The Glenn Canady Gorilla Website Marketing Course Review

After yesterdays brief detour I’m going to get back on track with documenting my experiences of Glenn Canady’s Gorilla Website Marketing Course, ABDevelopment, and how I spent $8000 with these people, wasted months of my life, and how their claims came true simply did not come true.

I’d mentioned that I’d raised my concerns about Zeus to Vicky. She seemed confident that the Pro version would work with none of the problems I’d encountered. I was desperately hoping that she was correct. Vicky had given me a small assignment prior to our first formal session. It was to get the Google and Alexa toolbar loaded, bookmark some web sites and to sign up with Trafficswarm. All of these I had done.

It was the 18th December 2003, nearly two months since I’d signed up, and I was only just beginning my marketing sessions. The claim that I would be seeing money come in before my first credit card bill hit me seemed laughable at this point and made me even more worried about the rest of the claims that had been made regarding earning my money back in the first 6 months.

Prior to my first session with Vicky she had sent me an email containing the download location of the Pro version of Zeus and a key to unlock it. I deleted the free version from my computer and installed the Pro version in preparation for our session.

Most of our first session was taken up with configuring Zeus. As I had mentioned previously, there are a lot of parameters in Zeus. Vicky talked me through each one of these step-by-step. Vicky was a very nice lady, but her style was more to tell me what I needed to do rather than discuss why it needed to be done. Scott on the other hand had been much better at explaining why, rather than just ask me to do things.

Vicky had asked me to do some keyword research prior to our session starting. These were the keywords that would be used to get Zeus started. Getting the keywords right was possibly the most important step in getting the best out of Zeus. It was also a critical part of getting the web site found on the search engines. This had to be done right.

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Hi Vicky,

Just wanted to confirm with you that the keyword / phrase that I will be concentrating on is ‘menopause symptom’.

I’m currently building up the list of 100-200 keywords using wordtracker. One question I have is should I be doing my keyword analysis in separate steps ? In other words, should I collect a general set of 100 words related to the phrase ‘menopause symptom’, and then another 100 related to ‘osteoporosis’, and another 100 related to ‘hot flashes’ ?

If you can let me know today then I can get them sorted out through Wordtracker.

thanks

Chris
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Vicky replied with :

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Chris,

Retrieve only 100 words total. osteoporosis, hot flashes, and menopause symptom are three of them. 97 more to go.

Sorry for the confusion.

Vicky @ AB Development
GorillaWebMarketing

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Our first session ended with Zeus having been configured and ready to be trained with keywords. I had hoped that I would have made a lot more progress during the first session and didn’t really feel like I was that much closer to earning any money out of all this.

I had finished work for Christmas and had two weeks off. I was determined that I was going to make this not just work, but be a major success. I was prepared to work solidly on it right over the Christmas period. My family would just have to take a back seat this year as it was far too important to make sure that this went well. We simply could not afford not to get that money back.

I mentioned that I was having all sorts of problems with Zeus (the free version). I forgot to mention that I emailed Vicky at ABDevelopment about this. She was going to be doing the upcoming marketing part of the Gorilla Website Marketing Course and she was supposed to be something of an expert in using Zeus. I figured she would probably be the best person to get to the bottom of the problems, as I was getting nowhere with the official Zeus helpdesk.

This is what I emailed to Vicky :

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Hi Vicky,

I have my final site building session with Scott Dimmick next Monday, or sooner. After that I believe you are still going to be doing the mentoring with me for the marketing of my site.

When I spoke to Scott last night I mentioned something that I wanted to flag early on as a likely problem. Obviously Zeus is going to be a basic part of the marketing strategy, so I downloaded the free copy and thought I would try it out with one of my other web sites so that I could get a feel for how it worked.

I have had nothing but problems with it since I downloaded it ! I have tried it on 3 seperate PC’s now and still cannot get it to work properly,consistently, or with stability. I’m not going to catalogue the list of problems here. I can point you to the Cyber Robotics helpdesk entry where I logged the problems and you can read the issues for yourself.

As this is going to be so key to the marketing efforts, I am raising this with you now as I am getting nowhere with Cyber Robotics support,and I assume Glenn Canady’s name must carry some weight with thesepeople.

The Cyber Robotics helpdesk is at :http://www.cyber-robotics.com/cgi-bin/pdesk.cgi

The userid to login is : xxxxxx
The password is : xxxxxx
The call id is 9136

I haven’t heard from them in 4 days (ok, there was the weekend) and since then I have discovered that if I crank up the number in the LoadFault Countdown in the Tools->Options->Advanced tab then I can get it work for longer before the problem hits. It still keeps failing though.

I need our marketing efforts to be a success and would be grateful if you are able to do something to get this resolved before it becomes a major issue.

Many thanks

– Chris O’Connor

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Note - I’ve editted out the sensitive bits - password etc.

Vicky didn’t seem perturbed by the problems at all and replied with this :

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Chris,

Don’t worry,the problems you are referring to is because you are using the free version.

How we solve this is you will receive the PRO version download along with a registration code that will secure your Zeus. The free trial period is like a demo, and will not work properly until you register it.

After Zeus is registered, it will work just fine. I will send you a registration code before our first session. Email me when you are ready to schedule, and please notify jason@abdevelopment.com when your sessions with Scott have concluded, so he is also aware of your change to me.

Look forward to working with you again.

Vicky @ AB Development
GorillaWebMarketing
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This didn’t ring true to me. From what I’d read on the Zeus forums there were a good number of people out there using the free version of Zeus as their main linking software. They also didn’t seem to be experiencing problems. And what about the fact that to go from the free version to the pro version you just had to buy a licence key and then enter it. In other words it was the same software.

I got back to Vicky with my concerns :

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Hi Vicky,

Are you sure about the free vs Pro version ? The free version becomes the pro version just by entering the registration code into it. So it is the same software, and I guess, with the same problems.

Chris
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Vicky was obviously quite confident in the Zeus software and replied with the following :

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Chris,

In our training sessions I will show you everything you need to do with Zeus. It probably didn’t work properly because it wasn’t properly trained.If you don’t have certain things right in the program, it won’t work. Ihave worked with hundred’s of different Zeus’, and I haven’t heard of any of them experiencing the problems you describe.

I will work with you every step with the program, so it will operate correctly on your website.

Talk to you soon,

Vicky @ AB Development
GorillaWebMarketing
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There wasn’t much more I could do. Getting the free version of Zeus to work had proven to be frustrating and ultimately fruitless. I had about another week to go before I started my marketing sessions with Vicky so I didn’t see any point in continuing to email her about Zeus. I did keep trying, but got nowhere. I’ve used all sorts of software over the years and never had the amount of problems that I encountered with this.

I got to the end of my site building sessions with Scott, and despite some tweaking on it that I was doing right up to the end, I felt my site was looking good.

As I had been asked to do, I emailed Vicky to tell her that my sessions with Scott were at an end, so that she could schedule in our marketing sessions.

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Vicky / Jason,
Just wanted to let you both know that I have just had my last session
with Scott and am ready to be scheduled in with Vicky.

My sessions with Scott were at 9.30pm GMT each Monday. I don’t know if
that slot is a possibility ? The only day that is not good for me is
Friday. Otherwise, I can do Mon-Thu 18.00 - 22.00.

Let me know what you want to do with the schedule and if there is
anything you want me to be doing or looking at in preparation for our
first session.

thanks

Chris
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I had signed up to Glenn Canady’s Gorilla Website Marketing Course back in the end of October / beginning of November 2003. I had been told that I would be getting money coming in by the time the first credit card bill came in. Well, the first credit card bill had come in and I was paying off my first installment on the $8000 plus interest. I still hadn’t even started my marketing sessions yet.

Understandably, my wife was starting to get very concerned. My big concern was that ABDevelopment seemed pretty laid back about the whole thing (well it wasn’t their money that was at risk !). Christmas was coming up and I really did not want my sessions slipping into the New Year before they started. I NEEDED to start earning some of that $8000 back.

Vicky replied to my email where I stated I could do Mon - Thu 18.00 - 22.00 by offering me a 4pm slot !?

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Chris,

Thanks for the update, and I look forward to working with you again. By the 1st session appointment the following assignments should be completed. If NOT we don’t want to waste a session, so let me know 24 hours ahead of time and we can reschedule. If you need to reschedule for any reason, a 24 hour notice is required!

-Download the GOOGLE Toolbar-

-Another tip is to look up your domain at altavista.com view your website’s reciprocal linking partners.

-Download the ALEXA Toolbar. Type in your domain and you can view your traffic rank. When you do Click the box to allow popups.

-Bookmark http://www.zeuscollective.com/ for future research of categories, andcompetitor’s link directories.

-Traffic Swarm sign up, and get free traffic in 24 hours, email me your ID #once assigned.

-Bookmark http://www.gorillawebsitemarketing.com/, click on resources, and scroll down to “Search Engine Tools” Overture Suggestion Tool.

-Bookmark http://www.wordtracker.com/

The next available appointment I have is this Thursday 12/18/03 @ 4:00PM your time.

Reply to confirm.

Vicky @ AB Development

GorillaWebMarketing
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So, nearly 2 months after starting this I am about to start my marketing sessions, which will take another 4 weeks. And how soon did they tell me it would be before I started getting money back from Glenn Canady’s Gorilla Website Marketing Course ? And more to the point, how the hell was I supposed to get my $8000 back within 6 months if it was going to be 3 months before I had even finished the training sessions ?

I was getting concerned. I’d already given up one temporary job to concentrate on this and now I was faced with another dillema. Luckily the 18th was the last work day before Christmas for the place I was working. They shut for 2 weeks over Christmas, so I figured it would probably be OK if I left a few hours early. I HAD to do whatever I could to get these marketing sessions going so I could start recouping my money. After all, I knew how to build web sites, I’d been doing it for years. What I needed to know was the latest and most effective ways of marketing the site. That was what was going to get my money back, and a lot more hopefully.

I emailed Vicky :

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Hi Vicky,

I normally don’t get back from work until after 6pm (GMT), so normally the earliest appointment would have to be after 6.30pm. But, I realise that it is probably going to get difficult fitting me in around Christmas and I don’t want our first appointment to end up drifting into the new year. So, I will finish work early this Thursday and I will be available for 4pm.

After Thursday can we make our subsequent appointments for after 6.30pm ? Is that OK with you ? Friday being the only difficult day for me.

I have done all of the assignments. I already had an account at Trafficswarm (id=153633). I’ve already got sites listed with them. Do I need to disable these ?

I have also had an account with Wordtracker for some time. My toolbars and bookmarks are ready to go !

look forward to speaking with you on Thursday.

Chris
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My marketing sessions were about to begin !

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