Disclaimer
The opinions expressed herein are my own personal opinions and do not represent anyone else's view in any way, including those of my employer.
© Copyright 2009
The opinions expressed herein are my own personal opinions and do not represent anyone else's view in any way, including those of my employer.
© Copyright 2009
Alan, a very good friend of mine just came over today to show me his new web site. He was so excited to tell me about his new business investment which he made before he lost his job. “It was a small $400 investment” he explained. They gave him a new domain name of his choice: alanvan.com and a site with it.
What I found strange at first was the look and feel of the site: a generic template that looks a lot like thousands of other sites I’ve seen. Then I did a whois lookup on the domain and found out that he does not even own the domain name. It’s owned by World Market Systems (worldmarketsystems.com), 3039 w peoria ave c102-167, Phoenix, Arizona 85029, United States.
Too bad it’s an older domain and now that he doesn’t really own the domain he cannot take advantage of it. Well, this is not really correct, since he has control over this “site” as long as World Market Systems chooses to deal with my friend, Alan. But what happens after World Market Systems? Well, my guess is that they will keep Alan’s $400 and take the domain my friend marketed and juiced up for them.
I researched the company a bit and found lots of discussions about this scam online. After a little more research, I found thousands of sites being registered under World Market Systems. Most of these sites look like Alan’s. I had to explain my friend that there is very little chance that he could ever make money with this site using search engine optimization because the content on “his site” is exactly the same as the content on thousands of others online. The only way he could make money with this is using PPC (Pay Per Click) marketing which could cost him a lot and we are not sure what conversion rate the site could produce, so the ROI may not be as pretty as he imagined.
Though I wish him all the luck with his new business venture, but at the same time I wish companies like World Market Systems get caught for this kind of business practices. I mean taking $400 for something that’s probably worth $10 (the price of the domain name), because everything else should be free: The affiliate programs they are offering are freely available to anyone online and the commissions they are making off of their clients’ marketing efforts should cover more than their hosting and initial “design “costs.
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10:50 pm - February 17th, 2009
Alan just showed me the “back-end” for this service and I found almost nothing that would allow a user to customize the site. No templates to choose from (can’t even change colors), cannot change the page title, add/remove/edit blocks on the page etc…
All you can do in there is check the revenue your site generated and view/edit your password and email address.There is no info on tracking stats which would be important to see how your pages are doing and there is no way to add your own tracking code so you could use a 3rd party tracking system.
You cannot edit the content on your site and you cannot customize it in any way.
Though, I found something interesting in there: a page where you can create sub-domains! The only problem is that all the subdomains serve the same exact content. In fact, you don’t even need to create your subdomains, you can make them up on the fly: http://vancouver.seo.alanvan.com/
But wait! This is not all… You can go to their site and make up your own sub-domains: http://vancouver.seo.worldmarketsystems.com/
One more thing. A correction: Alan didn’t pay $400 for it. He paid $477 and not in Canadian Dollars, but in US Dollars which is actually more.
9:37 am - April 27th, 2009
Yes, I know about World Market Systems. They were very active until they got my money, and it wasnt $400, it was just under USD $10000, after all the addons and extras. I had the feeling, but the greed must have been more evident, as I still went ahead with it. What do we say about Greed and Fear. Seems a lot of Aussies got stung on this one, just going through Google.