If you haven’t yet heard of Niche Devil and are sure you will never fall for the “get rich over night” type of marketing propaganda, then feel free to read another blog post of mine, for example about how to build your own backlinks. If you have heard about it and are thinking of spending $97 on it, then you should read on and perhaps this post will change your mind.
Disclaimer: I haven’t used the product and so far I have only seen two sites being built with it. All concerns and opinions in this post are based on the information stated on the Niche Devil web site, those two sites I have seen and the sales letters I have received from Niche Devil so far.
What is Niche Devil
Niche Devil is, in the developers own words a tool for “Make A KFC Family Sized Bucket Of Cash By Feeding The Google Monster It’s Favourite Food And Hardly Lift A Finger”. Great statement, right? But it is not about the use of language on the web site, which, together with the spelling, could do with some improving. It is about if the product is worth the money! So how do they claim you will be able, with Niche Devil, to make this “family sized bucket of cash”. The idea / initial setup is intriguing: You buy a domain (actually they recommend you buy MANY domains), hosting and Niche Devil. You install Niche Devil on your hosting account, you run the script, insert your chosen key words and your affiliate links for the store you want to build and magic, magic, Niche Devil spits out a site with content and products. And that all in only, hold your breath and drumroll, only 36 seconds! Now you only need visitors to come and buy those products. But hey, Niche Devil even promises that the visitors will come with the help of pinging. All this sounds great, doesn’t it?! Lets look at it point for point to see what is left of this great product. Here is such a web site that was built with Niche Devil: officialcarshopper.
Speed
36 seconds to build a finished site with content and affiliate products sounds great. But if you have been more than, lets say a week, in internet marketing, then you know that building a site is not so time consuming. What takes up time is the search for the right niche and keywords. And will Niche Devil help you with that? Nops, you still have to find a profitable niche + keywords all on your own. So that’s to the “only 36 seconds per site”.
Ease of use
You have to upload the script via ftp to your server / hosting account. And this server / hosting account must meet some minimum requirements to run Niche Devil. Now if I could find those minimum requirements on the Niche Devil web site, that would be really helpful, but nops, something so basic is not worthy to be included in the sales pitch. If somebody knows the answer to that question, I would be thankful if you could post it in a comment. Edited: Finally found it hidden in the middle of the sales pitch and in small print. The minimum requirement on the web host site is “Niche Devil Requires IonCube PHP Loaders” Mouthful, but something that comes pre-installed with many, but not all!, webhosts like for example Hostgator.
Affiliate products
Niche Devil is nothing else then a glorified niche store builder. You give it the keywords, your affiliate code and Niche Devil pulls the corresponding products from Ebay, Amazon
Content
Niche Devil is making a lot of hype about their “ever refreshing” content. What it does is pulling / scraping content from the internet in form of videos, images, twitter tweets, articles and the like, all content that is related to your key words. This content is refreshed every time the site loads, presenting Google every time with new content to spider. This part seems to work well, as none of this content gets its own page. It is simply an exchange of content on the same static pages your web site has. My concern is more about the legality of such content and the moral issues involved. Somebody wrote this content and took the images and videos. What is about their copyright? Whilst youtube videos and twitter tweets are not so much of an issue, the images are. Obviously there are also no back links provided to the scraped content ;-( How would you feel being ripped off like this?
Traffic Attraction
Another big hype, Niche Devil web sites claim to attract traffic all on their own, WOW, the internet marketers dream! Scraped content that attracts traffic all on its own and the whole thing key word optimized! So, where is the trick? The trick is to “ping”, now “pinging” is something that a lot of bloggers do semi-automatic or manual whenever they update a blog, I use Pingomatic and Google has also its very own blog ping service. Which service(s) Niche Devil uses to do this is not disclosed, obviously, if not everybody would do it for free. Again, if somebody has more information about this point, I would be grateful.
Sales Pitches
If there is one thing what turns me off then it is statements like “Hurry up, only available for 14days!” If somebody has a good product and wants to earn money with it, why restrict the time the product is on the market? I can think of two reasons, neither of them nice. One would be that they want to sell Niche Devil scripts before reviews and long term experience kick in. The other is to create an “urgency” to buy this product NOW, before it is too late. I was browsing yesterday and today some blogs and came across a lot of sales pitches for Niche Devil, mainly because of this urgency and the nice affiliate program they offer. If you have only 14 days to reap this kind of money in, you have to get the word out quickly, right? So a lot of people that previously shouted “BANS” are now shouting “Niche Devil”. BTW, they only say that “Niche Devil will never be sold again as a single product once the 14 day sale is over.” That doesn’t mean they take it completely from the market, they just put it in a package with another program and continue to sell it after the 14 days are over. Or, my personal guess, after 14 days they do a new sales pitch, claiming “Because of the high demand we extend the sales period one more time for xyz days.”
The fine print at the end (from their web site): “…there is no guarantee that you will earn any money using the techniques and ideas in these materials.” Exactly, there is no warranty at all to make money on the internet, not with a blog, not with BANS and not with Niche Devil. Because, now comes the 50 million dollar question:
Why would they sell a product that makes money so easily and not use it to make all this nice money for themselves??? If it makes money why give it to potential competitors in the niche markets???
Summary:
Is Niche Devil a Scam or not? You decide, but for what they offer I think they are way overpriced. Not only this, the whole “only for 14 days” hype gives me the feeling that they don’t want to wait until some longtime users put their reviews up! But hey, if you want to try them feel free to use my Niche Devil Referral Link, after all, I wrote this article for you!
@lowrdr
But as I said earlier, this whole discussion is a bit late as Niche Devil is “sold out”, or do they plan a re-launch? SY
Copyright works differently in different countries, from a wikipedia article: “but most recognize copyright in any completed work, without formal registration.” see complete article here http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Copyright In one point I agree with you, I also don’t run around and check for duplicate content of my web sites. I also don’t use copyscape, perhaps I should, but my experience so far with copyright infringement is that it is very difficult to fight. (I had some cases where people misused my photos and I can tell you that international copyright cases are an absolute nightmare and if you don’t have a lot of money for a lawyer, a waste of time and effort.)
Regarding one earlier point you made “I created roughly 15 websites in a matter of 1 week” If I remember right the original sales pitch for Niche Devil was on the lines of “Less then 2 minutes per site setup” Seeing that you worked a week on 15 sites, shows that you did much more then just run the script. I guess you added a lot of additional content and made some effort to reduce the footprint considerably. And I guess that that is also the reason the sites are still indexed and make money, because you put some effort into them and didn’t rely only on an automated script.
“As far as not linking my webpages, considering the content we’re talking about, you should be giving me kudos, for not being stupid.”
I wouldn’t call it stupid if you link for example to your blog or similar, I didn’t expect anybody here in this discussion to link to their Niche Devil created site
I can’t comment on a re-launch because I do not know, but when microsoft posted they’re crappy operating system and everyone paid $75-$150 for it, they made a better one, and still charged people who already had it.
Worked for them.
@lowrdr
SY
Lol, that was the reason I started to switch to Mac
I think of it as “you get out what you put in”, and from what you’ve described, you can probably make some short term money with this thing, but not enough to cover the expense of joining the program, and when the sites get pushed off the top 1000 search results or delisted, then it’s all wasted effort.
Why not spend some time on a winning blog configuration, and then get some tools to do quick reproduction of a blog setup, and then add your own unique high quality material?
The only thing I can think of that would make you profit on this is to set these sites up as fast as you can, and then flip them for $50 soon as google indexes them.
Jack Sinclair´s last blog ..By: An Easy Niche Finder Formula | Marketing Review
@Jack Sinclair
Excellent points, yes if you want to build up a portfolio of quality web sites that also produce income in future, such scripts are not the way to go. And for flipping such sites? Not my cup of tea, also you could run into problems with the script writer as you would have to pass the script on with the site. And I don’t think that was allowed, SY
So would you say that Chitika is the best second choice if you don’t want to use Adsense on a certain site? Or is there something better?
Yes, imho, Chitika is an excellent adsense alternative or addition to it, SY
I’ve been building niche sites by hand for quite a while now. They seem to work fairly well so I’m reluctant to try and use a script such as the one mentioned in this article.
The risk of Google banning all of the sites from a particular script just isn’t worth it. Instead I do the keyword research myself and then have several employees that build everything by hand using wordpress and a few specialized plugins.
Seems much less risky and honestly, the sites have real content on them that is useful for their visitors, not just spammy buy this product type stuff. So everyone wins.
Paul@Sony MDR 7506´s last blog ..Replacement Pad for Sony MDR-7506
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