Phone books

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Truly an amazing piece of publishing…it’s unfathomable how these things are still being dropped off at our doorsteps, isn’t it?

So, the end of last week brought a dude up the driveway to the front door of the house (this is unusual in and of itself since most years it never makes it past the garage door) and he dropped off a double wrapped (in plastic bags) phone book. A completely useless block of paper. Wait, ok, maybe not completely useless – maybe it could be used to start fires or a booster seat for a toddler, or doorstop or a block under a table leg or something…

At my house, it literally gets unwrapped and dropped straight into the recycle bin.

Anyway, it amazes me that these things are even produced any longer.

Imaging being a phone book ad salesperson. What kind of conversation do they have to have to be successful? “Look, I realize no one is going to open this thing and look at your ad, but if you could just spend a small piece of your advertising budget on this pointless square on page X that would be great and I can then try to feed my family.”

Do these things still get produced just for the “older people” because they can’t handle technology? Someone in my family suggested this when I mentioned we got the phone book brick. Maybe that is truly the case. It only takes seconds to find any of the information in the book when you use the internet and do a search. Perhaps that is just too much for an old person to handle.

Anyone else still get a phone book delived to them every year? Anyone actually use it?

Order #717

black and white restaurant lunch kitchen

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I wanted to try to avoid this, but unfortunately it has come to this. There are those who promise big things and make it happen, and then there are those who just promise.

There is a well known blogger out there who has a rather large following, about 120,000+ people. He writes about how he can help you grow your blog and the information he puts out seems like good stuff. He has multiple blogs and he puts out pretty much the same stuff on each of them. He even offers services to boost your blog traffic or with design, content, etc. It appeared to be legit, so I followed him, as I am sure lots of others have done too.

Perhaps the large numbers he boasts are just from following everyone himself. Sure, some of those numbers are generated from his content, but my thinking is there are a lot of people out there who play the “follow for follow” game instead of looking for actual good content.

Anyway, other than producing some content about how to blog, he also blasts his followers with requests for money. Obviously, the services he supposedly offers is to generate money for himself, but he also just plain out begs for money – for rent to avoid eviction, for a new laptop, to fix his dental problems, and most recently to buy a domain and start a new project. (That is all since the beginning of THIS year) You all know who I am talking about, right? I probably don’t need to name names here…but if you have any doubt, clicking one of the links will solve that mystery.

So, with some reluctance, I decided to take a chance and purchase one of those services that he was offering on one of his “specials.” The service that interested me was the “One-on-One”, a chance to have him do an in depth review of my blog and then meet with me via Skype and discuss his findings and make suggestions about how to improve it. So I purchased it on July 19th. Why not, this guy apparently knows a thing or two, right?

Blog service

So far, I haven’t received anything for my purchase other than an excuse (see below) and there has been no communication after that.

blog service emailOver the last two months, I have tried to contacted him via the TWO different email addresses he had listed and I have also tried via comment on his posts (which are moderated, of course, so I know he has seen them). All to no avail. Silence. He is just plain ignoring me and took my money, which in my book usually makes him a thief.

Anyone else had this experience with him? I am guessing I am not alone in this…

I recommend that you stay away if you have been considering his services.