Tag Archives ⇒ Review

List Building – Reviews

· Brandon Hann

Setting up a ‘reviews’ page is a great idea to help promote the products and services you have listed on your landing pages. It might not come as a surprise, but today, more and more people are trusting what the Internet has to say about the quality and effectiveness of new products. This is causing less effectiveness over traditional advertising.

What is a review page?


Just as it sounds, it’s a place where people can discuss your products and website. If you’re running a blog, you might already have somewhat of a review system in place and that’s your comment space. Each post you make has the capability of receiving comments from everyone that reads it. By the way, make sure you read my tips about comments while you’re here.

Giving your users access to such content is very important to help sell your stuff. Of course, when you make your own website, you’re going to biased about your products and people can see right through that. It’s not to say that you’re lying, but people want to really know what the facts are.

How important are reviews and testimonials?

Ask yourself these questions: when you made your last purchase, how much research did you do on the product? If you did any, how much weight did a user’s personal review of the product hold up against the manufacturer’s description of the product?

Look at it this way, if your product starts making it around the Internet, people will review it anyway, so you might as well put some of these comments on your own site to help people along. Using review pages in conjunction with your landing pages will create a successful marketing plan.

What not to do

  • DON’T lie – Making up fake reviews and testimonials will only take you so far. Eventually someone will buy your product and if it’s not like your fake reviews said, they will blast out the truth. In time, your site will be the only one offering positive reviews on your product. And how bad will that look?!
  • DON’T disparage – Never disparage a competitor’s product that’s similar to yours. Even if yours is truly better, putting down another business will only harm your reputation and image.
  • DON’T ignore comments – If you ignore negative comments, you won’t have the chance to improve what’s wrong. Also, flooding a space with only positive remarks can have the same effect as making up reviews. Somewhere else, the truth will come out.

Go look for reviews

It’s true that not everybody will care to write positive comments for you. If you are selling products, you should go out and ask your clients to say a few things about their experience. Offer them a free link on your website or something.

If you notice your business is getting listed on sites like Yelp.com, start linking to them to show your customers you’re not afraid of presenting 3rd party information whether it’s negative or not.

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Quibids.com Review

· Brandon Hann

Pronounced kwi-bids as in half of the word ‘quick’, Quibids.com provides an interesting take on the auction format. I wrote a really short auction summary about this site already alongside a comparison to eBay, but after watching (and participating with) the site for the last couple of days, I decided to dive right in and write up a review.

There are many people out there asking if this site and others like it are scams. While it’s easy to think like that considering you can get products at huge discounts (sometimes as high as 97% off), you really need to look under the surface to find that this is completely legitimate! You may be asking yourself how a company can afford to give away products as such discounted rates and that is where the magic comes in!

UPDATE: One of my visitors came to me and said he wrote an eBook about Quibids and that it contained all sorts of tips and tricks on how to win items from Quibids, so I asked him to send me a copy. I’m probably the biggest skeptic I know, so I just had to see and I must say that it was actually a really good read! Of course there are no sure ways to beat the Quibids system, but there are some logical steps you can take to increase your chances. See below for a review on this eBook.

Is Quibids.com a scam?

The answer is NO. The game is played with mathematics, timing and a little bit of luck. You as the bidder can bid on anything you want and as much as you want, but be careful…each bid only adds $0.01 to the item and costs you $0.60. Confused yet?! I’ll go over all this is a bit.

Ok, since Quibids is a penny auction, it’s obvious that the bids only increase by 1 cent or in some cases, 2, 10 and 20 cents. The exciting part of this format is that the final values stay relatively low and you can sometimes walk out of there with a $700 item for about $20. Don’t be fooled though–this statement is very similar to saying you can walk into a Vegas casino and take $3500 off a roulette table by betting only $100. It’s doable, but the odds are against you.

How does Quibids.com work?

They sell you bids and then allow you to use those bids to bid on real products. These products are always very popular items such as Apple iPads, MacBooks, home theatre systems, Blu-ray movies, etc. This is so people are more likely to bid. Here’s how the site breaks down:

  • You buy bids for $0.60 each.
  • Each bid adds $0.01 to the auction price.
  • You compete with other bidders.
  • Each auction has a time limit.
  • Any bids placed within the last 15 seconds brings the timer back to 15 seconds.
  • As certain values are reached, this resettable timer is reduced to 10 seconds.
  • If you are the high bidder when the timer reaches zero, you win.

After you win an item, you pay your bid amount plus shipping. Don’t forget to take into account the amount you spent on bids in the first place! One advantage that Quibids has over other similar sites is that if you lose, they let you take the total amount of how many bids you placed to put in as a credit toward buying the item at full price. But they get you here too because the “retail price” is sometimes higher than an actual price you might find at retailers or online shops such as Amazon.com.

How is this profitable?

In case you haven’t seen the business-end of things yet, here you go. Quibids is in the business of selling bids. For just about every bid, they make $0.60. I say “just about” because they do offer free bids, cheap vouchers to get extra bid packs and referral bonuses. But for the sake of this example, we’ll stick with $0.60 per bid.

If you saw an Apple iPad sell for $217.80, Quibids just made $13,068. This is how they can afford to lose money on
the sale. After the auction, they simply order you an iPad at retail price which depending on the model can be as low as $499 and ship it to you.

Of course, not every iPad sells for that much. I think the lowest one I saw was $17. Still not bad though, considering Quibids made about $1020 on that sale. The huge savings are passed on to you courtesy of the hundred other bidders that wanted that item as well.

My two cents

I’ve been on the site for about 3 days now and I’ve placed a few bids, but so far I haven’t won anything. I even chased a Blu-ray movie and got beat out because I couldn’t watch the auction. That leads me to my first comment. To play this game, you have to constantly watch. Of course you could use their Bid-O-Matic feature that will place bids on your behalf after you designate how many bids you want to use and what your maximum is, but you still have to be vigilant.

If you want to save your money, your best bet is to watch and watch and watch. Jumping in at the right time seems to be the only true way to win. When is the right time? That’s a tough question because it is easy to sit there and hope everyone else either gives up or goes to sleep. I even expected that people would be working and therefore unable to watch the end of the auction. This is not practical because this site is accessible all over the world, so no matter what day of the week it is or what time of day, there are always thousands of people on the site looking for good deals.

Plus, there’s no restrictions on who can jump in an auction or when. It might be you and one other bidder down to the wire and then all of a sudden, a new guy jumps in with fresh bid counts and maybe even more money than you. My advice if you’re planning on using Quibids is to bid on and win a few of the smaller items first so you can get familiar with the whole process. Once you feel comfortable enough, try something bigger, but always keep this in mind: no matter what anyone ever tells you, there is no “system” to beating this site and getting a good deal. You have to have a little luck and sometimes a lot of money.

Quibids Winners Guide

Anyone who follows my site knows that I never “sell” you anything. I’m here simply to voice an opinion and hopefully help someone along the way. With that said, you can rest assured that if I ever post a link on this site to a product it’s because I either own it myself or I have used it enough to make a comment on it. In this case, I was given a copy of this Quibids buying guide that is supposed to help you win at Quibids auctions. Naturally, I felt like this was just another spammy eBook that contain common sense knowledge and “strategies” that don’t work. I was wrong!

While there are certainly no ways to beat the Quibids system and ensure never-ending victories, there are a few things you can look out for and in time, you can theoretically increase your chances of winning. The eBook is 10 pages in length and doesn’t contain one picture. I mention that because without pictures, you get 10 full pages of actual text that will help you at Quibids. It was written by Mike Tjosvold and he sells the eBook from his Facebook page for $10.99 and that will end up being pennies compared to what you will save on Quibids.

For more information, view the Facebook page for the Ultimate Winning Guide for Quibids. If you decide to buy it, remember these two things: 1. On the PayPal checkout page, tell Mike that Ledfrog.com referred you and 2. There’s a money-back guarantee if you’re not happy with it.

It looks like the guy who wrote that guide just simply disappeared! Sorry…it actually was pretty useful.

My last piece of advice is that if you’re shooting for a big dollar item, plan to buy it at the retail price because you’ll hate yourself in the morning if you spent $200 trying to get a $500 iPad and didn’t end up paying the price difference!

DomainMonkeys.com

· Brandon Hann

I’ve dealt with my share of registrars in the past, but this one is by far the strangest. I’m writing this blog entry because I want to share my experience with the transferring of a domain I have registered with them while the process is going on to shed some light on any issues that occur for your future knowledge.

First off, I used SnapNames.com to acquire my full name as a domain so I can redirect it to this site. Since SnapNames is a domain backordering service, it needs to utilize many registrars in order to win the backorder race from other services like it. Because of this, any domain you ‘win’ from SnapNames will have been registered at a random registrar and then login details will be emailed to you in order to manage the domain.

The problems arise when you use one registrar for all your domains and you now have this new domain somewhere out there in a space that might not allow the same controls as your preferred registrar. The other problem is that you can’t transfer a domain until it’s been at the current registrar for 60 days.

Anyway, SnapNames registered my new domain over at DomainMonkeys.com and I must say that I’m surprised this company gets any business with the way it’s run and the lack of services and features that you can use on your domains. Regardless, I want my new domain in my GoDaddy account and on Sunday (1-10) I placed a transfer order there. In the past, all you needed to do was unlock the domain from the losing registrar and then retrieve the transfer codes to input into the site, but now, you have to wait for the “Transfer Concierge” to do things.

So I wait. And what happens? Well, because DomainMonkeys’ whois server is not using the standard port 80, no other whois servers can access it and therefore appears down. Now I have to wait for some type of human interaction on GoDaddy’s part to move this thing along.

As of this writing, I’m stuck of step 1 of 4 and the actual message I’m getting is:

Step 1: Initiate
Transfer is waiting for the Transfer Concierge to address a whois data problem. We were unable to get the whois data from the losing registrar. The Transfer Concierge will resolve this issue.
Recommended Action:
No customer action is required at this time.

I’ve already unlocked the domain and have even requested the authorization code, but since I can’t input it, I’m stuck waiting!

UPDATE – Jan 16, 2010

A couple days ago, I was moved up to step 3 which is the Accept or Decline step and normally when you receive an email from the losing registrar that someone is trying to transfer your domain away. At this point you can allow it or not. This is all contingent on two things: 1, the domain is not in “transfer lock” status and 2, you have the correct email address set for the admin contact. I have satisfied both of these requirements. I have the domain in “ok” status and is ready for transfer and I also have the right admin email address.

Easy enough, right? I should have been transferred by now. But no, I’m still waiting for that accept/reject email and there’s no way to force it through at DomainMonkeys.com! So, back at GoDaddy, it says that if the domain transfer is not accepted or rejected within 5 days, the transfer will proceed.

Well it looks like after about 7 days after everything was started, the domain is now resting comfortably in my GoDaddy account. I’m feel much better now.

Review of DomainMonkeys.com

If the first indicator of their professionalism didn’t come from the fact that their name contains the word “monkeys” in it, then maybe a quick look at their homepage did the trick. Here’s a screenshot as of today (Jan 18th, 2010):

DomainMonkeys.com homepage

The rule is and always has been, never judge a book by its cover, but this website is lacking everything but the cover. First off, my impression is that this company is simply one of the hundreds, if not thousands of ‘dummy’ registrars setup by sites like SnapNames.com, Pool.com and whoever else in an effort to add more outlets to snap up all the deleting domains coming out each day. I came to this conclusion because I discovered this site after a successful auction with SnapNames. They also don’t sell any other services or even try to offer you any type of support.

Down to the nitty gritty. There’s five links on the homepage. There’s one for the Privacy Policy, Terms and Conditions, WHOIS, Support and my favorite: Domain Updates. The first three require no explanation so we’ll start with the support page. It’s a very basic form that you have to manually fill out completely and this is also where you can apparently order new domains, although I wouldn’t recommend it because I can only guess as to where you’re supposed to type in your credit card number. And even after I guessed, I’d probably still be wrong. They do have a support number located at a 303 area code, but I get the feeling that I’d be dialing a rotary phone sitting on a tv tray in someone’s living room.

Updating your domain for those of you who use sites like GoDaddy, Register.com, Moniker, etc. is fairly an easy process and these days, you can probably add all sorts of free services to spice up your cool domain. The best part about DomainMonkeys’ domain update page is the login requirements!

As an example, say your domain is: LEDFROG.COM, your email is: nothing@nothing.com and your password is: passw0rd. This is how you login:

You click on the Update link from the homepage and you’re taken here:

DomainMonkeys.com Login page

In the account verification box, you are to type in this string: ledfrog.comnothing@nothing.compassw0rd

No joke. That’s the login. All three. All together. No spaces. Plain text.

…

Once you’re in, you’re golden until you want to transfer your domain to someone else. More on this later as the developments of my own transfer unfold!

Final decision: I will never use DomainMonkeys to register any new domains and I’m likely to never deal with them again unless I’m forced to by SnapNames.

PhoneDetective.com Review

· Brandon Hann

My friend had some issues with a random caller on her cell phone, so I decided to try out one of those reverse phone lookup services online to see what, if any, kind of information I could find on someone. Of course, all of these sites allow you to search any number for free, but if you want more information, you must pay.

Anyway, this site touts the availability of all this information:

Search results include:

  • Owner name and address
  • Phone type – landline or mobile
  • People search results
  • Household members
  • And more

At any rate, my intention in this operation was to at least get an idea of who might be behind these calls, so I opted to pay the $14.95 (I believe the site changes its pricing often because right now its saying $9.95). Here’s what I got for my fifteen dollars.

tracer-report
I’ve blocked out the “sensitive” information, but you can get the idea of what kind of information I got. Now, since running this report, I’ve gotten more information on the caller by simply talking to my girlfriend about it and I must say, the person who was on the other end of the phone does not match the person that showed up on the report! Also, the links you see only point toward more services you can pay for. These come in two flavors: a one-time, one-search charge or a monthly, unlimited searches charge.

I also want to point out that the report listed three addresses from persons with the same (or similar) name. To me, this was nothing more than a name search you’d do in the white pages of the phone book. In other words, useless. Imagine how long the report would be if the person’s name was John Smith?!

In conclusion, I didn’t particularly find any useful information from this website and I’m sure no others would be better. However, the site does NOT guarantee any amount of information you’ll get on the report, so I can’t complain too much. It was a crap shoot to begin with. This ‘review’ isn’t intended to sway you one way or another on using PhoneDetective.com or any similar site–I just wanted to share my experience.

Good luck!

Last words: Aside from you being a private detective where you might actually get some use out of the unlimited searching membership, I doubt you’ll get any real value from these services.