Bye Bye Haley

March 16, 2011 by · 8 Comments
Filed under: General Chat, Humour, Product Reviews 

Haley has vanished *unhappy face emoticon*

Shortly after the poop hit the fan, Haley decided she’d sold enough copies of Stripped Down Profits, and she pulled it from the market.

Quite upsetting really, think of all those poor souls who will miss out on that amazing 1 click software that will make them up to $237,729 per month, they are the people I feel sorry for, they are going to have to resort to, god forbid, doing some work.

I wonder if Haley really did decide to pull the product off the market because she sold out, or if there was some other reason. Normally someones word would be enough, but after getting my heart broken by Haley Milano I’m still not sure of her.

So I’ll bring up the sales page from the Bing.com cache and try to order via the order link, which I just happen to have here:

http://strippeddownprofits.com/dlg/sell.php?prodData=cb,1

*sigh*

She broke my heart for a 2nd time, when will I ever learn:

“IMPORTANT!

This product is no longer for sale or has been disabled due to a terms of service violation This product is no longer for sale or has been disabled due to a terms of service violation”

Maybe Clickbank actually got a conscience and realized that selling a product using nothing but lies might be, I don’t know, a little bit illegal?

Or maybe Haley got Clickbank to close the account on her behalf.

Make your own minds up.

And before I move on from Miss Milano, here is something to remember her by.

Was The Sales Page Really That Bad?

Yes, it was.

If any of you are glutens for punishment, you can view a full copy of the controversial sales page by clicking on the image below.

Love Always,
Dan “Still on the Market” Thompson

Stripped Down Profits Review

March 10, 2011 by · 72 Comments
Filed under: General Chat, Humour, Product Reviews 

This is not a review of Stripped Down Profits – this is me giving you my opinion on the sales page. I haven’t seen or used the product they are selling, but if the sales page is anything to go by, stay well clear of it.

Start of meaningful words.

Sometimes in life all you need is a break.

A chance encounter with a stranger could change your life forever.

You could be working in a strip club, and a client comes along, gives you money, and you show him boobies (.) (.) roflcoptorpmslw00tetc

But this client isn’t any client, he just happens to be a top secret internet marketing guru ninja.

You ply this unnamed ninja guru with more booze, drugs and boobies than his mind can handle, and you then threaten to show his wife and kids the implicating video of said debauchery if the guru ninja doesn’t show you how to make a billion dollars on the internet.

As I said, sometimes all you need in life is a break.

And well done to the delightful Haley Milano for seizing her break with both hands.

Not only did she blackmail (yeah…she went there) a successful guru into giving her all his secrets, she then used those secrets to become an overnight Clickbank millionaire at the touch of a button.

But that’s not all, this girl just can’t stop giving….sorry, bad turn of phrase.

She’s decided that “Doing nothing but figuring out how to spend your money and avoid paying taxes” sucks….sorry, cheap joke, that’ll be the last of them, so she’s selling the “1 touch money making software” that she’s using to crank out millions of dollars on auto-pilot.

And get this, she’s selling it for just $47, what a gal, I wonder if she’d marry me.

Hmmm, but wait a minute, I’m having pre-wedding jitters.

After commission and Clickbank fees, Hayley will only be getting around $20 per sale, and imagine the amount of support she’ll have to do.

Why would she want to make $20 per sale selling her 1 touch millionaire making software, when she could carry on using the software herself to churn out the wonga.

Maybe my jitters are right, I need to do more research before asking her to become Mrs Thompson.

So I’ll start with the sales page.

And before I go on, full credit to everyone in this forum thread who has done some digging on the product, I don’t deserve full credit (if any) for the detective work below.

The first thing that catches my eye is that Haley used to work in Spearmint Rhino’s before getting her break, that doesn’t bother me at all, I would have no issues marrying a stripper. Moving on.

I prefer Stringfellows

I can see that she also likes pancakes, I like pancakes too, maybe she is “the one”.

Hmmmm, but then she says that her personal chef cooks them for her every morning. That sounds a little bit lazy to me, but we all have our flaws. I can live with her being a little bit on the lazy side.

Do you want a Haley Milano pancake?

As I scroll further down the page, I see that Hayley Milano (google approves of my misspelling) has posted a picture of some gurus enjoying a few drinks in what I assume must be some sort of private party.

Turns out these aren't actually gurus

If I right click on the image and look at the file name, it looks to be a picture of a bachelor party in Atlantic city. Apparently there isn’t a Spearmint Rhino club in Atlantic city, Haley must have got that picture off a friend or something.

Or maybe she’s just using a stock photo to represent what a group of Gurus sipping a few drinks MIGHT look like.

Because if you do a search for “Bachelor party atlantic city” on Google images, the very same picture comes up, and can be found on the following site:

http://www.destination360.com/north-america/us/new-jersey/atlantic-city/bachelor-party-atlantic-city

They must’ve nicked that picture off Haley’s page, the swines.

Never mind, I can understand Haley using a stock photo to represent what gurus drinking MIGHT look like, it makes sense, I might even start looking for honeymoon destinations….

I’m getting excited now, carrying on down the page I can see this:

Haley milano fake house?

SHE BOUGHT HER PARENTS A HOUSE!!!

She is the girl of my dreams, if she got her parents a house just because they produced her, what will she buy the love of her life….I want a plane and a dolphin please Haley Milano of Stripped Down Profits. (in that order)

Just out of interest, I think I’ll right click on the image of her parents house, then do a search for the filename on Google images…

Hmmm, that’s strange, Haley’s parents house looks exactly like this one:

http://www.arcadiahomesinc.net/2_story_Colonial_Farm_House_1.htm

I live in a house, a very fake house in the countrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrry

Maybe there’s an innocent explanation for this, maybe instead of taking an actual picture of the house, she decided to use one off a website to represent the house. Yeah….that makes sense, I wonder what sort of ring she’ll like, probably something big and tasteless.

WOW, not only did she buy her parents a house, she then retired at 29 and bought herself what looks like a god awful apartment, and she then created her own range of designer handbags.

Stripped Down Profits Fake Sales Page

Again, just out of interest I’ll do an image search for the filename of Haleys house…….WAIT A MINUTE, WHAT IS THIS:

Thanks for breaking my heart Haley Milano

Out of the first 18 search results for “29399440.JPG”, 15 of them are Haleys house. How strange is that.

A little bit more reading leads me to this page:

http://www.nytimes.com/2009/08/09/realestate/09deal1.html?_r=1

Haley Milano lives in an apartment that cost $25m – the most expensive home EVER in the history of Brooklyn??

Hmmmm, that smells just a bit fishy to me, she lives in a $25m home, but is wasting her time selling software for $20 on clickbank?

My Conclusion: I’m not going to ask Haley Milano to marry me, I feel I can do better

My Other Conclusion

Anyone with an ounce of sense can see the sales page is 100% fiction – the story is fake, Haley Milano is fake, the images are fake, so how did it get past Clickbank and why are people promoting it?

I haven’t sold a product of my own on Clickbank for years, but when I did the approval process was a nightmare, if the wording of the page was even a little bit iffy, they’d make you change it. So how can a product like this get past the review team, and didn’t the American Government bring in some kind of legislation to stop these kind of sites?

When did copywriting amount to lying?

Update 16th March 2011

The sales page has since been taken down, but don’t worry, you can view a copy of the full “sales page” here:

https://elpassoblog.com/bye-bye-haley/

(Link to the full sales page at the bottom of the post)

P.S. Anyone wanting to get this “review” to the top of Google, I’d appreciate if you’d link back with the anchor text “Stripped Down Profits Review”, lets see if we can’t do a bit of fake sales page exposing for the greater good. It’ll be good karma and stuff.

2010: Dating, d*cks, and Meat Loaf

December 31, 2010 by · 28 Comments
Filed under: General Chat, Humour 

If you rearrange the words in the title, it will make up a sensible title for the post, it’s a little Christmas game, I hope you enjoy it. I actually had a different title, but I’ve been informed it was quite offensive, so I’m playing it safe.

I thought I’d be normal and write a quick year in review, it seems to be the “in thing” right now, must be the time of year or something.

But I’ll make mine a bit different, it will contain minimal marketing stuff, mainly because I’ve not done any! I will however include some D9 Hosting stuff in there, so anyone looking for anything semi-serious to read wont be totally disapointed with the content.

**START WARNING**

This blog post contains mild references to genitalia, if you are offended by this, please don’t read any further.

**END WARNING**

The year started with January, but it must have been an uneventful month because I’m having serious trouble remembering it. I should point out at this point that I’m useless with dates (date dates, not date dates, more on that later), so if I say something happened in March, don’t take that as gospel, it probably happened in August.

February and March were the same as January.

This blog post is starting to sound like a bad idea.

Instead of doing things by the month, I’ll just think back to a few memorable things and talk about them, they may or may not be in chronological order.

Online Dating

One of the most amusing things that happened to me in 2010 was a foray into the world of online dating with a couple of friends, it’s led to many amusing stories being shared between us, none of which will ever be discussed on this blog.

To sum it up, I’d say a lot of the stereotypes are correct, there are A LOT of really crazy people on there, but some really nice people as well, a bit like life in general really.

So if you live in a village where the number of girls/boys aged between 18 – 26 (insert your own age range there) is less than 5, or if you just fancy meeting a few new people, I’d recommend giving it a go, if nothing else some of the profiles will make you laugh.

My favourite was the bluntness of this one:

“I’ve joined *name of dating site* because I’ve just found out I’m pregnant”

Meat Loaf & Malfunctioning Penises

This happened in December, I’m 100% sure of this because it was only 3 weeks ago.

As a birthday present for my Dad, I bought 4 tickets to go and see Meat Loaf at the Manchester Evening News arena. My Dad’s a bit of a fan, but so am I, so I killed 2 birds with one stone.

I managed to get good tickets, we were in the tiered seating right next to the stage, and around 7 rows back.

During one of the songs (Paradise by The Dashboard Light), Meat Loaf and his sexy (in an older woman kind of way) female singer stopped half way through, and proceeded to bring out 2 big mechanical penises that fired t-shirts into the crowd. As we were near the front, I thought the chances of us having a t-shirt fired at us were quite high.

After a couple of shirts had been fired, the female singer (Patti Russo) turned around and pointed her penis at us. She pressed the fire button, and the penis malfunctioned, she proceeded to take the shirt out of the penis and threw it to someone in the front row, I was disappointed.

It was a very good gig though, and it contained a few more stories that will never be told on this blog, but if you are into that kind of music and he’s in your area, go see him!

I’ll include a couple of Youtube clips for your viewing pleasure, be warned that they contain a little bit of naughty language, if you want to skip most of it, jump to 1m 60s on the 1st video.

Bobby Farrell & The Thompson Curse

Bobby Farrell was the male singer in the 70’s Disco group Boney M, he sadly passed away yesterday from currently unknown causes.

This on it’s own wasn’t enough to warrant a mention in this blog post, but read on, the plot was like the custard my mum put in this years xmas trifle, it thickens.

Here are a list of gigs that either me, or a member of my family have bought tickets to in the recent past:

  • Meat Loaf, 2008
  • Tina Turner, 2009
  • Elton John, 2009
  • Michael Jackson, 2009
  • Meat Loaf, 2010
  • Boney M, 2011

Out of all the above, the following went as planned:

  • Tina Turner, 2009
  • Meat Loaf, 2010

And the rest:

  • Meat Loaf, 2008 – Cancelled, cyst on vocal cords
  • Elton John, 2009 – Cancelled, bad illness
  • Michael Jackson, 2009 – Cancelled, death
  • Boney M, 2011 – Likely to be Cancelled, death

I also have tickets to see Peter Kay in October 2011, so I’d be very nervous if I were him.

D9 Hosting

Yay, a semi serious story from 2010 that doesn’t relate to music!

D9 Hosting has been going well throughout 2010, it’s gone from being a hobby to a full time job. So much so that we took the decision to get some staff in back in the first half of the new year, which allows us to offer true 24/7 technical support.

The first few weeks were obviously a little difficult whilst we got everyone trained up, but we have a good set of customers who were very understanding, and now that the staff are trained up, I’m sure any customers will agree that any technical issues are dealt with in a timely and efficient manner.

2010 was really a year of stabilization for us, we wanted to build solid foundations from which we could move the business forward in the coming years, and I think we’ve gone a long way to achieving that. There are still a few little things that could do with some tweaking, but all in all it’s been a very good year.

With a bit of luck we’ll be ready to go on a full on marketing spree in 2011 and take the number of sites we host past 20,000.

Other “D9 Stuff” to happen in 2010 included the launch of our official Facebook page:

http://www.facebook.com/pages/D9-Hosting/20700629688

We should probably launch our own Twitter account as well, but….I have an intense dislike of Twitter :-0

I Went to Leicester

In November I drove down to a service station in Leicester to pick up a new car, can you tell I’m running out of things to write about?

I Tore my Groin

As you may (or may not) know, I’m a keen football player.

Back on August 15th I tore my groin. It’s now December 31st and I’ve only managed to play 2 games since, I think my football career may be coming to a cross roads.

Christmas

We had a Christmas in 2010, it was around 1 week ago.

Unfortunately my 88 year old Nan got rushed into hospital the day before Christmas eve, we were all prepared for the worst but thankfully after 5 days in Hospital she’s back home and back to her normal talkative whiskey drinking self. But I did spend most of Christmas going to and from the hospital.

That’s a pic of me and her from this past year:

I'm the one on the left

And I know what you are thinking, why on earth is Dan wearing a suit? Well I had to, it was a wedding.

But whilst we were at the hospital, it dawned on me where I get my warped sense of humor from – it’s from my Nan! A couple of quotes from the hospital include:

“You know we were going to have a big party for my 90th birthday, I think we should probably bring it forward a year just to be on the safe side”

“I’m like the Angel of Death, that old dear (looking at the person in the next bed) was fine when they brought her in 2 hours ago, and now her feet are blue and she’s unresponsive”

New Year

Who knows what the new year will bring, I suppose we’ll find out in 12 hours and 5 minutes time.

So a very, very belated Merry Christmas and a very, very Happy New Year to you and your family. I’ll be back in 2011, with (maybe) a more serious and relevant blog post.

Toodle,
Dan

SEO 102

December 6, 2010 by · 14 Comments
Filed under: General Chat, How To Guides 

SEO 102 is a natural progression from SEO 101 that I posted a couple of weeks ago.

In one of the comments I was asked how I know how many times to include a keyword in the body text, how often it should be bold, how to get the perfect description and so on.

So I thought I’d show you how I do it.

I use some software called “Internet Business Promoter“.

It’s not some software that I’ve just started “using” so I can make a thinly disguised affiliate pitch to you, I’ve been using it for at least 3 years now and it’s a great tool – a bit pricey but well worth it IMO.

Before continuing, I know I said this isn’t some BS affiliate pitch for a product that I don’t actually use, but I am going to be using my affiliate link when mentioning the software, I may as well try get a tiny bit of revenue from this blog, not so I can use it to feed my hidden crack addiction (I’m very boring like that, never done drugs, never smoked, only a moderate drinker), but to help me buy shiny things for Christmas.

But anyway, here’s how I use the software.

First of all I write my content and put my site together, I write the content as naturally as possible, but in the back of my mind I’m always trying to fit my keyword/keywords in the content as naturally as possible. At this point I don’t think about the density or anything like that, I merely try and fit them in there naturally.

When I’ve done that, I upload the site to the WWW without any formatting. (Bold, italic, headlines, etc.)

I then open up Internet Business Promoter (IBP for the sake of my keyboard), and run a report on the site by clicking on Optimization > Run Report

Internet Business Promoter

It then analyzes the current top 10 listings on Google (or the search engine you choose) and compares them to your page. It then cleverly tells you what you can do to your page, to improve the on page optimization to take it above your competition.

It presents these findings to you in a nice easy to read report, with a percentage score at the top of the page. The idea is to get your page as near to 100% as possible, I’ve never actually got a page to be bang on 100% but in my experience 80% and above will usually go a long way to help you rank well in the organic search results.

IBP Generating The Report

This is a bad report

You can see from the above picture, that the site I just ran the report on only scored 54% so that’s not too good. So how do we change that?

Well, we read the report of course 🙂

There are lots of things I can change to make it better, but I wont show you all of them as it’ll probably take all day for me to write. So I’ll just show you an example of the sort of things it tells you to do, the screenshot below shows you how I can improve my page <title> to make it more appealing for Mr Google.

Don't worry, it can be fixed!

It tells me that the keyword density in my <title> tag is too high, so what I need to do is have a rethink and come up with a new <title> that isn’t so keyword heavy.

When I’ve done that, I can re-run the report and see if my page score has improved.

It’s basically just rinse and repeat – run the report, implement the suggestions, run the report, etc.

If you keep doing that, then eventually you’ll have the perfectly optimized web page, ready to get you a top ranking in Google.

Don’t believe me, do a search on Google for “Lovefilm Review”.

Number 1, but worthless

You’ll see that the number 1 site in the organic search results belongs to me. I have many sites like that, all with page 1 rankings, but I don’t mind showing you the Lovefilm one – you can compete with me all you like on that keyword, it was doing well until Lovefilm decided to have a change of policy and banned affiliates from using the Lovefilm trademark in domain names, so I’m no longer a member of their affiliate program. So if anyone wants to make me an offer for that website, go ahead, maybe you can make money from it in some other way!

So that brings to an end this blog post, as I said, it’s not a full on affiliate pitch trying to sell you the software, it’s just an insight into what I use. If you want to check it out, then go ahead, there’s a 30 day free trial, if you don’t, then not to worry!

Thanks for reading.
Dan

SEO 101

November 16, 2010 by · 16 Comments
Filed under: How To Guides 

You see that title right there ^^

That’s a bad <title>

It’s good in some ways as you know exactly what you are going to get from this post, but from a SEO aspect I’ve seen better.

Just a bit of background before I jump right into it.

I AM NOT AN SEO GURU

But I have been building websites for who knows how long, and I do pretty well with getting traffic to them using organic SEO. (Search Engine Optimization without the use of any fertilizers)

So I’m just going to share with you the basics of what I do to a new website – a lot of it you’ll probably already know, but it wont do any harm to have a bit of a refresher course.

***********
Intermission
***********

My limited edition deluxe box set of “The Promise” by The Boss has just arrived, so the rest of this post shall be written to the tune of Badlands, circa 1978.

Bruce Springstein The Promise

***********
End Intermission
***********

The first thing I’ll do when starting a new website, is of course the keyword research, I’m not going to go into great (any) detail on this aspect, else it’d make the post too long, and I’d get bored writing it BADLANDS. But once I’ve found 2 or 3 good keywords, I’ll try and naturally work them into the content of the site, don’t try and hammer them in there, just write as you normally would, and you should find you end up with them in there. SEO FOR BEGINNERS FREE COURSE GUIDE 101.

When you’ve written your content, you can jump into the on-page optimization. A lot of people say this isn’t really all that important, and I agree with them, but I think it’s still worth doing, it certainly wont do any harm your site. (Despite what I said about meta tags in a previous post)

The first thing I do is to make sure I have a good page title:

<title>Your Page Title – It Appears At The Top Of Your Browser</title>

In my humble, un-tested opinion, the <title> tag is still one of the most important parts of on page optimization.

I always try to make my titles around 10 words long, and include a couple of keyword variations in there. If for example I had a site reviewing Meat Loaf (the singer or the food, I’m not fussy) I might use the title:

<title>Meat Loaf Review – Food (or Music) Reviews For Popular Meatloaf Dishes (or Tracks)</title>

You can see there that the 1st part of the title contains what I’d consider to be my main keyword/phrase:

Meat Loaf Review

And in the 2nd part, if added a few words in the that may make up other search terms. In that title you’ve got the following combination of words that can all make up long tail phrases:

– Meatloaf; Is Meat Loaf one word or two? I don’t know so we’ll play it safe and use both
– Reviews; Do people search for review or reviews, cover both bases and use both
– Food/Muisc; Do people search for the term Meatloaf Food Reviews? If so we’ve got that covered as well

I probably picked a daft example (what’s new) but you should be able to see what I’m getting at. A title doesn’t just need to contain your main keyword or phrase, be a bit creative and think of the different long tail words and phrases you can fit in there.

<h1>I’m a Heading, Treat Me With Respect</h1>

Heading tags have been around forever, and are used to define…headings, for example:

<h1>This is my main heading</h1><h2>This isn’t quite as important as h1</h2>

<h3>h3 has confidence issues</h3>

<h4>h4 aspires to be like h3, which is somewhat depressing</h4>

The idea is that you can sprinkle your keywords lightly around the heading tags, but don’t over do it. Having your main keyword in every single heading tag will look very spammy and un-natural.

Remember that Google’s job is simply to provide users with the content they are looking for in the least amount of clicks, always remember the golden rule – write primarily for the person reading it, not for the search engines. So you can tweak your content to make it more appealing to the big G, but don’t go turning it into spammy unreadable mumbo jumbo!

<meta tags>Are they obsolete?</meta tags>

Back in the days before algorithms, meta keywords were the one way of getting a site on the first page of search results. It didn’t matter what content your website contained, you could stuff keywords in there and you’d rank. Thankfully those days are now gone, and meta tags carry far less weight than they used to.

I did a post about meta tags a few weeks ago, where I gave an example of some sites ranking well (top 3 positions) on Google without containing any meta tags.

Would I go so far as to say don’t use them at all? Probably not.

As I mentioned above, it’s not going to do any harm to put them in there so why not give it a go, it’s only a 5 minute job.

For the keywords, I usually stick to around 4 or 5 keywords per page. Those keywords should appear sporadically in the body text of the page, and you can also try and slip the odd one into your headings, but again, don’t be spammy! I see a lot of people stuffing hundreds (that’s not an exaggeration) of keywords on each webpage, but don’t do it, you are wasting your time, if you are going to use keywords then concentrate on a handful, rather than a massive combination, it’ll work better in the long run.

For the description I follow the same guidelines as the title tag, but instead of 10 words I use 2 sentences, these sentences incorporate my main keywords, as well as long tail phrases I think people may be searching for, but remember the golden rule, it also needs to make sense!

<img>Images Are Good Yar</img>

We all use images on the page, so make use of them!

Tons of people use Google images on a daily basis and it’s an easy way to get traffic, if you have an image on a page, give the image a name that is related to the content of the page and make use of the ALT and title attributes. Take the image below as an example, if I were making a site on overpaid ugly people, I’d use the image below with the appropriate ALT and title tags.

Wayne Rooney is Overpaid and Ugly

<internal>Linking, Not Haemorrhage</internal>

This is an easy one for you to do, if you are talking about something that you’ve covered before, link to it using appropriate anchor text.

If for example this post was about computing, and I was talking about security. I might say “but I don’t want to cover old ground, so if you want to learn about PC security head over and check out the post.”

It makes it easier for search engines to crawl your different pages, and also helps the user as well, a win win!

<strong>I Like My Bold and Italics I Do</strong>

To be honest I don’t know if this still makes a difference, but in the past it’s been advisable to have your main keyword or phrase in a section of bold and/or italic text on the page – don’t make that the only bold/italic text on the page, as again, it’ll look spammy.

***********
Intermission
***********

Just heard about the Royal News, let us rejoice.

William and Kate on their royal wedding day

***********
End Intermission
***********

Good job the intermission came when it did, I think I’ve just about finished covering all of the on-page optimization I do to my websites, not all my websites, just those that I’m promoting with organic SEO. It only takes an hour or so to do, and you don’t need any fancy software or anything to do it, just a bit of graft 😀

There are of course “off page” things you need to do, but I think that’s going to be a subject we can look at another time.

Thanks for reading, and let me know if you have any questions or comments.

Dan

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