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Scribe SEO – My Review of Brian Clark’s Scribe Service

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scribe-logo

You may of missed it – but a couple of week’s ago Brian Clark – of Third Tribe Marketing fame – launched his latest money-making venture- Scribe SEO. What Does Scribe Claim To Do: From their own site they make the following claims – enrolling in Scribe SEO will have the following benefits to you the would be SEO copywriter, blogger or affiliate marketer: hit the keywords you are after employ SEO best practice it the keywords you are after produce optimized traffic faster increase search and social traffic remove SEO guesswork retain maximum readability optimize faster balance keyword usage Sounds good right? And frankly I understand the appeal – I spent quite a long time considering myself  incompetent at SEO – I thought it was really, really hard and technical and even though I thought I was technical I didn’t GET SEO. So I see where there market is at. I thought writing SEO Titles was a Dark Art. I didn’t know what a keyword was – I may have been very likely to jump at this tool. What is Scribe SEO? At the time of writing Scribe SEO is using WordPress plugin technology. Later releases will extend the [...] Read more »

Third Tribe Marketing Launches Their Affiliate Program and Some Stats

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Wellington Queen's Wharf

Third Tribe Marketing has just launched their affiliate program! Wow that was a surprise! Yes I am being Sarcastic! In fact if I had been a smart arse I could have predicted this when they announced the price increase from $27 to $47 – because if you offer an affiliate program  that pays 33% of $47 – that equates to $31.50 to the Third Tribe founders – i.e. you put up the fee to pay for  the affiliates, you end up making the same or more anyways. Meanwhile the affiliates do all the the traffic generation for you – they send their own followers over, or they rank their own Third Tribe reviews in the search engines and send the resultant search traffic. Some one in the Third Tribe forums was surprised that they hadn’t launched with an affiliate program. That wasn’t an oversight – it was deliberate. Initially they wanted to milk their own audience. If they had had an affiliate program at the stage they would have been paying for buyers they already had access to. The   initial  “lower price”  allowed them to get the maximum sign up from the curious – who then have the incentive to [...] Read more »

Tribes – Why I Don’t Belong To Third or Any Other

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70's Fashion at Wellington 7s 2010

Sorry guys this is probably gonna be an odd rambling personal post.  My Third Tribe review is honest – I do indeed think the Third Tribe  Marketing service is over priced and won’t help most beginners make money online  and yes I knew I could rank for the relevant keywords. But it was a fundamental – emotional “yuck” response which I got first – well Cat confirmed that maybe t wasn’t just me … Cat left a comment on my followup Third Tribe Marketing review which made me realise perhaps I should admit the real reason I made the original review  post. Cat said in part: And that’s an example of what bothers me about this whole notion of being in a ‘tribe’ – there’s this impression of forced conformity – that you’re either on their side, in agreement with their whole philosophy, or not. And that is something that has bothered me my whole life. I don’t know where it comes from either . When I was about 13 I was at a holiday camp run by a somewhat Evangelical Christian group – at the end of the week there was a big wrap up meeting – and towards [...] Read more »

Third Tribe Marketing and Keyword Academy Reviewed – Can Membership Sites Help?

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tka

I recently posted a Third Tribe Review and I’ve made no secret that I am a fan and a member of The Keyword Academy – both are membership sites which cost less than $50/month and claim to help you make money online – one I thoroughly recommend – one I don’t why? First off lets be clear: do you want a work at home job or a business built on passive income? Personally I have no more desire to be at the beck and call of clients than I liked answering to a boss. In fact I could see it could conceivably worse. I am looking to make income online which keeps happening even while I am not there. Third Tribe Marketing Hmmm guys you might want to take a second look at your copy -  and fix up some of the missing elements such as Privacy Policy, contact details etc, etc Andy Beard has pointed them out here : Agressive Hype and Obnoxious Tactics. According to Chris Brogan they are about Internet marketing not making money online – that’s pretty confusing cause I thought the whole point of marketing was to make sales and sales are supposed to make [...] Read more »

Third Tribe Review – Inside Rowse’s Third Tribe Is it a Scam?

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You need accurate road maps in Internet Marketing - and the Northern Territory, Australia

Which Tribe do you belong to? Apparently – according to Darren Rowse, Brian Clark, Chris Brogan, Sonia Simone – you really should be in the Third Tribe. Up until now there has only been two tribes: the sleazy, scum-bag Internet Marketers who promises the earth, or usually $14,449  plus a Lamborghini, while you sleep, and then there are the nice social media folks – they hang around singing kumbaya making lots of friends and making no money. I couldn’t stand  a kumbaya video – so here’s a video of my aspirational Lamborghini – from my favourite car reviewer - Apparently there was no middle ground – which was bit of a surprise to me as I have been doing it for a couple of years and so have a whole bunch of other people I know online – but no apparently there has been a vacuum… and Darren Rowse has decided to fill it.  There is apparently a third way  – oops I mean a third tribe (apologies to Eastern Religions there) – Internet Marketing Strategies That Work (Without Being Obnoxious) – as they like to subtitle themselves. What Exactly is Darren Rowse’s Third Tribe – and How Will It [...] Read more »

Andy Black’s Index Checker Review – Do You Need to Check If Your Support Article is Indexing?

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Wellington Waterfront, near Te Papa

I have updated this post  – see the end! I bought Andy Black’s Index Checker before Christmas but only recently got around to actually installing it and using it. I liked the sales pitch – it claims to allow you to check any xml site map or RSS feed to see which url’s are indexed. This seemed to me quite useful to double check that my articles on Web 2.0 properties such as HubPages were indexed. The product is a $7 instant download which you then need to install on one of your own domains. The instructions are detailed and accurate and I certainly managed to install Andy Black’s Index Checker on my Hostgator account with no problems. The problems came when I tried checking the indexing of my articles on Hubpages and EzineArticles.com – check out my first ever screencast below to see why I won’t be recommending this product – even for $7. For a larger version of the video click here. UPDATE As you can see in the comments Andy is acutally a respnsive and responsible developer who gets major kudos for showing up and supporting his product!  In the video below I was using an outdated [...] Read more »

I joined the cloud – do me a favour and join too!

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(cc) Kenneth Yeung - www.thelettertwo.com

I joined the Cloud! You know cloud computing, personal PCs are so 2008 and now everyone lives in the cloud – well that’s what the Economist said a week or two back so it must be true.  Seriously though – I have just migrated all my important files onto an online backup system and I think you should too. I am seriously old and remember when hard drives broke – a lot! I remember when tape backups took hours and hours to restore your files – and then you discovered that the tape was corrupt …  Lets just say telling someone the file they have been working of for weeks is unrecoverable is not something you want to have to do too often in one lifetime. Now I do have a backup system- I have a portable hard drive which I back up to on a hmm semi-regular basis – and always before the laptops go travelling. But I was becoming more and more aware just how stuffed my business would be if I lost some crtical files. I have a client who raves about googledocs and I use googledocs from time-to-time – quite honestly if that is what the [...] Read more »

Need to Make Online Cash Now? Consider a Freelancing Business

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Yup you read that right- if you are desperate to make an income right now. You have been told your job ends in two weeks and you don’t know how you will make next month’s mortgage repayments – then making passive income online won’t help you – yet. I have been playing this website building game for two years – my income still fluctuates – I wrote that in July I had made $2000 online- I am yet to get past that approximate figure again – in fact my passive income was significantly down in October – but overall I was up because of a domain sale and some more freelance work. It swings-and-roundabouts – it doesn’t make me lose sleep at night. But it might – soon. My partner’s contract finishes at Christmas and we are moving back to New Zealand. My income suddenly becomes our only income – at least for a while – the pressure is definitely noticeable i.e. my partner now asks every month how I am doing LOL – see partners are interested when the money starts rolling in – or not! So what do you do if you really,really need the income and you [...] Read more »

WordPress Themes – Should I Pay for a WordPress Theme?

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I’m a fan of WordPress – this blog actually started off on blogger a very long time a go – but I go so frustrated with their technical limitations I moved Passive Income over to self-hosted WordPress and never looked back. WordPress is free and of course there are approximately a zillion free WordPress themes around but I have now spent money on three different options for paid wordpress themes – given that I don’t like spending money – you might well ask why? Two reasons really – support and re-saleability (is that a word ?). I’ll explain. I had this particular blog on a free theme but the down side with WordPress is that it gets updated regularly – way too regularly sometimes. Its settled down recently but at one stage they were realising updates every week or so. These updates are usually to fix security holes so you ignore them at you peril. The problem that arises of course is that the update sometimes breaks the theme, or maybe its the updated plugins you are using are broken – anyway you can spend many unhappy hours trying to fix the support. And with free themes you get the [...] Read more »

Brett McFall, The World Internet Summit, Is He Legit?

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I had to make this quick post because my mate Mike from Retire Young and Wealthy just published a potentially controversial article on InfoBarrel titled: Don’t Waste Your Money on the World Internet Summit. Now Mike didn’t know this before he wrote this piece but I spent a day listening to Brett McFall and when he did the free version of his “How To Make Money While You Sleep”  in Perth some months back. I had never heard of Brett McFall online but the full-page in the local tabloid that passes as the West Australian newspaper caught my eye in its sheer awfulness – you know the type – 6point type, releaved by the odd large bold – I WAS  BROKE TOO, NO SKILLS NOW I MAKE $100,000 WHILE I SLEEP. I signed up out of curioristy – with about a 50% desire to actually go to the event. As the day nearer I was impresed with their follow up emails and even on the day an automated call to my cellphone (taking into account the local timezone) reminding me of this once in a life time opportunity. Now as I said on my comments on Mike’s article – I [...] Read more »

The Keyword Academy Video Course – A Scam?

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The Keyword Academy is the best program I know that teaches how to build a sustainable online business - however if you want get rich quick look elsewhere. Read more »