Gorilla Website Marketing sessions FINALLY start !
I’ll do a quick recap on yesterdays lengthy post. It was now nearly 3 weeks since I had signed up for Glenn Canady’s Gorilla Website Marketing Course and ABDevelopment had failed to find me a dropshipper for the products that I wanted to sell.
Having a product to sell, and the right product to sell, is probably one of the most significant parts to having a successful sales site. I’d done my research, as ABDevelopment requested, and found something I was interested in, knew a lot about, and appeared to be a fairly hot product to sell. ABDevelopment failed to find me a dropshipper for it, despite all the promises, and boasts that they could find me a dropshipper for anything I wanted to sell.
In frustration I had signed up with the Drop Ship Source Directory, (which by the way is excellent) at my own expense, and found a dropshipper for PDA’s myself. However, the company concerned had no way for anyone outside the US to sign up with them. I’d tried, but was getting nowhere. Out of desperation I suggested maybe selling Nature’s Sunshine products. It was something my wife had an account for and I could get them to deliver direct to the customer. It wasn’t something I was particularly interested in, and the product cost is low, and the margins aren’t huge, but it was SOMETHING to sell.
One of my big reservations about my ’second best’ product choice was that I could only get the stuff dropshipped to the UK and countries in Europe that accepted the Euro. OK, so thats a big market, but when you look at all the languages involved, and my site is just in English, then you are really down to just the UK. I was told by ABDevelopment this was not a problem.
If I had waited for ABDevelopment for a dropshipper then I could have been waiting a VERY long time. They were showing no inclination or sense of urgency to find me one. After all, why should they worry, it was my $8000 on the line, and not their money.
The killer blow came when Vicky announced that I should get back to ABDevelopment and ask for another mentor because she couldn’t schedule me in. So, they couldn’t get me a dropshipper and now they they couldn’t provide a mentor ! It couldn’t get any worse. Could it ?
I emailed Jason the very next day to let him know about the situation. I was getting extremely frustrated with the whole experience. I’d paid my money. Money that I simply could not afford, and I NEEDED to start earning it back ASAP. I had been led to believe that I would be getting a return on my money by the time the first credit card bill hit me. I couldn’t see how that was going to happen now.
I had forwarded Jason the emails from Vicky saying she couldn’t be my mentor as well as my last email to Vicky suggesting alternative products, seeing as they could find me a dropshipper. I said in the email that I would phone Jason, which I did. I never got to speak to him and two days later I STILL hadn’t received a reply to my email.
By this time I was getting very concerned and worries were starting to creep into my mind that maybe this was just some big scam. After all, think about it, take $8000 from someone, send them a box with a printout of a $39 ebook, and then disappear off the face of the earth. The sucker at the other end is thinking it must be legit. After all, they sent you something and you spoke to them a few times. That was what was running through my mind.
Here is the email I sent through to ABDevelopment on a different email address, as I was getting nowhere with Jason’s.
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Hi,
Here I am, over 3 weeks and $8000 later and I still have not been assigned a mentor. At least not one who has either contacted me with any mentoring, or lasted more than a week.
I have paid my money and I want to get started. When I paid my $8000 I was led to believe that I should start seeing money coming in within about 2 - 3 months. How is that going to be achieved if I can’t speak to anyone and over 3 weeks have gone by ?
I’ve tried phoning a couple of times tonight. The 888-277-1315 number goes through to an answering machine. The mailbox for this is full. I’ve tried calling 001 435 628 6473. This number is also not answered and redirects to another phone that is also not answered.
Come on guys ! I’m $8000 out of pocket. I expect better than this. Also, emails I have sent with basic questions remain unanswered.
I’ve just given up a temporary job so that I could concentrate on getting my web business up and running and recoup my money quickly andhopefully start building a web business that can make me a living. I’m desperate to get going but I can’t even get started with this if nobodywill talk to me ! It’s really not good enough.
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Chris O’Connor
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Yes, thats right. I gave up the temporary job that I was doing. The temporary job that I’d taken on to fit around the work needed on the Gorilla Website Marketing Course. And when it appeared that the job was going to get in the way of the meetings with ABDevelopment I gave up the job. Hey, at least one of use was commited to trying to make this work !
And the reason why I was seemingly being ignored ? They said they were merging with another company and had been ‘busy’. Yeah, don’t worry about your core business, the paying customer, after all you’ve already got his money.
The very next day I got an email from a guy called Scott Dimmick. I’m not going to paste Scott’s email here because it contains a lot of personal contact details for Scott (home phone number etc.). Scott did not work for ABDevelopment and I assumed he was from the other company they were merging with. I believe it was CMGHelp.com . Although Scott may have just been recruited on a temporary basis, I don’t know for certain.
Let me make something clear. Scott was a very nice guy and very professional. Like I’ve said before, I’m an IT guy and I’ve been creating web sites for years, so the technical aspect of creating a web site was no problem whatsoever. Had it been, then I’m sure Scott would have been able to help me through it, although how far you would get with no knowledge of building a web site and only 4 sessions of 30 - 60 minutes God only knows !
My sessions with Scott were primarily about cosmetic issues. I didn’t always agree with Scott, but he was the expert and I always listened and implemented what he suggested. Lets face it, the reason I was doing this course was because the sites I was creating weren’t pulling in money. I was trying to find out what that missing something was. What would have been the point in me arguing with a guy who WAS doing well with his sites. I was there to learn from him.
I put a hell of a lot of time and effort into my site. Scott and I didn’t particularly agree on things like the colour scheme, but that was really about it. We got on well and our sessions were pleasant. What was nice was that I gave him a few tips about useful sites and how I’d done certain things on my sites, so we both learnt a bit from each other. He was a good guy, and the advice he gave me about layout made a lot of sense. It was basic common sense stuff. Nothing radical. But the important thing was that it was stuff that I should have been doing but wasn’t, and he had picked up on that. Our sessions never seemed like teacher and student sessions. It felt to me more like a couple of blokes having a friendly chat about how best to lay a page out so it looked good. There wasn’t a huge transfer of knowledge. None was needed. I was sorry when our sessions came to an end.
One point of note here that I will revisit in a future post, is that months later I started getting a few emails from people claiming that they had been scammed (yes, you can imagine who by). In all of the emails I got the one guy that emerged as clean, and liked by everyone, was Scott Dimmick.
I was still desperate to try and get to the stage where some of the money I had been told to expect would start coming in. I wanted to do anything possible to try and catch up with the time ABDevelopment had lost. I knew my upcoming sessions were going to involve using Zeus so I downloaded the free version so that I could get to grips with it and be able to hit the ground running when the marketing sessions came around.
My early experiences of Zeus were not good !