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Rants

Bullying Online is NOT OK – Even for “Adults”

If you’re bored with the making an income online – you are bored with life in my opinion. Normally I stay out of the day to day online dramas – but hell – what the heck – so here’s my thought of the day.

Don’t Let the Bullies Win

Today a blogger (and I’ll get to that term later) – wrote to me and said he’d removed a post, that I’d commented on. The post was written celebrating that he had resigned from a job that was “sucking the life out of him” – it rang a very loud bell with me – so I commented. Then he deleted the post – because the company that he hadn’t named was threatening to withhold his final pay (and his name isn’t on the site either). Now he probably shouldn’t have posted until he had the final check cashed, but either way the company was bullshiting – and he fell for it – it happens a lot online.  Bullies win, because people think they need permission.  I hope he puts the post back up once he has his final pay banked.

I don’t like bullies, I’ve mentioned that before. Its one of my trigger points, bullying.  My bet is that anonymous blogger’s boss was a bully in primary school too.

But online bullying is hard to do. Because bullies work by playing on people’s fear. The victim wants everything to go away – unless they stop and think, and realise that the free speech is a what most of us think is the basis of a decent society.

And writing your opinion of what you think about a product or service, on your own blog, is the right of anyone really.

Here are some of my opinions:

  • MacDonald’s makes bad food;
  • there’s no point swimming in water colder than 24C;
  • rugby sucks and Rugby World Cup is a complete waste of my (taxpayer) money;
  • Ken Evoy Googlebomb are three words that go together.
You may chose to disagree – but I warn you now – any pro-rugby comments will be deleted forthwith!
Tropical Beaches - the only one's worth swimming on!

Own Your Own Website

There’s an awful lot of people out there who are looking for a work from home opportunity – it seems quite a lot of them can write passably well. So they believe that they can make money writing for revenue share sites such as Suite101, eHow, Squidoo, HubPages. Scam  or for real?

I used to promote HubPages on this site – as a way to make money -because I earned my first online money with them.  Now I don’t. Because they have made changes to their site and their terms and conditions, which I don’t like. And there is not a darn thing I can do about it.

And don’t just own your website (hosting and domain name) – make sure you own the technology behind it. For example if you use a proprietary site builder like – hmmm, let me think,  Site Build It!, and for any reason you decide to leave the program – you will have to move onto another technology (I’d recommend WordPress). This is of course entirely possible – if you are pretty technically able, which you probably aren’t as a newcomer. You will have to pay someone to do it right, and if they aren’t very careful you will lose quite a lot of your rankings. If your site is large, you might even find that paying $300/year for your site’s hosting with Ken Evoy, will be cheaper than moving to to your own hosting.

Commentators – Read This First

Let’s get this very clear. I am bored to tears with SBI!, sitebuildit, Site Build It and related keywords. I’m not writing this,2 1/2 years AFTER my first post on the topic, to re-kindle the fires.

Dr Ken Evoy did that. Read the first link to Ken Evoy Googlebomb. Let’s be clear – I really don’t care if Evoy has declared war on Google, let’s face it, Google probably doesn’t care either.

What I care about is that Ken still doesn’t get it. He doesn’t understand that the reason that my original post has dropped into obscurity, its nothing to do with the original post – its because of the appalling behavour of his hit squad that descended on my site. This is, and has never been, about the post – its about the comments.

I thought maybe he’d figured it out – after all he’s a smart guy. But apparently not.

He is rallying the troops again. The same goon squad is currently forming in the private SBI! Forums and he’s telling them to start attacking my social media profiles and to write pro Site Build It Reviews and link to them. The reviews I don’t care about.

Though there has always been plenty of positive SBI reviews out there – that was what started this whole saga – there were ONLY positive reviews.

Because of Ken’s – shut down the opposition policy.

Still I don’t give a shite – but it bothers me that third parties are scared for me – scared enough to contact me and warn me, genuinely.

Its still bullying guys – and it still doesn’t work.

Sending me pornographic suggestions doesn’t work – frankly I enjoy sex – and some of your suggestions are interesting …

Abusing how I look – why would I care? I have spent nothing on my appearance ever – I think I’ve had good value for money.

Praying that I or my family die of cancer – yeah sweet – confirms everything I’ve ever thought about the religious fringe – glad they are not on my side – don’t want to spend eternity with you either.

So fill free to comment, but I may delete you comment without warning – or I may copy it and send it to anyone I feel like. Might even tweet it …

Oh and yeah – maybe before you do anything your favourite guru tells you to do you might want to watch this:

Debate is fine – bullying is not – its not hard to tell the difference – discuss.

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Guest Posts Paid Tools

Site Build It Scam Review Redux!

Today’s post is a little different – because I didn’t write it – a reader did so this is my first ever guest post on Passive Income.

The Thinking Man - Rodin's Original
The Thinking Man - Rodin's Original

I don’t know Ray but he wrote to me asking to put this post up because although it was originally published on his SBI! site – it was about to be lost to cyberspace because he’d been unable to liberate it from the clutchs of the evil one (well he didn’t actually say that because if you continue reading you will realise he is much better at the English language than I am, but you get the general idea!).

The post deserves much better than that so enjoy –

My One Year With Site Build It!

by Ray Harvey

This post is not a phony review with a sales pitch at the end, and I am not writing this so that you’ll buy SBI! through an affiliate link.

In fact, I’ve never been an SBI! affiliate, nor would I ever be an SBI! affiliate, because I think SBI! is a very mediocre product. I now speak from one year of actual experience. Definitely, “for what you get,” as the SBI! folks like to express it, it’s not in my estimation worth the extravagant price tag, which is $300.00.

The $300.00 to renew is a complete joke.

I will tell you also, right here in the beginning, that making money was not my primary motive in building my SBI! website, though I was certainly open to that possibility. My site, the-thinking-man dot com, was written entirely by me, and it cost me a great deal of work. Counting the blog, it contained over 200 pages of real content, covering all the four major branches of philosophy (metaphysics, epistemology, ethics, and politics) as well as the two main sub-branches (economics and aesthetics), with numerous articles that elaborate upon each of these subjects.

After one year with SBI!, I can confirm that my initial impression was correct:

There is unquestionably a cultic aspect to the program.

SBI! is not, in my estimation, an outright cult. It’s cultic in that self-help, motivational-speaker, twelve-step sort of way — as opposed to, for example, the more in-your-face type of cults, like Heavens Gate.

And yet as Eric Hoffer taught us in his excellent book True Believer, cults are never the same in terms of specifics but are almost always united in principle. There is, in my opinion, something decidedly Amway-like about SBI!

My second biggest regret is that I missed the deadline for a full refund. I say that in all seriousness, because as soon as I was able to begin building this website in earnest, it was approximately six weeks after I’d made the purchase; I realized immediately then (reading the so-called Action Guide, the SBI! Forums, and especially a long and unpersuasive article by Ken Evoy himself which attempts to pigeonhole anyone who doesn’t like SBI!) that SBI! was a $300.00 mistake. That conviction has only deepened as the months have passed.

Until four days ago, however, I had not planned to write anything about any of this and had even resolved to forget all about it. And then I saw Ken Evoy’s comment on a blog I’d never read before, a blog someone forwarded me the link to because, as coincidence would have it, I’d asked this fellow if he could help me transfer all my work to a new location, since SBI! offers no Import/Export function (among a litany of other things, like a decent blog or the capacity to attach a forum). I was simultaneously stupefied and sickened by Ken Evoy’s threat to sue for “defamation and slander” — not (Evoy hastens) that he’s a litigious person by nature. Yes, of course. He was just so incensed by this obscure blogger (I, at any rate, had never heard of her) daring to speak poorly of him that he almost got litigious, even though he’s not that way by nature. It’s all perfectly logical. That lady, after all, wields a great deal of influence and holds so much sway over so many people that Evoy is justified to sue her for defamation and slander — not, of course, that he’s litigious enough to actually do it. Just saying …

I wonder: Does Evoy realize the magnitude of his miscalculation? Does he know what a fool of himself he’s made? I honestly do not know.

Does he know how appalled I and so many others were to see his comments and the subsequent comments of his sycophants? Does he know how thoroughly he beclowned himself, despite the fact that the majority of points this blogger made against him were incontrovertibly incorrect? I do not know.

The fact that Evoy even bothered to reply to this post at all — at the SBI! forums or her blog — tells us everything we need to know. It tells the entire story and then some. The ensuing comments — beginning with Evoy’s — changed everything.

To the reader who does not know SBI! but is curious about it, there are a number of specific examples I could give from my personal experience after one year with SBI! to illustrate precisely why, in my opinion, it is cultic in the ultimate purport (and I’m not just referring here to those well-documented cult signs such as, for instance, exclusive jargon and neologisms, like as “Action Guide,” “BAM,” “Brainstormit,” and so on); and yet only one example is I think required. It happens to be the one that first tipped me off, about 40 days after I’d purchased SBI!, and candidly my heart sank when I saw it.

It turns out that Ken Evoy is an explicit admirer of a New-Age pseudo-self-development quack, a half-militant vegan and fanatical raw-foodist named Steve Pavlina. Steve Pavlina, incidentally, has also toyed with some very extreme quackery like breatharianism and inedia.

Pavlina, like many cult leaders, has in addition to everything else found a number of tortuous ways to rationalize his embarrassingly public decision to cheat on his wife.

All this, as you know, is standard procedure for cults of all flavors and varieties, and there is absolutely nothing original here. Indeed, it affronts us with its banality.

The jaw-dropping part is that anyone, let alone a medical doctor like the owner of SBI!, Mr. Ken Evoy, could be duped by such an obvious fraud. And yet duped he was — and is, apparently, at least to judge from his comments on the previously mentioned blog, which set Evoy off half-cocked in the first place and precipitated his very misbegotten comment.

I was familiar with Steve Pavlina long before I’d purchased SBI!, and I greatly deplore the fact that I didn’t realize beforehand that Steve Pavlina and Ken Evoy were as cozy as lice. Had I known, it would have saved me a year of folly.

To give you a few other relevant facts about Steve Pavlina, whom Ken Evoy admires so much, he has also admitted on his blog that he has no good understanding of economics or politics, both of which, however, are significant components to the science of philosophy — a fact I mention only because self-development (like everything else) is deeply rooted in philosophy.

Pavlina’s metaphysics are a sloppy admixture of New-Age neo-mysticism and astrology. He admits openly that his metaphysics cannot be proven or verified by any ultimate test, and he is correct: it’s all arbitrary assertions without hard data. That fact alone should make you run in the other direction.

Accordingly, his epistemology places “intuition” above reason, and he often speaks of such things as “psychic pings” and other like nonsense, all of it bunked a billion times.

Pavlina is also fond of such fashionable quackery as numerology, which is why he displays 11:11 at the bottom of his web pages.

Steve Pavlina tells his readers how to find their purpose in life thus:

1. Take out a blank sheet of paper or open up a word processor where you can type (I prefer the latter because it’s faster).

2. Write at the top, “What is my true purpose in life?”

3. Write an answer (any answer) that pops into your head. It doesn’t have to be a complete sentence. A short phrase is fine.

4. Repeat step 3 until you write the answer that makes you cry. This is your purpose.

This is the sort of pablum that appeals to charlatans and sheep, but it is hardly sound doctrine. The writer of that pablum, Mr. Steve Pavlina, is the fellow whose sentences Ken Evoy was finishing, as he never tires of telling us, the first time the two ever talked, and vice-versa. Touching, isn’t it?

Yet it may not be what you want from the owner of your business-in-a-box.

Site Build It! is not a scam, in my opinion, and it’s not, strictly speaking, multi-level marketing, but it has elements of both. It is, in any case, not, as far as I’m concerned, worth a fraction of your time and money.

Please visit me now at my brand new website, which cost approximately $220.00 less per year than this mediocre SBI! site. And don’t forget to buy my new book, published by Pearl Button Press.

Categories
Online Business Passive Income Product Reviews Rants

Site Build It Scam Review

Site Build It has been around for a while, the question is – is it a good way to make Passive Income?  There are some good parts to it. But that doesn’t make it any less a scam. I’ve thought about reviewing it before but now I am MAD – and Steve Pavlina is the reason I’m mad. I like Steve –  his motivational writing is great – but now he has sold out to the other side and is pushing the old Site Build It scam review bandwagon!

Latest Update Jan 2011 – read my latest Site Build It Review

UPDATE: If you are late to the riot you may want to check the comments section and also the next post for the update on Site Build It scam review.

Your site all tied up
Your site all tied up

What is Site Build It ?

Its a “one stop shop” for someone who wants a website but doesn’t know where to start. You pay them a heafty fee- PER SITE – around $300 ANNUALLY. And for this sum you get:

  • “free” domain name
  • “free” hosting
  • drag and drop website builder
  • newsletter manager
  • autoresponder
  • search engine ranking help
  • traffic reports
  • hand holding: forum, tutorial etc.

Now if you Google for “site builder scam” – you will find a lot of  “reviews” which are just affiliate pitches.  Why? Because Site Build It pays affiliates around $75 a sale, and that’s an annual fee too remember. You don’t even have to be a user of SBI to be an affiliate – how can you sell something you don’t use yourself – that’s what I turned me off affiliate marketing initially.

You will find no link here for SBI – if you want to join – type in their url direct and then sign up as an affiliate and pay yourself the commission as a discount!

So Why is Site Build It a Scam?

  1. You don’t own your domain – the Anguilla-beaches .com site which features prominently in the sales pitch is owned by Ken Evoy – who owns site build it – according to domain tools anyways; UPDATE: yes you do own your site but this is still disingenuous marketing
  2. You can’t just move your website elsewhere to say cheaper hosting – you are tied up with SBI for life. You have to make $300/year just to break even on the deal! UPDATE: you can with varying degrees of difficulty – its not easy appears to be the consensus
  3. They spend a lot of time quoting Alexa rank of SBI sites – Alexa ranks just proves that you have a bunch of internet marketers visiting your site – probably because of the link from the sales page – as they are the only people who use the Alexa tool bar. Internet marketers are unlikely to buy your homemade chocolates or rent your condo in Puerto Rico;
  4. The search engine help according to Ssite Build Tt’s own sales promotion video involves submitting your sites to the search engines –  do not ever do this – this just prooves to Google that your site is not worth visiting cause no one is linking to it. Read Court on why you should NOT submit your website to Google
  5. Then to rank your site they suggest you use pay per click (PPC) advertising – this is as about as risky as say foreign exchange dealing as it not something any new on-line marketer should be doing.

So, no, SBI! is not a traditional scam. They no doubt deliver on what is promised – though you no doubt have to pay extra for the PPC champaign. Yes traditional hosting and free software won’t give you support on how to build your business.

But $300 for support is pretty darn expensive.

What Does It Cost to Build Your Own Site:

  • under $10 for a .com domain name ;
  • around $5/month for cheap hosting BTW that will cover more than one website to;
  • Drag and drop software to develop the site WordPress free ;
  • keyword research – free use adwords external ;
  • traffic analysis Google Analytics or Statcounter – both free

Yes its not all in one place, you have to learn to do some odd stuff along the way – but you are building a business aren’t you? SiteBuildIt is basically a franchise model applied to building websites – without the brand awareness that having “McDonalds” or “Avon” in your business does to customers in the real world. UPDATE: Its more like a cult – its a pretty scary one to, see the comments! Your visitors won’t feel more likely to buy from you just because your site is a “site build it!” site!

UPDATE: April 2012 The latest update of SBI’s software appears to have been a bit of a technical disaster. So rather than dealing with his customer’s complaints and sorted out the glitches, Ken Evoy has taken to hurling abuse at people who dare to complain that their website’s are broken -and has even, according to reports, banned some from the forums, and possibly even from SBI! 

Think about it – do you really want to have your website held hostage to someone who behaves like that? 

Yes they don’t promise that you will get rich in your sleep. Whatever tools you use to develop a website that’s the easy bit – getting the traffic is the work bit.

Bottom line with the  Site build it scam  you put the hard work in – you get your keywords to rank and you don’t own your website UPDATE You do own your site but you are locked into the SBI tools and although you can take the actual words from the site and you lose the access to the tools that you use to maintain and develop the site.

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