The Rich Jerk. Interesting name, huh? This multi-millionaire has decided to put his secrets into an ebook (big surprise there…) and sell it to the millions of people looking to make easy money online. A pretty common strategy, but this guy stands out a bit. Not because of the photos of his lavish lifestyle, but because he’s a jerk. He has better things to do than help you out, and he makes that clear in his sales letter!

But I happened across his site the other day and guess what - he’s offering to give you a free website if you signup for his mailing list! Supposedly the free website is built using his secret strategies - that’s awfully nice of him, isn’t it?

So what’s the real deal? Do you actually get a custom site worth $300 with no catch?

Yeah right!

No self-respecting internet guru would give away something like that without a catch!

You can get a free site, yes, but it sure doesn’t look custom. Unless by custom they mean it is only 99% the same as the others, then I guess it could be considered custom. But here’s the real catch - you only get the site after signing up with their hosting partner. I didn’t bother looking at the hosting plan, but I doubt it’s anything special.

So by giving away the website which costs very little to make, he can make quite a bit of cash with commissions on the hosting! Not a bad idea! (Since the commissions are probably $100+ each.)

Not only did this experience give me some material to rant about, it taught me a good lesson in marketing!

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I’m sure you’ve seen this headline by now if you subscribe to any newsletters related to internet marketing. The email goes on to endorse the VEO Report, about creating sites for visitors instead of normal SEO. Hence the name, Visitor Enhanced Optimization.

This ebook is supposedly endorsed by Google, in that Matt Cutts (a G employee) was interviewed for the creation of this book. Matt also gave permission for some snippets of their conversation to be revealed in the book. So great, it’s endorsed by Google. Google also provides free guides about things such as working with Adsense. Did just reading that guide skyrocket your Adsense income?

Think about this, too. Every time an ebook comes out exposing some secret method of increasing your income, everyone and their mother start to do it. And Google notices. And promptly changes their algorithms to decrease any effect of the technique. Take article writing and submission, for instance. Once that became popular, Google simply devalued links from article websites and increased penalties for duplicate content.

What scares me is that building websites for the visitor is how I build my main sites. That’s how I started out, for two reasons: 1, I was a website visitor more than a marketer, and 2, I didn’t even know what SEO was. So if people start overusing these methods, could we see a change for Google to make these methods less useful? Is it possible that the big G would screw with internet marketers at the expense of their visitors? Maybe, maybe not. You never really know these days.

And now that I’m thinking about these algorithm changes, who says that Google isn’t already changing their algorithms to make this VEO less effective? Maybe that’s the only reason that Matt Cutts allowed some of his stuff to be published - he knew that Google planned to change the stuff anyway! Man, wouldn’t that be a low blow?!

Notice I didn’t say I read the book, so maybe it is awesome. I don’t know. Colin McDougall did make a nice site supposedly using these VEO methods, and amazingly it has some very nice rankings. So if everything is true, damn right it’s worth $79 to know how to create websites that get great rankings fast, all without worrying about SEO!

But there are two questions: 1, is it all good info without hype? and 2, will you actually put any of the info into practice?

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