Bring The Fresh

I ordered Bring The Fresh through this forum, and this morning I have asked Clickbank for a refund.

It does seem to be swimming against the tide, as everybody else loves it as far as I can tell. Maybe I'm just not getting it; maybe it's a case of The Emperor's New Clothes. Who knows? :confused: All I can do is share my experiences.

I found the product to be very confusing to use - there seemed to be no clear path. I compare this with the sheer professionalism of Tim Atkinson's Commission Overload which I got about the same time and which I have started working through (and will review in due course too). Okay, there was a Quick Start PDF which seemed to be the first step.

So I read that:

It speaks of SEO - a lot of it is fairly basic stuff (proper titles etc) and the rest is a step-by-step walk-through on how to set up your Wordpress blog for best SEO. This looks fairly comprehensive, but I had e-mailed a query before purchase and asked did you have to do Wordpress to succeed in this, as I use XSitePro, and was told that no, you don't have to use WP and XSP is fine. But there was no mention of how to optimise a non-WP site.

Then follows good, but basic, information on article marketing - nothing new really unless you're a complete beginner.

Then a section explaining meta-strategies. I'm not sure I understood what they were saying, but it seems to be that you need basic skills to succeed and they would be teaching those.

Then follows a rather incoherent, IMO, section called Organization, using copywriting as an example. They value organization they tell us, and they say that if it can't be found quickly it's not organized. Fair enough, but that's one of my issues with the product - nothing can be found quickly! My time is my most valuable asset and I don't have time to sift through their stuff to find what might or might not be there.

And then there were sections on 'Sex and the Story' and on 'Events' and frankly I'm not sure what they were getting at there.

I'm a professional writer, words are my thing, I'm literate and reasonably well-read. I don't think it's me here, that I couldn't get it. Perhaps if I had spent longer trying to decipher what they meant I could have figured it out - but I think it's the responsibility of the communicator to carry the message clearly, not the communicatee (so to speak!) to take ages to interpret it. Especially when the communicatee doesn't yet know there is value to be got out of it at all.

So, I didn't really 'get' the Fast Start Guide. No worries, I thought, I'll check out the videos, see how they go, come back to the Guide and see if it makes more sense then.

The navigation is confusing too. But I start with the BTF Road Map as that seems the logical place (even though it's fourth in the list after 'Latest News' 'Member Forum' and 'Recommended Products'.

The BTF Road Map tells us the first step is the 'Hotsheets'. This totally confused me. It wasn't a link, so that was no help. It described the Hotsheets as being the 'fast start guide' so I think they mean the Fast Start Guide - I'm not being funny here, the former has no capital letters so seems like a reference to these elusive Hotsheets rather than a title. And the reference to 'hotsheets' in the plural confused me when there is only one Fast Start Guide ...

Anyway ... I started watching the next section down, the Fast Start Videos.

The first two videos (totally an hour and a half) flagged themselves as being about Market Research. I watched them through once and at the end thought, "What? What exactly did I learn there?" It all seemed so vague.

So I watched them again, and took notes. Basically they said to market things you're passionate about (which I disagree with - you can have great success in IM marketing things where the figures add up regardless of your own interest. And indeed in the video he explored the niche of 'deer-hunting' despite telling us, many times, that he knew nothing about deer-hunting, so that was a contradiction for sure).

But I digress. They assumed that since we're in IM, we're passionate about that, so why don't we sell that? In fact, why don't we sell Bring The Fresh?? There was, IMO, huge pressure to do that ... occasionally there would be a reference to, "Of course you could ssell other products as well," but it would quickly segue back to BTF as it was such a good product to sell and they'd be there to help us sell it etc. They also spoke of dating and PickUpArtist niche, which they (or just Mike, I'm not sure) is involved in too.

Apart from that it was extremely basic stuff about seeing what was selling on Clickbank (a bit of good advice re Clickbank etc, which I won't share as it's proprietary - but it was a small gem in a LOT of dross).

And then there were ENDLESS screenshots of ancient Pay Per Click campaigns they had done. I was confused as I thought SEO was the thrust of it all. And more confused as the quality of the video wasn't great at all and I couldn't see the details of the campaigns. And there seemed to be no pattern to it, he'd say things like, "I can't remember why we paused that campaign, it's so long ago" and even, "I can't remember that campaign at all".

Well why show us then? There didn't seem to be much point to it. (There was a bit of advice about keywords mixed in here, which was good albeit very basic.)

Okay ...

I really wanted to give this a good try, so I thought I'd check out their super-duper '1 Article To Rule Them All' section, which was promoted as a way of getting thousands of backlinks really easily. I'm a writer, as I've said, and I enjoy, and am good at, article-writing, so this could be wonderful for me.

It still could, I guess.

If I could figure out what it was.

There are 3 1/2 hours of video and I am still none the wiser*. The quality was extremely poor. He was showing us on-screen what he was doing - but it was too small to read at normal size, and when I maximized it, it was too blurry to read. Also the sound quality was pretty bad and that combined with his accent (I'm a non-US native English speaker) made it very difficult to know what was going on. So I couldn't see properly, nor hear properly - it's no wonder it wasn't working for me. (Others on the forum have said they had trouble with the sound quality too, so it wasn't just me.)

*So, I went on to the forum and put in a question in the 'Ask Kelly and Mike' section about what exactly the concept was, explaining my difficulties with the videos. Other members have kindly explained their understanding to me, but it seems very brief to be 3 1/2 hours of video. Who knows, though.

Another point is that neither Kelly nor Mike answered my query, as of yesterday (and I posted it I'm guessing 10 days ago).

One of the big 'sells' of this was that you would get their private e-mail addresses and also their cellphone numbers. I have received neither, although I have read on the forum that they're on the site somewhere. Not good enough, people. I've no intention of using the cellphone number, but if it was promised, it should be given. And apart from my initial pre-sale query, any emails have not been answered either.

Indeed, I read yesterday that Kelly asked that we not e-mail them with queries, or put queries in the 'ask them' section, that could be answered by other members. Well, fair enough in one way, but if the queries are about flaws/gaps in their product, then they should be the ones to answer them, surely. I could see a question about 'Is it okay to aim for a keyword with 100k competition, or should I limit myself to 50k?' being better aimed at the collective wisdom of the members. But a question: "I couldn't understand your videos, please explain what they're about?" is their responsibility.

Another thing about the videos is that they didn't seem to be scripted at all so there was a lot of waffle. At one stage Mike said, "And Kelly's site about X is at number 3" and called it up, and said, "Oh, it's not. Well it WAS". Like, when? Did he not check it just before making the video?

The 'Article' video was funny in a way. He said he'd spent months preparing for it - well again there seemed to be no script so I'd like to know what prep he'd done. He was against a daylit window and apologised in advance as dusk was coming and might mess up the lighting on the film. It didn't, in fact, but surely then the answer was, rather than risk that, to film when you knew you had enough daylight, or close the curtains and use artificial light from the get-go.

Also his mother interrupted him at one stage, and that was filmed, and shown without being edited out. Very unprofessional IMO. Others might like the down-home aspect of that, but I just think it's an arrogant waste of my time - I just want to get the information, and get to using it, thanks. I don't care about your forthcoming party or your mother's visit. (No more than I expect you to care about mine.)

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They offered free upgrade to their Full Disclosure vids if you bought two products through their affiliate links. I did this, but got no upgrade, and e-mailed a couple of times.

Eventually I, and clearly others, got an irate mail saying that clearly people didn't read the information properly, that it was taking them ages to upgrade people as they had to do it manually and we had been told in the original information it might take a while.

Well, I can't swear they didn't say that. I presume they did since they're saying so, and I don't care enough to try to read back and find it. BUT ... if a lot of people were getting this wrong, then it wasn't made clear enough. Again, we're back to the fact that it's the communicator's job to get the information across. If one 'communicatee' doesn't get it, then that's obviously their mistake. But if many don't get it, it's the communicator's.

There are other videos too. These are their vaunted 'mega-strategy' videos and is based around chats between Kelly and Mike as far as I know. I didn't watch them - I've wasted enough time on this already and I have no confidence that they will be any better than what I've already seen.

I saw on the forum yesterday that everybody should have got their upgrade now, and if you didn't, to write in. I didn't get mine, but I won't bother writing in. I'm cancelling my membership as I say.

In summary: it's confusing, incoherent, the information as far as I can judge is nothing new (and they were promising amazing new stuff, but I either didn't see it, or didn't get it). The videos I did watch were of extremely poor quality, to the extent that I couldn't even pick up the information that was on them.

As for the two products I bought just for the BTF bonus - well, I'll look at them and judge them on their own merits, and will share my experience with them here too. But if they're not up to it, I'll have no hesitation in asking for a refund.

Morrigan