The Glenn Canady Gorilla Website Marketing Course Review

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 !

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

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.

–
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 !