So disappointed in Armand Morin

Armand Morin is a bright young man, an infopreneur, who says he’s just happened to have made $25 million over the internet since 1996.

He made the bulk of it by creating and marketing products needed by other infopreneuers. Marketing to other marketers.

Now he’s breaking the internet, just to squeeze a few more bucks on the sly. Greedy. Truly “black hat,” as he calls it. Too bad.

I bought my last-ever product from him a couple weeks ago. I’d bought at least one earlier product from him. I think it was year 2000. He came out with the “eCover Generator” program for creating especially nice-looking e-book cover graphics. It sold for $100. Was sorely needed. Was snapped up like hotcakes. Is still the leading such program, although it has some real competition now.

One of the things I particularly admired about Armand was his powerfully effective, straight-forward, yet relatively low-key copywriting style.

I studied it. Kept samples of his salesletters in my “swipe file.”

And had thought of him as being a pretty upright, up and up guy. Then I fell for something.

He produced a country CD recently under a pseudonym. Not a very good CD. But it is obviously something he enjoyed doing. And he wanted to make a splash with it. So he made a powerful offer online.

He agreed to share something he said he had never shared before to anyone who would buy two copies of his “Michael Lee Austin” CD during a certain couple days. He said he would explain, step by step, how he makes more than $300,000 per month from Google’s AdSense.

Since I’m an internet publisher trying to master Google’s AdSense program as one revenue stream for my publishing efforts, I was interested.

First, I was amazed to hear that Morin was making $300,000 per month from AdSense ads on his sites. I’d never noticed AdSense ads on any of his pages.

Second, since I respected Morin’s internet business savvy, I expected he would teach me a few pretty important principles that would help me along the way.

So I spent $25 for two CDs I didn’t want and didn’t open. (I listened to every song online before ordering and didn’t find one that thrilled me, that made me want to drink beer, howl at the moon, run off with your wife, or shoot a man in Reno — and a good country song should do at least one of those things.) I bought the CDs because that was the price of admission to Armand’s AdSense Mastery training seminar he promised to deliver via telephone bridgeline and downloadable MP3.

Well…. Just downloaded the MP3s from that seminar and played them on my pod-like device while on the road today. Rather, I played about an hour of them. And am totally dismayed. Feel like I’d been taken.

No question but that Armand is making a killing on AdSense. He just bought his parents a new home and an expensive new car with one month’s earnings. But he’s doing it by gaming Google and trashing the internet. He’s one of the guys (maybe one of the main ones) who’s ruining the search engines.

He made no apologies for it.

Morin is behind all those bogus directrory pages you get nowadays when you do a Google search. He created and sold a program that manufactures the pages. And he’s putting up new ones every day.

What pages?

You search a subject–say “price of tea in China.” Google returns 12 million three hundred thousand twenty-seven results. You read through the first 1 or 2 million results–or, really, the first 10, maye 20 results. One of them says something like: “Price of tea in China, up to the minute reports from 40 cities.” You say, “Yeah!” and click on that.

Poof. Up comes Armand’s site (imaginary in this example): www.priceofteainchina.com and it’s nothing but some java and php coding that dynamically creates a “web directory” consisting of regurgitated search-engine results describing sites discussing the price of tea in china. If you’re lucky, one of them includes the one that caught your eye that said, “Price of tea in China, up to the minute reports from 40 cities.” But maybe not.

Maybe that site was only generated in the results the day that Google indexed this page. And now it’s no longer around. So you did a search, thought you’d found something useful, clicked on it and found that all you got was a page with bunch of crap search engine results.

Armand’s program for creating these junk “search directory” pages is called “directory generator.” And he explained that he and his partners painstakingly tested and eliminated its every footprint to make it almost impossible–if not impossible–for search engines–like Google–to automatically detect that the pages it produces are basically bogus, automated and mass-produced junk pages clogging the search engines.

And, of course, he puts AdSense ads on each of those bogus pages.

And he has thousands and thousands and thousands of such sites. And is building more all the time. And just taught everyone who bought his country music album how to do the same.

There is nothing good to report about this.

This is junk, search-engine spam that makes the internet less efficient and less useful and less usable for all of us. And he and others doing it are doing it only to exploit how the search engines work so that they can stick targeted AdSense ads in front us and hope we might click on one–rather than provide us with the solid content we are searching for when we do Google searches.

This is not good business.

I feel taken.

And I won’t be buying from Armand again. In fact, I’m wondering whether to ask for my money back from him or from Amazon where I bought the CDs, and whether to share what I’ve learned with Google, or both?

Why does someone who has made $25 million on the internet by selling useful and needed products feel the need to scam Google and clog up the search engines with nonsense pages just to line their pockets?

Sorry, Armand, but you’re not doing good work here.