Do you mind if I turn this around and ask you some leading questions?
Do you think that 7500 words can constitute an "Ultimate Guide" on anything, let alone a subject as broad and deep as, "Building a Recurring Revenue Business from Scratch"? Do the points featured in the blog post seem to flow naturally from one to the next? If you were to ignore the title of the post and what it claims to be about, what would you think it was about after reading it?
Does it read like an essay, or like an outline?
What kind of recurring revenue businesses will this guide help to build?
I had started to write an objection to this post hours ago after following the link to Maneesh's "first passive business" and doing a little more background research. About halfway through I canceled the comment, deciding that it probably wasn't constructive and probably wasn't worth my time (or a reader's).
(Side note: I was going to go to mixergy.com to try to also make the argument that the usual content from Mixergy is far better than this, but found that I couldn't actually load the site without first signing up with an email address. I look forward to the future messages delivered to my account, [email protected]. I also realize that my argument would have been wrong.)
If Maneesh has been building fame and fortune online by using SEO tools to come up with subjects that $.01/word writers at http://thecontentauthority.com/ will blog about for him (it's "high quality" and "not spam", of course) and then post around the web for him so that he can make passive AdSense revenue from people directed to the ghost-written posts by Google, well ... awesome, I guess. I honestly kind of wish I could give up programming and do something like that; I certainly can't argue with his quality of life or how he's chosen to spend the money he's made exploiting a company that provides both ads and search results.
And if he's now coming up with ways to leverage his skills into enormously popular posts like, "How I quadrupled my productivity by hiring a hiring a woman to slap me", or, "How to learn a language in 90 days", or, "How to Earn $12,840 from a Single Guest Post", then that's awesome too, I guess.
And if he then writes a post that compiles a bunch of tips on building a social-media-newsletter-marketing-recurring-revenue business, then awesome, too. But, I find myself agreeing with handzhiev's sentiment that it's vague and incomplete and not polished, and I also find myself feeling like I should soon expect to see a follow-up post, "How I made $32,768 by having someone else write a guest post on my site and submit it everywhere", followed by the even more popular, "The ultimate guide to getting rich online".
Side note: I was going to go to mixergy.com to try to also make the argument that the usual content from Mixergy is far better than this, but found that I couldn't actually load the site without first signing up with an email address. I look forward to the future messages delivered to my account, [email protected]. I also realize that my argument would have been wrong.
Sorry, but this is really rude and immature. Andrew has put an incredible amount of effort into compiling info at Mixergy.com, apparently with the goal of gasp making money. And you can get most (almost all?) of his content, which exists nowhere else and is hugely valuable, completely free. All he's asking for is a way to contact you in the future. And yes, partly to try and convert you to a customer at some point. God forbid you should actually pay for the value you're receiving, right?
I wasn't visiting his site to benefit from his content. I am not one of his customers, or readers, or viewers. I loaded up his site for the sole purpose of being able to point to things on it and say, "these are great and you have done a good job". Publicly.
Instead the site threw a barrier up in front of me and forbid me from proceeding at all until I gave it an email address. It went a step beyond all of the goddamnproliferatingeverywherenow lightboxes that more and more sites seem to be using lately: there was no close box, no "cancel", no "no thanks not this time". Just, "give me your email address or go away."
The day that that particular tactic is no longer considered rude and inconsiderate and Bad will be the day that I'll be done with the internet.
Believe me when I say that I was way more polite in my comment about it than my initial visceral response to it.
...Or am I not allowed to call him out on a bad move just because he's Andrew Frickin' Warner and "has put an incredible amount of effort into" Mixergy?
So it's rude and inconsiderate that he's asking for your contact info (or for fake contact info) before he gives you all his material for free? That seems more than fair. He doesn't owe you anything.
Would you mind pointing out what he gave me? Because I can't seem to find it. Thanks.
I would try a less snarky way to say, "he didn't give me anything", except that I already said that and you ignored it in your personal quest to annoy me.
Mixergy gives away hundreds of interviews for free via their podcast feed (I subscribed via iTunes and my iPhone podcatcher, search for Mixergy), and transcripts of the interviews are still available via Google search. I'm not a fan of the pushy email signup, but there's ways around it to get to the free content.
And there's definitely some great interviews on Mixergy. The most recent one I listened to was with the female CEO of a hardware company that builds spectral analysis devices for the oil & gas industry and US Defence Department. That's worlds away from the online eBook info-product market.
Thank you for posting this. It boggles my mind how people - let me rephrase 'wantrepreneurs' - lambast people who want to actually make a profit.
If you don't care to exchange something valuable (an email address) for something worth 10x (the content on a site) - simply hit the back button.
Those same people who complain about "sales tactics" will spend the next 5 years reading about other entrepreneurs on this site, with the excuse "well I don't want to sell 'that' way, that's why no one is buying my product and I am still working a day job on the slow lane"
My background is business and I absolutely loathe those unclosable pop-ups. I love the parts of Andrew's personality I saw come through in his early videos (and the more recent ones) and I gave him my email address long ago. But every time I see that kind of behavior on the site it makes me dislike Mixergy.com just a bit more. I'm all for the sponsorships, I can understand paid content, but if increasingly annoying barriers are going to be constructed between me and the content it will eventually drive me (and whatever spending abilities I have in the future) elsewhere.
Do you think that 7500 words can constitute an "Ultimate Guide" on anything, let alone a subject as broad and deep as, "Building a Recurring Revenue Business from Scratch"? Do the points featured in the blog post seem to flow naturally from one to the next? If you were to ignore the title of the post and what it claims to be about, what would you think it was about after reading it?
Does it read like an essay, or like an outline?
What kind of recurring revenue businesses will this guide help to build?
I had started to write an objection to this post hours ago after following the link to Maneesh's "first passive business" and doing a little more background research. About halfway through I canceled the comment, deciding that it probably wasn't constructive and probably wasn't worth my time (or a reader's).
(Side note: I was going to go to mixergy.com to try to also make the argument that the usual content from Mixergy is far better than this, but found that I couldn't actually load the site without first signing up with an email address. I look forward to the future messages delivered to my account, [email protected]. I also realize that my argument would have been wrong.)
If Maneesh has been building fame and fortune online by using SEO tools to come up with subjects that $.01/word writers at http://thecontentauthority.com/ will blog about for him (it's "high quality" and "not spam", of course) and then post around the web for him so that he can make passive AdSense revenue from people directed to the ghost-written posts by Google, well ... awesome, I guess. I honestly kind of wish I could give up programming and do something like that; I certainly can't argue with his quality of life or how he's chosen to spend the money he's made exploiting a company that provides both ads and search results.
And if he's now coming up with ways to leverage his skills into enormously popular posts like, "How I quadrupled my productivity by hiring a hiring a woman to slap me", or, "How to learn a language in 90 days", or, "How to Earn $12,840 from a Single Guest Post", then that's awesome too, I guess.
And if he then writes a post that compiles a bunch of tips on building a social-media-newsletter-marketing-recurring-revenue business, then awesome, too. But, I find myself agreeing with handzhiev's sentiment that it's vague and incomplete and not polished, and I also find myself feeling like I should soon expect to see a follow-up post, "How I made $32,768 by having someone else write a guest post on my site and submit it everywhere", followed by the even more popular, "The ultimate guide to getting rich online".