“Don’t Buy” List

Here’s a list of popular Internet marketing tools and products that I recommend you DON’T buy.

This page is currently still evolving and changing and you’ll have to bear with me while I get things sorted out. Here’s the problem: A product can be pretty good, but still not recommended. For example, a product might be overall useful and well made, but end up on the “Don’t Buy” List because you can get something better for a similar or lower price. That doesn’t make a product bad (the presence or absence of competing products doesn’t impact the quality of anything), but it makes it a second choice (I’ve now also created a list of recommended products).

I’m not yet sure how I will implement this in my reviews and this list may undergo some changes, before I really get into a groove, so to speak.

For now, let’s just call this the…


Don’t Buy List – Beta 1.3


SEO and Link-Building Related


Don’t Buy RankBuilder 2.0

Reasons:

  • Clumsy and sub-optimal user interface
  • Similar competing products are available at better prices and/or with far better features
  • Recommended Alternatives: Magic Submitter, SEnuke X

Don’t Buy SEOLinkVine

Reasons:

  • Articles don’t get many publishes (compared to competing products)
  • Competing products simply offer (slightly) more bang for your buck
  • Recommended Alternatives: Article Ranks, Unique Article Wizard

Don’t Buy IM-Advantage

Reasons:

  • Not enough updates to the membership to warrant the high price
  • Link-Building tools, which are arguably the best part of IMA, are available separately, for a lower price: SEO Blueprint (but even this isn’t recommended)
  • Article Blueprint tool lost a bit of value in a recent change and the Bookmark Blueprint tool seems to be stagnating (currently not yet a useful tool)

This may not be fair, but with IMA, I actually recommend that you join the membership, grab the valuable resources and then leave again. There is some HUGELY valuable stuff in there, but good new content has become very rare these past months. So, it’s worth paying for, but it’s not worth paying for on a monthly basis.

Don’t Buy SEO Blueprint

Reasons:

  • As mentioned above, the Article Blueprint component has lost quite a bit of value and the backlinks you get from it are low quality.
  • Link Blueprint is a link exchange system. Nothing wrong with that, but you can find those for free and as part of other memberships etc. as well. So nothing really unique, there.
  • Blog Blueprint is okay, but in direct competition with the vastly superior BuildMyRank.

Don’t Buy Bookmark Demon

Reasons:

  • Actually, go ahead and buy it, if you are an advanced user and will invest the time and effort to set it up as a higher-end spamming tool.
  • “Regular” use (creating one to three sets of accounts on all bookmarking sites and bookmarking your pages) will yield next to zero ranking results.
  • “Advanced” use (bookmarking and promoting your own bookmarks via dozens of user-accounts and through rotating proxies) requires a lot of setup and maintenance.

Don’t Buy Article Submitter/ArticleBot/Any Article Directory Submission Tool

Reasons:

  • Submitting to 100s of article directories is a complete waste of time (explained here).
  • Article directory submissions have limited value in terms of backlinks (more value in terms of click-through traffic).
  • The best article submitter is available for free (see link above).

UPDATE: A possible exception to this “no article submitters” rule has appeared on the marketplace. Click here to see the Article Marketing Robot Review.

Don’t Buy Expensive Backlinks

There are more link-building services out there than you can shake a stick at. You can get manual backlinks built for you, you can get automatic blasts to thousands of sites and you can get everything in between. I’m currently still doing a lot of testing on this subject, but for now, just let me tell you that you shouldn’t ever pay $1 or more per link you get, no matter what a sales-page promises. I’m working on some simple systems that will enable you to get tons of highest-quality links for next to nothing.


Other Products (Non-SEO)

Don’t Buy Newbie-Traps

  • Any product that makes huge promises (usually along with displaying many ClickBank earnings screenshots and Google analytics screenshots) but is vague about the actual offer is a newbie-trap.
  • These product are generally complete garbage and usually have absolutely no resemblance to what is promised on the sales-page.
  • These products are also generally followed by dozens of upsells and your suspicion that the only one making money in this deal is the guy shilling the product is correct.

More on newbie-traps.

Don’t Buy Kajabi

Reasons:

  • Certainly don’t buy it if you are not already an info-product and membership site creator.
  • Unless your business model focuses almost exclusively on high-ticket products and high-priced membership sites, the pricing and limitations in Kajabi are an issue.
  • Currently, some essential features, such as an affiliate module, are missing from Kajabi.
  • There are alternatives available that are likely to be more suitable to your needs (see this post on membership site software).

Don’t Buy Wealthy Affiliate

Reasons:

  • The price has now increased to a pretty ridiculous $97/month
  • The training material is disjointed
  • The tools and extras offered are outdated and generally low quality