As soon as OnlyWire.com launched a while back, I thought it was pretty cool. I even said OnlyWire was great for internet marketers.

If you haven’t heard of OnlyWire, it’s a social bookmarking tool that lets you bookmark websites to all your social bookmarking accounts with one click. Kind of like a mass-submission software for spamming social bookmark websites would do.

Why a regular web user would need more than one social bookmarking account, I’m not sure.

But this was the perfect tool for internet marketers that wanted to jump into the social media craze without doing much work.

So, considering I didn’t need OnlyWire to post to my sole del.icio.us account, I hadn’t logged in to my OnlyWire account for 6 months or more. But then I got an email the other day that reminded me of the service.

There were four parts…

The friendly introduction thanking you for using the service and reminding you that you actually signed-up for this and should therefore not report it as spam:

Dear OnlyWire User:

Thank you for signing up with OnlyWire - the fastest, easiest way to submit web content to all your social bookmarking sites automatically.

Throwing the product description in there makes for a nice transition to the next part…

The bragging and gloating making the service sound amazing and reinforcing the idea that you made a good decision by signing-up for it:

Over the past year, OnlyWire has become the most popular bookmark submission tool on the Internet and has won some notable acclaim. OnlyWire also became a valuable member of SNiPiTRON, LLC, a web-based software development company that provides Bookmarking and Collaboration tools for capturing, organizing and sharing bookmarks, content, and files with clients, co-workers and friends. With the SNiPiTRON platform, OnlyWire has now become the Number One Bookmarking Tool on the web.

Then they state the reason you should use OnlyWire again, even if you got bored with it:

We have made many improvements to OnlyWire. With these enhancements we are pleased to launch OnlyWire 2.0. Using a stable, secure and optimized platform for enhanced performance and reliability, OnlyWire 2.0 is BETTER and FASTER. Some of the recent improvements include: faster submission processes, increased bookmark links and improved functionality (to mention just a few). We are very proud of these enhancements and urge you to check out the new release at www.OnlyWire.com.

At this point you should be really excited about how awesome OnlyWire is and can’t imagine life without it. Which means you are primed for…

The “oh yeah, we’re going to start charging for the service” details:

With this new release, OnlyWire is implementing a “Pay or Promote” program. To continue to use OnlyWire, we are asking all existing users to choose an account option – one is FREE and the other is a paid version. The choices follow:

  1. FREE version — To continue to use OnlyWire for FREE, all you need to do is add the Bookmark & Share button to your website. To choose this option and to add the Bookmark & Share Button to your website’s homepage, click here.

  2. PAID version —If you do not want to add the Bookmark & Share button to your homepage, you can simply pay a small fee of $2.99 per month or a discounted annual fee of $24.99 (a 30% savings). You can pay this fee via credit or debit card. To sign up, click here.

They have the gall to start charging a monthly fee for their service! That is anti-Web 2.0 if I’ve ever seen it.

But there’s a simple solution to this dilemma…

Remember how I said this was a great service for internet marketers? Well, any time internet marketers find a good concept, hundreds of them will copy it.

Here’s the proof - projects on Get a Freelancer and Script Lance.

Out of the hundreds of clones, a few survive and even attract a few users. So all you have to do is find one of these sites and use it instead.

Like this one - Social Marker. It looks like a worthy substitute.

It’s not like the $2.99 per month is a lot of money, but it’s pointless to pay for such a service. Heck, you could buy web hosting for $2.99 per month and you should end up with a positive ROI.

It’s also the principal of the matter! No spammer is going to stand for a $2.99 monthly charge!

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Something I’ve been wondering for a while, even more so now that technology is rapidly improving and expanding, is…

What happens when a guru can no longer hide behind his ebook?

Future internet marketing guru.

The thing with ebooks is that you can write some crap down, come up with good sales copy, and then make a bunch of sales. You don’t even have to write the book yourself; you could get someone else to answer your questions, or resort to the ever-popular “copy and paste” method.

So not only don’t you have to be an expert, you don’t have to know jack!

That has been changing to an extent in recent years, what with all the popular seminars, teleconferences, and DVD packages. But even then, the only additional requirement is a little bit of public speaking skill.

Even if you’re presenting live, you’re still giving your own speech, which could just be a few hot points from your ebook. Then you’re done.

But today, people crave more. They crave personalized advice, action plans designed specifically for them.

But how many “one hit wonder” internet marketing gurus can help beyond what’s in their book?

I don’t know, and they don’t care. They don’t care because phone consultations are typically reserved for big B2B consulting services charging $500-1000 per hour.

But VOIP and live chat and that kind of stuff is gaining popularity. There’s even this new way to monetize your website called Speak To Me.

It takes the one-on-one phone consultation but makes it very easy for both an expert and the customer, eliminating nearly all the former “barriers to entry” on both sides.

I guess it’s like a widget that makes phone calls with just a couple clicks. But the point here is that gurus will desperately cling to their ebook thrones, while secretly wishing they were raking in the big bucks by giving out personal advice.

As I mentioned, anyone can play the ebook game. But it takes a true expert to dish out advice over the phone. (Advice that’s worth paying for, at least. Maybe SpeakToMe needs a built-in “dumb guru, refund my charges” button!)

So what do you think? Will gurus stick to their intense sales letters and ebooks, or will they risk their reputation in the phone consultation gold rush?

You can probably guess which side I’m taking! (Sorry to be the bearer of bad news, but unless the gurus outsource their phone consults to real experts, Speaktome will only be as profitable as BlogRush…)

Photo credit: F.S.M.

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The other day I got a cheesy email from a so-called Silicon Valley start-up…

Hi,
we are a startup www.hyperwebenable.com based on silicon valley.
providing next generation blogging service.
we have seen your blog its very interesting we request to write review
about our service in your blog it will be useful to all your readers .
We will be happy to provide more info about our service.
Thanks and regards

Apparently they thought they could bypass my $3000 review fee by using impeccable grammar and saying that their service is useful to all my readers. But it’s never that simple in the dog-eat-dog world of internet marketing.

But luckily for them, I thought this would make a good post, so here we go…

The domain was weird enough I almost skipped by it, but funny looking enough I checked it out - hyperwebenable.com.

Just look at the domain, it’s funny. But once I looked it a while, I realized it’s “hyper web enable” which must mean something like “making you able to be on the web at hyper speeds.”

Free hosting, right? Like getting a blogspot subdomain? (But at warped speed, of course!)

Nope. I was surprised - you actually get a real domain, for free.

The only catch - you choose from a dropdown menu of domains. You can’t just pick whatever you want. (There are some nice domains on the list though, like giveawaycity.com.)

Sounds pretty good, right? But what’s in it for them?

(Always ask yourself this, because there is no such thing as a free lunch.)

It appears to me that they are giving out free sites in order to build a large network of publishers so they can sell ad space in large quantities over the network.

They provide the money and infrastructure, you do the work, and then they make lots more money from advertising. It’s a clever idea.

I didn’t see this mentioned in the terms, but I bet the website publishers have to meet some sort of minimum traffic requirements in order to keep their site from being closed down and the domain given to someone else. Otherwise HyperWebEnable would be wasting money on dormant sites.

Even so, it could maybe possibly be a neat way to get started online for free.

Just remember to read the terms for things like who owns and controls the domain name, whether or not you can place your own ads on the site, etc. Also, could they seize control of your site at any time? Did you agree to turn over copyright of all your work to them once it’s published on the site?

I couldn’t find any of that stuff specifically in the terms, but those are just concerns I would have if I were starting a business and hosting a website with them.

This looks like it would be better for someone doing a hobby site, not for beginning a long-term venture.

* For example, they mention that you can make money with your site. But that doesn’t necessarily mean you can put third-party ads on the site. It might just mean that you can refer others to HyperWebEnable and then get a $1 reward for each referral.

And they don’t exactly have a clean record of customer satisfaction.

But props to the founders for their ingenuity, even if the execution was less than stellar…

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It’s not everyday you’re presented with a truly irresistible offer. Sure, the $67 ebooks about making $89,251.56 overnight by writing one article on a blogspot blog are tempting, but they’re so prevalent. If you miss one, there will be a new one the next day.

(And yes, the next one will still have that “wait! save $5 if you order now” offer when you try to close the page.)

Well, yesterday I was presented with a very kind - almost irresistible - offer. The kind offer, from a gentleman we’ll call Sammy Smitters, went something like this:

“You can [...] Continue Reading…

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In the latest news of epic FAILs by internet marketing gurus, you’ll see that BlogRush is shutting down.

It comes as no surprise to me - I switched to running BlogCrap widgets long ago as I predicted from the start that BlogRush would be useless. (Actually I didn’t switch, because I never bothered with BlogRush in the first place.)

If you read the sales letter explanation, you’ll see an interesting point:

We have received several offers & inquiries about acquiring BlogRush, but we are choosing not to go that route. While many might think this is crazy, we truly feel it’s [...] Continue Reading…

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Once again, Blog Action Day has amassed numerous bloggers throughout the world to raise awareness of a certain issue. Last year I did a little volunteer copy writing to help the environment, and this year I’ll be helping an issue that hits a little closer to home.

That is… poverty. See, poverty is a common theme amongst almost all “Make Money Online” bloggers. Not just on Blog Action Day, but almost every single day.

Whether it’s the story of get-rich-quick schemes gone wrong, or getting scammed out of lots of money, to hard work with mediocre results and [...] Continue Reading…

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Wouldn’t it be nice if spammers gave us a way to opt-out of their spam blog comments?

Well, some spammers are considerate enough to do that:

(Click picture to see larger version.)

How considerate!

To repay the favor, I have left the spammer’s email and IP address, so that you can manually block them through your WP admin panel if you bother doing that.

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