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Dominate Sports Betting E-Book

Posted by Aegist on September 15th, 2007

When I received an email from Dominate Sports Betting (DSB) many months ago requesting link exchange, advising of its affiliate program that I should join up with, and generally request help promoting its E-book (along with a list of about 30 different websites who received the same email) I glanced over the website and rathly harshly decided that I couldn’t be bothered. I am normally not that quick to judge, but websites that look the way DSB look, really turn me off. It is one of those typical sales websites, with big red lettered headings telling you how you can make THOUSANDS of dollars every week! and yellow highlighting on important sentences which tell you how you can’t lose, how you can make hundreds of thousands of dollars every year, and all of the other important sales phrases. It has a key video demonstrating how easy it’s techniques are, and pictures of highly emotionally charged athletes and stock brokers! All coming together to make a perfectly stereotypical sales page. And I hate them. Sorry, but I just do.

I don’t know why all of these sales pages seem to all look the same. I get the feeling that they all bought “The Rich Jerk” e-book or something like that, and the recommendation in that e-book was “Make more websites like mine and sell e-books. That’s how you make money online.” and so the internet is overflowing with websites which all look the same and all sell e-books which are basically nothing more than advice which has been collected from free websites, packaged into a PDF, then resold. And the regular emails received from DSB which basically amounted to “Help me market my product”, combined with the 90% sales website (10% - “Help me market my sales website”), came across as a textbook rendition of this tried and tested “How to make money online” strategy. Get a product which you can sell (E-books are great, because they are free to produce), make a website which sells the product, get traffic to the website. DominateSportsBetting has done well. 10 out of 10 for following the rules of internet marketing.

The e-book though! The e-book is what I am meant to be reviewing! Should you buy? Will it help make you fortunes? Will it enable you to make €5000 a week?

Before I start to actually review the e-book, it should be pointed out that I have never had a high opinion of e-books in the first place (as if that wasn’t obvious by my opening couple of paragraphs in this article). It even says in our FAQ in response to the question “Should I pay for an Ebook on Arbitrage Trading?“, I have provided the answer:

“The very purpose of this website is to provide a complete guide for Sports Betting Arbitrage. This website is intended to replace the need for those E-books. Many people have told me that they wish they had found SAG before they paid for “X” E-book, because SAG covered everything that was in the book. The second advantage the free Internet and this website has over an E-book, is that they interactive. We have Forums where many users ask questions, exchange stories, and provide help for each other. Arbitrage trading is an experiential learning process. No static text will ever provide you with everything you need to know.”

So obviously I am starting from a belief that the information being Sold in these arbitrage e-books is freely available anyway, so the price tag isn’t worth it. What really irks me though, is that in the few e-books I have seen, the price tag isn’t the only profit they are making. Half of the time it seems like the e-book is just the next stage of the sales process, where they then proceed to try to sell their affiliated alert services and bookmakers. DSB is no different. They have affiliate accounts with OddsAndBets, ArbSeek, ArbAlarm, and numerous bookmakers on their website which they are trying to sell to their readers. There is nothing wrong with that of course; indeed that is how SAG works, but that is what annoys me. Everything that SAG does is done for free. SAG provides all of its information with no demands placed on the user whatsoever, just an earnest hope that the user appreciates our work, and supports the site by using our affiliated alert services, bookmaker links, e-wallet links and supports our advertisers. We don’t even discriminate between the services which have affiliate programs, and those which don’t. So when the DSB e-book lists its preferred alert services and only lists one with affiliate links, I am curious as to whether the deciding factor was the quality of the service, or the commission paid.

The biggest shock though, was the discovery that their description for ArbSeek (one of their alert service options) was very very familiar…I’m going to have to quote an excerpt from the e-book for this:

“Arbseek is relatively new on the scene of Arbitrage. It seems to have put together quite a comprehensive piece of arbitrage trading alert software which not only does the usual arbitrage discovery and alert, but also maintains a history and portfolio of your bets, your profits and your progress. This is the only software I know which possesses this feature. It has the ability to filter arbs based on sports, bet type, bookmaker, min-max profit, and min-max time away from event. It also has its own browser interface which allows you to trade the arb from within the software. When you find an arb you want to bet on, you set the calculator up (distributing the profit equally, rounded, or speculating on the winner) as you want, then click on the ‘place bet’ button which launches the browser to the relevant bookmaker sites with all of the information for the arb stored in frames. When the arb has been placed, you press the ‘Complete’ button, and the arb is updated into the portfolio of your account.

The ArbSeek software costs €10 for 3 days, €50 a month, €135 for 3 months or €500 a year. A demo version is also available for free which restricts all displayed arbs to a profit of 0.5% or less.“

Compare with our description of ArbSeek from SAG:

“ARBSeek is relatively new on the scene of Arbitrage. It seems to ahve put together quite a comprehensive piece of arbitrage trading alert software which not only does the usual arbitrage discovery and alert, but also maintains a history and portfolio of your bets, your profits and your progress. This is the only software I know of which does this. It has the ability to filter arbs based on Sports, Bet type, bookmaker, min-max profit, and min-max time away from event. It also has its own browser interface which allows you to trade the arb from within the software. When you find an arb you want to place, you set the calculator up (distributing the profit equally, rounded, or speculating on the winner) as you want it, then click on the ‘place bet’ button which launches the browser to the relevent bookmaker sites with all of the information for the arb stored in frames. When the arb has been placed, you press the ‘Complete’ button, and the arb is updated into your portfolia for account keeping.

The ArbSeek software costs €65 a month, €150 for 3 months or €500 a year. A demo version is also available for free which restricts all displayed arbs to a profit of 0.5% or less“

Hmmmmm very familiar indeed….The “ahve” typo on the first line is fixed (thanks for that, I’ll fix that on my website right away!), and the end of the third sentence is changed to “…which possesses this feature”, and the copy they have is the original pricing version (which I have since updated in line with a price change at ArbSeek) but I think DSB have to work harder than that to separate their work from the source. Technically you could say that this is illegal, but I’m more inclined to just be Flattered by it. Perhaps the second edition might be kind enough to reference SAG, and maybe even have a link to us! Assuming the opening sentence to DSB e-book is true (and I assume it is, who would lie about this? ->) and “The Dominate Sportsbetting E-book is becoming a worldwide success, with thousands of sales every month.” maybe a link to SAG would really help me out! I only get thousands of Visitors each month, of which only the smallest percentage convert into affiliate referrals. And I even have great rank in Google with reference to the most sports arbitrage based search terms! Prior to that obvious instance of plagiarism though, I had noticed a few lines here and there which sounded familiar, but haven’t bothered to look them all up. In general most of the text is their own original work, but as you will see by the end of this article, there is nothing particularly ‘new’ to any of it.

The thing that I find hilarious though, is that I basically made a self-fulfilling (inverse) prophecy! I wrote so very long ago “This website is intended to replace the need for those E-books” and then in the next generation of e-books on arbitrage, you find SAG inside them! I guess SAG didn’t replace them, so much as integrate into them!

I’m still laughing that the owner of DominateSportsBetting offered me a free copy of his e-book to review it, not realising that this would happen….

Anyway, back to the reviewing!

I won’t nitpick the typo errors (we all have them, but the word is “Lose” (opposite of win), not “Loose” (opposite of tight)) and gramatical errors, but the first half of the e-book sounds exactly like the standard arbitrage e-book. Arbitrage is betting on all outcomes, its easy to do, you can make money, here is an example of how easy it is, hooray!

“The concept is as easy as that. Is there any risk? No. Is it legal? Yes. Does it require exceptional skills? No. Can you make more money than at aregular job? Definitely!“

The opening half is just like the sales page really, but without the colours. It builds the reader up into a frenzy, eager to get into arbitrage, ready to make their thousands of dollars! Commendably, it at least gets a guesstimate about the funds required to start arbitraging reasonably accurate, however I think its predictions on how the following months of profit proceed is exceedingly optimistic. It goes through its affiliate alert services that it wants you to use, and of course references its affiliated bookmaker listing available for free on the website (why hide such useful information?). It mentions the need for online ‘banks’ like Moneybookers, PayPal (affiliate links provided) and Neteller (no link provided, just their email address so you can get the friends referral bonus (and they can get their referral commission)).

The e-book continues on with the usual stuff, covering basic mathematical theory, frequently asked questions, and continues to over-sell the concept and refer to it as ‘risk free’ the whole time. And then, at the end of all of the usual stuff, the e-book abruptly finishes on a high by selling you the next product, The DSB Members Card! Only 50 Euro once you have signed up through their affiliate link to OddsAndBets! Oh dear.

One final point before I conclude this: after talking about arbitrage being risk free all book, no effort was made to explain how to avoid the risks! There was a *very* brief mention of some of them (not all of them) in a dot point summary, and they were kind enough to tell you that when you buy the membership card you will have access to the articles which tell you how to avoid them, but that was all! Someone buying this e-book and using it as a resource for their arbitrage trading would completely fail when it comes to tennis, baseball and hockey rule mismatches! They would know nothing about them. The e-book made absolutely no effort to explain *how* to trade sports arbitrage in the end.

Conclusion

Well, what I took from the Dominate Sports Betting e-book, was that I can be proud of my efforts with Sports Arbitrage Guide and SureBetBookies. There is basically nothing in DSB which isn’t covered in one form or another in my sites. I was really hoping to learn something from this e-book. I was really hoping it would actually go into details about how the professional traders make their extra cash which us newbies don’t yet know (yes, I am still a newbie). But it simply didn’t. It told you what arbitrage was, it provided affiliate links to alert services, e-wallets and bookmakers, it briefly touched on calculations, answered some common questions, and then sold you some more stuff. If anything nice could be said about it, it would be that it is basically a much more concise version of SAG. When the day comes that I actually finish the fourth section of SAG, the ‘Arbitrage Trading’ section where I plan on going into detail as to how each trade should actually be made, outlining the common mistakes, rules of thumb, tricks etc, I wonder if that sort of advice will start turning up in e-books too?

So is it worth it? Well I’ve submitted an application with their affiliate program, when I get accepted I’ll put their link up here right away and you can buy it! Until then, feel free to just send €30 to my Moneybookers, PayPal or Neteller account and then you can read through SAG and SBB at your leisure (contact me here to find out how!). You can even log into our forums (or arbforum, I don’t discriminate) straight away (no need to pay another €50 for membership!)

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