First, I want to give you two a public apology that you both deserve. I have been following several threads concerning your BTF and the new leaf you are turning over.

Through bits and pieces of comments you two have made and the results of the tests of BTF by Tiffany Dow, I have come to realize that several things swayed my criticism. First of all, I misunderstood what you meant by teaching your ‘Rich Jerk’ tactics. I assumed you were teaching the personality and the practice of abandoning your customers. I realize now is your marketing strategy instead. I also understand now that you are restricted about what you can say about Rich Jerk. Obviously, I conclude that there is some other kind of ownership or authority there. I could be wrong, but maybe that is why your identity was secret in the first place.

I apologize for the negative remarks. I made them before I had an understanding of what you were actually doing.

(Mike)
@Buck: There’s nothing that I’ve read more than the New Testament, and nothing I’ve learned more from. As in: I do everything in my power that I know of to follow Jesus Christ’s philosophy. So yes, I believe in Jesus Christ. Kelly can speak for himself, but I’ll tell you that when I (frequently) quote parables and share stories from the New Testament, he’s always a welcome, engaging and eager audience.

===> (Buck)
You have here, my personal (non-ads) email address. Feel free to email if you want to discuss the Bible. I am open to discussion with anyone willing to understand that sometimes we just have to agree to disagree at some points.

I don’t apologize for being cautious about your faith. It is healthy for anyone to be cautious about someone they don’t know in that situation. That being said, Based on what I have seen, I feel comfortable accepting your word about that now.

As far as your question about Bring the Fresh is concerned, I have to say that I reject your premise that if you go into a school that a teacher can tell you how long you will learn and how much money you will make. I spent tens of thousands of dollars collecting a history degree at James Madison University and it has made me zero money. When entrepreneurs start businesses, at least in America, their earnings are neither guaranteed, nor are they capped.

This may not sound satisfying to you but the trade off that we make when we quit a job to become an entrepreneur is that we no longer get to trade time directly for a guarantee of a set amount of money.

That said, there’s no reason for you to quit your job before you are making that comfortable income.
(Buck)
I have reluctantly (i.e. kicking and screaming all the way) come to the conclusion that I had a bad misconception in this regard. While there are some programs that should be able to be measured in a similar manor, because of the changes that keep occurring by Google, affiliate sites, etc., this marketing arena is too fluid for most absolutes.
(Mike)

And if you feel like you need some free training to get you started, then here’s one of the places to look:

http://kellyfelix.com/just-do-this/
(Buck)
I checked and it is moved to the member’s area. I’ll see if I can be a member after posting this.
Mike
This is Kelly’s post about his SEO method. He’s currently using it have gotten over 100,000 visitors to his site that he reveals in Bring the Fresh full disclosure absolutely free in the last 30-days. It took him about 3-months of planning to create that site from scratch, and then another 3-months for the traffic to really kick in.

Several of our Bring the Fresh customers and I have also used the same method in the last month to start getting rankings…

…For highly competitive terms…one of our customers just reported in our Yahoo Group how in the last 3-weeks he’s gotten a #3 ranking for a search term with 22,900,000 competing pages…and now he’s sitting right behind the Wall Street Journal and one of Google’s own pages eyeing the #1 slot. (I have several sites on the first page of Google for highly competitive terms, all that I started in the last 30-days, and I have disclosed all of them to our Bring the Fresh Full Disclosure customers. My cost for my sites has been the cost of server space and the cost of registering about a dozen domain names on GoDaddy.)

If you look at the “Just do this” post and say to yourself: “not for me” or if you just don’t get the right feeling about what we’re doing for *any* reason, then please HOLD OFF.
(Buck)
I will look at that material. SEO will fall into what I am in the process of doing. You will probably advise me to keep with what I am doing since I have been working hard at breaking the Raven habit… chasing shiny things. The previous plan I tried to follow was obviously black-hat, and what I am following now incorporates black-hat strategy. However, I it is flexible enough that I can use substitute it with white-hat strategy.
Mike
We’re not shutting down enrollment. This isn’t a scarcity based launch with a dealine. If you change your mind next week, next month, or next year, we’ll still be here. And in the meantime we plan to keep sharing new content, both inside of BTF, here and to our subscribers. So if you don’t buy now and then change your mind later, it’s no big deal.
Buck
LOL, You’ll never make money that way (tic).;) Actually, it is a welcome relief to see something without false scarcity, or even self-imposed scarcity. I understand some things have to have it, such as personal one-on-one coaching. There are only so many hours in a day.
Mike
In any learning situation there will be value the teacher provides, and value the student provides.

In Bring the Fresh, Kelly and I offer instruction, an over the shoulder approach where folks can see the actual business moves we’re currently making, and we offer a community and a culture built for encouraging success.

Our customers provide their own time, ingenuity, their own unique strengths and passion…and they mix with Kelly and I to make up what is turning into an extraordinary community in our Yahoo Group.

If you feel my answer is a “cop out” then I’d advise you not to join at this time because the reservations that you feel will make it so much more difficult for you to enjoy the value that we provide, and it will make it so much more of an uphill climb for you to provide the value required of you to build the business that you’ve talked about in your post.
Buck
I would not have been ready to accept this post as written at the time it was written. I don’t think you are copping out. It looks like you two are applying personal attention to your program rather than outsourcing it and walking away (dumping the customers). I have seen this so many times with other gurus since I criticized Kelly for using that tactic and then (I, wrongfully) criticizing him for teaching that tactic in BTF. I won’t name names, but I discovered three gurus I trusted because of their good material, only to find that they, too, dump their customers off to an outsourced group. I understand that you can’t afford to spend quality personal one-on-one time with every customer of your $30 product (hypothetical price), but you can afford to take an hour a week and address a few questions and concerns in a forum. Obviously, you are now doing at least that. I was just discovering that tactic being used by others when I first posted here. That was a sore-point for me.

I already said why I should not join your program right now. But it is due to my reservations. I have it on my list to follow up on when I reach that point in my current path.
Mike
Either way thank you, Buck, and than you to everyone who has helped kindle this extraordinary community that’s building around this Blog and around this whole Bring the Fresh situation!
Buck
You are welcome. Thank you for both opening the door and addressing my concerns.

I know you had to be pretty brave to open yourselves up on this forum, as well as on others, with BTF. It is hard to be transparent. I canned the idea of anonymity on the Internet when I first started in the early 90’s. As a result, I have to be transparent and honest. Unfortunately, I occasionally get that Chinese bug, what is is called? Ah, Huufontong. We call it “Foot in Mouth” here in the US.

I meant what I said, when I said it. But I was wrong to have said it without the knowledge to back it up. Now that I have the knowledge, I recognize that I was wrong in saying it. I apologize for having wronged the both of you.

Thank you
Buck

PS I will be posting a brief apology on my own site as well. (Yes, I read the NT, as well as the Old.

Until then, the “Rich Jerk” persona did not quite match the sincere phone call. I hung up immediately and switched off my cellphone for a couple of days…wondering what the heck was going on. Yes, it gets THAT freaky. It shows you that ANYONE out there, any of these money-minded internet marketers can call you up ANYTIME just to show you that they are watching you. I get you Kelly, I get it that you are brave enough to come out of your shell that you were hiding behind.

But still I don’t know… I’m still suspicious, your “coming out” may just as well be another ploy to market other stuff once again. It may just be another ploy to push all sorts of emotional hot buttons. And I’m still highly suspicious. I think it’s important that someone finds their OWN way to do things when it comes to marketing online.

I’m a straight-shooter in real life. I always say what I think, and that is why I have few friends in real life. Now, that doesn’t bother me a single bit. So why would I even care if people start dissing me online? Who cares? Create a new persona, and you’re good to go again. That’s why I’m still highly suspicious of you. Having a comfy group of people to fall back on (known as a “mastermind” group) is vital in creating more money. But you know out? Nothing is gonna last forever. A new breed of tech-savvy, more ruthless group of marketers are emerging. One day, the bad guys will be the ones that gets burnt. Google was the King for a long time, now it’s Facebook. One day you’re in, next day you’re out. Live with your conscience the only way you can. Don’t sell your soul to the devil for $…you’ll burn in hell when you die. There is no heaven or hell? Says who? Believe in what you’ve experienced and filter out the rest of the crap. You know best.

Davo )

Really though, I’ll give you the benefit of the doubt, but only just this once. ;0)

I never bought your RJ ebook but I got it from some of my “sources” for FREE and they gave it to me because they thought it was a useless piece of crap they wasted their money on BUT when I read your ebook, I found they were absolutely wrong. There was so much info in your ebook for a newbie like me, I came to know things I didn’t knew existed! We all need to start somewhere right? And your ebook was the one that led me into the internet marketing scene! And finally ended up buying your ebook

However, since I found value in your ebook, I thought the other ebooks would also help me learn something new BUT its been years and I am still reading ebooks that preach the age-old marketing gimmicks, same old rehashed stuff, nothing new! I wasted my money on them but yea I was smart enough to ask for a refund through Clickbank, I guess the ones who just whine and complain are non-action oriented and painstakingly lazy people who don’t even wanna make the effort to get their OWN money back! Comeon if a person can’t make the extra effort to get his OWN money back, how can we expect him to make the effort to increase his/her earnings lol ) So it was not all your fault all the way, there are people in this world who want or invite others to take advantage of them and that my friend is a very “REAL” fact! You can’t help people like them because they are looking to find excuses for the lack of happiness, success, and wealth in their lives! They need someone to blame their miseries on and internet marketers fit the bill very well! They don’t wanna do the work but they wanna get the money and that is never gonna happen! Until and unless people like them understand that making money is not easy and there is no magic bullet that will make them piles of cash instantly, several new IM Guru wannabes will keep taking advantage of them! There has to be an end to people’s unrealistic expectations and your post, my friend, makes that point very clear! Kudos to you for that

And I feel sorry for those who didn’t get your point and just considered it as an public apology. I know you are sorry for what you did or happened to do in the past but thats not the only point here right? No matter what the world says, you’ve got a lifetime admirer in me. My heart says you are really trying to make a difference here and 9 times out of 10, my heart is always right

Cheers and God Bless!

Honesty is a human norm. No one should be congratulated for it, any more than you congratulate someone for not being a murderer or a rapist. To a very large extent, marketing, like its cousin, advertising, is an illicit activity, for the simple reason that it results to all kinds of subterfuges, all kinds of appeals to human vulnerability and even vice–like greed, lust, etc. That is why the public feels a kind of instinctive disgust and dislike of the huckster, the salesman, the hot-shot businessman–they know that much of that success is due to being at least something of a sharpster or a con man. People who actually bring things of real value to a marketplace are rare. And even them, they are disagreeable in many cases, because they are forced to toot their own horns. And how sublime are topics like “traffic” anyway? Its ridiculous the way people go on and on and gush about all this.

Ah well–rant over.