So today, I read this great article by Jon Payne titled

Online Marketing MLM Schemes & Scams, iJango & Over-Hyping

You should read it.  Its a great article.  You will learn something reading the article.  That goes double if you are trying to understand business models in online marketing, blogging, seo or search.

Go read it. (Sure click away, do it now, the rest of this article won’t make sense until you do!)

I must warn you the article is over 4,000 words long.  If that’s not your cup of tea, click away.  Anyone that fears word count should probably not read any of my stuff anyway, because I’m a long winded(worded) blogger. Wordcount doesn’t scare me at all.

By last count of this article it was close to 2500 words

I like to read. I like to writer, hence I blog.

So if you read the article and you are now back, thanks for coming back!  (Drop me a comment or something, maybe your twitter link, odds are you are my type of people, or just some internet loon that doesn’t know any better, either way you know what they say, “keep your friends close, and always monitor the location of your internet stalkers!”

So this is my comment to Jon on the subject of iJango being as much of a Scam as Google

Great article, about half way through, it struck me that this would probably make a good ebook or at least a white paper (just add stats) 

I thought your perceptions, especially on your two friends in Baltimore were very interesting and enlightening.

Back in 2005 I left the world of accounting and began working online after a friendly little run in with the some Chinese mafia types that bought a division from Motorola that I happened to work for at the time. 

I had an over developed sense of skepticism back then and still do today.  That came to me in part from years of work in multiple industries, along with too many years spent in school, and a couple death threats from some people that made a billion dollars per year helped me hone that skepticism even more.

Read about the CIT Group Connection to this craziness if you like

Is CIT Too Big Too Fail for China? – Note the mis-spelled title!  I love associated content sometimes 

CIT Bomb to Kill Chinese Manufacturing and US Retailers?

Point is, when I started working online, I rapidly learned that even with my training and experience (at that time likely fitting the profile of the targets of the ebooks mentioned above) I could rarely tell a legitimate website from a scammy website or company when it came to online revenue topics.

I used to work in credit, giving credit lines ranging from $5,000 up to $1 billion (Verizon Wireless 2001).  It was my job to review companies based on their merits and then put my companies money and my job on the line with the decision. 

But when I entered this area of the online world, the tools used by both legitimate and illegitimate companies and everyone in between were exactly the same, thus the results could be very very similar.

Furthermore, having my over developed sense of skepticism and having worked companies like Verizon, Motorola, Wal-Mart etc. I also happened to know that just because a fortune 500 or 100 company makes a lot of money, has a lot of customers, and a lot of employees, it doesn’t meant that they are not the role model for social responsibility. 

As this is an SEO blog, and as I work in a couple niche areas of the SEO industry (I don’t work in PPC, not my thing, don’t claim it to be etc etc) but SEO I know a thing or two about. [further disclaimer, if you want to hire an SEO consultant see the author or the commentators above before you talk to me.]  All that said, Google provides the primary play ground for people to play in today.  They have this interesting little concept of ‘do no evil’ built into the foundation of their company.

Yet, they are a corporation, which by its very nature (read up on the foundations of corporate law in the US over the last 120 years) is designed to shield the business entity from the mistakes and problems it or its employees might make.  End result, when Google or its employees make mistakes or go after a business or industry, people get hurt.  When people get hurt, some people view that as a type of evil, but Google as a corporation established to do no evil is a bit of an operating paradox, similar to the Ijango business that on one hand says one thing on its website and says another in its TOS.

That’s Google too, just bigger, with more money, and low IQ bigots.

What’s the point?

I’m not promoting ijango, I stayed away from that event the other night.

The point is that for the most part, anything that can make you money on the internet can typically be learned with out paying anyone for it.

Right from go, if anyone wants to charge you to teach you something on or about the internet, your skepticism radar should start going off immediately.

Does that mean you should never pay to learn anything?  From a ebook?  from a book on amazon? from a school or college or university?

No, it doesn’t.  Some people have to learn things the hard way.

Everyone’s definition of the ‘hard way’ or ‘life lesson’ or ‘hard lessons in life’ is a little different.

• Some people have to pay for information because Google doesn’t always work well (often doesn’t, and often the info isn’t in a form that Google can even find)
• Some people can not use good information when  they find it.  They just aren’t prepared to put a lesson to work for them yet.  I can tell a person how to grease the bearings on a car, but if they don’t know how to remove the lug nuts, they are sol.
• Some people will buy scammy information and not learn the lesson that it is scammy
• Some people will perpetuate a scam to recoup their money or time investment, some will do it because they do not know it is a scam.
• Some people will push a dream knowing that eventually a dream can become a new type of reality, (like a Google that came up with a crazy idea that the number of links might help build better search results and charging people for PPC could be tied to that Search Engine to make a profit, and despite the millions if not billions of dollars of click fraud that followed immediately there after, eventually developed into a quasi legitimate business that many people accept and believe in.  (if you want a different analogy study up on what it takes for a country to become a sovereign nation or a cult to become a religion-> a lot of belief really and not much else)
• This list could
  go on and on and on . . .  Go watch Idiocracy if you want to see how dumb people are becoming ~ I wonder if there is a connection between Brawndo and iJango????

So anyway, as we attempt to avoid drinking the cool aid, we have to do it knowing our own subjective perspective.  At the end of the day it is completely impossible for any person to be completely objective.  Absolutely impossible, no two ways about it, I literally tested out of rhetoric in college after proving this (to a subjective college professor) in words, meaning I’m more than happy to debate it, but be prepared for a long winded discussion. 

Its easy to castigate iJango, mostly because there is a lot of easily identifiable bad press behind the guy that founded it.

If he didn’t have a bunch of failed businesses, back child support and complaints in courts around the country, but instead had an MIT pedigree, he might find is business concept more tenable.  (and he wouldn’t be pitching it to a bunch of people in a hotel ball room that cost a couple hundred dollars)

Google is not considered a scam (these days) because they survived long enough to prove their critics mostly wrong, survived enough of the lawsuits that showed their scammy nature and flawed algorithms, survived long enough to compromise their do no evil mission justifying that compromise with their sorbanes-oxley requirements to attain shareholder value because they are a publicly traded corporation.

But at the end of the day there isn’t much difference (more objectively speaking) than Google and iJango.

They are both just tools.  If iJango develops the critical mass of people to make it the preferred tool over Google, then Google will become the new Yahoo and iJango will become the new Google.

The best tool does not always rise to the top (blueray, betamax, digital cellphones, any recently available generic drug replaced in the pipeline by a new drug with a big marketing budget, say the purple pill . . . ., Xerox’s PARC desktop computer of 1972, which was promptly ripped off by both Steve Jobs & Bill Gates over a decade or two later)

  If you haven’t seen the Triumph of the Nerds Documentary by PBS, that’s definitely worth paying some money to ‘learn something’. 

Unanswered Questions

At this point you may have a few unanswered questions

1.  What’s this guys Twitter Address? (I want to follow him)

http://twitter.com/brettbum

2.  What’s this guys twitter Address? (I want to make sure I’m not following him)

http://twitter.com/michael_vick

3.  Trivia – What S&P 500 is in the news this week that helped launder money for the Chinese company that threatened to make Brett disappear?

The CIT Group ~ I don’t think they realized their complicity at first, why they chose to continue is their issue.

4.  Will you be at Blogworld in Vegas in October?

Yes, but that’s an irrelevant question

5.  Have you ever purchased anything from iJango or Google and been ripped off?

I’ve never purchased anything from iJango and don’t plan on it.  I have run PPC ad campaigns through Google Adwords, and always felt that I was not getting enough ROI from the results.  I have also registered domain names through Google, one third of those registrations and the services they were attached to were not delivered successfully correctly and I think I was ripped off because Google didn’t staff that area of their company correctly.

6.  Do you make more working online now or did you make more working in corporate finance?

That’s none of your business, but since you asked, I will tell you that working online is not a get rich quick type of area for most people.  At the peak of my corporate finance career I made about $100k per year, and was rewarded with death threats for myself and my family not to mention a 3 – 6 hour round trip commute everyday. 

Working online as a blogger and web designer, and marketing consultant ( I too do not really need more streams of income) I make about half what I made in corporate finance, but no one has threatened to kill me, nor my kids, I have not been required to become a whistleblower for the IRS, I have not had to hide out on the Lamb in a different state with my name on an FBI watchlist of people that should be considered homicides immediately if they are reported missing.  I also have zero commute and work on a fishing dock, so fuck you Chinese Mafia types!

7.  Will you teach me to do what you do if I pay you a lot of money?  Any money?  Buy you a 12 pack of Coke Zero?  Promise you a potential job and then chat with you for two weeks until I pump as much useful information as I can pump out of you while still maintaining the farce that I have consulting work for you before I break the news to you that I no longer have the budget?

Yes to all of the above.  I help people learn how to do this all the time.  I typically try to help them for FREE, but I do charge for some of my training services.  Bottom line is that if you want to come to our community events, you can learn for free, if you want to learn it right away now, put it to good use, and learn it on your schedule and not mine, then you have to pay me to schedule the time in. 

8.  Do you think Matt Cutts is a Paid Schill?

Yes, isn’t that obvious?  He’s an employee of one of the largest marketing companies in the world.  He’s like a Microsoft Tech Support Call Representative, except he’s competent.  If you are an employee, I’ve got news for you, ‘you are a paid schill’ that goes double if you get paid to blog, write about your company.  I’ve never met him in person (which doesn’t matter).  He seems like a nice guy as far as his online persona goes, but if you read that original article, you might now understand that there is a difference between an online blog persona and reality and that goes triple for anyone that speaks regularly at social media events)

I don’t have a problem with that btw.  This gets back to that subjective versus objective debate.  I personally just thinks its important to be able to recognize the fact that the cool aid is spiked with AUM (See The Illuminatus Trilogy by Robert Anton Wilson and Bob Shea)

Very funny book and as far as I can tell the first fiction work to talk about the Illuminati (dates back to 1969-1972)

9.  Will these post blog article questions ever end? rong>