published Sunday, November 21st, 2010 at 1:11 pm by
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Is it possible to be an ethical internet marketer? I don’t doubt that a great deal of money is being made from IM and I would dearly love to grab a slice of it, but I’m more and more convinced that it is impossible to garner lists, followers and sales without making promises which you know to be false. It seems all too easy to slide into complicity with this murky exercise. One marketer for whom I had huge respect, who at one time was urging everyone to unsubscribe from lists and abandon the whole sorry charade, now regularly mails me with the latest flavour-of-the-week astounding offers.
And as people get desensitised to the usual promises, the techniques get more and more sneaky, for example:
- free webinars ( who has the time to listen in to these things 5 times a week?)
- highly specific results claims “$342.63 every day!”
- “your confirmation code enclosed” for something you have never heard of
The only things which have actually made me any money are the genuine recommendations I have made for products which I actually use. And these are a slow burn, coming in when I least expect it, from seeds sown months ago.
Intellectually I get it and I can see how it works from the inside. But at some visceral level it all still works on me as a buyer. For some reason, it is still a slap in the face when the marketing turns out to consist of bare-faced lies. The latest was a Monster Betfair Bot, which used the words “autopilot” and “fully automated bet placement” throughout its advertising and turned out (after turning down about 6 “one time offers”) to be nothing more than a stakes calculator for a martingale progression. I was surprised that Clickbank referred the refund request to the vendor, but happy to see that after two days a full refund was issued and my complaints were not disputed.
Which is why I love Clickbank, as it gives you the chance to believe all of the claims on a contingent basis, and get a prompt refund when they turn out to be another crock…
published Thursday, September 30th, 2010 at 11:33 pm by
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Now this is perplexing. From one perspective my autoblogging systems are working well. For a few of them I seem to have selected the right keywords within WP-Robot to ensure that every 8 hours, as regular as clockwork, a high quality article, Youtube video or product review is pulled into the site’s content. The WP Syndicator plugin will then tweet, blog and post a summary of each item as a nested link in over a dozen places around the internet. And the indications are that the tweets and blogs which reference these posts are being followed by an ever-increasing group of people. The visitor stats for the autoblogs have long since left my manual blogs in the dust. And so far as I can tell I have correctly coded in my Clickbank, Amazon, Shopzilla and other userids.
So where is the money? I can’t see a single cent of income in any of the affiliate accounts, or even any indication of traffic going to the linked offers. Have people really become so blind to adverts that not one has taken the bait in over two months of traffic. Anyone who can suggest where I might be going wrong or who is in a similar situation, please leave a comment!
The worst spammers of my inbox are currently those people who have previously sold me something. They have a particular edge over regular spammers, in that I will always be concerned about unsubscribing from their list in case I miss out on the next version of their software or update of their materials. But Lord do they milk that advantage. As Turbo Profit Sniper had singularly failed to deliver on its promised avalanche of targeted traffic, I was less than impressed when its vendor (Ian Ross) started trying to entice me into every me too product launch under the sun. I said as much in a return email and suggested maybe he should focus on trying to deliver on the initial commitments. Imagine my surprise when I received a mail entitled “From Ian Ross (Personal)”. Imagine my lack of surprise when it turned out to be yet another product advert (Auto Mass Traffic anyone?). Time to unsubscribe regardless and scratch around to see whether its too late to get a refund on the original product.
published Sunday, August 15th, 2010 at 1:19 pm by
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Its fare thee well Traffic Annihilator and CB Pirate this week. I thought you guys could work together, what with TA delivering unstoppable floods of laser-targeted traffic and CB Pirate converting such traffic to massive while-you-sleep commission earnings. I actually liked the technical aspects of both and had I earned even a penny in the three months I have been using them I might not now be cancelling my subscriptions.
Why are “auto-pilot” and “while you sleep” such powerful magnets for my paypal clicking finger. I think I may have done it again with Turbo Profit Sniper, which on first blush looks to have been marketed with another hugely exaggerated set of claims. Gloves off time – if it doesn’t deliver the promised automated income stream, it will be refunded in due course.
The weekend has been mainly taken up however, with an overhaul for all of my autobots, following the acquisition of a great WP plugin which posts extracts from your main blog to various other blogging and miniblogging sites (with higher pagerank than your own). So far the WP Syndicator plugin looks to be the real deal, as I’ve seen an overnight uptick in traffic, twitter followers, and of course the spam which goes along with any increased profile. Once you’ve been through the signup process once for all 15 target sites, the rest of your blogs can be syndicated in about 5 minutes apiece. Once I have got all of my autoblogs updated in this way, I can turn my attention to how I have managed to spend over $300 commissioning over 3 million ad impressions on mobile phone apps, for a clickthrough total of around 3,000 and confirmed commissions of around $3!
Quick Postscript with a picture of the effect the WP Syndicator plugin had on this blog (after the cut)
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published Sunday, August 8th, 2010 at 8:30 pm by
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Well the mystery about Ryan’s upfront goodies was quickly solved when he launched his full product for just south of £2,000. So, its thanks for the freebies Ryan and …lets move on.
This week the IM world is resounding with the noise of jaws hitting the floor as people read and absorb the contents of Mobile Monopoly. Not even worth my pasting an afflink here as I’m sure most of my half dozen readers already have it or are buried under a range of offers for it. Many products claim to be game changers, but cynical as I am, I have to say this really deserves the tag. Seasoned SEO experts, bloggers, email responder gurus and copywriters are all downing tools to work their way through the 50 videos included in the course. This guy overdelivered by a large margin. Want to know of a mobile advertising network? He hooks you up with about 5, and has detailed videos for how to use some of them. CPA offers specifically for mobiles? Here’s a list of dedicated sites. And at cost per click of 5 cents and less, your Adwords campaigns suddenly look a little sick. I did a little trial run on a Peerfly offer, which although not mobile optimised, did refer to ringtones. In about an hour I got over 100,000 impressions and clickthroughs of 600 for some banal line like “Get 25 Fresh Music Ringtones Now!”. For a cost of $36 or about 6c per click.
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published Sunday, July 25th, 2010 at 8:04 am by
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Everyone is piling on the bandwagon and touting this, so there’s really no need for me to give yet another link, but Ryan Deiss has got me scratching my head. He’s giving such valuable information and resources away for free that you have to wonder what is he keeping back to earn some money down the line? The Cherry Picker software was a good start, his analysis of what you need for traffic generation (including freshness of content) breaks some new ground, and his codes for finding .gov and .edu sites to get backlinks from are immediately exploitable. Gold star or dunce’s cap to Ryan, depending on your perspective (I’ve gained less info and resources from some courses I’ve paid $77 for – see below).
Another of the good guys who has given me tangible information for free is Phil Henderson of Stupidly Simple SEO. He got on my whitelist with some good tips about how quickly Xomba gets indexed for Amazon affiliate write-ups, which helped me sell a £130 CD book set in half a day. More recently he sent me a great demo of how to whip up an advertising video with a free version of animoto. Great signal to noise ratio from Phil.
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