Foreword: For those of you who have been following this saga, thanks for your emails and comments. Patrick Grote summed it up really well for my liking in terms of my own disappointment in terms of Joel Comm’s current activities, and also has some interesting finds in terms of duplicate content that are worth further investigation as well..check it out. Mike also pointed out Joel Comm promoting a program called Instant Article Ghost Writer in the comments..hmm, sounds really legit (not). Also, aside from the general breaching of Google’s TOS, I also noticed (by accident) this post from Jensense that suggests that Joel’s promotion of images next to Google ads may also be dodgy…further food for thought.
Part 2 isn’t about Yaro’s involvement today (and I’d note Yaro has made some changes to his original post), but as a result of a number of Yaro’s supporters in the original post in this series suggesting that Joel Comm can’t be judged based on his previous relationship with spam blog promoter Rick Butts. You see, as I dug deeper into this whole “Made for Adsense” bought to you by Joel Comm venture, one name kept coming up: Eric Holmlund. It’s not a name I was familiar with, and an initial Google search yesterday didn’t bring up an awful lot. But the more I dug, the more I found.
Introducing Eric Holmlund.
So who is Eric Holmlund? Well, although Joel Comm’s name is on the Made for Adsense program he is promoting, Eric Holmlund is actually the brains (for lack of a better word) behind the program, at least in terms of designing the templates. Joel Comm lists Eric Holmlund as being the primary contact for product/ site questions for the program here:
Maybe a paid employee perhaps? but the links are deeper than that, because every single one of the “sample” sites given in the joint venture partner pages has something in common: they are all registered to Eric Holmlund.
But this doesn’t say much really now, does it. So lets dig a little deeper. All the sample sites sit on a server by the name of PSALM9.COM….maybe Eric is a religious man? Lets take a look at the psalm9.com server (this is one screen shot only and doesn’t show all domains):
Now as someone who myself tends to buy domains on a whim, there’s nothing overly untoward here, until we start taking a look at some of these sites:
Dating-Facts.org
Free-info.org
Indeed, there’s a whole pile of sites like this….template look familiar? maybe because it’s the same sites Joel Comm is flogging.
We still don’t know that much about Eric, but psalm9.com also hosts Eric’s blog: Eric’s Tips. On it, he promotes products such as Blog and Ping packages, and one product I hadn’t heard of before (but none the less sickens me when reading it), WP Mass Installer.
In Eric’s words:
Basically, it’s a program that instantly installs WordPress blogs with the click of a button. It allows you to use any WordPress theme (you can add as many as you want), and create topical blogs based on any keyword that you input.
It will then create the blog and automatically post entries to it, based on your keyword, pulled from RSS feeds at your specified interval.
First of all does it work? Absolutely. I tried it personally and created some blogs in under a minute.
Now he does go on to say these sites could be a “little spammy” but still plugs an affiliate link for the program (can you believe this stuff is only $49…no wonder so much stuff is being ripped from my blogs!).
But to be fair, those running against me on these posts argue that promoting someone elses product isn’t a sin in itself. So what’s Eric’s cup of tea: a program called Eric’s Inner Circle. The first line on the Inner Circle Webpage:
Only members of this elite inner circle will learn my secret techniques for building AdSense websites.
You also get 7 free videos as an Inner Circle member, but number 3 is the clinger:
Getting unique human-generated content based on those keywords
Yep, it’s called spam blogging and it’s ripping off an RSS feed near you.
So hence I introduce to the world Eric Holmlund, the brains behind Joel Comm’s latest venture. Do people still believe that Joel Comm’s program is all good?
Postscript: if you want to know exactly what templates you are (most likely) going to get in Joel Comm’s program without paying a cent, my guess is they are the sites all sitting on the psalm9.com server now, you can get a full list by doing a reverse ip search at any good domain tools site for psalm9.com
Tags: Eric Holmlund, Joel Comm
