Let’s be honest, the launch of CBPredators has been a bit of a mess.

The basic site building part works fine, but other things promised on the sales page are mysteriously missing.

So what has been going on?

That question has been asked, quite vehemently, on the Warrior Forum over the last couple of days. There have been people shouting ‘scam’ and others talking about how they have already asked for a refund.

As I promoted this – and still stand by my recommendation, I felt it appropriate and honest to write an update of where we all stand. This is what I wrote…

I promoted CBPredators to my subscribers.

As with every product I promote, I asked the creators to give me access in advance of the launch so that I could test it out to make sure I was happy to put my name to it.

As a result, prior to the official launch I had created two sites and had shown them both to my subscribers.

One used the basic FlexSqueeze default theme (and a few articles added that I got from EzineArticles): http://www.factsaboutabs.com

The other had no extra articles, but I had made some changes to the look of the theme to make the site look a little prettier: http://pregnancy-miraclereview.com

I don’t know anyone else who promoted who took the trouble to do that. For me, making sure my readers know what they are getting is more important than positions on launch leaderboards.

The first site took me about half an hour to create – including adding the articles – because I was learning my way. The second one took about 15-20 minutes.

Both sites were indexed by Google quite fast (I added a link to one of them from my blog and put a link to site 2 in site 1) and although neither seem to be ranked high enough for me to find them, my stats show that traffic is starting to come from search engines. (Mainly from Bing). Only a trickle, admittedly, but it is early days.

When I was testing the program, and at the time I was telling my readers about the sites I’d built, I had not seen the sales page, so was unaware of the various promises made. As far as I was concerned CBPredators was simply a quick way to build optimized review blogs.

Could I make the sites without CBPredators?

Yes, of course. But not as quickly. I very much liked that the reviews were pre-written – yes, I knew I had to rewrite them, but it is way faster for me to rewrite something that exists than to think up something new to say on my own. That alone saved me a lot of time.

So I was happy to recommend CBPredators simply on that basis.

I didn’t really notice that there was a lack of training materials because there didn’t seem to me to be much that needed explanation.

That was all prior to the launch.

After the launch, and after I saw what was being promised on the sales page, I was a bit surprised to see how much hype was written.

The claim that you can make money after just 15 minutes is nonsense, in my opinion. I am sure my sites – if they continue to get traffic as they already are – will make sales. In fact, checking my ClickBank stats shows that there have already been ten order form impressions. No sales yet, but at this rate I’d be surprised if there wasn’t one soon.

There are also promises made for parts of the system that don’t seem to be finished yet. I’m not entirely happy about that either – if you are going to launch a major product, I think it should be at least 99% ready, not about 60% as seems to be the case here.

Mind you – they are not the first to rush a product to market and worry about getting it right later, and nor will they be the last.

What will be important is how fast they address the clear issues.

I note that there are more training videos there now – they are not great, but they are a start.

I don’t understand how the system can make other sites for you, ones not based on the prewritten reviews. This seems to be an important option, but I’d like someone to explain to me how to do it.

I also don’t understand how the system adds content, as promised in the sales letter. There doesn’t seem to be anything in my sites that could allow that. Perhaps that is something that is ‘coming soon.’

All in all, I was very happy to promote CBPredators and still stand by my initial recommendation. It is a great idea and as far as the basic sitebuilding is concerned, it works.

I would have much preferred them to have all their ducks in a row before launch, or to have been up front about the delays and either put it back a week or warn new subscribers that there is a hold up. A timetable of when stuff will be added or fixed would have been nice too.

I have skyped with Jerome Chapman and Mike Merz and know that they are committed, and working furiously behind the scenes, so have confidence that this will come good very quickly.

But to all those people who are crying ‘scam’ and rushing to ask for refunds, I have to ask ‘why?’

This is a ClickBank product. You have time to wait. Give it a few weeks and if they haven’t made good by then – that’s the time to ask for a refund. ClickBank isn’t going anywhere.

I’ve created and launched products of my own and understand teething problems. Maybe the problems that CBPredators face are of their own making, but let’s give them a chance to put things right before we send out the lynch mob.

Update: After I wrote the above, Chris Fox posted to answer some of the questions.

He has now promised that the plugin that will add content to your blogs automatically will be ready early next week.

He says that the facility to make blogs that are not based on the pre-written reviews is currently switched off, but will be put on line very shortly.

He tells us that there is already more training material available, with more on the way.

He advised customers that there was a webinar last night and will be another one tonight.

He assured us that they are getting on top of things, are currently training more support staff and sought to put our minds at rest that they are not going anywhere.

Frankly, they have a lot of money riding on this so it is not in their interest to screw it up any more than it already has been.

Now to answer one specific question that has been put to me – what should you put it the input fields for the FTP part of the setup?

Here are two different alternatives (note that the field names may be slightly different, but their order should be the same)-

In this one I have set up the blog on the root directory

Here I have set up the blog in a subdirectory called review1

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Speaking of which, there are two threads right now that are interesting. One is from someone moaning that Blogger.com has deleted all his blogs and the other from someone who is saying that WordPress.com have done the same.

Both services allow you to set up blogs for free, and they host them for you.

In effect, they own your blog. And as a result, if they decide they don’t like you, or what you’ve posted, they can instantly delete all your hard work.

And they often do because many people ignore the terms and conditions they agree to when they sign up and create blogs that break the rules.

Doh! Of course they delete stuff they don’t like.

The only surprise to me is why anyone would allow someone else that much power of their business?

Buying a domain is cheap. Buying hosting is cheap. And once you have those two things, setting up a real WordPress site on your own domain, under your own hosting costs nothing.

So why, oh why, would anyone not do that?

I know that the $20-$30 dollars needed to buy the domain and hosting is still money that some people don’t currently have, but unless you are prepared to invest that small amount you can never, ever, say you have a business. You will always be at a third party’s mercy. And ‘Woe is me, the blogs I’ve worked so hard to produce’ threads on the Warrior Forum will continue to be commonplace.

Blogging is an excellent strategy. It can get you very high Google rankings very quickly. And in the process, it can make you a lot of money.

But for goodness sake, stay in control of your own destiny and use your own domains and hosting from the very start.

Rob Benwell’s Blogging to the Bank 2010 ebook tells you how to get started in blogging the right way. Incidentally, I’ve been saying that this is the third edition of the book, but I’m mistaken – it is in fact the 4th.

http://urlnex.us/bttb2010

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My Twitter followers have reached 1997 – so close to the magic 2000 that I can smell it! I’m sure that particular barrier will be powered through in the next few hours.

Twittollower is certainly performing brilliantly and my website traffic is feeling the benefit very nicely.

The secret, if there IS such a thing as a secret, to Twitter seems to me to be the same *secret* that confuses people so much about Google. That is to be as informative and natural as you can be.

So many people think that they can get high Google rankings, or responsive follower lists in Twitter, by churning out impersonal, automated, pitch-fest junk. But thankfully, success doesn’t come via that particular route.

You’ll so often hear people bemoaning the fact that their latest strategies don’t work, when those strategies usually entail buying in garbage articles from barely literate ghost writers, throwing up content-less websites, posting unhelpful, automated blog posts and tweeting endless affiliate links.

Those are not strategies that work. Believe me – I’ve tried them all!

What works is to provide real, useful, naturally-written information.

What works is to put the reader first and your profits second.

What works is to use your common sense: would YOU want to read what you have blogged/posted on your website/tweeted? Because if you wouldn’t, what on Earth makes you think anyone else would?

I’d love for you to follow me – http://twitter.com/imkick

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