Archive for the ‘Reviews’ Category

WPMUDev Review – A Little Slice Of Bloggers Heaven

You may remember that in an earlier post I talked about weighing things up and examining products and services based on the value they deliver. It’s one of those business terms – called ‘return on investment’ and often abbreviated to ROI. It’s also one of those things that the average Joe (or Joeline) blogger doesn’t give a whole lot of thought to – which can cause you to miss out on spectacular value if you aren’t thinking that way.

That’s a big word – spectacular – but every now and then you will come across a site or service that does just that – provides spectacular value. And if you are REALLY lucky you will come across a site that offers spectacular support to go along with the spectacular value. I think I’ve used that ‘s’ word enough, so lets get on with the review!

I first discovered WPMUDev a couple of years ago. I had set up WordPress Multi-User (aka WPMU) for the first time and was looking around to see what plugins were available that were specific to the WPMU environment. I have to say that WPMUDev was a little rough around the edges back then. My impression at the time was that it was a couple of guys building or adapting plugins for WPMU. I bought a 1 month membership, downloaded the plugins I needed and went on my merry way.

Well, I have to say that in the years since I first visited WPMUDev they have come an awfully long way. That ‘couple of guys’ website has turned into a team of designers, programmers and support staff and they have created a thriving community of loyal, serious bloggers. The loyalty comes from the excellent support that the WPMUDev team provides. They have several ‘front line’ support staff who can answer most questions about the WPMUDev products. If they can’t answer it then it is referred to the relevant designer or programmer. The bulk of support is provided in the WPMU Dev forums, but live support is also available for members.

The support staff aren’t your average ‘here’s the script and make sure you spend no more than 10 minutes on each support enquiry’ kind of people. I can personally vouch for the level of expertise these guys have as I applied for a support position and whilst I got as far as the shortlist, I was unsuccessful in the end. I have around 30 years programming experience,20 years online and 5 or 6 years using WordPress – so I’m no slouch. The ‘interview’ process included providing those sort of details as well as some tests that involved providing sample answers to some real support requests. Needless to say that whilst I was a bit disappointed that I didn’t make the final cut, the guys who did are doing one of the things WPMUDev does best – providing excellent support.

I use several WPMUDev products myself including the Anti-Splog plugin and the EduBlogs theme at Work From Home Aussies. At one stage I had to disable signups at workfromhomeaussies due to the large number of people who were auto-creating and auto-posting spam blogs (splogs) there. Anti-Splog is a powerful plugin for detecting splogs and it allowed me to ‘re-open’ the site. I still get plenty of people TRYING to create splogs, but nowadays they don’t ever go live as Anti-Splog detects and disables them straight away.

I’m also using the WordPress Membership plugin over at Blog Membership Scripts. That’s just a fairly new site, so there’s not a whole lot to see there yet, but the WordPress Membership plugin will allow me to provide premium content to members once I have the content in place.

One of the areas that places WPMUDev head and shoulders above most other online product and service companies is the support, both from a customer support point of view and the work that is ongoing in the background. Plugins are being improved and updated all the time. In fact, the very day that WordPress 3.1 was released, the WPMUDev development team had already updated most, if not all of their plugins to be compatible with WordPress 3.1.

Of course the plugins and themes are top quality as well, and the combination of quality products and what I would describe as ‘almost over the top’ support is very rare these days.

With well over 100 plugins and a bunch of premium themes, WPMUDev is easily one of the best investments any serious blogger can make. For just $79 per month (cheaper if you take a 3 month or 12 month option!) you get access to virtually thousands of dollars worth of plugins and themes PLUS live and community/forum support from genuine experts PLUS detailed manuals.

WPMUDev really is right up at the top of the ‘ROI tree’. You can find out more at the WPMUDev website.

Instant Cash Empire – A GENUINE Review

Yes, you read that correctly. You have probably visited a bunch of pages that all purported to be reviews for Instant Cash Empire and every one turned out to be a sales pitch. This here is a genuine review of Instant Cash Empire based on what I’ve seen, what I know and what others are saying.

I was suspicious pretty much straight away for two reasons. Firstly because the email about this program came from Anik Singal and secondly because of the ‘income streams with 7 mouse clicks’ claim. Anik is what I like to call a ‘drive by’ guru. He puts programs up, makes lots of cash and then moves on to his next cash cow. He has a good sized list and plenty of JV marketers, so he could probably promote a pair of smelly socks and he would get a few sales. Anyhoo – this isn’t about Anik so lets look at Instant Cash Empire.

My original plan was to talk about the product promotion and then offer a link. I figured if people want to throw good money away at bad ideas I should at least make a few bucks in lieu of being able to say ‘I told you so’. Having seen what actual purchasers are saying, I decided against it as I think this program is going to tarnish the reputation of anyone who promotes it.

Like everyone who has seen Instant Cash Empire, I was taken to a web page with a video where Mike Harvey talks about this amazing system that produces income streams from ‘just 7 mouse clicks’. He starts by telling a story of debt and frustration and how he ‘burned his last credit card’ on an internet marketing seminar. To cut a long story short, he says a ‘guru’ sells a product from stage and makes $50k plus after the presentation. Later, in the bar, this guru is telling his guru buddies that he doesn’t sell the ‘real’ software to customers. He says the real software is on a DVD that he holds up and shows them – and it has made him millions of dollars.

After a few drinks the guru and his guru buddies leave. As this guru picks up his laptop, the DVD slips out. Mike then says that he grabbed it, intending on giving it back, but then changes his mind. Instead, he gets a programmer to hack the software, which he uses for a few months. Not content with software theft, he then gets his programmer to reverse engineer the software and turn it into ‘Instant Cash Empire’. Of course if this story were true he would be facing litigation from the software owner (i.e. the guru) as well as some felony charges.

Mike then goes on to explaining (in broad terms of course) that you can create an income stream in 2 minutes without doing anything other than clicking your mouse 7 times. His presentation has the usual ingredients – make big money – don’t do any work – clear your debt – write your own paychecks. He throws some figures around such as $69k in one day and $6k-$10k per day.  He also says that you will only get one chance at this because the page will be ‘ripped down’ in 30 minutes. Not surprisingly, when I went back an hour later, the page was still there. Shock!

At this point I was still skeptical but still planning to buy it myself so I could look it over, and was still going to add a link in this post. Then I stumbled across some reviews from people who actually bought the software. I was pretty amazed at how many people were critical of it so soon after launch and that influenced me to save my $27.

Given the laws regarding people who make income claims I suspect the FTC would raise an eyebrow at Instant Cash Empire. There are no income disclaimers on any of the pages I was taken to. The first email you receive from Mike will say:

“I’ll also tell you how to go and bank $100 in the next
5 hours by clicking your mouse button just 7 times.”

…and on the exit page for the video (i.e. if you exit the video page without clicking the ‘Download Now’ ) it says ‘Swipe our proven $477 a day cash site FREE’. The link on that page leads to a second page where, rather than being given anything free, you are offered a $10 discount (after providing your email address of course!). Apparently there is also an upsell to a more expensive coaching course.

Folks, please don’t get tricked into buying this sort of junk and avoid any ‘gurus’ who promote it. It plays on your emotions and the thrill of being able to make gobs of cash without doing hardly any work. The business model centers around, what we call in the blog community, splogs. Basically they are mass produced sites that offer nothing more than material copied from youtube and article directories. They don’t get traffic because Google *hates* them. Googles recent changes to their algorithm were partly to address the problem of duplicate, somewhat worthless content.

If you have bought the product yourself and have anything, good or bad, to say about it then please do leave a comment. I did mention that some actual purchaser reviews influenced me to not bother buying it myself and you can see those HERE.

Meshin Outlook Sidebar Review

A while back I wrote a ‘why I’m lovin’ Meshin’ post about the Meshin outlook sidebar. I’ve been using it for a few months now so I thought it might be worth re-visiting with a review.

First up, I am still using it. That’s a first for me. I’ve tried a few MS Outlook sidebars and most of them have lasted less than a week either because they made Outlook slow, or the crashed it or they simply didn’t do anything useful enough to be taking up a portion of my MS Outlook window real estate.

I probably don’t use Meshin anywhere near as much as I could (yet) but when I do – it saves me considerable time. Probably the most useful feature for me is one of its most basic functions… search. Search is fast and gives me a list of related messages which I just need to mouse over to view the contents of. I put it to the test today when I was talking on the phone. I needed some info that would usually take me, at the very least, a few minutes to find. Meshin to the rescue – I typed in a keyword and had found the message within about 15 seconds.

Meshin has other cool features that I mentioned last time I wrote about it such as linking together everything it can find about people, companies and the messages and attachments they have sent. Another cool feature I just found is the ‘Focus’ section. It lists ‘important’ messages at the top (though I’m not sure at this stage how it ranks importance) and then a list of recent messages below. These are grouped like ‘Last 46 minutes’, ‘Last 1 hour’,'Last 2 hours’ etc.

After using Meshin for a while you quickly get a good idea of what it’s all about. It’s about pulling together all of the little bits, pieces, snippets and scraps of information that relate to the people and businesses you communicate with and presenting it in an organized and very accessible way.

Automated Home Profits Review – Buyer Beware

As a rule I don’t like to post negative reviews – they tend to be subjective in many cases and most negative reviews that I’ve seen are driven by (sometimes quite extreme) emotions. However, I also don’t like to see people ripped off by very elaborate and deceptive marketing techniques.

I was searching around today and clicked on an ad that was for a work from home opportunity that looked legitimate. I was taken to a page that was written and laid out like a news story at NewsDaily7.com. By all means, click the link and have a look (it will open in a new window), but please don’t be drawn in by the very well written copy. At least read the rest of this blog post before you decide to do anything!

The ‘story’ looks very legitimate and very compelling. It all seems a little too good to be true though (nothing unusual about that!). I am a great believer in ‘due diligence’ so I did a search for ‘Automated Home Profits‘ and found an interesting and very eye opening blog post about this very program.

Please read the post HERE to find out a bit more about Automated Home Profits.

And please, NEVER spend your money without first looking for independent and/or unbiased reviews and comments about the program you are considering spending money on. The link above isn’t totally unbiased as the author has a link to another program at the bottom of the article. The content of the blog post and the comments that have been left are quite compelling though.

A Professional Mailer/Autoresponder For Free

For many people the toughest part of starting a business is the budget. That’s also one of the major advantages of starting that new business online – the costs are very low and there are some excellent free services and products out there.

I came across this one kind of by accident. I’d actually done some work for a client a year or two ago, integrating their autoresponder service. I was impressed back then by just how switched on this service was. They had an excellent API and an attitude that reminded me a bit of Dreamhost. Anyone who has hosted with Dreamhost will know what I’m talking about – their newsletters were sometimes the highlight of my day/week!

Anyway, I was browsing around and someone mentioned MailChimp. I’d not been to their site for a long time so I figured it would be worth a visit to see what was happening over there. I was really surprised (and pleased) to find that they offer a free account which allows you to build a list of up to 1,000 subscribers and send up to 6,000 messages per month.

That’s perfect for anyone who is starting a business and wanting to build a mailing list. You could be sending out a weekly, bi-weekly or monthly newsletter and you’ll be well under the monthly limit.

So why would they do that and what’s the catch?

There’s no catch – it’s just smart marketing. They know that the entrepreneurs among us will build that list beyond 1,000 and move up to one of their paid accounts. Presumably if you have 1,000+ on your list you are selling the occasional product or service, so the cost will more than justify itself. For those who never build a list of 1,000 many will quit after the first month or two. So whilst there is a cost to MailChimp in providing the service I guess that cost is more than covered by the new clients that it brings them.

I’ve used quite a few autoresponders in the past including AWeber and GetResponse and I can confidentally say that MailChimp beats them hands down on features, service and… well… they are just REALLY human (if that makes any sense)!

Click HERE to get started with your free MailChimp account.

Theme by NewWPThemes.com