Reviews
We’re pretty sure you’ve bought something from the world’s biggest online store, Amazon.
If you’re shopping on Amazon, you’re not only looking at the item and its description and what it can do for you, but you should be looking at the feedback that people leave when they buy it.
Sometimes, you truly have to scratch your head at the reviews you read. Because, sometimes they all sound like they were written by the same person, with just a few words changed.
That suspicious review you read may have been written by a human being, but was that person paid to write that review? That happens more times than you’d expect.
So, when you read reviews about anything, always ask yourself this question: what’s the website or who’s the person doing the review? What do they have to gain by a good or bad review? And, is this review for real?
As the Internet grew in size and scope, the site became so unwieldy you had drop-down menus that seemed a mile long. So, the media company who ran the site eventually broke it up into many specialty sub-sites.
Every one of these “about“ web pages had an “expert” who reviewed what they were experts about and wrote a piece on About.com.
The “expert“ on sports betting was a well-known writer on that topic, who called us and we did a long interview over the phone with him.
He had told us he was headquartered in Las Vegas, and knew most of the important sports betting people in town. After checking us out with them, he called us back to say that he had written his piece for About.com. He said that when he spoke to the many influential sports betting contacts he knew, none of them had anything bad to say about us and that those who knew about us had nothing but good things to say.
And he produced what we believe to be the single best review of anybody who sells sports picks has ever gotten, or perhaps will ever get.
We’re very proud of what he wrote, because every word in the review rings true.
The entire review can be seen below. It contains what we’re confident is the most powerful single sentence ever written about anyone in this business by a major player in this industry at the time it was written: “No one can match Akmens in terms of winning consistently.”
In short, we’re trying to show you that we are a major player in this very tough business.
It’s the reason that since 1978, when we got our very first customer, that we’re now somewhere in the vicinity of 674750 active and past (some of them actually have, sadly, passed) customers.
We have this running gag in our office. Every now and then, usually one of our newbies will say to our Exalted Leader, Dr. Bob: “Boss, what’s the next city?” And these days, Dr. Bob will say “Boston, baby. We need just a couple thousand to reach Beantown!”
And that’s true. We’re just a couple thousand customers short of all the people that live in the great city of Boston. And you know what our next goal will be only a few thousand more new customers after that? Las Vegas, that’s who!
You just don’t get to a number approaching 700,000 paying customers unless you’ve done something right.
And with all modesty, we’ve done a lot of things very right over the years.
