The Glenn Canady Gorilla Website Marketing Course Review

No, I haven’t got bored and given up on this blog. I’ve been busy typing up my complaint regarding Glenn Canady’s Gorilla Website Marketing Course and ABDevelopment. It takes a LOT longer than you would imagine, and even then I had to cut it VERY short. When you have spent a year of your life trying solidly to make something work then there is a lot to tell. Unfortunately for Glenn Canady and ABDevelopment it is not good.

BTW - I see Glenn Canady no longer seems to link to his Gorilla Website Marketing Course from his original Gorilla Website Marketing site. It is now on a different site where he sings the praises of Vicky, the lady who did the ‘advanced’ mentoring on my course. His courses are now being pushed through gorilla-internet-marketing.com .

Glenn Canady offers to ‘a few select companies’ that he will do all the online marketing for them for ONLY ‘80% of website sales‘. This mans generosity knows no bounds ! It’s just a shame that he can’t seem to accept responsibility for the failure that his course ended in after I paid $8000 to do it, and doesn’t seem to be able to admit that Glenn Canady’s Gorilla Website Marketing Course actually DOES have something to do with him.

My updates continue starting from tomorrow.

Picking up from where I left off, I was still slogging away at Zeus, just trying to get it to perform in a logical manner and get it to the magical figure of 100 keywords. I was having no luck.

I’d scoured the Zeus forums for help and applied just about all the tips that I could. I was still getting nowhere. I’d tried clearing it out and restarting from scratch, in fact I had tried just about everything and I was at the point of tearing my hair out with frustration.

It seemed to me that ABDevelopment had dragged things out on Glenn Canady’s Gorilla Website Marketing Course and I was now worried that despite all the extreme hours and hard work that I was putting in, it felt for the first time that I was the one that was the one that was the bottleneck on progress.

It was now the 30th December 2003 and I fired off another email to Vicky :

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Hi Vicky,

I have cleared out the database, taken a copy of all the settings prior to this, and started again. I’ve gone through Zeus and got about 18 key word phrases before it couldn’t find any more. I then changed the keyword phrase in the EZ Keyword Trainer and have found that while it has kept the original 18 keyword phrases in the ‘very unique’ category, the ‘Keyword Smartness Rating’ is now back down at zero. It shows 0 single words, and 0 phrases. How am I supposed to get this up to 2/3rds when it does stuff like this ? I haven’t shut it down or made any other changes.

Chris O’Connor

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From what I could see the so-called ’smartness rating’ was actually pretty dumb. There seemed to be no logic behind the way it was behaving and I could see no way that I could achieve what I had been asked to achieve in the way in which I had been asked to do it. I had been at it and at it over and over and this indicator just kept going up and then going back down again !

Vicky replied :

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Chris,

Be patient, what you wrote below is normal. Keywords you type in manually,
you must also type them into the EZ keyword training section to increase the
smartness rating. They do not read off of each other, and that is why it
says 0 in the smartness rating but 18 in very unique category on the bottom.
This is probably why you’ve been confused. Think of them as two completely
separate stages in the training. That is how the program is worked enter
them in manually, then EZ, but keep in mind once he is trained you don’t
need to do this step again.

Hang in there, you are doing great!

Vicky

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Now Vicky was a nice lady, but I really don’t appreciate being treated like I’m some sort of dummy !

If I point out that the thing I’m supposed to be getting up to at least 2/3rd’s is going up and then plummeting back down to zero for no good reason then I expect a sensible reply.

And if I ask what, if any, the relationship is between the keyword tally and the smartness indicator then again I expect a decent reply.

I never did get a decent reply as to why it was behaving like this. What got me was that she described the way Zeus was behaving as ‘normal behaviour’. Yeah, right !

I fired this off in response to Vicky’s email :

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But Vicky, I *am* typing these into the EZ Keyword training section. Like I said, I cleared out the database and have started again. I am*only* entering stuff through the EZ Keyword trainer.

There are *no*keywords that have neen entered via the manual keyword trainer.

Chris
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As you can probably tell, my patience was starting to wear a little thin by this point.

Vicky also fired off this to me :

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Chris,

Use this for some help in between our sessions.

http://www.cyber-robotics.com/Seminars/index.htm

It is the link to the teleseminars that are daily put on by the Zeus programmers.

Vicky

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Now I know that Vicky was doing everything she could to be helpful, but I am not the sort of person who tries something and then goes running for help at the first opportunity. I had tried and tried with Zeus. I had followed the instructions to the letter. And, I had already signed up to the Zeus forums weeks before so that I could pick up tips and get answers to problem I was experiencing. So Vicky’s email added nothing of value.

So here I was. New Years Eve and I was still slogging away trying to get Zeus to do what it was supposed to do in the way I had been told to do it. Any chance I might have had of getting a break before I went back to work had long since evaporated. It had been 2 weeks of solid grind, working 15 hours+ a day. It was demoralising and depressing. I’d paid $8000 for this and it just did not seem to be working. I was doing what I had been told to do, but still it did not work.

I then received another email from Vicky :

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try some of these words.

home remedies
herbs for women
supplements for women
hormone
estrogen
women’s sexual health
fertility
life changes
menstrual cycle
hormone balancing
fertility supplements

also try changing the order of the words, and mix them up a bit.

Let me know how it goes.

Vicky

Happy New Year!

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I was desperately hoping that Vicky had done a bit of research and come up with words that were going to kick Zeus into action. That these words were going to be the end of all my problems. Although I felt sure that I’d already used some of them.

Here was my last email to Vicky in 2003 :

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Hi Vicky,

thanks for the keywords. I’ve been using these and managed to get up to
67 words. Two things bother me. First, I really feel that I am picking
words which are not particularly ‘on topic’ and are way too wide scoping
for my site. I feel I’m having to do this because otherwise I am never
going to get anywhere near the 2/3rds to genius level. I am concerned
that the further I go through this the more the words are drifting off
topic. Every time I click on the button to get it to bring up new words
I see the message saying that I should only be choosing words that could
only be found on the sites that I am looking for. More and more I feel
I am drifting away from this.

Secondly, even though I have only got up to 67 words Zeus has now
brought up a message saying training is finished and has not returned
any more words. I’m very concerned that if I click on the EZ Keyword
Training button it is going to lose the lot, and another day of my time.

I have attached a screen print for you to see for yourself.

Your advice would be appreciated.

Thanks

Chris
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PS. I hope I’m not ruining your New Year with all my problems.

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So that was how I ended 2003, still slaving away trying to get Zeus to work properly. I’d been told to keep my keywords very tightly focused, and that was exactly what I was trying to do. The results were rubbish. Christmas ruined, and now New Year. All thanks to Glenn Canady’s Gorilla Website Marketing Course and ABDevelopment.

I’d just finished my first session with Vicky. It was the 18th December 2003 and I had a LOT of work to get through. Luckily I had 2 weeks off for Christmas and I was determined to get through as much as possible, as quickly as possible, so that maybe I could have Christmas Eve and Christmas day off.

I’d been told to get 100 keywords associated with my main keyword or phrase. I’d used Wordtracker and the Overture inventory tool to find my keywords and I was happy with the words that I needed to focus on to bring in the most traffic. One niggling worry that I had though, and it was something that I had mentioned to Scott, was the fact that because I had not been provided with a dropshipper for the product of my choice (they promised me that they would find me one) I had been forced to come up with an alternative product. The problem as I saw it was that I could only really deliver this to the UK market.

I was concerned that to get my $8000 back, AND make the sort of money that I was told Glenn Canady’s Gorilla Website Marketing Course was likely to make me, the UK market on it’s own might not be big enough. Here I was looking for keywords in a global arena when my target market was just a small corner of it.

I think it was Churchill who, when talking about the British and Americans, described them as being 1 nation divided by a common language (or something like that !). When doing my keyword research I certainly found this to be true. A US phrase would have lots of traffic, whereas the British spelling of the phrase would have nothing like as much. Which do I go for ? I was told to go for the ones with the most traffic. Scott said he had sites that were focused just on 1 state in the US and he was successful with them, so he didn’t see my Global vs UK market situation a problem. I figured it had to be, as my market was a fraction of the size. BTW - I am in no way blaming Scott for any bad advice. His job was to go through the web site constuction, not the marketing.

I was picking up keywords from systems (Wordtracker / Overture) which were displaying figures for global usage. There seemed to be no way of identifying or isolating what the market just for the UK was searching on, or what the volume of those searches was.

I’ve contacted Wordtracker to see if I was missing a trick with this global vs UK issue. They tell me it is something they are aware of and it may be addressed. It does seem to me that anyone just marketing to the UK really is either working in the dark or working with potentially irrelevant figures when it comes to keyword analysis. If anyone knows of a way of doing keyword analysis, using something like Wordtracker KEI, JUST on UK searches then please contact me as I would love to hear about it.

What still gets me today is that NOBODY saw the global vs UK thing as an issue. It was never taken into consideration, and NONE of the marketing was ever adapted to take it into account. I have learnt a lot of things from the mistakes that I believe were made by ABDevelopment and Glenn Canady’s Website Marketing Course. There is information that they I feel they SHOULD have given me before I even had my first session that they failed to give me. Basic information that would possibly have made a bit of a difference. The fact that they didn’t even see or mention these things really raises some big questions in my mind about the competence and suitability of the people running these courses.

Here was Vicky’s advice to me for training Zeus and finding potential link partners :

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Chris,

Assignment recap: Make sure all settings in tools, and options are completed in Zeus. Train your Zeus as much as possible, to increase the smartness rating as much as you can. Click on the EZ train tab to do this option. The more you teach it, the more it will find potential link partners related to your theme. Manually enter in keywords using “manual keyword teacher,” and assign to “very unique” category.

After you have trained your Zeus you are ready to find themesites. Click on the “find” icon on the left. Make sure you have no other programs running, and a suggestion would be to run your Zeus at night. Click on the lightning bolt button that says “find web sites.”

Run your Zeus until it finds about 50 themesites, and STOP by clicking the same button you did to start it. In our next session I will discuss how to approve the themesites, and categorize them correctly. Have you category names ready by then.

Tip* You can train your Zeus with the keywords of your potential link partners. Select a keyword that can be related to your theme. Type this keyword into Google toolbar. Screen through the TOP 10 and visit each site. Click on View, Source when you are on their homepage, and write down their meta keywords. Program these in “manual keyword teacher tab”, and assign to very unique.

To add potential link partners click on the train icon, “websites to visit tab.”

This will help Zeus find more link partner sites than competition.

Let me know if you have questions, and I will talk to you on Monday 12/29/03 @ 2:00PM my time, 9:00PM.

Vicky @ AB Development

GorillaWebMarketing
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First thing next morning I set about following Vicky’s advice. One thing that I noticed straight away was that the Pro version of Zeus WAS considerably more stable than the free version. I experienced the odd problem, but nothing like the amount of problems I’d had previously had with the free version.

My biggest recollection of this period is getting up early every day and working solidly hour after hour, slogging away at Zeus, just trying to get the damned thing trained. I’d start about 6.30 - 7am and go straight through to about midnight (obviously taking toilet breaks etc !). I was becoming more and more frustrated.

I had been told to keep the whole thing tightly themed, but just getting any words what were vaguely related seemed to be proving extremely difficult. I had been told to keep training it until the ’smartness rating’ was as far across as I could get it. The problem was that the ’smartness rating’ didn’t seem to be so smart.

I could go on at great lengths about the fruitless hours that I spent just trying to get this thing trained. But I won’t. Instead, here is the email that I sent to Vicky on Christmas Day. It was sent at 6pm. I’d spent almost the whole day slaving away at the PC just trying to get Zeus to perform in the way it was supposed to.

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Hi Vicky,

I don’t know when you are working over Christmas, but hopefully this
will get to you before our session on Monday.

I am having real problems with getting Zeus to return decent, useable
keyword phrases using the EZ Keyword trainer. I have been at it for
several hours over a 2-3 day period and getting nowhere.

It loses the keyword smartness rating on the EZ keyword trainer page
when the program is closed and restarted. So, trying to get to 2/3rds
of the way to genius is going to be virtually impossible as it sometimes
loses any progress from the last time I was using it. This, combined
with the seemingly spurious and irrelevant words it returns are making
things extremely difficult.

Let me give you some example to illustrate what I mean. I have typed in
‘black cohosh’. Zeus returns ‘photography’, ‘fly fishing’, ‘web design’,
‘games’,'arts and crafts’ etc., but nothing related to the herb black
cohosh. If I type in ‘ovaries’ I get stuff about lung cancer, prostate
cancer, body building, and colitis. ‘Estrogen’ returns organic
gardening, alzheimers, dental health etc. I could go on, but I think
you get my point. It just seems to be unrelated, irrelevant nonsense
that Zeus is giving me. I don’t know where it is pulling this stuff
from. If it is from the ZeusCollective then I have already seen that it
seems to be polluted with people linking to anything, whether it’s related
to their topic or not.

My question is, how do I get around this ? How important is the
‘keyword smartness rating’ ? Can I achieve the same thing by just
manually entering the keywords ?

What is the link between the figures that the ‘ keyword smartness rating’
displays and the numbers shown for keywords at the bottom of the screen ?
For example, the keyword smartness rating is currently saying ‘6 single
keywords, 36 phrases’ but the figures at the bottom of the screen say 7
unique, 85 very unique, and 92 keywords so far.

I’m certainly putting in the hours with this software, but it’s driving
me round the bend ! Obviously getting this working is
critical to my success, so I’d be grateful of any help you can offer.

thanks

Chris
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So that was how I spent my Christmas 2003. $8000 down and a miserable Christmas. Thanks for nothing Glenn Canady and ABDevelopment !