All of the problems were logged through the online support form, so I haven’t got any of those I can paste here. I do remember the software continously timing out and not returning anything. I’d studied the help forum, read the documentation, tweaked all sorts of settings but nothing would get it to work.
I fired off a message to the support people. This is what I got as a reply :
The problem is with your network. Check all settings and documents. You must have the proper proxy settings in Zeus. Also check your firewall settings and try to run Zeus after closing your Anti-Virus software.
This is a network that has been running happily with no problems for 2 years. I’ve got a broadband connection, and I had already eliminated the firewall and AV software. What got me was the way he was able point the finger of blame at my network without even asking how it was configured !
I’ll continue this tomorrow, Battlestar Gallactica is about to start 