More than 10 years since bizoppsuk.com was first uploaded to the web I figured it might be interesting to look back at some of the opps I bought over the years. First up is 2005.

It was through buying Vince Stanzione's spread betting course in 2004 that I was introduced to the world of business opportunities.

Following that purchase I remember receiving plenty of sales letters through the mail. As soon as you got on one company's mailing list the letters started arriving regularly. It was later on I discovered that this was because they rented out their lists for income.

What surprised me as I looked back through my records, emails and written notes is that I didn't buy a lot of courses directly from the seller. In many cases I picked up stuff second hand and then flipped it when I'd finished with it, often for a profit.

For this writeup I'll concentrate on the opps I bought direct from the seller.

So the first purchase of 2005 was Oliver Goehler's Divergence Profit System which was £49. I remember sending off a cheque to buy it.

The sales letter for this opp was very good and I read it through carefully before being pleasantly surprised by the price at the end. Also there was a very generous guarantee on this - your money back plus £10 if you weren't happy.

The manual arrived and I read it and it all seemed OK.

Until right at the end.

Oliver started going on about using a 2nd eBay account to place bids on your own auctions in order to pump up the price.

All credibility he had with me went out of the window with that daft idea. The newspaper stories, his appearance on TV, all his claims of big profits were now redundant because his manual basically suggested that he had been using other accounts to artificially raise the auction bids and create these big profits. I sent another letter asking for my refund.

A completely stupid and unnecessary addition to what was an interesting manual.

Next was Google Cash by Chris Carpenter.

Ah Google Cash, what a wonderful biz opp this was.

I can look back now after buying lots and lots of opportunities and truly appreciate how great Google Cash really was.

It was innovative.

It was simple.

It was profitable.

What more could you need?

There was no need to write any sales letters, no dodgy claims about making fortunes by 'popping a couple of DVDs in the post'. Chris Carpenter's manual showed you exactly how to make money by combining pay per click advertising (Google Adwords and Overture) with affiliate offers.

And it was only £31 or so.

I've seen so many products since then where the same unoriginal, dated biz opp ideas are peddled ad nauseum with slightly different slants. Information publishing, anyone?

Google Cash, though, was a brand new concept which Chris explained perfectly.

I bought the manual in mid-April 2005 and promised myself I would start as soon as I returned from a holiday in early May.

My first profit was banked by the end of that month and I continued to make money for months after that.

Probably the best opportunity I ever bought. Five stars.

Next was Super Affiliate Handbook which was also around £31. I bought this 4 months after Google Cash.

I can't remember much about this one so I guess there wasn't anything groundbreaking in it.

A few years later there was a blog that attacked the author of this book that seemed to be rather mean but that's my limit of recollection.

I've just searched my files and found the ebook so maybe I'll get round to reading it again. Probably not though.

In early September 2005 I bought a set of 10 DVDs from Pat Adams, the "UK Masters in La Manga" seminar footage.

Speakers were John Gommes, Mike Chantry, Vince Stanzione, Peter Hobday and Phil Gosling.

It was good viewing at the time and well worth the £69 the DVDs cost me. Pat's pitch was something to do with the bloke who did his duplication making some error with the colours on the discs. All complete cobblers of course, much like the salesman who insists that the car's only previous owner was a vicar. Harmless but amusing. Worked on me anyway.

Looking back and knowing how the biz opps industry has turned out, it's very impressive that Pat managed to get a load of people to commit to attending a seminar abroad. There are barely any seminars anymore because organisers can't get people to go to London never mind getting on a plane.

A week later I bought "Beat Betonmarkets" (£25.57) which turned out to be one of those horrible executable ebooks you can only read in Windows. It promised 5 strategies to make money from Betonmarkets .

If I read it through once I'd be surprised and thinking back now I couldn't tell you anything about it. I remember using Betonmarkets a few times but never really making any money on it. I probably ended up a couple of hundred pounds down.

More recently the site has transformed into Binary.com and Beat Betonmarkets is now a physical book sold on Amazon, renamed Beat Binary or something along those lines.

Following what I learned from Google Cash I made some money selling Beat BOM as an affiliate but nothing from any ideas I got from the book.

One month later I bought an ebook called "The Silent Sales Machine Hiding on eBay" for around £27.

This is another book I must have read but couldn't really tell you much about it aside from in one section it recommended selling concert tickets on eBay to make money.

After searching I have just found it on my hard drive as well so I could re-read it if I ever felt compelled to.

My last purchase in 2005 came at the very end of the year, a couple of days before Christmas.

Through eBay I found someone who had been on one of those two day seminars where you pay £6,000 and leave at the end of day two with the rights to sell 5 different DVD sets.

You were also promised to be taught how to make a fortune selling these DVDs via direct marketing. I've never heard of anyone who ever made money after attending one of these seminars.

Except for the seminar organiser, of course, who pocketed multiple hundreds of thousands of pounds.

This seller was obviously struggling as he was resorting to selling them cheap on eBay.

I contacted him and thrashed out a deal for a complete set of the DVDs. They were:

Some Bill Myers DVDs, the "Product Development" ones
A series of Copywriting DVDs by Carl Galletti
The "System" seminar DVDS
Carl Galletti's Internet Marketing Superconference DVDs
Armand Moran's Big Seminar DVDs

Total price he quoted me was £200 delivered so I snapped up the offer.

Aside from the copywriting DVDs I watched all of the others over the next few months. Bill Myers' DVDs were well-produced and interesting whereas the "System" seminar was extremely dry and, frankly, boring and I think I only watched it once.

I liked the Superconference DVDs and watched them a few times. Ditto with the Big Seminar DVDs.

Well worth the £200 I paid.

And that's 2005, the year I started BizOppsUK.com. Mostly my purchases were good and there were no outright cons in this lot.

I can't say the same about what I bought in 2006, when I came across a terrible course sold by the author's wife whilst he sat in prison for VAT fraud...