Posted by Jason on June 27th, 2006 — in Society
I do quite a bit of business with my office supplies catalog company. Most times they seem to have everything and with same day delivery, it’s usually an easy choice, even if they may cost just a bit more. Last month was a particularly busy month as I completely outfitted the new office. This included 2 desks, a packing table (just a big desk really), 3 filing cabinets, storage cabinets, and a couple of chairs. When I place a normal order I usually get a free gift thrown in. I can’t even count how many flashlights, backpacks, tents, and tins of biscuits I have received. This time, however, because of the value of my order they threw in a couple of mp3 players.
Now normally, the gift of not one but 3 mp3 players would make anyone happy. So what if I already own one, I figured I could keep one in the car, one in the house, another for the plane, etc. Yesterday I set up the first of them. Now I didn’t expect an amazing mp3 player but I was already a bit weary of how light these things were, but I figured it was just Chinese ingenuity. The second bad sign was nowhere on the packaging did it say what size they were and no instructions came with them. Normally I wouldn’t care but moments after turning it on, I realized there were no words but just cryptic pictures. After around 15 minutes of trial and error I figured out how to get the thing to play. One of the first quirks is if you play it at a volume less the 20, it squeals. If I had the instructions I could check and see if that was a “feature” but I’m pretty sure it’s because they are just plain cheap. That being said, I still used it as it was free and I have a hard time not taking advantage of free stuff. Today, I realized how cheap it really was. When you remove the dead battery and put a new one in, it somehow loses all the info you had previously stored on it. Suddenly it was Groundhog Day and I had to recopy the music back to it if I wanted to use it. That was it for me and I just dumped them.
What amazes me is they are in Retail packaging which means someone else actually parted with a few bucks of hard earned money for these. Maybe kids would want them but seeing as how a working mp3 with 128 can be had for like $25, I can’t see the attraction. Finally, I would post the name of the player in question but in what turned out to be their only smart move, the company not only didn’t put their name on the box, they didn’t even put it on the player itself.
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Posted by Jason on June 16th, 2006 — in Online Business
I normally cut through my emails like a Samurai, slashing every bit of Spam as fast as possible. Today, however, I threw one mail from Ezine Articles into the trash then quickly recovered it as something caught my eye. Although it was an obvious form letter, they were making a plea for self help authors which sounded like a perfect match to me. I already write countless articles which have been included everywhere from online to print media and have always been a great marketing technique, especially when it came to sales. So I opened it up and saw they were partnering up with another site which specializes in that area to “publish” an ebook that contained articles from knowledgeable self help authors. The payoff was a bio at the end of your piece and guaranteed distribution of 100,000+. Here is the first part of their pitch
Dear Jason,
This is Chris Knight, the publisher of: http://EzineArticles.com
Would you like one of your articles featured in a self help book that includes articles written by Ken Blanchard, Mark Victor Hansen and Les Brown?
I am working with SelfGrowth.com to find great self improvement authors for a new paperback book. The project is being organized by David Riklan, the founder of http://www.SelfGrowth.com.
Ken Blanchard, Mark Victor Hansen and Les Brown are already in it and dozens of EzineArticles expert authors will also be included!
Isn’t that exciting? I’ve already told David to count me in as an author! Then, I asked him if I could invite other people to join us. He said “Yes!” which is why I’m writing to you today.
This is the third book in a series created by SelfGrowth.com.
The title will be:
“101 Great Ways to Improve Your Life, Volume 3.”
To see details on the first book in the series, go to http://www.SelfGrowth.com/products/greatwaysbook1.html
Briefly, David will include 101 articles or short chapters from 101 experts in the self-improvement industry. Each expert will provide an article teaching people “How to Improve Your Life.”
Would you be interested in submitting an article for this new print book?
Although I will be the first to admit it has the typical overhype of Spam, it is targeted and so far sounds like it could be turned into an opportunity. I was actually considering applying and thought I would scan the rest of the email out of curiosity. Then I found this condition at the bottom of the mail (after paragraphs and paragraphs of hype designed to make you stop reading and just sign up)
The retail price of the book is $14.95. To kick off a strong launch, David is asking each author to purchase at least 100 copies of the book at the author’s rate of a 50% discount off the retail price. The total cost for 100 books is $750. The retail value of the books is $1,495 (100 books sold at 14.95 each)
The purpose of asking all of the authors to purchase books is to guarantee an immediate distribution of at least 10,000 copies.
So now the whole thing becomes clear. This is basically the Who’s Who scam which will bring in around $8,000 without lifting a finger. For those of you not familiar with Who’s Who it was a company in the US that published a book supposedly giving recognition to the top students in the country. Their name would be printed in this book and immortalized for all to recognize their tremendous achievement. All parents had to do was fill out an application for their High School student which would be evaluated and only the best would be accepted. Of course the scam was that everyone was accepted and all parents needed to do is support this great resource by buying one of the books for like $89.95 (The book was just pages and pages of peoples names). I remember one of my friends moms fell for the whole thing. The funny part was the kid was a complete burnout that hardly went to class and was failing out of everything. It was a great source of comedy that he was the supposed “cream of the crop”.
So anyway, congrats on Ezine for adapting the scam. The sad part is they will probably get their 101 authors but I don’t see the book being worth the digital paper it’s printed given their conditions for submission
David is looking for articles roughly between 600-1200 words for each of the chapters plus a short bio at the end. The article doesn’t need to be new material
I’m not sure who I feel more sorry for, the authors that get scammed or the 6 people that buy the thing only to realize its a collection of crappy articles already available all over the web.
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Posted by Jason on June 15th, 2006 — in Online Business
As some may have noticed, the pace at which I have been posting here at Off the Top of My Head has slowed quite a bit. This has been due to the rollout of a new Business Directory which I believe will add greatly to the resources already present. Although you may have noticed the link to it as early as 2 months ago, the customization and development of it did not really start until around a week ago. When I decided to add a directory, of which there are already plenty of, I wanted to make sure it was up to scratch so to speak. So what we did is make it a true Business Directory with an “Other” section for all non business related submissions we receive. The second part was to actively seek listings, not just by submissions but by adding what I feel are industry leaders manually. I still have a bit of work to do to further organize them into subcategories but I am proud to have the start of a directory that represents Off the Top of My Head.
I have just started working on a feature list as I plan to add a lot of custom features to make the directory stand out. Short term there will be opportunities to purchase Sponsored Listing however they are currently by invitation only. I want to add a lot of the features and build up the unique visitors using this resource before I open it up. If you have a suggestion, feel free to post a comment. Otherwise, why not drop by and submit your site?
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