The Glenn Canady Gorilla Website Marketing Course Review

I mentioned that I was having all sorts of problems with Zeus (the free version). I forgot to mention that I emailed Vicky at ABDevelopment about this. She was going to be doing the upcoming marketing part of the Gorilla Website Marketing Course and she was supposed to be something of an expert in using Zeus. I figured she would probably be the best person to get to the bottom of the problems, as I was getting nowhere with the official Zeus helpdesk.

This is what I emailed to Vicky :

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Hi Vicky,

I have my final site building session with Scott Dimmick next Monday, or sooner. After that I believe you are still going to be doing the mentoring with me for the marketing of my site.

When I spoke to Scott last night I mentioned something that I wanted to flag early on as a likely problem. Obviously Zeus is going to be a basic part of the marketing strategy, so I downloaded the free copy and thought I would try it out with one of my other web sites so that I could get a feel for how it worked.

I have had nothing but problems with it since I downloaded it ! I have tried it on 3 seperate PC’s now and still cannot get it to work properly,consistently, or with stability. I’m not going to catalogue the list of problems here. I can point you to the Cyber Robotics helpdesk entry where I logged the problems and you can read the issues for yourself.

As this is going to be so key to the marketing efforts, I am raising this with you now as I am getting nowhere with Cyber Robotics support,and I assume Glenn Canady’s name must carry some weight with thesepeople.

The Cyber Robotics helpdesk is at :http://www.cyber-robotics.com/cgi-bin/pdesk.cgi

The userid to login is : xxxxxx
The password is : xxxxxx
The call id is 9136

I haven’t heard from them in 4 days (ok, there was the weekend) and since then I have discovered that if I crank up the number in the LoadFault Countdown in the Tools->Options->Advanced tab then I can get it work for longer before the problem hits. It still keeps failing though.

I need our marketing efforts to be a success and would be grateful if you are able to do something to get this resolved before it becomes a major issue.

Many thanks

– Chris O’Connor

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Note - I’ve editted out the sensitive bits - password etc.

Vicky didn’t seem perturbed by the problems at all and replied with this :

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Chris,

Don’t worry,the problems you are referring to is because you are using the free version.

How we solve this is you will receive the PRO version download along with a registration code that will secure your Zeus. The free trial period is like a demo, and will not work properly until you register it.

After Zeus is registered, it will work just fine. I will send you a registration code before our first session. Email me when you are ready to schedule, and please notify jason@abdevelopment.com when your sessions with Scott have concluded, so he is also aware of your change to me.

Look forward to working with you again.

Vicky @ AB Development
GorillaWebMarketing
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This didn’t ring true to me. From what I’d read on the Zeus forums there were a good number of people out there using the free version of Zeus as their main linking software. They also didn’t seem to be experiencing problems. And what about the fact that to go from the free version to the pro version you just had to buy a licence key and then enter it. In other words it was the same software.

I got back to Vicky with my concerns :

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Hi Vicky,

Are you sure about the free vs Pro version ? The free version becomes the pro version just by entering the registration code into it. So it is the same software, and I guess, with the same problems.

Chris
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Vicky was obviously quite confident in the Zeus software and replied with the following :

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Chris,

In our training sessions I will show you everything you need to do with Zeus. It probably didn’t work properly because it wasn’t properly trained.If you don’t have certain things right in the program, it won’t work. Ihave worked with hundred’s of different Zeus’, and I haven’t heard of any of them experiencing the problems you describe.

I will work with you every step with the program, so it will operate correctly on your website.

Talk to you soon,

Vicky @ AB Development
GorillaWebMarketing
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There wasn’t much more I could do. Getting the free version of Zeus to work had proven to be frustrating and ultimately fruitless. I had about another week to go before I started my marketing sessions with Vicky so I didn’t see any point in continuing to email her about Zeus. I did keep trying, but got nowhere. I’ve used all sorts of software over the years and never had the amount of problems that I encountered with this.

I got to the end of my site building sessions with Scott, and despite some tweaking on it that I was doing right up to the end, I felt my site was looking good.

As I had been asked to do, I emailed Vicky to tell her that my sessions with Scott were at an end, so that she could schedule in our marketing sessions.

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Vicky / Jason,
Just wanted to let you both know that I have just had my last session
with Scott and am ready to be scheduled in with Vicky.

My sessions with Scott were at 9.30pm GMT each Monday. I don’t know if
that slot is a possibility ? The only day that is not good for me is
Friday. Otherwise, I can do Mon-Thu 18.00 - 22.00.

Let me know what you want to do with the schedule and if there is
anything you want me to be doing or looking at in preparation for our
first session.

thanks

Chris
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I had signed up to Glenn Canady’s Gorilla Website Marketing Course back in the end of October / beginning of November 2003. I had been told that I would be getting money coming in by the time the first credit card bill came in. Well, the first credit card bill had come in and I was paying off my first installment on the $8000 plus interest. I still hadn’t even started my marketing sessions yet.

Understandably, my wife was starting to get very concerned. My big concern was that ABDevelopment seemed pretty laid back about the whole thing (well it wasn’t their money that was at risk !). Christmas was coming up and I really did not want my sessions slipping into the New Year before they started. I NEEDED to start earning some of that $8000 back.

Vicky replied to my email where I stated I could do Mon - Thu 18.00 - 22.00 by offering me a 4pm slot !?

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Chris,

Thanks for the update, and I look forward to working with you again. By the 1st session appointment the following assignments should be completed. If NOT we don’t want to waste a session, so let me know 24 hours ahead of time and we can reschedule. If you need to reschedule for any reason, a 24 hour notice is required!

-Download the GOOGLE Toolbar-

-Another tip is to look up your domain at altavista.com view your website’s reciprocal linking partners.

-Download the ALEXA Toolbar. Type in your domain and you can view your traffic rank. When you do Click the box to allow popups.

-Bookmark http://www.zeuscollective.com/ for future research of categories, andcompetitor’s link directories.

-Traffic Swarm sign up, and get free traffic in 24 hours, email me your ID #once assigned.

-Bookmark http://www.gorillawebsitemarketing.com/, click on resources, and scroll down to “Search Engine Tools” Overture Suggestion Tool.

-Bookmark http://www.wordtracker.com/

The next available appointment I have is this Thursday 12/18/03 @ 4:00PM your time.

Reply to confirm.

Vicky @ AB Development

GorillaWebMarketing
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So, nearly 2 months after starting this I am about to start my marketing sessions, which will take another 4 weeks. And how soon did they tell me it would be before I started getting money back from Glenn Canady’s Gorilla Website Marketing Course ? And more to the point, how the hell was I supposed to get my $8000 back within 6 months if it was going to be 3 months before I had even finished the training sessions ?

I was getting concerned. I’d already given up one temporary job to concentrate on this and now I was faced with another dillema. Luckily the 18th was the last work day before Christmas for the place I was working. They shut for 2 weeks over Christmas, so I figured it would probably be OK if I left a few hours early. I HAD to do whatever I could to get these marketing sessions going so I could start recouping my money. After all, I knew how to build web sites, I’d been doing it for years. What I needed to know was the latest and most effective ways of marketing the site. That was what was going to get my money back, and a lot more hopefully.

I emailed Vicky :

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Hi Vicky,

I normally don’t get back from work until after 6pm (GMT), so normally the earliest appointment would have to be after 6.30pm. But, I realise that it is probably going to get difficult fitting me in around Christmas and I don’t want our first appointment to end up drifting into the new year. So, I will finish work early this Thursday and I will be available for 4pm.

After Thursday can we make our subsequent appointments for after 6.30pm ? Is that OK with you ? Friday being the only difficult day for me.

I have done all of the assignments. I already had an account at Trafficswarm (id=153633). I’ve already got sites listed with them. Do I need to disable these ?

I have also had an account with Wordtracker for some time. My toolbars and bookmarks are ready to go !

look forward to speaking with you on Thursday.

Chris
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My marketing sessions were about to begin !

I mentioned in an earlier post how annoyed I was when I purchased Glenn Canady’s Gorilla Website Marketing ebook. The pre-sales information leads you to believe that you can get a million hits and a page 1 ranking in the search engines in 90 days without having to spend any money. Technically that may be correct, but in practice, without buying software, such as Zeus, to help you find potential link partners you are going to have a virtually impossible task on your hands. Even with Zeus it will take some time. As I mentioned in my previous post, Glenn Canady’s ebook is around 50% about Zeus, how to use Zeus, and Zeus tips. So to say that you don’t need any other software may be technically correct, but it is also a highly misleading claim.

Well, now I was on Glenn Canady’s Gorilla Website Marketing Course and my marketing sessions would be coming up shortly. I wanted to make sure that I got as much out of them as possible, so I downloaded the free version to try and get to grips with it.

I’ve got to say that Zeus is not going to win any awards for it’s looks. It has got to be one of the ugliest bits of software I’ve used in a long time. I think it has tried (and failed) to have an Outlook style interface. It just looks clunky.

One nice thing about the software though is that it has a number of ‘wizards’ to hand hold the new user through the necessary steps to getting Zeus set up and in a position where it can start finding potential partners for you. Zeus is unlike a lot of the other reciprocal link programs in that it uses a spider, similar to search engine spiders, to find sites, crawl them, and store all sorts of data about the site in a database.

Before the spider can go off looking for you it needs to be trained. You need to go through the training process which gives it 100 keywords that would be relevant to the sort of sites that you are looking for. Obviously, you want to give it words that ideally would only be found on the sites that you are looking for, and not just on any old site. It operates by a scoring system system, so you can assign a value to the keywords and the very exclusive ones would score highest, and you can give negative values to words you don’t want on the site to try and eliminate those sites.

In practice it takes a bit of work to get it fine tuned, but when tuned the spider should run and run and come back with lots of relevant sites where you could potentially ask for links. Well thats the theory.

It’s recommended that to start with you only let Zeus build up 50 sites in the database, then look at what it has found and fine tune you keywords and adjust scoring if necessary.

I had downloaded the free version, as my marketing sessions had not yet started and I had not been given a key or a link for the professional version of Zeus. I’ve got to say that I had all sorts of problems. If it could go wrong it did go wrong. The software seemed unstable and unreliable, and it just would not work properly. Let me stress here that I was using the free version. I could not get it to work properly, but other people use it with no problems.

All of the problems were logged through the online support form, so I haven’t got any of those I can paste here. I do remember the software continously timing out and not returning anything. I’d studied the help forum, read the documentation, tweaked all sorts of settings but nothing would get it to work.

I fired off a message to the support people. This is what I got as a reply :

The problem is with your network. Check all settings and documents. You must have the proper proxy settings in Zeus. Also check your firewall settings and try to run Zeus after closing your Anti-Virus software.

This is a network that has been running happily with no problems for 2 years. I’ve got a broadband connection, and I had already eliminated the firewall and AV software. What got me was the way he was able point the finger of blame at my network without even asking how it was configured !

I’ll continue this tomorrow, Battlestar Gallactica is about to start

I’ll do a quick recap on yesterdays lengthy post. It was now nearly 3 weeks since I had signed up for Glenn Canady’s Gorilla Website Marketing Course and ABDevelopment had failed to find me a dropshipper for the products that I wanted to sell.

Having a product to sell, and the right product to sell, is probably one of the most significant parts to having a successful sales site. I’d done my research, as ABDevelopment requested, and found something I was interested in, knew a lot about, and appeared to be a fairly hot product to sell. ABDevelopment failed to find me a dropshipper for it, despite all the promises, and boasts that they could find me a dropshipper for anything I wanted to sell.

In frustration I had signed up with the Drop Ship Source Directory, (which by the way is excellent) at my own expense, and found a dropshipper for PDA’s myself. However, the company concerned had no way for anyone outside the US to sign up with them. I’d tried, but was getting nowhere. Out of desperation I suggested maybe selling Nature’s Sunshine products. It was something my wife had an account for and I could get them to deliver direct to the customer. It wasn’t something I was particularly interested in, and the product cost is low, and the margins aren’t huge, but it was SOMETHING to sell.

One of my big reservations about my ’second best’ product choice was that I could only get the stuff dropshipped to the UK and countries in Europe that accepted the Euro. OK, so thats a big market, but when you look at all the languages involved, and my site is just in English, then you are really down to just the UK. I was told by ABDevelopment this was not a problem.

If I had waited for ABDevelopment for a dropshipper then I could have been waiting a VERY long time. They were showing no inclination or sense of urgency to find me one. After all, why should they worry, it was my $8000 on the line, and not their money.

The killer blow came when Vicky announced that I should get back to ABDevelopment and ask for another mentor because she couldn’t schedule me in. So, they couldn’t get me a dropshipper and now they they couldn’t provide a mentor ! It couldn’t get any worse. Could it ?

I emailed Jason the very next day to let him know about the situation. I was getting extremely frustrated with the whole experience. I’d paid my money. Money that I simply could not afford, and I NEEDED to start earning it back ASAP. I had been led to believe that I would be getting a return on my money by the time the first credit card bill hit me. I couldn’t see how that was going to happen now.

I had forwarded Jason the emails from Vicky saying she couldn’t be my mentor as well as my last email to Vicky suggesting alternative products, seeing as they could find me a dropshipper. I said in the email that I would phone Jason, which I did. I never got to speak to him and two days later I STILL hadn’t received a reply to my email.

By this time I was getting very concerned and worries were starting to creep into my mind that maybe this was just some big scam. After all, think about it, take $8000 from someone, send them a box with a printout of a $39 ebook, and then disappear off the face of the earth. The sucker at the other end is thinking it must be legit. After all, they sent you something and you spoke to them a few times. That was what was running through my mind.

Here is the email I sent through to ABDevelopment on a different email address, as I was getting nowhere with Jason’s.

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Hi,

Here I am, over 3 weeks and $8000 later and I still have not been assigned a mentor. At least not one who has either contacted me with any mentoring, or lasted more than a week.

I have paid my money and I want to get started. When I paid my $8000 I was led to believe that I should start seeing money coming in within about 2 - 3 months. How is that going to be achieved if I can’t speak to anyone and over 3 weeks have gone by ?

I’ve tried phoning a couple of times tonight. The 888-277-1315 number goes through to an answering machine. The mailbox for this is full. I’ve tried calling 001 435 628 6473. This number is also not answered and redirects to another phone that is also not answered.

Come on guys ! I’m $8000 out of pocket. I expect better than this. Also, emails I have sent with basic questions remain unanswered.

I’ve just given up a temporary job so that I could concentrate on getting my web business up and running and recoup my money quickly andhopefully start building a web business that can make me a living. I’m desperate to get going but I can’t even get started with this if nobodywill talk to me ! It’s really not good enough.

–
Chris O’Connor

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Yes, thats right. I gave up the temporary job that I was doing. The temporary job that I’d taken on to fit around the work needed on the Gorilla Website Marketing Course. And when it appeared that the job was going to get in the way of the meetings with ABDevelopment I gave up the job. Hey, at least one of use was commited to trying to make this work !

And the reason why I was seemingly being ignored ? They said they were merging with another company and had been ‘busy’. Yeah, don’t worry about your core business, the paying customer, after all you’ve already got his money.

The very next day I got an email from a guy called Scott Dimmick. I’m not going to paste Scott’s email here because it contains a lot of personal contact details for Scott (home phone number etc.). Scott did not work for ABDevelopment and I assumed he was from the other company they were merging with. I believe it was CMGHelp.com . Although Scott may have just been recruited on a temporary basis, I don’t know for certain.

Let me make something clear. Scott was a very nice guy and very professional. Like I’ve said before, I’m an IT guy and I’ve been creating web sites for years, so the technical aspect of creating a web site was no problem whatsoever. Had it been, then I’m sure Scott would have been able to help me through it, although how far you would get with no knowledge of building a web site and only 4 sessions of 30 - 60 minutes God only knows !

My sessions with Scott were primarily about cosmetic issues. I didn’t always agree with Scott, but he was the expert and I always listened and implemented what he suggested. Lets face it, the reason I was doing this course was because the sites I was creating weren’t pulling in money. I was trying to find out what that missing something was. What would have been the point in me arguing with a guy who WAS doing well with his sites. I was there to learn from him.

I put a hell of a lot of time and effort into my site. Scott and I didn’t particularly agree on things like the colour scheme, but that was really about it. We got on well and our sessions were pleasant. What was nice was that I gave him a few tips about useful sites and how I’d done certain things on my sites, so we both learnt a bit from each other. He was a good guy, and the advice he gave me about layout made a lot of sense. It was basic common sense stuff. Nothing radical. But the important thing was that it was stuff that I should have been doing but wasn’t, and he had picked up on that. Our sessions never seemed like teacher and student sessions. It felt to me more like a couple of blokes having a friendly chat about how best to lay a page out so it looked good. There wasn’t a huge transfer of knowledge. None was needed. I was sorry when our sessions came to an end.

One point of note here that I will revisit in a future post, is that months later I started getting a few emails from people claiming that they had been scammed (yes, you can imagine who by). In all of the emails I got the one guy that emerged as clean, and liked by everyone, was Scott Dimmick.

I was still desperate to try and get to the stage where some of the money I had been told to expect would start coming in. I wanted to do anything possible to try and catch up with the time ABDevelopment had lost. I knew my upcoming sessions were going to involve using Zeus so I downloaded the free version so that I could get to grips with it and be able to hit the ground running when the marketing sessions came around.

My early experiences of Zeus were not good !