The Glenn Canady Gorilla Website Marketing Course Review

I’ve covered what was in the Gorilla Website Marketing Course package that was sent to me by ABDevelopment. However, I was still waiting to get started with my mentoring sessions. I’d been told prior to sign up not to worry about putting the $8000 on my credit card. I was told it was sound business sense and that I was doing what most businesses do. I was simply setting up a business using ‘other peoples money’. Besides, I was assured ‘I would be making money before the first credit card bill hit me’. The whole thing was supposed to be self financing, with the $8000 paid off within 6 months. This is what they led me to believe.

You know, when I look back on the claims that were made, and what they led me to believe would happen, and when it would happen, I realise that I was being told had to be impossible to achieve. I guess that at the time I had put my complete faith in them, but it makes me extremely angry to think back on it.

They must have known damned fine that there was no way I could be getting money back by the time the first credit card bill hit. It had already taken a few weeks and I hadn’t even started my first mentoring session. The mentoring was scheduled to take 8 weeks. So work it out. If 4 weeks have elapsed and I still haven’t even started the 8 week long sessions then realistically, how the hell was I going to be making money by the time my first credit card hit me !

I don’t know about you, but all the credit cards I have will have any purchases on them within 30 days. Lets be VERY generous to ABDevelopment and Glenn Canady and pretend that the timing was absolutely perfect and that I didn’t get the $8000 on the first credit card bill, but I got it on the second. That still only allows 60 days to go from sign up, to having a web site built, marketed, and pulling in money. But it was to be about 4 weeks before I started with a mentor and I then had another 8 weeks to go with the mentoring sessions. So how the hell could I be taking money from my site by the time the first credit card bill arrived ?!

The site wouldn’t even have been built by then !!! And of course it wasn’t built by the time the first bill hit me ! And by the time 6 months were up ? I hadn’t made a single sale from the site. And don’t forget Glenn Canady’s Website Marketing Course was supposed to have got my site pulling in $8000 by this time to cover the money I had paid out.

My experience of Glenn Canady’s Gorilla Website Marketing Course and ABDevelopment has been that they seem to be great at making big claims about what they can do. Closer scrutiny and personal experience have shown these to be wild claims, coupled with unrealistic timescales, that from my experience they simply cannot deliver on.

The last email that I’d had from ABDevelopment was from Vicky (Terence Davis having disappeared of the face of the Earth). Vicky was suggesting a 4pm GMT call to get me started with the web construction etc.. Here is my reply to Vicky :

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Hi Vicky,

4PM is ok with me, but what about my questions regarding my preferred choice of product (as a result of the brainstorming session) and the fact that nothing PDA related appears on the drop ship list that I was provided with ?

My understanding of the first session is that the product must be sorted out and also an idea of ‘rival’ sites, which I haven’t thoroughly researched as I was waiting for a reply on the product choice. I don’t want to waste our first session. Please can you get back to me on this.

Thanks

Chris
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In other words, they STILL hadn’t resolved the issue of finding a dropshipper for me. I had chosen my product, and here were the people that claimed they would be able to find me a dropshipper for anything I wanted, and they still hadn’t delivered on this.

Here is ABDevelopment’s response :

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Chris,

As you know the dro ship list does not have what you are looking for, PDA’s. The product is the foundation we will work from. I will be able to send you a list of wholesalers for PDA product, but not my the morning (my time) when we talk.

I recommend as you suggested in your previous email to reschedule for early next week, when are more prepared.

Tuesday @ 5:00PM your time, is my next opening.

Let me know,

Vicky @ AB DevelopmentGorillaWebMarketing

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OK, so have you spotted the problem here ? I was promised dropshippers, and what am I being offered ? Wholesalers ! Bear in mind that ABDevelopment KNOW that I am in the UK. So what the hell is the point of offering wholesalers in the US ? Absolutely useless !

Being a polite kind of guy, and not wanting to rock the boat too much at this early stage I fired off a polite reply to Vicky :

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Hi Vicky,

Thats good news that you will be able to provide a list of wholesalers for PDA products. Are these also dropshippers ?

I mentioned about my having started a temporary job which involves shiftwork. Friday (today) was my day off which is why 4pm was good for metoday (obviously no good without the product though). I am on afternoons for the next 2 weeks, which means 2pm - 10pm my time. So,realistically the earliest time I could take a call on Tuesday would be about 10.30pm my time. Is that ok with you ?

Chris
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I got the list from Vicky and checked it over. I’ m sort of tempted NOT to paste it here, but on balance, and for the sake of completeness I am going to do it. Lets face it, it was sent to me on the basis that it was a great list of sources for PDA dropshippers, and as such I found it completely useless. There are obviously PDA related items that can be sourced from this list, but there were NO PDA dropshippers. I wanted to sell the latest PDA’s, not some tacky old accessories for the PDA’s of yesteryear.

In fact, rather than just paste the list that I was sent I’m going to paste my reply to that list. It specifies the so-called ‘dropshippers’ and why I had an issue with them. Read it for yourself.

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Dropship companies emailed to me.

1. http://www.texas-sales-tax.com/wholesale.html

The only company they list is Tiger Direct

http://www.tigerdirect.com/ They run an affiliate program and offer 4% commission !.

2. http://www.pcs-ltd.com/

They just do Krussel cases and a limited range of them.

3. http://www.wholesaleramp.com/WholesaleRAMP/LotDetail.cfm?Lot_ID=13964

They have one ‘PDA’. It’s not a proper PDA. Nobody has ever heard of it. It looks like an overgrown calculator. Rubbish.

4. http://www.wholesale-pda-accessories.com/

Sell accessories (screen protectors, cables, stylus mainly). they will accept resellers, but NO mention of drop shipping, only bulk selling. Have emailed the following via their online form :

Do you offer drop shipping on your products. I’m in the UK and want to sell to US customers, but I don’t want the hassle of buying, getting goods sent to me in the UK, only to have to post them all the way back to the US.

thanks

Chris O’Connor

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UPDATE 17/11/2003 12:40 - message from them on wholesale411.com message board saying they sell in bulk.

5. http://www.shopping.com/xKW-PDA/kworg-PDA_WHOLESALE/linkin_id-2081916/DMT-4/GS.html

This is a shopping comparison site and seems to have nothing to do with wholesalers or drop shippers.

6. http://www.wholesale411.com/cgi-bin/search/search.cgi?Terms=pda

Most are not wholesalers (eg. Tucows) and no mention of any drop shippers.

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Quite frankly, at this stage of the process I was starting to get a bit concerned. ABDevelopment seemed to be completely clueless when it came to finding me a dropshipper, and obviously not the slightest bit bothered about the amount of time that was passing since I had signed up, and certainly not in the least bit concerned about meeting any targets that had been set regarding me getting my money back.

Clearly, something had to be done. I had given ABDevelopment every opportunity to provide me with the dropshipper that they promised they would find me, yet time and time again they failed. How much longer could I go on waiting ? They just weren’t delivering. I NEEDED to start getting my money back, so I made a suggestion in my covering email to them :

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Hi Vicky,

I’ve checked out the list of drop shippers that you provided me with., Unfortunately, none of them are any good, for a number of reasons. Ihave made notes on each one and attached them to this email in a Worddocument.

I was determined to try and find a drop shipper for up to date PDA’s soI paid $69 for 6 months access to The Drop Ship Source Directory at http://www.mydssd.com/ This is an excellent resource, but only had one company listed for PDA’s(http://www.dandh.com/). Their application form does not have any wayfor someone outside the US to sign up. I have sent them an email asking if it is possible and am waiting to hear back.

In the meantime I am keen to get started and feel that the product choice is becoming something of a problem. Before I signed up with youI mentioned that my wife was selling Natures Sunshine products and thatI was setting up a web site for her. It was suggested that I shouldlook at other products. I still think that these are ideal products tobe selling, and particularly so after reading the Gorilla Web SiteMarketing book.

Basically, the Natures Sunshine products are natural, herbal, and alternative health supplements. From research I have done on WordtrackerI have found that the word ‘health’ and a lot of health related phrase sare among the most searched on. People are searching for answers to problems. These products give answers to those problems. They are products that will be drop shipped for me, and, they are products that have tons of non-competing information based websites that I could belinking to. The only restrictions that would be imposed on me is thatmy sales would have to be in the UK, Eire, and countries that accept the Euro (ie. most of Europe).

I have already created a site for my wife(http://your-natural-remedies.com/) but obviously if I am working withyou guys I am happy to start with a new domain name and start from scratch on a different site. There are also lots of products that couldbe sold as niche (eg. to help with the menopause).

Please let me know what you think. PDA’s are my main interest, but Iwant to get started quickly and it is proving difficult to find a dropshipper I can use. The Natures Sunshine stuff is something I have already spent a lot of time and effort on and done a good bit ofresearch on it.

thanks

Chris O’Connor
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BTW - the UK site for Natures Sunshine (a US company) is http://naturessunshine.co.uk/

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OK, so what do I get back in response ? Here it is :

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Chris,

Unfortunately that time does not work. My schedule is full until after the Thanksgiving holiday we have next week.

I suggest that you email jason@abdevelopment.com for assistance with scheduling for another mentor. Typically I only focus on the marketing of your website, along with Zeus integration.

Perhaps they could get you in sooner, and my schedule should be more open around the same time your website will be up and ready.

Reply to confirm.

Vicky @ AB Development
GorillaWebMarketing

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So now Vicky only does marketing and Zeus integration. Do you remember Vicky’s earlier comments from a previous post :

My name is Vicky, and Glenn assigned me you file to work with you one on one through website construction, and intense marketing.

So how about that then ! Absolutely brilliant. I pay $8000 to do Glenn Canady’s Gorilla Website Marketing Course and they can’t find me a dropshipper, they can’t meet the simplest of deadlines, and now they can’t even do the mentoring they promised they would do ! Time is slipping on and already it was looking almost impossible that they would get me to a point where I would be making money before the first credit card bill hit. After all, could you create a web site from scratch, get it to page 1 on the search engines, and get it pulling in money in less than maybe 7 days ? ABDevelopment certainly couldn’t, as I was about to find out.

Yesterday, I had to break off covering the contents of Glenn Canady’s Gorilla Website Marketing Course package that had been sent to me by ABDevelopment. I’m going to pick up on that here.

So far I’ve covered the bound copy of Glenn Canady’s Gorilla Website Marketing Ebook (something like a $39 value, and I already owned it), the next to useless ‘Free Traffic in just 24 hours’ report (all 3 pages of it) that encouraged the use of webrings and Trafficswarm.

Also included in my binder was a ‘Getting Started’ section written by Advanced Business Development (ABDevelopment). It starts with an encouraging few sentences ‘Congratulations on your new internet business, and welcome to the fast growing world of internet entrepreneurs. Our goal is to help you, as an entrepreneur, reach your financial goals, by teaching you the fundementals necessary to start and maintain your own business. We are both striving for success, and if you succeed, we have succeeded.’

That all sounds so good doesn’t it ? So promising. Unfortunately, it all ends several months later with me having followed every one of the things they asked me to do, having worked myself into the ground, having given up 2 jobs to concentrate on this, wasted $8000, incurred huge credit card debts, and ABDevelopment and Glenn Canady not even wanting to listen to me. ABDevelopment fail to reply to any emails I send (and pretend that they can’t contact me) while Glenn Canady just shrugs his shoulders and says it’s nothing to do with him !

So, ABDevelopment, if that is your way of measuring success then on the basis of your performance you can only be judged to be a complete failure.

But of course they try and cover their backsides with the following statement further down the same page, “Also, the information is proprietary and is non-recoverable, and given the nature of your internet business there are no guarantees associated with potential earnings, implied or otherwise. We want to make sure that you understand that as with all businesses and investments the income from this program is entirely based on your own personal commitment”.

Funny how they only mention all this AFTER they have got my $8000. And isn’t it funny how before I signed up the earnings potential was going to be almost whatever I wanted it to be.

Another point is that if ‘the income from this program is entirely based on your own personal commitment’, then how come I’m not a millionaire ? I was supposed to put in 15 hours a week. Sometimes I was putting that in EVERY day. Day in, day out.

As well as the waffle in the ‘Getting Started’ section there was a section on internet terminology. I’ve worked for 25 years in IT and used the internet for about 10 years, so that was a waste of paper. Some info about what the mentor will and won’t do, and what I’m supposed to do and not do. Pretty basic, but I guess necessary stuff. There was also some business related information about how to form a company, what to do regarding taxes etc. This information is 100% US related and has absolutely NO relevance to me whatsoever. I live in the UK. I’ve just spent $8000 and ABDevelopment and Glenn Canady send me me information about tax in the USA. For $8000 they can’t even be bothered either to take it out, or find something that was relevant to the UK.

Then there is the section that lists what I’m getting for my $8000. Here it is :

• 4 Weeks of basic mentoring
• 4 Weeks of Advanced Mentoring w/Glenn’s Personal Experts
• Gorilla Website Marketing
• Zeus Software
• Marketing Templates
• Web Ring w/directory
• 2 Million Email Blast Campaign
• Custom Built Website w/Drop Ship Company

Total Enrollment = $8000

Out of that lot I have had the 8 weeks of mentoring. let me make it clear, you don’t get 8 weeks of mentoring, you get 8 hours of mentoring, at best. Up to 1 hour per week. I got a copy of Gorilla Website Marketing, a $39 product that I already owned (they knew that, it’s why they contacted me !), and I got the Zeus software (approx. $195).

I have no idea what they mean by ‘marketing templates’. When you purchase Zeus at a hugely discounted price, which I’ve done, and I’m sure they must have done, you can get the Zeus people to create you a directory template for free. I don’t know if this is what ABDevelopment mean by ‘marketing templates’. I wouldn’t describe a link directory as ‘marketing templates’, so I have no idea if this is something that they failed to deliver or not. The ‘web ring w/directory’ I never got, and all attempts to quiz them about this have been ignored by ABDevelopment.

The ‘2 million email blast’ I have never had. Prior to sign up I recall being told that the difference between the basic $5000 package and the top of the range package was the email blast that it came with. If there was $3000 difference and 2 million emails difference then it doesn’t take a mathematician to work out that the email blast is estimated to be worth $3000. This is something ABDevelopment now deny. I never got the email blast and I have a LOT to say about this in a future post.

And then we have the ‘Custom Built Website w/Drop Ship Company’. OK, to me that sounds like they are actually giving me something. Let me make it clear, I got nothing. I built the website myself and despite asking several times ABDevelopment did NOT find me a drop ship company for the products I wanted to sell. This I believe is one of the biggest reasons reasons for the failure of all this. Yet despite promising they could get a drop shipper for anything I wanted they were unable to find a dropshipper for fairly ordinary products that I came up with. And they couldn’t care less.

The concept of drop shipping is a very US based thing. It is almost unheard of in the UK, so I was totally reliant on ABDevelopment to find me a drop ship company, as they had promised me they would, and as they were contractually obliged to do. They failed to do it.

I also got in my package an audio cd of Glenn Canady waffling on about they same stuff that was in his book (from what I can remember). It added nothing of value. So there we have it. That was what was in the Glenn Canady Gorilla Website Marketing package that I was sent.

Tomorrow I’ll pick up on the dropshipper issue again.

In one of the emails I pasted into my last post I mentioned that Glenn Canady’s Gorilla Website Marketing Course package had arrived from ABDevelopment by post. I was a box big enough to hold an A4 ring binder (because thats exactly what it contained - OK, US Letter size if you want to be picky). In the binder was Glenn Canady’s Gorilla Website Marketing book. It was the same book that I had already paid something like $39 to download only a few months prior to this. Now I was paying $8000 and getting the same thing ! I could have printed the thing off myself for next to nothing !

Despite that I was quite excited to get the package and really wanted to see what was in it that I could really get my teeth into and get started on my path to success. In particular I seized on the ‘Free Traffic in just 24 hours’ report that was included. This comes to a total of just over 3 sides of print. No I’m not joking, that is it. Your probably thinking that Glenn Canady has probably distilled his immense knowledge of driving traffic to websites and given me some pure highly concentrated, focused information. Well, maybe he did. Maybe this was the best that Glenn Canady had. Maybe he was sharing with me his best traffic generating ideas. But WEBRINGS !!!! Come on, I don’t know about you, but these were not a bad idea about 7 or 8 years ago, but now ! You have got to be joking ! I mentioned that Glenn Canady’s goldmine of quick traffic generation secrets came to just over 3 pages. Well, webrings took up just over 2 of them.

So, what was the other big secret ? Trafficswarm. That is what it was. Glenn Canady suggests signing up for Trafficswarm.

Some years ago, when the whole ’start page’ thing took off I signed up with Trafficswarm, amongst others. I did not have any success with any of them and gave all of them up as a bad job. So imagine my feelings when I’ve paid $8000, open the package and find Glenn Canady claiming that the best way to traffic in ‘24 hours’ is webrings and Trafficswarm !

Now I don’t know if you know what Trafficswarm is. If you do then bear with me while I explain it for those that don’t. A few years ago there was a rash of ’start page’ programs. The idea was that you changed the start page on your browser to be a page that Trafficswarm, or what ever program you had signed up with, had given you. So, you open up your browser, you automatically go to the page that they assigned you, and you get x number of credits. The programs varied slightly in how they worked, but the basic idea was that those credits would then be translated into exposures for your site on the network. So, you open your browser, see some site you have no interest in, and for every 2 or 3 times you do that your site then gets shown to a stranger, who has no interest in your site. Brilliant.

For a period of time desperate site owners thought these were great and would create macros, bots, anything they could to create fake ‘clicks’ or ‘browser refreshes’ to try and notch up extra credits on the network. A lot of these ‘Start page’ exchanges fell by the wayside, buried by the cheats, fake clicks and exposures. A few survived. Trafficswarm was one of the ones that did, and it did so for good reason. It was one of the best and most astute. It quickly developed systems to catch out the cheaters, and it did so without being obtrusive. It also allowed for webmasters to get targetted traffic to their web sites by allowing them to categorise their sites. As a Trafficswarm member you then say which categories you are interested in seeing when you start up your browser. This means that people should only see adverts that they are interested in. It’s clever, it’s simple, and it works.

So you are probably thinking ‘what the hell am I moaning about ? Glenn Canady has obviously delivered the goods’. Well, no, he hasn’t, there is a slight problem.

Think about it. Who signs up for Trafficswarm ? Not Joe Public. Why would they ? The whole point about the Start Page exchanges is that you sign up to help you get exposure for your web site. The average buying member of the public doesn’t have a website and therefore absolutely no need to sign up to Trafficswarm or any other Start Page scheme. In fact, the ONLY people signing up are other webmasters who are signing up simply to promote their own web sites. They couldn’t care less about your web site. Trafficswarm at least deals with this problem by making sure that you have to wait several seconds before you can click on to the next site or just go to wherever you want to go to. Lets face it, in that time, if you are forced to wait to get the credit then you might as well read the adverts in front of you. Don’t forget they are in categories you said you were interested in. You know, I’ve actually found a few good bits of software and some interesting sites through Trafficswarm while waiting for the required number of seconds to elapse.

What I’m trying to get across here is that the Trafficswarm audience is made up mostly of fellow webmasters trying to get people to buy THEIR stuff from THEIR sites. Not members of the general buying public. So if you have a site selling everyday items (lawnmowers, kitchen utensils, etc.) then I would say forget it. However, if you have a web site selling ‘opportunities’ then Trafficswarm can be a really good thing, due to the Trafficswarm audience (webmasters offering opportunities that seem to be willing to look at other webmaster ‘opportunities’).

However, I’d paid $8000 for Glenn Canady’s Gorilla Website Marketing Course and the whole point about it was that Glenn Canady was the expert. He was the guy that was going to tell me how it SHOULD be done. My ways weren’t working, so what did I know ? Despite my grave reservations I decided that I was going to implement the webrings and Trafficswarm exactly as Glenn Canady suggested. And I did.

Now one thing I would like to say to Glenn Canady is, when you create an e-book (if you can call 3 pages a ‘book’) and you have hyperlinks in it which lead to your affiliate link then that probably works great. When it is printed out it doesn’t, and it just looks stupid. You see the printed sheets I had were straight from Glenn Canady’s ebook/report. Every mention of Trafficswarm was a link to Glenn’s affiliate link, so that you signed up under him and he got money from it if you signed up as a ‘pro’, and he got free traffic out of it also. So, hardly unbiased advice, and we can see who really stands to make the most out of Glenn’s ‘free traffic in 24 hours’ report. The one guy guaranteed to get free traffic in 24 hours is Glenn Canady !

Like I said, I implemented Glenn’s ‘advice’. I signed up for all the webrings I could find that were related to the site I was eventually to create, and I dug out my old Trafficswarm ID and re-activated it. I think I got maybe half a dozen hits from the webrings over a six month period. From the logs it looked like it was the spiders they use to see if you still have the webring code active on your site, and not actual visitors.

I still use Trafficswarm, but I only use it for one site, and not the one I developed with ABDevelopment and Glenn Canady’s Gorilla Website Marketing Course, that was a waste of time. I tried Trafficswarm with all sorts of sites and didn’t get any worthwhile traffic. It DOES do well with one site that I have, which is an affiliate site where I offer webmaster opportunities. I get a tiny bit of money out of this. Well I would do if they ever paid up what they are supposed to owe me (but thats another story).

If you have a web site that offers ‘opportunities’ then it is worth signing up with Trafficswarm. If you haven’t then I’d say don’t bother. If you fit into the ‘opportunity’ category here is my blatant affiliate link for you to click on ===> Trafficswarm, give it a try for free.

I’ve just realised that it is getting late and I haven’t covered a fraction of what I was planning to cover today, so I’m going to wind up here and resume tomorrow.