Straight away I was purchasing opps in 2006 with £34.43 spent on the Rich Jerk ebook in early January followed closely by a book from Streetwise for £29.95.

Sadly I didn't note down the name of the book in my records.

The Rich Jerk ebook was reasonably good although the advice about creating one page websites was basically encouraging fraud.

The 'Jerk' advised his readers to go off and create daft little so-called 'review' sites. On these sites he told them they should claim to have been ripped off many times when buying business opportunities.

And after being ripped off countless times they finally found three products that really made money.

And here are links to those wonderful products:

[insert Clickbank affiliate links here]

Here's a great idea, the Jerk suggests, why not plonk the Rich Jerk down as the number 1 choice? It pays 75% commissions making it well worth your while to cast aside any professional credibility you may have built up over the years.

Despite how dumb it all was, the Jerk's advice was used by thousands of people and this method was quickly run into the ground. It was this stupid advice that inspired the woeful Danny's Scam Review from US halfwit 'Mark Warren'.

Early in 2016 there was a second coming of the Jerk when he released a follow-up Rick Jerk product. It didn't appear to catch on as well as the first book and he has been quiet since.

The book from Streetwise was most likely John Harrison's How to Stop Working and Make a Million Pounds Instead.

It was a good read if I remember correctly and I should probably re-read it at some point. Buying that book obviously got me on Streetwise's mailing list because my next 3 purchases were from them:

• eBay Kommando Newsletter - £47 for 1 year
• Passive Income Newsletter - £57 for 1 year
• "Streetwise book" - £19.95

I don't remember much about Oliver Goehler's eBay Kommando Newsletter other than it arrived through the post every month. I didn't renew the subscription and I sold the 12 issues that I did receive on eBay several years ago.

Ian Maitland's Passive Income Newsletter was a good read and from what I can recall it had share tips, betting tips and short articles with ideas about different business opportunities.

I'm not sure the sales letter accurately described the end product here and I didn't renew. The 12 newsletters are still in my collection though. I did use one particular idea to liven up a trip to Belle Vue greyhound track several years ago and make a little bit of profit.

The £19.95 book mentioned here is obviously another from Streetwise although I didn't note down which one unfortunately.

It was another month before I purchased anything else, spending £10.99 for an ebook from Laycock Publishing (Tony Shepherd and Sara Brown). This one was called "Worn Paper" and described the process Tony and Sara used to create information products.

In May I paid £42 for another Clickbank ebook called "Become Hated". This has some tosh in it about HYIPs (High Yield Investment Programs - scams in other words) but on the whole it was pretty good.

A week or so later I paid to join Fantastic Pay which turned out to be a comically ridiculous pyramid scheme.

If the comments on the official forum were to be believed, some of the members of Fantastic Pay invested their life savings into it and were convinced that they really would get monthly returns of 200%. Some people are just utterly, painfully stupid.

The money I put in was actually returned to me, technically.

It was paid out to the payment processor but as I think back it occurs to me that I could never actually get this payment processor to push this money to somewhere where I could use it, for example my bank.

My investment likely still sits in an account somewhere, a small sum of money that will never be claimed. Luckily it was only £27.

In June I subscribed to the What Really Makes Money newsletter from Canonbury Publishing which, at that time, usually carried reviews of all the latest biz opps.

Two weeks after I subscribed I paid £267 for lifetime membership to WRMM after receiving a very enticing offer via email:

• All the back issues of WRMM
• £1000 worth of live personal consultations with Nick Laight per year
• Entry to the 'annual closed-door wealth symposium'
• Membership to the WRMM website
• Choice of one free Canonbury product
• 25% lifetime discount on Canonbury products

The price was £267 plus a maintenance fee of £17.50 per year. I thought it was a great deal and snapped it up.

As it turns out, I don't remember ever having any invites to consultations or wealth symposiums. I don't think I ever remembered to claim the 25% discount. The back issues and the free product were delivered, though, and the website became available in early 2007.

WRMM newsletters continued to drop through the letterbox every month until I stopped paying the maintenance fee a few years later and so they stopped arriving. WRMM is still running as far as I can gather and appears to now be a membership site with a monthly fee.

"Chris Cobb eBook" is the next entry in my list, something bought in mid-June for £44. Looking back I am very irritated with myself for not claiming a refund on this. And that's all I'll say about Mr Cobb and his products.

In August I paid just over £100 for a ticket to the "Focus 4 the Future" weekend seminar in Birmingham which I attended in the first week of September. What a superb investment it turned out to be. I've written plenty about it before so have a read through the report:

Robert Puddy's Focus 4 the Future UK and US Seminars

Maybe I'm not on the right lists or not looking in the right places but there don't appear to be any internet marketing seminars anymore in the UK. What happened?

It was the 15th September 2006 when I paid £34.99 for a product called "Get Rich at Home" by David Burch.

What a mistake that was.

This was advertised all over Google's search engine results pages via Adwords and via Adsense adverts on all kinds of biz opp related websites.

Adverts for Get Rich at Home were plastered everywhere.

And it was pure junk. I'll come back to this later because Burch's wife Donna did her very best to ruin my Christmas in 2007.

Via the Warrior Forum I bought a lifetime subscription to something called The Nettle by David Congreave on the 9th October. It surprises me that I bought this because (a) it wasn't cheap at £51 and (b) I honestly don't remember ever getting anything from it.

Was it a website? A newsletter? I genuinely don't know.

I know who David is because I'd met him at Robert Puddy's seminar the month before and then saw him at other seminars in later years. However, I've still no idea what I got from this lifetime subscription...

In the middle of October I signed up for the Internet Marketing Review newsletter for £127. I definitely remember this one because it was from the two Neils and it was a monthly newsletter delivered through the post as an A4 printed publication and also a members-only website. At Christmas they used to do a special DVD highlighting what they had done during the year which I always found very interesting.

I stayed a subscriber until they sent me a letter saying I could renew for the discounted price of £19.99 per month. Considering I had previously been paying only £127 a year I didn't bother renewing because I didn't feel that DOUBLE THE PRICE was any kind of discount!

IMR is still running although one of the Neils seemed to disappear all of a sudden.

At the very end of October it was back to Clickbank to buy Mike Filsaime's Butterfly Marketing Manuscript for $114 (£62). This was a PDF version of the manual Mike had included with the Butterfly Marketing product he released at the beginning of 2006. It was easier on the pocket as the original package including the software was $1,000+.

Mike had done a very, very good presentation at the Birmingham seminar I attended in September so I bought this to learn more about his techniques.

About a week later it was over to Canonbury to buy "Blog It for Profit" by Jonathan Street for £64.20.

This was a printed manual and CD set. Interesting stuff but it dated quickly because it was based on using the Blogger platform. It was pure bad luck that Blogger changed their design very shortly after Jon took all the screenshots for his manual.

Licensing Secrets by Nick James was the next purchase at the end of November. This was a DVD and printed manual set. It might have been when I wrote about this sales letter or perhaps another one but I remember receiving an email from Nick asking me to urgently change my review because I was confusing his customers.

Seems what had happened was an earlier sales letter he used contradicted the story in a later sales letter and he didn't want this highlighted. Oops...

Perhaps the moral is to always assume that stories in sales letters are 'embellished'. Or perhaps these biz opps sellers don't let the truth get in the way of a good story.

UKIEC London 2006 DVD Set (QTY 1) was the next entry on my spreadsheet and this was a set of DVDs from a UK internet marketing seminar organised by Steve Foley, purchased in early December.

The name of the seminar was something along the lines of the "UK Internet Entrepreneur Conference". The DVD set wasn't cheap at £231 but this was at a point where I was still quite enthusiastic about the whole 'internet marketing' scene and it was only a couple of months since I had experienced my first seminar. I had been so impressed by that seminar and how much I learned that I was eager to see more presentations.

Somewhere in a filing cabinet I will still have these DVDs and perhaps I should give them another watch to see how much the industry has changed a decade on. Steve put on a good seminar and attracted several top UK names to speak. In fact, I just found this set for sale on eBay and it reminded me of something that bugged me at the time...

One of the speakers, a lady called Diane Johnston, used her hour and a half to pitch a white label of 1ShoppingCart. The other 7 speakers actually took their time to provide lots of usable info.

Of course they all did 10 minutes or so of sales patter at the end but that was after giving away some solid information. I remember watching this at the time and thinking it was ridiculous that she thought an hour and a half of pitching was a good idea.

Something similar happened with the completely unfunny David Cavanagh at the 7 Figure Code seminar in 2007 (which I shall cover another time). Completely out of place inbetween other informative presentations.

There were no more purchases in 2006 but the takeaway from this year should probably be that I made some strange buying decisions.

Fantastic Pay and Get Rich at Home I ordinarily wouldn't have touched with a bargepole but subscribers to my newsletter at the time had been asking about them so I decided to check them out.

There were commissions coming in from various companies - Clickbank, Commission Junction, MyDD, Amin Sadak, PurePointGolf, INO - and so it wasn't a problem to buy these products and review them for content for the site. Perhaps I should've stuck to buying through Clickbank so I could ensure a refund request would be honoured.

David Burch was selling his junk product through NoChex which offers zero protection for the buyer. Without doubt, it was for this reason that Burch sold using NoChex. He knew he would never be forced to make a refund.

Several purchases didn't warrant a mention in here, all were 'WSOs' or 'Warrior Forum Special Offers'. Back in 2006 the Warrior Forum was rather different to the empty shell it is today and there were some tremendous offers to be had.

Coming soon in the 2007 write-up:
Dimwit Donna tries to steal Christmas and Keith Wellman demonstrates how not to run an affiliate bonus offer.