DoFollow 001Letting the link love flow

If you have any interest in either webdesign, programming or internet marketing then you would have definitely joined one, some or all of the following forums: Digital Point, Sitepoint, Warrior and Sphinn.

They are all lively, popular hubs of discussion, with Digital Point having over 260,000 members and Warrior Forums being filled with nearly 450,000 posts in its second incarnation.

Under various names I have been a regular reader and contributor on all four of these websites. I've enjoyed some more than others and here is my review of them all.

Warrior Forums

Warriors is more focused on affliate marketing than the other three, and is the only one of the four to have a paid section.

Sub-forums include The Copywriting Forum, Ad Networks and Programming Talk.

What makes me most laugh about Warrior (other than the name!) is the sub-forum entitled "Mind Warriors - Success, Power, Self-Improvement". Think your way to success... that'll work! It's like a throwback to Samuel Smiles and Eighties self-help VHS tapes.

A typical thread reading:

I am writing this message to all the rookies like me! Well, now that I think about it, you are probably not like me. I am a 57-year-old grandmother who lives on a tiny farm in the middle of a cow field in Central Washington.

Anyway, last December I was financially desperate. I won't tell you my whole sob story, but the bottom line is that I was out of money and still had $1000s of bills to pay each month!

So I had to reinvent myself. I had been in real estate investing and when the bottom dropped out of the market, it took all my financial resources with it.

I started reading Your Portable Empire by Pat O'Bryan and that's when I decided to try Internet Marketing.

So I bought a couple eBooks that taught me what to do . . . and I started. I followed the writers' advice to the letter. One of the eBooks was about writing eBooks and the other was about getting traffic to your site.

Here is my encouragement to you! I had never done this before! I was a writer and I had a laptop, but that's about as much as I could bring to the table. On top of it, I had very little money! So I had to make things happen with a minimal investment!

I ended up spending less than $100, wrote and started selling two eBooks of my own . . . and within just over 5 weeks, I made more than $12,000. What I’ve since learned is that this is even more amazing since the two eBooks I wrote and I sold were both priced at under $10 each.

And it goes on and on - it's almost as believable as Nigerian 419er: "Hello Sire, I am a princess living on a tiny farm in the middle of a cow field in Central Washington. My husband King Nuembela has just deposited $20 million dollars in an offshore account, I need you to... "

The comments underneath are ridiculous:

What a terrific story Susan!...also, I'm going to pick up Your Portable Empire by OBryan. Sounds like it belongs in my library, too.

Thanks for your inspiration. I'm a new warrior and new to IM and you have given me a lot to think about. I wish you much more success and happiness. Thanks for sharing.

That's inspiring! Just goes to show you that more can happen on the Internet than most people can dream of

It's like - get real people. This isn't the outpourings of a 57-year-old grandmother from Washington. It's somebody trying to sell you an Ebook - it's a marketing pitch.

(I couldn't resist it. On the thread I wrote: "This story filled me with tears. God bless America! God bless the world!" The sarcasm was lost on these schmucks though)

A forum for warriors? Whatever.

Digital Point

Over at nickycakes.com, Mr Cake(hole)has been less then complimentary to Digital Point:

The place is just a cesspool of 3rd world scammers trying to make a few dollars a month clicking their own adsense ads. It’s really impossible to describe, and the Cakes is probably preaching to the choir here, but if you’re part of the 1% of the readers who have not been there before, you really have to see it for yourself. Make your way to the google adsense section on a rainy sunday weekend for more laughs than you can handle.

I myself haven't visited much over the last 12 months - and even then it was just to go to the politics sub-forum.

The reason for that is I haven't had anything to drink since last summer (no, I've not been going to AA meetings instead).

You've got to be pissed to find Digital Point alluring. The drunken man never listens - he is only intent on giving an opinion. Read the threads. People just post with out properly reading the OP or its responses, consquently threads go on for pages without focus. It really is Digital "fluff" Point.

This all comes from a mistaken believe that building up 5,000 signature links will result in a successful SEO campaign.

Note as well the obligatory new daily thread in the Google sub-forum entitled 'When is the next PageRank update?'.

Digital Point seems to attract the youngest crowd with past surveys revealing that the majority of members are lads under the age of 21.

Sphinn

This Digg-clone was created by Danny Sullivan's Search Engine Land, and because it came from the god-awful Pligg CMS it seems to be the major stopping off point for every spam whore on the net.

Admittedly, there are some good articles that make it to the frontpage but at the same time in typical SEO fashion there's a lot of gaming going on which means your more likely to find mediocre items then anything inspiring; and debates, when they happen, frequently boil down to the "I've got the biggest SEO cock" variety.

Sitepoint

The atmosphere at Sitepoint is really quite chilled and it has an ambiance of a caring uncle about it.

It is somewhere where I would point people if their are seeking qualified advice - although it is probably the only place on the internet where people become over-defensive about the Opera browser.

At times though it is just too slow with not enough new threads to keep me coming back regularly.

So, for now anyway, you're more likely to find me over at Sitepoint, although all of them hold some sort of attraction, no matter how weird.

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