Grumpy Old Man

Fight the Good Fight?

Last year I stupidly signed up for one of those instant site-making tools. (I was at a conference and all my friends were buying it – you get the picture.) I agreed to pay several hundred dollars up-front and 99 dollars a month fee.  When I got home and started to use the program, it didn’t work properly. Anoyingly, it would work for a while and then sudenly break down. I’ve used a couple of similar programs in the past with no problems. This one seemed to be having difficulty because it was written in Flash and because the server was underpowered.

So I asked for my money back. But then a person I know well and trust moved into the company to sort out their problems. He wrote me a note asking me to ‘hang on in there’ so I did. But nothing changed on the technical level so I again asked for my money back. Not only didn’t I get it but they insisted upon charging me a further $99 before I could leave.

My friend has now left the company. I have no confidence that the company will ever have a decent product but they are still running a very effective marketing campaign. Do I start a campaign warning others against them or do I let sleeping dogs lie?

Automatic Social Bookmarkers

I’ve been tempted to stray on the dark side recently.

It’s hard work writing articles all the time though the benefits in terms of visitors to your site is excellent. That’s why any ‘automatic’ system which can give your rankings as big a push as article marketing seems so worthwhile. Pay 97 dollars a month, press a button and go play a round of golf sounds “a great strategy”.

But we all know it’s only a matter of weeks now before Google gets on top of all the people manipulating social bookmark sites. And when that happens, all those people doing that are going to lose their top spots in the search engines. And us article writers are going to replace them. Original content rules.

Bah Humbug

I’ve just spent the whole day trying to set up all the recent tools I’ve bought for my sites. I’m sure I’ve missed some. Memo to self – stop buying WSOs.