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.
You can get all the real weight loss knowledge there is for free at t-nation.com. I think the point he is trying to make tho' is that paying for something motivates him to do it. Which is human nature really; people do not value what they get for free.
This doesn't work as well as you might think, at least not for everyone. I've paid for programs, and still basically taken the same attitude towards them I would have had I got them for free. Granted, if everything I own was on the line, it'd probably be different, but $97 makes little difference (and I'm not rich, by any stretch of the imagination.)
I tend to realize when something is a sunk cost, so regardless of what I've put into it, if I'm not motivated to continue, I don't.
He's not concerned with credibility. He's mocking the system, mocking its methods, but using them to build his own traffic and generate money via affiliate marketing.
It's a parody. I'd say the original post and all the followups he's doing along the same lines are incredibly effective at demonstrating his point.
I thought that too at first, but he is also taking money from people. If the whole thing really is a joke, I would think one of those people would inevitably sue him (or at the very least issue a chargeback and tell the world).
It's not a parody. It's funny, but it's real. This diet saved my life. I mean you could spend a lot of time debating what I really mean, or you could just assume I mean what I say, get the book, improve your nutritional habits, lose tons of weight and live longer. Just consider the possibility that maybe it is that simple. What kind of crazy-ass dipshit would kid around when he was talking about having heart surgery three times by the age of 35?
Anyway, as far as your other question, there are tons of people making money hand over fist in affiliate marketing. I hate to be a dick but if you want to make money in affiliate marketing, you shouldn't just build some random complicated system in the hopes that maybe it might work, you should PAY FOR ADVICE. Just buy a couple ebooks on affiliate marketing and figure out which systems work. Even if you buy a bad book, you learn a little about how to spot bullshit. $35 or $97 on an ebook costs a lot less than several weeks or months of programmer time at a startup. I mean that's just crazy.
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".
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.
if you take my argument to its logical conclusion (and there's no apostrophe in a possessive "its", dammit), then you can't trust anyone without affilate links.
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.
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).
I wish losing weight weren't always the focus. In America today everyone is fighting against two horrible forces. On one side we have unrealistic body image expectations set by a photoshop/post-processing media landscape. On the other hand we have an abundance of tasty, high-calorie, but nutritionally bereft fast and processed food options.
The best formula I've found is to take the time to cook for yourself, and focus on physical fitness rather than weight.
If that's true (and it certainly explains why I don't gain weight when I go on vacation and eat totally different food like a pig for two weeks) then would flip-flopping diets entirely every few weeks have a good effect on weight? (Though not necessarily overall health, I suspect!)
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?
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!
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.
what I'm not telling you is that Dr. Fuhrman's system involves eating a lot of beans, and beans make you fart; and that eating at restaurants, I don't even bother trying any more, too much oil/salt/etc. also technically that can't cost me money, it can only cost me opportunity. it's nearly impossible to lose money self-publishing a blog.
Basically, he thinks that news sites like Reddit/HN/etc are doomed to become tabloids, since their author's incentives are all screwed up.
The format of the post is a trick to both get on the front page of HN, and prove his point - that you're more interested in fighting and gossip than real information.
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.
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.
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).
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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[ 4.0 ms ] story [ 68.9 ms ] threadI 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.
I tend to realize when something is a sunk cost, so regardless of what I've put into it, if I'm not motivated to continue, I don't.
http://gilesbowkett.blogspot.com/2009/12/blogs-are-godless-c...
He's not concerned with credibility. He's mocking the system, mocking its methods, but using them to build his own traffic and generate money via affiliate marketing.
It's a parody. I'd say the original post and all the followups he's doing along the same lines are incredibly effective at demonstrating his point.
I thought that too at first, but he is also taking money from people. If the whole thing really is a joke, I would think one of those people would inevitably sue him (or at the very least issue a chargeback and tell the world).
Anyway, as far as your other question, there are tons of people making money hand over fist in affiliate marketing. I hate to be a dick but if you want to make money in affiliate marketing, you shouldn't just build some random complicated system in the hopes that maybe it might work, you should PAY FOR ADVICE. Just buy a couple ebooks on affiliate marketing and figure out which systems work. Even if you buy a bad book, you learn a little about how to spot bullshit. $35 or $97 on an ebook costs a lot less than several weeks or months of programmer time at a startup. I mean that's just crazy.
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".
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.
The best formula I've found is to take the time to cook for yourself, and focus on physical fitness rather than weight.
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?
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.
Basically, he thinks that news sites like Reddit/HN/etc are doomed to become tabloids, since their author's incentives are all screwed up.
The format of the post is a trick to both get on the front page of HN, and prove his point - that you're more interested in fighting and gossip than real information.
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.
Here is an example of the kind of thinking you get from him: http://www.diseaseproof.com/archives/diet-myths-do-primitive...
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).
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.