By the time it got to March 2004 I was completely exhausted. We were flat broke, and my wife was (understandably) frantic with worry. I’d been putting a huge amount of hours in every single day, trying to get ANY of the sort of ’success’ I had been led to believe I was going to have by following the instructions AB Development had given me on Glenn Canady’s Gorilla Website Marketing Course. I think I mentioned in a previous post how both Glenn Canady and Advanced Business Development conveniently change their definition of ’success’ to suit their needs. When they want you to sign up to something ’success’ is defined as the amount of money that you are likely to make. Glenn Canady’s gorilla-internet-marketing site is currently boasting “Do you want to learn how to make MILLIONS on the Internet ?”. That is an example of the sort of thing that they define success as BEFORE they get your money. When it starts going wrong the definition soon changes.
I have correspondence from both Glenn Canady and AB Development where they say that they don’t know what I am complaining about because they have achieved ’success’ for my site. ‘Success’, according to them, is now re-defined. Success, by their definition AFTER you’ve handed over the money, is defined as having page 1 rankings in the search engines. Frankly, any idiot can get page 1 rankings in the search engines for SOMETHING. That does not give them a successful business, and I’m sure there are a LOT of people out there with page 1 rankings that will agree with me.
Let me make it very clear, I already could get to page 1 or 2 on the search engines. I did NOT need to spend $8000 to do something I could already do. I paid to learn how to get the ’success’ that they led me to believe I was going to get (ie. financial), and more importantly, learn how to do it over and over again, as I was told I would be able to do.
By mid-March I had had enough. I’d given it my best shot. They wanted 15 hours commitment a week from me. I was putting in 15 hours A DAY, most days. I hadn’t sold a single thing and my site was ranked nowhere.
I decided to confront AB Development about the problems. My first problem was finding the person to email. A guy called Jason was the point of contact at AB Development for co-ordinating things. I tried to contact him but he had left. They seem to me to have a pretty high staff turnover at AB Development. That usually says something about a company, and from my experience it’s not usually good. I contacted Vicky, my mentor for the marketing sessions. She pointed me to Jason’s replacement, Doni Roebuck.
Here is the email I sent to Doni Roebuck :
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Hi Doni,
This email was originally intended for Jason, but I hear that he has
left the company and that you are now responsible for my account.
I signed up with ABDevelopment / Gorilla Web Site Marketing back in
November last year. I was initially sceptical about the whole thing,
particularly when I heard how much it was going to cost. However, I was
swayed after it was explained to me that this really was a tried and
tested formula for success, provided I followed it to the letter, and
put in at least the amount of time and effort that was being asked of me.
I parted with $8000 and was assured that I should start seeing money
coming in from my web site before the first credit card bill hit me.
Well, here I am several months later, $8000 poorer, and not so much as a
single penny has been earnt from my web site. I was asked at the time
of sign up what my goals were. These were to pay off my huge credit
card bills. All I have done is add another $8000 to the debt and put my
house and family at risk.
Let me make it clear that I have not only followed the instructions I
was given to the letter, but I have put in FAR more time and effort into
this than was ever asked or expected of me.
I fully understand and support your company’s position when it says it
cannot *guarantee* what returns someone will get from applying the
techniques that you teach, as you have no way of knowing whether they
will be applied in full, if at all, or how much time the individual is
actually dedicating to the process.
Let me assure you I have followed the advice I have been given *to the
letter*. I also gave up a temporary job I was doing before Christmas so
that I could concentrate on my site. Since January I have gone from
full-time to part-time in another job so that I can invest as much time
and effort in my web site. I have been getting up at 5am to spend 1 -
1.5 hours on my site in the morning before going to work and then a few
more hours after work. I spend virtually all weekend working on it.
This has been going on EVERY day ! I have not had a single day when I
haven’t put in a minimum of 3 hours work. So what has this brought me ?
My website has a Google Pagerank of 0/10. I get between 17 - 49 visits
a day (typically around 25-30). So who are these visitors ? Are they
potential buyers ? No, they are the other webmaster losers who are just
visiting my site to check out the reciprocal links between our sites !
My Alexa ranking is currently standing at 213,442, which would put me
probably in the top 1 - 2% of all websites. That sounds good until you
start looking at how Alexa ranks websites. According to the Alexa site
the ranking is determined by the number of Alexa toolbar users that
visit a site. Now who are the most likely people to be using the Alexa
toolbar ? Webmasters looking for link partners ! Doing exactly the
same thing that I was told to do. Use the Google toolbar and the Alexa
toolbar to help you find your link partners. My Alexa ranking is NOT
representative of the traffic volume I am getting. It is simply that
about 100% of the people visiting my site are other webmaster who are
using the toolbar !
My site has been spidered by the Googlebot and I have paid Positiontech
for inclusion into Alltheweb, Altavista, etc. I was so concerned about
my complete lack of presence in Google that I emailed them to find out
if I had been blacklisted. They told me that my site was in their index.
I show 1 backward link in Google, even though I know I have around 90
link partners.
By any standards this is a dismal failure. The traffic, the search
engine rankings, and the sales and success that would come with them have
all failed to materialise. The techniques have been applied to the
letter and I have put, and continue to put a huge amount of my time into
trying to get links and maintain my link directory on a daily basis.
I am an IT consultant and have years of experience of developing
websites. I am not some newbie who doesn’t know the first thing about
website development or seo techniques. For me, I felt I was missing a
piece of the jigsaw. Something which was preventing me from taking my
sites, which barely made money, and turning them into profitable
businesses that could bring in a living wage. Instead, I have been
plunged deeper into debt, put my house at risk, turned down work, and
seemingly wasted months of my life.
I was told, prior to parting with my money, that I would not be left
high and dry. If I didn’t earn my money back within 6 months then
someone would work with me until I did. Well, it’s now over 4 months
since I signed up and I’m raising the red flag now. It is clear that this
is NOT going to go from $0 to $8000 in 1-2 months, no matter how hard or
how long I work at it.
The few people who are aware of what I am doing keep telling me that I
have been ripped off. That this is a scam. That there is no way it is
going to work, and no way I am ever going make my money back, or make
any money on the internet (my wife included !). I’ve been patient,
persistent, and worked hard at this, but it has now got to the point
where I have nothing to respond with when people ask me “So when IS it
going to start bringing in some money ?”.
So, I’m turning to you for some answers :
How was my site ever going to be bringing in money by the time I got my
first credit card bill for the money I paid you guys (as I was told it
would) ? It was 4 weeks of site building with one mentor and 4 weeks of
marketing /Zeus training with another. I don’t know about things in the
US, but I get a credit card bill each month. I was paying for this WELL
before I was even half way through my mentoring sessions !
How was I realistically going to be benefitting from the techniques
taught to me, and making money after 3 months, using a brand new web
site, when the first link exchanges didn’t happen until the last
mentoring session (ie over 2 months into the process !) ?
Why is there such a MASSIVE discrepancy between what I was led to
believe would happen, the timescales it would happen in, and reality ?
I still want a working business, and I’m not the sort of person who
gives up on things What I want to know is what ABDevelopment is going
to do to help deliver on the claims that were made for these techniques, that
promised so much and delivered so little ?
I look forward to your reply.
Many thanks
Chris O’Connor
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Menopause Symptom Relief
http://menopause-symptom-relief.com
BTW - I am aware that I am still owed a 2 million email drop and a
conversation with Glenn. I am hoping to get my site listed on DMOZ
before I use the email drop as I want to use a DHTML pop-up to capture
email addresses for a newsletter and don’t want to implement this until
DMOZ have reviewed my site. I do not see the email drop as a solution
to my current problems though. How targetted is the traffic for this ?
My target audience is menopausal women in the UK. How much of the 2
million emails is this going to hit ?
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More tomorrow …
