
Bowkett: This Is Why You Should Pay For Advice - fogus
http://gilesbowkett.blogspot.com/2010/01/this-is-why-you-should-pay-for-advice.html
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maxklein
That affiliate link just kinda kills it for me.

And no, you often do not get what you pay for. A lot of ebook peddlers will
take your money and give you some really crappy stuff. I've never bought them,
but I've taken them off bittorrent and been glad I didn't buy them.

He's making money off the guys system - he has no incentive to tell us the
negative stuff. The positie stuff may be true, but what has he not said
because he knows it will lose him money?

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abstractbill
Does anyone make significant money from affiliate links? We tried a ton of
different things for making money at jtv about a year ago when we were just
getting started with generating revenue, and amazon links were close to the
worst performers of the bunch for us. At one point we went as far as scraping
amazon's entire product catalog and building our own ad-server from it, so we
did try this route quite seriously!

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petercooper
When people claim to be making big money from affiliate links, it's rarely
Amazon links (or, rather, Amazon doesn't make up the lion's share of the
income). It's affiliate links to products on Clickbank, joint venture
promotions (e.g. all the JV partners who helped sell Frank Kern's Mass
Control), or links to _other_ vendors or middlemen that pay better than Amazon
(e.g. Chitika or Web hosts).

I know someone who - until Google really started clamping down on it - made
about $10k a month as an affiliate for a major text link ads company merely by
running ads on Google Adwords for them and getting a payout when they signed
up.

Back around 2003-2004, I worked alongside an affiliate marketing department at
a bargain basement Web hosting company that paid $100ish per referred signup
(which was amazing since their account only cost about $100 for the year
anyway). Some folks (often with "web hosting review" sites) were doing
hundreds of referrals for them each month. It's a big business, but people
don't tend to shout about it.

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Eliezer
Read Seth Roberts to discover why practically _any_ sufficiently large dietary
change will cause you to lose large amounts of weight... at first. Roughly,
your brain learns a flavor-calorie association that tells it how much food is
available, which determines your body's set-point weight. Any large dietary
change will cause you to lose weight... until your body learns the new flavor-
calorie association, and then it's back to hell again.

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paul
If you eat like Dr Furhman recommends, I guarantee you will lose weight and
keep it off, assuming you stick to the plan. It's difficult to get enough
calories eating only whole fruits and vegetables (vegetable oil and corn syrup
aren't vegetables).

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swombat
Nice affiliate link he's got at the bottom of the article.

I understand that we've all got to eat, but having an affiliate link in such a
praiseful article kind of demolished one's credibility - even if your name is
Giles Bowkett.

Considering the number of cranks and scams surrounding this topic, if you want
people to take your advice on such matters seriously, at least post a plain
link.

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anthonyb
Don't forget all of the ads he's pasted up on the right hand side, too. If you
follow your argument to it's logical conclusion, you can't trust anyone with
affilate links, ads, or any other way of making money from their readers.

The main difference here (from watching the video) is that the service he's
promoting is from a medical doctor and based on results published in medical
journals. That's a pretty high bar of evidence, and I doubt that it would be
anywhere close to a "scam".

~~~
Psyonic
I do lose at least a bit of trust in anyone with affiliate links or ads, at
least as far as their opinion of those products/companies are concerned. Who
wants reviews of anything when the review is clouded by money? I'd much rather
pay directly for the information.

So many forms of reviews are completely worthless because this system has got
out of hand. Amateur video game reviewers get the games for free, but if they
really rip a game, the publisher cuts them off in the future. Wonder why
almost no game gets rated less than 70%? And on, and on, and on. If you want
the worst of it, the incestuous world of affiliate marketing is where to look.
Say you want to buy a program to learn how to start... ok, you heard of one,
now you look it up on google to see if it's legit. EVERY SINGLE RESULT FOR 100
PAGES will be some guy pretending to review it, but really just promoting it.
They even use titles like this "Affiliate marketing scam," and the article
says, "Is it a scam? Let's investigate... no. Sign up here <aff link>"
Basically, within that world, it is impossible for a beginner to separate the
wheat from the chaff. Outside of AM, it's not as bad, but it's getting there.

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unexpected
To whoever wrote this post: you should realize, by now, after so much dieting,
that diets are a strawman's game. Congratulations on losing 75 lbs - I'm glad
paying for advice provided you with enough incentive to lose the weight. That
does not make your way the only way.

I lost 80 lbs by following free, useful advice found on the internet. That
does not give me any more credibility than you, nor anymore credibility than
me.

And if anyone wants to know how I did it, I'll tell them for the low, low
price of $19.99! ....just kidding.

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knightinblue
What's this guy's beef with HN? He harps against it repeatedly in various
posts.

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mcantelon
I get the impression he has a chip on his shoulder in general. My first and
only interaction with him was on a Reddit thread: some folks, including
myself, disgreed with one of his blog posts. He replied to the comments that
disagreed with him insultingly, calling people names and such. Then, after a
day or so, he deleted his comments after the fact to protect his rep.

~~~
giles_goat_boy
not to protect my rep, to avoid a personal problem I have, which is an
overwhelming compulsion to have the last word in every discussion. I can get
just about anybody to agree with me if I spend enough time to find out what
mistake they made when they misinterpreted my words, and I have a really hard
time accepting that people are going to say things about me which are
inaccurate or illogical. so I end up wasting a lot of time arguing with people
who never bothered to read what I was saying carefully in the first place.

I created this account so I could come on here and correct these comments. I
had to create a new account because I threw out my HN password about a week or
two ago in hopes of staying out of these kinds of discussions. I don't know
which specific incident on Reddit of deleting my comments and/or my account
you're referring to, because I've done that many times, but it probably
involved wasted time or inadequate explanation on my part and poor logic on
the part of several other people.

it's basically a failure of discipline and priority-setting on my part. I'm
getting better at it, though.

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gregwebs
Almost any diet can work if you have been eating standard American fare. You
can do a lot better then brain-washed vegetarians like Furhman, though.

Here is an example of the kind of thinking you get from him:
[http://www.diseaseproof.com/archives/diet-myths-do-
primitive...](http://www.diseaseproof.com/archives/diet-myths-do-primitive-
peoples-really-live-longer.html)

He makes a sweeping conclusion using 2 ridiculous citations. One of is some
random website, the other is off-topic (about modernized eskimos, not
primitives).

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mcantelon
Summary: Bowkett gives free advice on why you shouldn't accept free advice.

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celticjames
The financial incentives for downloading Joel Fuhrman's book from btjunkie are
great!

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Psyonic
But if you pay $30 for it, you'll follow it... right? Since EVERYONE who has
paid for diet books, camps, seminars, etc is skinny, right?

