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Dave and I were discussing what topics we should post about and figured it might be a good idea to review some of the services and products we used while building our business…
The first in our series of reviews is Dan Thies’s SEO training.
Dan thies sells various training packages off his company website www.seoresearchlabs.com , these training packages come in a variety of flavors including Advanced SEO $895.00, 1 on 1 coaching $395.00, Link Building $795.00, Site Workshops $795.00 and Pay Per Click training $695..
Each package includes different training, I personally purchased the 1 on 1 coaching package for $395.00 USD which came with 1 years access to his private site located at www.seomonthly.com, access to 5 weekly conference calls and 2 one hour long phone calls directly with Dan Thies.
After purchasing the training package I immediately logged into the private site www.seomonthly.com to see what goodies I could find, the first thing that struck me was the recent news was all dated from August and September 2005, as well the recent links section on the site was all horribly out of date. This of course set off a lot of red flags which unfortunately being young and innocent didn’t lead me to asking for a refund, to be honest for the most part I bought the service for the 1 on 1 phone calls the rest was just gravy anyways.
Moving on through the site I noticed the promised 20+ hours of video was in fact there, I was a bit disappointed to see that much of it was already quite old, thankfully over the next several months new coaching calls and webinars were added and I have to say much it was quite useful if not a little dry. That being said looking at the private site just now I see the current videos are already getting quite old with the last files being added in the July-September range.
I would give the private side a B minus rating, it’s not updated regularly and the forum is pretty dead, however if you are a noob like I was then this would be an easier way to introduce yourself to the SEO field then reading ebooks and forums.
The Conference Calls…
This was perhaps the greatest disappointment, when I scheduled my first of 2 calls I invited Dave to drive up and sit in on the call, the call was scheduled for 11:30am and around 12:30pm Dan Thies called apologizing profusely for being late saying the call shouldn’t have been scheduled at that time but somehow was..
This was fine and we learned a lot of interesting things from Dan including some ideas we hadn’t thought of yet for our yet to be completed classified ad script for our network, the first call was amazing and is probably why I still look up to Dan Thies as a talented guy.
The major problem occurred with the second phone call, we scheduled it for the same time a few weeks later unfortunately this time Dan never called, I sent an semi upset email to him and he replied a couple days later essentially saying it was my fault and that I hadn’t included a phone number.. I could have sworn I had included and it was a very simple form which I very carefully filled out but since I had no way to prove it I gave him the benefit of the doubt.. I attempted to reschedule on 2 occasions and for whatever reason the script suddenly wouldn’t email me the confirmation link.. Most people probably would have fought to get there call but I kinda gave up at this point.
Call usefulness? I would probably give the 1 on 1 coaching a B+, whatever my personal feelings after this ordeal I do believe that Dan knows his stuff, these packages are definitely not for the experienced webmaster but for the newbie with a site whose looking for some professional help it may be worth it. Dan defiantly needs to refine his scheduling system though.
This brings us to the last part of my review, group training and the video’s included on the private site. As I mentioned many of the videos to me felt to be a bit out dated, we all know the search engine world moves quickly and I felt the videos shouldn’t have been 1-2 years old considering how much you pay for access, that being said they covered a wide variety of topics and things you don’t normally hear about in normal forum chat such as graph theory and Google’s application of it as well as how Google can detect paid links.
The group training sessions unfortunately I had no benefit from, the scheduling changed almost every week, technical errors happened constantly causing on 2 occasions the training session to be canceled, this wasn’t such a big deal for me because the audio for the sessions was only accessible from a long distance phone number so I only attempted to sit in on 1 of the 8 sessions.
Overall I can’t honestly say I would recommend Dan Thies’s packages to anyone who already has an extensive amount of experience, for the newbie’s out there who need more hand holding then these packages may be what your looking for, if your more self motivated and a good reader then Aaron Wall’s SEObook.com (affiliate link) may be better for you, its cheaper and it’s kept up to date.
News Flash: I just noticed that Dan has announced he is shutting the doors on his SEO training, however his site is still accepting orders and his “Retirement” seems to be more of a starting a new company with even more training packages.
February 7th, 2007 at 4:07 pm
Wow, Jason… guess my emails didn’t get through to you either, eh?
Anyway… I wasn’t kidding… the coaching program is closed. We’re not taking any more students. The only reason you see any training available for purchase on the site right now, is because I still have coaching students left who are paying a month at a time.
Anyway, thanks for the review, and for discouraging anyone who might come looking for a “hot SEO secrets” site, ’cause that’s not what I was selling. Stuff like this reminds me of why I quit offering one-on-one coaching.
February 7th, 2007 at 5:26 pm
Dan,
Jay received no Emails from you but the one mentioned in the email, claiming otherwise won’t change that. The fact that you were late on the first call, and now you’re trying to use everyone’s favorite excuse “the emails didn’t arrive, but I sent them!”, just goes to proove his review as acurate.
His review is nothing more than a fair an honest depiction of the service received. Perhaps it’s best for everyone that you’re not offering one-on-one coaching anymore.
February 7th, 2007 at 6:17 pm
Dan,
I’m not really sure what prompted you saying:
“Anyway, thanks for the review, and for discouraging anyone who might come looking for a “hot SEO secrets†site, ’cause that’s not what I was selling. Stuff like this reminds me of why I quit offering one-on-one coaching”
I can’t see how my review in any way described me looking for a “hot SEO secret”, granted I wouldn’t have complained if it had one but I purchased your training to learn the nitty gritty and you may notice I didn’t have anything negative to say beyond the fact I felt the materials were fairly old and I had a lot of problems communicating with you and I stand by it as an honest unbiased review.
As for my comment about you starting a new firm, Dave actually informed me about that a few minutes before I posted my review on our blog, I looked into it and saw a number of blogs saying you had stated an intention to start a bigger training program under a new company of sorts, so if I was ill informed I apologize.
Anyways I’m glad your still around and doing well and wish you the best in whatever you do..
February 9th, 2007 at 7:24 am
Hey guys, I understand social bookmarketing, and link bait and all that. DIGGing your own blog posts is a common practice, it seems. If you want a hot tip, the trick is to get your friends to vote for the stuff you Digg, otherwise it’s as good as buried. I don’t bother with that kind of stuff myself, but YMMV.
Anyway… I was indeed late on the first call. The scheduling system allowed a booking on a scheduled day off, which was a configuration problem, and it has been fixed. My error, all the way. On our subsequent CALLS, you were unable to start on time once because Dave was on the road, and yes, you did in fact fail to call as you said on another occasion, then emailed to ask me about scheduling without using the online system. I sent two emails in reply, which you say you never received. I can’t “prove” that they were received but I did send them.
As far as the private site content goes, it is what it is. Live classes over the past couple years have been recorded and archived. The purpose of the private site is to provide access to those archives, and to allow students in the classes to post questions in the forums. I’m not sure what has changed so radically in SEO over the past couple years, other than methods I don’t recommend working even worse than they used to. We reviewed the Advanced SEO class (one of the oldest pieces of content) a few months back and it didn’t seem out of date to us then, but what do I know? Maybe there are secrets so secret that I haven’t been informed. It’s true that the only live classes last year were link building and coaching classes. Those were also archived and available to you.
Quite honestly, this whole thing smells a lot more like link bait, since the feedback here is almost 180 degrees from what I heard from you in person. But if anyone is reading this besides us (unlikely), it’s academic - there is no coaching program available, and no live classes are scheduled or planned.
February 9th, 2007 at 8:37 am
Actually I only posted the review because I needed a topic to post about, we were running an experiment in January to see if we could actually maintain posting at least 1 quality content post every day between the 2 of us before putting time and money into a nice looking design and some custom coding work, when the earnings dropped I pulled out of the experiment because I didn’t feel right running a blog about how to run a sucessful web business if I wasn’t running one myself.. After 2 weeks we peaked at around 100 visits a day and after a few weeks of neglecting the content we still get around 30-40 visits/day.. I know thats small time but for a short experiment it shows promise..
However I hope you understand in your latest reply you just more or less proved everything I’ve said to be right… First of all your package only included 2 hour long calls.. The first call you made was late because of your scheduling problems and when you did finally call Dave was out getting lunch and so you were nice enough to call back a little later when he was back.. But I don’t see in what way anything I said was misleading and their were no calls beyond that..
As for the second call, like I said in my review you emailed me saying I did not include a phone number and while Im sure I did I can’t honestly say I can prove it one way or another either so I gave you that one but gave you a low rating because your reply was entirely unsympathetic and at no point did you make an effort to email and say your waiting on my call or anything to give me indication of that.. In fact at that point I didn’t even have your office number so Im not ever sure why you would just assume if no number was entered that the person was calling you.. Espically since I emailed you when 20 minutes had gone by and I had not heard from you yet
As for the feedback being different, may I ask what is so different? On the one phone call we had, I said in my review, you were very helpful and it’s the reason I still look up to you as an expert of sorts, since we had no further exchange of feedback beyond me saying I was disappointed with the handling of the second call which never happened.. I also acknowledged my own failing in not pursueing you with that your phone number to get the second call when your script mysteriously stopped allowing me to book any further calls
But anyways whatever you can say what you wish and I do enjoy this discussian despite the fact I doubt I will be able to change your opinion or you mine. If your out of the game and just working away on stompernet thats fine and I wish you well.. I don’t have any hard feelings Im just calling it as I see it..
If you feel the need to keep commenting thats fine Im more then open to a debate or even just friendly discussian but if you feel you have to keep posting messages which are nothing more then subtle attacks then please take it elsewhere..
February 9th, 2007 at 8:52 am
http://digg.com/software/Ever_wondered_if_Dan_Thies_expensive_SEO_training_was_worth_your_money
That is you guys digging, isn’t it? Maybe I am misunderstanding the “tone” of that.
Anyway, if you ever do want to talk, my office # is still 214-550-1359.
April 16th, 2007 at 7:06 am
[…] This has happened 3 or 4 times on our little blog already (several times when were were first starting and had next to no readership, even). It’s interesting how Web 2.0 companies and online businesses have a fascination with blogsphere PR. In some cases it can be good, like when Matt Mickiewicz let us know our concerns were being taken care of in the Sitepoint complaint post. In the mediocre category, is when Dan Theis basically argued with Jay after he posted a less than favorable review on the services we received (not that we didn’t learn anything from Dan, but read the post and surmise your own conclusions; I stopped posting on the thread after my first reply because I tend to get a little hot around the collar on these issues and I’ve learned that it’s wise to just keep your pie hole shut sometimes). […]