RIP Free WSOS. Another nail in the WF coffin?

That's pretty sad!

It gets worse....

This is ridiculous as even the Warrior Payments system has autoresponder integration, so all buyers are automatically added to your list without their "knowledge or consent".

And another big slice of nonsense....

Which, pray tell, takes precedence?

I think that maybe the person who was given the job of re-writing these rules has a drug problem

Ok so you can't sell a list that you built for your company to your successor of your company. You can't have your customers optin for updates to get updates. You can't use JVZoo because that would violate the having the offer on another site rule oh that brings up the point that you can't have your own site to host what they are buying because if its open to the public to buy on then you get rejected. Anything else I'm missing on how this is good for business.

Well now members can just visit the other section.

So this is just a movement from one section to the other.

Why is this so horrible?

Thats a bummer, I was about to launch one..

Yeah, I don't get it. If you can clearly 'do it' (make people opt in) in another section of the WF and in your forum signature why scrape a great strategy to build lists and add value before selling something? They don't have to opt in if they don't want it. As far as the pay for something and add to your email list, I think a disclaimer could solve that?

Here's a full list of the rules: Warrior Forum - The #1 Internet Marketing Forum & Marketplace - Announcements in Forum : Warrior Special Offers

The $100 price is if you want a "sticky" post at the top of the Classified Ad section for 24 hours....

It still only costs $20 to run a classified ad.

"All listing, bump and sticky fees are final and non-refundable. This includes if your offer is removed from sale.

Payment For WSO Threads and Bumps:
WSO Listing Fee - $20
WSO Bump Fee- $19.95

Payment for Sticky:
WSO - $200
Complete Web Sites for Sale - $100
Warrior For Hire - $100
Web Hosting Offers - $100
Warrior Forum Classified Ads - $100
Wanted - Members Looking To Hire You - $100
Affiliate Program Database - $100"

"Sellers are not to force email opt ins from customers to gain access to their product."

You are now allowed to FORCE people to optin as a way for them to gain access. This is something PayPal even has issues with.

W+, JVZoo, etc... when a person purchases they are automatically added to a list in the background so it doesn't interfere with the purchasing process and allows the person to still gain access.

Wait... so is the fee to post a brand new thread on the Classified Ad section now $100?

Or is that only to have it sticky...

Because if it's $100 for a Classified Ad, I sense ghost town

This is something many members (both old and new) on here have been clamoring about for years. Now they got it.

It will be interesting to see how this plays out. Wish there was just a section for free WSO's.

For sellers, if you conform to the rules, there's an opportunity there to make more sales and for your offer to be on the frontpage longer so whatever organic traffic there is (not much at this point), your offer will be seen more.

I agree with some of the rules but not with others. Again, this was done because of all the bitching and whining over the WSO section for years.

Now all that whining can stop and guess what? now buyers have no one to blame for purchasing decisions but themselves. No scapegoating the product creators anymore. (of course that's wishful thinking)

Any income claims are vetted to some extent or you can't use them at all and the offer must be transparent (no blind sales copy)

Of course, using a line like this in your WSO thread: "I'm not allowed to say how much money you can make" will cause plenty of intrigue

The rules of the game have changed. Some will win, others will lose.

No, the OP was wrong.

The $100 price is if you want a "sticky" post at the top of the Classified Ad section for 24 hours.

It still only costs $20 to run a classified ad.

"All listing, bump and sticky fees are final and non-refundable. This includes if your offer is removed from sale.

Payment For WSO Threads and Bumps:
WSO Listing Fee - $20
WSO Bump Fee- $19.95

Payment for Sticky:
WSO - $200
Complete Web Sites for Sale - $100
Warrior For Hire - $100
Web Hosting Offers - $100
Warrior Forum Classified Ads - $100
Wanted - Members Looking To Hire You - $100
Affiliate Program Database - $100"

No ... getting rid of free offers from the WSO section will not make this place a ghost town and no Classified Ads are not $100. Free offers are basically some free crap designed for the seller to capture emails to build a list that no one probably even wants to be on. I've yet to see a free offer that offered something I'd like to have.

Payment for Sticky: <<<<<<<<<<<<<<<<<<
WSO - $200
Complete Web Sites for Sale - $100
Warrior For Hire - $100
Web Hosting Offers - $100
Warrior Forum Classified Ads - $100
Wanted - Members Looking To Hire You - $100
Affiliate Program Database - $100

And no one should have to join a mailing list to get their product that they just purchased. I'm fairly certain that autoresponder integration will not be included in that scenario, but that having to enter your email in a form to get access to your product will.

Hey...apologies for getting the class ads price wrong!

It is indeed $20 per listing.

My gosh.

Honestly... my gosh.

So the rules are changing because a corporation bought an entity and choose to run it as benefits, gasp, the corporation.

There are STILL fantastically grand reasons to use the WF. It's STILL a highly-trafficked destination for those who want to learn about making money online.

So freebie WSOs have been moved to the classifieds. Well guess what. I have released 8 of them during the past 2 months (one of them nearly free). From that, I built up my lists more. And every time I release a freebie, I let my lists know about it.

So they'll now visit the Classifieds. So what?

*Anyone* can easily release a 97 cent goodie or a $5 goodie or $9.97 leadgen to the main WSO forum to stay in compliance.

Evolve, folks.

It's very simple.

Alexa knows whats up.

Here's the thing I've been able to turn free wso's (from the wso section) into a 5 figure months. Can the classified section get the same results..? Not to sure?

My students have been able to get amazing results with free wso's too. It's a great way to build a list. Probably the highest quality traffic in the internet marketing niche.

If you have a better IM traffic source let me know (apart from doing a product launch)? I am pretty sure there isn't for the price of $20. Solo ads, adwaps, clickbanking, are all low quality poo poo traffic sources.

I create high quality free wso's and teach my students to do the same. I tell them to create wso's that could be sold for $7. Thank god I did that.

Now that they've moved free wso to a the classified section I will be testing it out to see if it's worth doing. I'll need to invest a couple bucks to see if it's worth my time and my students time.

I think another path here is Charging a very low amount ($1.00 or less) inside the main WSO section, with decent copy of course. Then promote your main offer as an upsell. TripWire so to speak, or develop a strong follow for your buyers list.

in my experience BUMPING a paid wso doesn't make much income at all unless you're selling at a price point of $20+ (to crush it more within the $27 - $1000 range to be honest).

So the $1.00 tripwire has to be tested unless anyone can chime in here on there experience with a low prices like this?

I don't see the classified section working to be honest. Who knows? I am going to test it anyhow and see what happens because I could be wrong.

Also, I integrate with W+ when doing a free wso so this is going to be a problem with W+ too. I've contacted them to ask them what is happening with tracking/free offers etc.

All in all this is business, things change, while we can all whine and complain. Finding solutions should be the focus now.

It's a shame WF took this away. They have temporary stopped a lot of peoples income stream (you should have multiple anyway).

I don't know how this benefits the forum at all because a lot of people don't make good money from bumping paid wso's. People who do well with WSO's do launches or have a list. Surely it will clean up a lot of crap but it will also reduce WF income significantly i believe.

Unless you're in the launch circles, its going to be tuff for a lot of people to get started. That's if the classified ad section sucks.

For me I know I can still make good money from bumping alone, but there are a lot of people who can't!

I guess this is a sneaky ploy too to get people to buy banners, sticky thread. Sticky thread sucks and the banner traffic isn't that great unless you know what you're doing

Well the bar has been raised either way.


UPDATE:

So just a thought, With no FREE WSO's in WSO section + no duplicate threads. This means a longer time on first page I guess?? This could possible increase sales? I wonder how this is going to pan out.

One thing they need to consider doing now is removing the signature lines from the Classified Ad section just like they did in the WSO section.

A lot of people will go into the Classified Ad section commenting on threads and trying syphon off traffic or get people to their offers. You see this happening a lot now, but it will get worse.

Shouldn't change anything in W+, with any offer funnel you can specify the URL. You can even use the buttons outside the forum.

21.3% of that traffic is now coming from India so not only is the quantity of traffic less but so is the quality.

Their website, their rules.

Adapt or die.

Going to be interesting seeing how they enforce this one. If you sell your business the mailing list is an asset of that business - sometimes the ONLY asset. Who will freelancer sue? You? You don't own the list anymore. Your buyer? They're not under any contractual obligation to Freelancer. How do they PROVE the list is from WSO buyers? It's not economic to purchase every WSO just to seed the list and catch people out.

I reckon whoever dreamt this one up had been drinking too much eggnog (or spending too much time in the Aussie Christmas sunshine ).

So here is a good question if we can't sell lists built out of WSO's can the WF still use their list they bought when they purchased it lol

Interesting.

Their forum, their rules.

My personal opinion is that it is a bad move BUT plenty of places to advertise - not just the Warrior forum.

As long as the "thing" you are offering for free is of some 'value' I really don't see why they would do this, maybe screen the free offers but as above, hope it works out better for them - love the Warrior fourm.

Another thing that could happen is you'll just get a ton of CRAP $1.00 ebooks. Where as before it was free crap.

Now people will investing money for crap... lol

oh crap

I guess this will call out the good from the bad.

Boom...

All they had to too was improve the approval process.

so true

LOL @ all the people whining. Of course you're whining: playing by the rules requires a bit of sweat, doesn't it? And you don't like that, do you?

guys a question, was this befor freelancer bought the forum or just after???

The rules sound fair enough to me. It's only the people who are trying to push their (generally worthless) free WSO's to build a list of newbies they can promote to, who will be effected. Not a big loss.

I'm not leaving WF any time soon, I haven't found a good White Hat place to replace it!

I downloaded a free WSO today just for kicks. The person seemed like a "reputable" person here. I was then sent to about 5 WSO offers that I quickly skipped over before I could download the free "content". I don't know if all free WSO's are the same but based on the majority of these responses, I'll make the assumption that at least 70% of it is garbage.

When I finally downloaded the content, it was literally a couple of sentences and some very generic links that equated to nothing. Actually, one of the links was www.warriorforum.com. I think stuff like that takes away from the over all purpose and feel of the forum or at least, what it could be. I'm sure a lot of traffic leaves the site due to obvious low grade forms of marketing that others do for the sake of some sales.

Anyone who thinks the rule changes are no big deal needs to read the second sentence of rule #13. That's a big deal.

Things like this often cause immediate knee-jerk reactions but only time tells what it means.

Everyone will know in time that free WSO's have moved. Then a sub forum with little traffic should become a sub forum with a lot of traffic from people seeking free WSO's. Although I think it's a bit daft to put them in the Classified Ads section. Surely a dedicated sub forum for free WSO's would have been far more logical. A free WSO is not a Classified Ad and shouldn't be treated as one. And it's dumb to now clutter up that sub forum with free WSO's when people go there explicitly to find solo sellers and services. That's the dumbest move of all in my mind.

In the meantime the worthwhile free WSO's will probably become $1 WSO's.

Adapt and move on. Only people who need to worry are the ones churning out the utter garbage free WSO's.

Admittedly I never launched anything on Warrior, only JVZoo. I was planning a free WSO in January, but a worthwhile one. Will now wait to see the implications in the next weeks. If it looks negative I'll release it as a cheap WSO and see how it goes in the future.
I'm a newbie in product creation, but I don't do cr*p worthless products. So I have no worries whichever way I do it.

In a few months I'd expect that free WSO's are still alive and kicking in the Classifieds.

Handle the transition period with bit of thought and you'll probably be fine.

Just sayin'.

Thanks for your discussion and thoughts. Our main goal with the new rules and the WSO section is to provide a trusted marketplace for buyers to be able to find the best Internet marketing deals available and a strong distribution platform for serious sellers with high quality products to promote their offers.

In regards to the free offers, a lot of them have been extremely low quality and have not added real value to the marketplace and community. This has crowded the marketplace and driven away a lot of potential buyers. Obviously, this isn't the case for all free offers however it's a rule we have put in place to eliminate the numerous low quality free offers in order improve the quality as a whole.

There has also been a lot of discussion around Rule #18. After a buyer has purchased a product they have the right to access the product immediately without having to go through a forced email opt-in for the sole purposes of building a list. This is to improve the overall buyer experience. This rule does not prevent sellers from collecting buyer emails by using auto-responder integration with Warrior Payments or other platforms.

You make a good point in regards to the selling of email lists. Our goal here was to prevent sellers abusing buyer emails however we understand the point a lot of you have made in regards to a situation when you sell you business. We have amended this rule.

Actually, these new rules are not as bad as some are taking them to be. But regardless of how you view them if you want to play in the WF ballpark you've got to play by their rules. I guess I'm saying the same thing that Barb said "adapt" and move on.

Also I do agree with Mark that the forum signatures should be removed from the classified section. In fact I'll take it a step further and say they should be removed from all sections that require payment for a listing.

This is a welcome change and the benefits certainly outweigh the minor adaptations some of you will need to make. Well played FL

I have run one WSO in my life. If these rules had been in place I probably would have never ran that one. I got to say I don't like many of them and can see why people are bitching.

I see at Alexa that the Warrior Forum took a bit hit in traffic along about October.


I wonder if this has anything to do with a corporate entity taking over and Alan stepping down. Alan was a marketer at heart, and he started this forum with the thought of helping marketers. I don't know who in hell Freelancer is. Other than they are buying up a lot of freelance sites and who knows what, but Warrior Forum is one of them.

Now it belongs to them, and you know what they say, he who has the gold makes the rule. Warrior Forum used to be the gold, it ain't so shiny any more though. The traffic stats show the truth. I know I barely come here any more.

If I had a product to release to build a list, I would put it in the SEO section and price it at $0.99 or something. With a good up sell to make some money, just like usual. But I don't, and probably won't. If I was to create a product, I would probably put it on Warrior Plus or JVZoo and drive my own traffic and recruit JVs to drive traffic. Warrior Forum will lose a lot of money by changing these rules the way they did.

Not saying rules didn't need changing, just saying some rule changes didn't help.

But ask me if I care a damn. No! My life goes on. I am heading for five figures a month before this time next year, and on to six figures a month the year after. Without releasing a single WSO.

I remember on June WF was 128th in Alexa and now 699th!

IMHO

It does look like an honest attempt to take steps in the right direction. I like the efforts to conform more to legalities and the rules against the scrapers and other blackhat products. Unfortunately you can't legislate for excellence.

I don't think any of the new rules will generally change the WSO section much at all. There will continue to be the very rare excellent products and the rest will still be very poor.

It does look like an honest attempt to take steps in the right direction, and I'm encouraged by the fact that amendments have already been made to some rules in order to address flaws revealed by member feedback.

It works both ways though. We all have our own part to play in the way this place is perceived, and I find it a bit sad that the thread on the 'main' internet marketing discussion forum with the biggest number of page views and very nearly the biggest number of responses shows us standing in our 'shop window' highlighting how pants the place has become, how little it has to offer these days and how many are claiming they would like it to stay that way. It's not difficult to see why taking advantage of a Warrior 'Special' Offer might seem unattractive to the casual visitor.

I'm not saying that this is a discussion that shouldn't be taking place - it's obvious it's badly needed - but the WSO forum was always the jewel in a much bigger crown. You can polish it up all you like, but as long as the stuff surrounding it goes neglected it might just as well be a diamond on a massive pile of bull dung.

CHANGE IS GOOD FOR EVERYONE!

This has happened for a reason and purpose so we have to ADAPT and
grow as business owners/marketers/coaches/list builders etc.

I have NO DOUBT that someone here will find a way to fully utilize this
change and take full advantage of it.

If the QUALITY of the FREE/PAID product that is posted at this new section
is HIGH then plenty of members will begin to flock there just like they have at
the WSO section all these years that have past too.

I wait in GREAT anticipation to see what happens over the coming weeks.

Just curious... how would any of this be a nail in the Warrior Forum
coffin? Has there been a sillier subject line recently? I haven't seen one.

Do you think Warrior Forum became the premier marketing forum on
the internet because of WSOs?

CLUE: If WSOs ceased to exist this forum would still thrive. Frankly, if they
all went away I think it would be a good thing. But, I know the new owner has
to make a buck and that's a good thing, as well. I applaud the new rules as
a means of reigning in some of the "cowboys" around here.

This is just my opinion, however I have observed in life in general, and especially concerning Gov't, that more rules and regulations, just produce more rules and regulations, and really don't bring about the desired results, as life goes on as usual and People discover new ways to get around the rule or regulation. All I have seen is that, more and more rules and regulations stifle creativity and business, even though perhaps, that wasn't the intended result.

Does this affect Early Bird threads? I will not be selling anything at that point and will be asking exclusively for email addresses towards a future paid launch.

I was just checking how many people are viewing the WSO Forum and those stats don't seem to be displayed today at the head of the forum and sub forums.

Has anyone else noticed the number of members in a forum is now gone, or is it just my browser?

Update: It must have been my browser, because it's working now.

Tightening up the rules is a good idea. It's been too lax for too long and we've seen a lot of crap be sold as a result. WF is the oldest IM forum out there. And they're trying to rescue it's reputation and image. I see nothing wrong with this. WSO creation shouldn't be seen as a long-term business model anyway.

I didn't notice the rules until the other day that they have made up different rules. I have yet to get used to some of the few changes, but it's definitely great to be able to see how all of these changes happen and grow. We'll have to wait and see what is going to happen with the WSO forum since free WSOs are now completely gone, and that you can't just ask people for their emails. You have to go straight to checkout, but some people will still ppossibly use the w+ integration.

The new rules seem good to me.

The only ones moaning will be those scammers and garbage sellers who cant do it anymore, even adding some crap PLR as a 'bonus' is now banned.

Its a bit like people who moan about speed cameras, I drive past hundreds of speed cameras a year and have been fined once for guess what, speeding.

Dont go over the speed limit then speed cameras make no difference, dont peddle shit in the WSO section and the new rules make no difference.

I do agree that a dedicated 'Free Offer' section would be better than putting free offers in the classifieds.

I am sure this will become just another thing sellers deal with in their daily business life. They will get over it, and flourish as most have in the past. None of it is a really big deal. The lists will get build, one way or another. I see offers for additional items if they subscribe to your list. Optional.

We always adapt, don't we?

Meanwhile... the banners are still showing stuff like this $7 report that shows you how to "make $300+ per day" on Facebook. Fast Cash Formula Special Report

Yes I know that refers to WSOs but it should also apply to the scams in the banner ads. You've got guys advertising there that are NOTORIOUS scammers.

This should also apply to the banners -

Disclaimer - I don't intend to hurt Barry and I don't know him. My opinion has nothig to do with his products. My best wishes are with him.

My 2 cents: Buyers have been taken for a wild ride and ripped badly by many sellers in the WSO section in the past and this was possible because the WSO section has had some loopholes. The forum is just trying to clean up the mess and trying to offer some kind of protection for "buyers".

This is the new trend everywhere. Google is plugging its loopholes and so is Paypal. Supposedly no one wants "tricks" anymore. I welcome the change.

P.S - If you haven't noticed, WSOs can no longer use income claims unless verifiable through Warrior Payments. Again, another massive change that's going to weed out some rogue sellers.