Avoid the scams, find out which Business Opportunities actually work
10th September 2012
Filed under: General Opportunities,Internet Marketing — Ben @ 8:57 am

Everybody loves a bargain, especially if it can be resold for a profit. That’s why I have often bought collections or “bulk lots” of items and then split the contents to sell on separately.

Years ago it was quite profitable to buy private collections of DVDs and then sell them one by one.

Typically people would list their entire collections on eBay when they were having a clear-out or needed some extra cash. And typically they would lump the gems in with the ordinary without realising.

Certain DVDs were quite valuable as they were “out of print”. Threads, Lock Stock and Two Smoking Barrels and Blade Runner were three that spring to mind. Each would sell for £30 or more without difficulty.

Therefore if you could find one of those DVDs in a private collection and win the auction for a reasonable amount, it was possible to make your money back by selling 50% to 75% of the lot but then perhaps double your outlay with the remaining DVDs.

Easy money back then. Now, of course, DVDs of feature films are practically worthless when you can buy them for £3 brand new in Asda.

Other bulk lots can still be split. You just need to find a motivated seller.

Here’s what I found and it cost me just over £100, delivered from the US:

Picture of bulk lot of internet marketing products

The seller was a US marketer who quit the whole “internet marketing” scene about 3 years ago following a partnership that went wrong. He’d recently found a load of stuff in a box when cleaning out his office and wanted rid of it all.

Definitely a motivated seller.

It’s not surprising that some of these products were still wrapped up in their cellophane. The person who sold these to me was, for a time, quite successful and so he most likely received products for free before they were released as the product creator would want him to help promote the launch i.e. be a joint venture partner.

Had he actually chosen to buy the products, he would probably have at least opened them. As it turned out he put most of them into a box and simply forgot about them.

The contents were as follows:

Product Creation Workshop – 2 DVDs

This is a workshop that took place at one of Bob Puddy’s Focus 4 the Future seminars in the US. There’s a notice at the beginning that states it was in Seattle, WA on the 7th July 2006.

Mike Filsaime, Gary Ambrose and Keith Wellman share their thoughts about product creation with the seminar audience.

The production values are low – this is basically just a single camera on a tripod trying to catch all of the ‘action’. The sound is a bit poor, it doesn’t help that the three speakers share 2 microphones.

Still, not a bad DVD set, worth watching if just to pick up a few tips about creating simple products. And by products here they just mean internet marketing products – ebooks, interviews, CDs, DVDs and so on. Cheap to make with large markups (or at least the markups were large in 2006 when it was filmed!).

Teleseminar Trade Secrets

This is a DVD by Tracy Repchuck. I don’t have much info about Tracy but from what I can gather she started becoming more ‘famous’ in internet marketing around 2007. I did see her speak at Bob Puddy’s excellent Coventry seminar in October of that year.

Tracy went on to speak at the World Internet Summit and now appears to be a regular on the seminar circuit. She is also, according to her blog, “The World’s No.1 Woman Speaker for Internet Marketing”.

2 DVDs by Shawn Casey – $10k Club

From some quick Google research this appears to be a monthly subscription and costs $99 per month. The package I bought contained 2 DVDs that were unopened. It would be reasonable to assume that these were sent to the seller as ‘samples’ with the hope that he would view them and then promote them for Shawn.

Same List More Profit DVD

Gary Ambrose and Keith Wellman are the two speakers on this DVD and again it appears to be a presentation taken from an internet marketing event.

Better production values here that the Product Creation Workshop. Content is OK. It’s another 2006 production and from a bit of research it seems Gary and Keith held a little workshop at the same venue as a Michael Penland “Internet Marketing Super Conference” in December 2006.

The deal was that if you bought tickets for Penland’s seminar through Gary and Keith’s affiliate link you got free entry to their workshop whilst you were at the main seminar.

The product’s sales page is still online: http://www.samelistmoreprofit.com/

Yanik Silver’s Web Copy Secrets Presentation at Dan Kennedy’s “Last Ever Copywriting Seminar” CD

Don’t know anything about this except that it’s a CD so I imagine it’s audio only.

Focus Marketing Seminars Live, Dallas, March 16 – 18, 2007 – 12 DVD set

Interesting fact about this seminar – it was one of the very first, maybe even the very first seminar to be broadcast live over the internet.

Robert Puddy sold tickets to the live webcast for $99 which included the DVDs in the post afterwards. I bought a ticket and watched it live from the UK. A prime example of a great event. Even though the speakers sold from the stage they still shared excellent information before taking 10 minutes to sell.

Presenters were Robert Puddy, Tellman Knudson, Donna Fox, Nathan Anderson, Keith Wellman, Harris Fellman, Gary Ambrose, Marc Harty, Craig Perrine, Scott Paton and Ken McArthur.

Expert Positioner Software

This appears to be a CD containing software from Glenn Dietzel. On his website it says the price is $997.

And that, apart from seeing Dietzel speak once in London, is all I know about this one.

The Secret DVD

This is the DVD that was made based on the book. There are plenty of fans and there are plenty of cynics. It is probably worth a watch I guess on a rainy afternoon, or if I have trouble sleeping.

The Freedom Class by Tim Brocklehurst

This is the DVD set of a $10k per ticket seminar held in 2008. This one item is the reason I bought the whole lot seen in the photo above. I had wanted to see these DVDs at the time of release but not enough to pay the $1,000 that Brocklehurst charged when he released them in August 2008.

Here’s the blurb from the back:

“In 3 days, Tim Brocklehurst assisted 15 people to set up their own automated Internet business from scratch.

Each person left The Freedom Class with a live working web business selling a product on the back-end through a viral front-end which helps it grow automatically.

Using this structured, easy-to-navigate DVD of The Freedom Class, combined with the MVS software, you can do the same…”

“MVS” here stands for MyViralSpiral which was the software that Tim sold from the stage when he was a speaker for the World Internet Summit. For some reason he took down all the hosted MVS sites and the customer forums at the beginning of 2010.

It will be very, very interesting to see what a $10,000 seminar involves. It’ll also be interesting to see what happened to the attendees afterwards. It’s been 4 years now so their sites should have made them plenty of money having grown “automatically”.

And after viewing all of the above, it may be worth giving it a go making some money from the lot.

Surely there’s a little bit of profit in selling them on individually? Or are they just too “old”?

5th September 2012
Filed under: Betting — Ben @ 8:17 am

In my ongoing quest to find decent betting systems and opportunities I took a chance and ordered the “Automated Winners” horse racing betting system.

This purchase decision came only after recieving a glowing email recommendation from Matt Fyles – the man behind the 30 Minute Unitrader, Ternary, V System, Heptamatic and more.

(Matt Fyles and the 30 Minute UniTrader System is a page containing a full review of Fyles’ UniTrader system).

In his promotional email Matt said:

How would you like an income of up to £975.45 every day by doing nothing more that placing bets guaranteed to deliver “automated wins”.

The sales page promised that all you needed to do was log in each day, discover what the selections were and then place your bets.

So that’s what I did.

Sadly the system failed in my test.

Big time.

The recommended bank of 50 points was swiftly reduced by more than 60% in a matter of just a few weeks after following their selections.

And all this even though buyers were promised that they could turn £5 into hundreds of pounds everyday.

Fortunately this product was sold through Clickbank who have emailed me to let me know that my refund has been processed today.

What a waste of time.

The full review and results can be found on the main site:

Review of the Automated Winners betting system – including test results

And so the search goes on. Do you know of a decent tipster or betting system?

Or are they all a waste of time?