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…

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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.

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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)

This is one product I am more than happy to promote. The terminally lazy among my readers can get it from my afflink right here. However, given that my readership is almost entirely made up of IM savvy individuals, I expect you will do what I would do in most cases, and save yourself over 50% by buying through your own Clickbank userid. Have fun!

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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. 

Here’s the rub.  I did check that the offer URL redirected to a mobile page.  As did the ad network, or else they wouldn’t have run the advert.  But the redirect mobile page didn’t contain the offer that the normal URL would have led the public to.  So they may well have enjoyed the wap-style index of services on display, but there was no possibility of any conversions or ultimately any commissions for me.  Which might not have mattered if I had collected emails on the way through via a mobile squeeze page.  But in my haste, I missed out on that step too, and thereby lost out on a possible 600-strong list of young americans known to be interested in ringtones.

$36 was a cheap price for such a fast practical lesson.  I have also decided I need to enlarge my number of ad network signups.  Admob is slowing me down not only by the ad approval process, but also by the unheard of requirement for approval of funding of the account.  So even if my campaign has run out of funds and I enter the same card I used last time I might have to wait a few days for the money to be accepted for use by Admob.

Long story short, Mobile Monopoly is definitely on my list of never-to-be-refunded Clickbank products.  But it is making me take a long hard look at some of my other subscriptions and recent purchases!

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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.

Having carped recently about the marketers who buddy up to you with a sales pitch but then won’t answer your emails, I should mention that I’ve come across some great exceptions recently.

Paul Hooper has become my go-to person for SEO automation – he’s such a fan of all things technical and so knowledgeable.  We seem to be travelling parallel tracks, though I’m some way behind still.  Always answers emails with more detail than i ever expected and, best of all, clued me in about the capabilities of Micro Niche Finder, which is proving to be my top recent purchase (wonder how big the SEO automation niche is)

When I’m in the mood for a rant about the iniquities of Internet Marketers, Wayne Sharer always responds to my comments with sensible balanced commentary, generally pointing out the exaggerations in my position in the nicest possible way.  And every post he sends out to his list is worth reading, as are the blogs they link to.

Vince Severson is probably the only person I know who shares my interest in both Internet Marketing and Roulette Bots!  The difference is that he’s a skilled programmer and I’m just an enthusiastic software user.  In fact, you are unlikely to be on his lists unless you have bought either Roulette Assault or Article Marketing Robot (both of which I highly recommend).  My fingers are crossed and my breath abated waiting for imminent launches of a Blackjack bot with a decent staking system and an SEO automator to rival Xrumer.

Others on the Whitelist include Alex Sysoef who gives great support for his Expert WordPress product (which is the way I set up my automated blogs) and Thomas Hoefter who could sell me anything he wants after the revelation which is WP-Robot.

Cutting a swathe through the rest of my subscriptions, chopping out all of the me-too links, misleading titles and over-hyped descriptions.  I thought from all of the praise I read that Underground Traffic Blueprints was going to eclipse the second coming.  Instead of which I have to watch hours and hours of a guy talking over every branch of a single mindmap, in order to try to find the odd gem of information (newsnow.com so far – save yourself $77!).  Hopefully little enough left in my mailbox after my cleanout to give me time to actually build some sites!

Two posts in a day!  I’m on a roll, but don’t hold your breath for the next one.  I have some sites to develop and some bots to tend.

PS – why do people think that just because you bought their product, you want to buy life’s every necessity through their affiliate links forevermore.  Cindy and Soren, you know what I’m talking about – I’m still waiting for CB Pirate to deliver on all its promises, so lets focus on that!  Normal grumpy service has been restored…

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• My phoney friends (0)

Hey Mark,

I think you need to see this immediately...

http://anotherspammyoptinbunchahooey.com


Imagine getting your hands on a system today
that could dump fast cash gains into your
Clickbank account like

..$677.12

....$1063.05

.... and $1752.42 in a single day.

In as little as 48 hours from now!

etc etc etc blah blah blah

I’m getting swamped by this stuff recently with ridiculously misleading titles, whose SOLE purpose is to make me open the mail.  Well, I’m pulling the plug on every one of these I get (and I’m sure there will be more).  So farewell Jason G, Tim B, Nathern J.  Too much, too often.

And while I’m feeling sour, who has the time to watch 9 hour-long videos or listen to huge audio files?  My heart sinks when I part with my cash (even if only temporarily) to find I am expected to give up my next week of free time to listen to some thickly-accented verbose bore padding out his or her threadbare offering.  Worse still if their idea of a video accompaniment is a glacially-paced rolling powerpoint presentation containing nothing but bullet points of every word they are saying.   Come on guys – these things have been old hat in “proper” business circles for decades.  Even the US military has turned its back on Powerpoint.

Gold star to the Consumer Wealth System (no, you’re not getting an affiliate link) for supplying its main course modules in about 6 different formats, including video, pdf, powerpoint, audio etc.  On the downside, their idea of “plug n play” sites is laughable, in the amount of work you have to expend to get them up and functional.

Enough of a rant.  I’m just pleased to find this post again when I thought it had been irretrievably lost a week ago.

To vary the tone, the next post will be nothing but sweetness and light and plaudits all around…

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Sometimes I fail to recognise the game that is being played and take it all a bit too seriously. So, for example, I wrote to George Brown to say more or less “thanks so much for bringing Miracle Traffic Bot to my attention, but were you aware that it has very poor features compared to Article Marketing Robot”. No reply! More recently, some other, probably hypothetical question was raised in another of his letters to me. I thought I had a sensible response to offer, so I did. Again no reply!

Now I have a bit of a soft spot for George because he’s done well at a young age, his videos have good production values and he oozes enthusiasm in his pitches. But if you’re going to buddy up to me when you want to sell me something, I expect some sort of response (even an autoresponse!) when I take the time to reply. Wayne Sharer always manages to respond to my emails and blog comments.

So, sadly, I’m going to have to unsubscribe from my George Brown list.   But he can take comfort in the fact that all of his best buddies still have the opportunity to flog me their dross.

Despite the above rant, I’m feeling quite perky on the IM front, as Calvin and Joel (or was it Chas and Dave) put me onto something good with Auto Income Profit Manual, or whatever else AIPM stands for. In particular, their mention of WP Robot and autoblogging started me on a very fruitful trail, as mentioned in my other blog at http://thebotfarm.com

I also figured out how to put the dog-ends of two old try-out systems together to create a wondrous new set of mini-businesses.   Clickbank Pirate covers all of the list building and follow-up emails on your behalf in a number of different niches if you can only get traffic to the squeeze pages they host on your behalf. I’ve started sticking banners from their promotional materials into the Traffic Annihilator and Traffic Supreme Pro sites, to feed the popunder ads, of which I still have thousands of prepaid displays to go. And as a side-benefit I get to split test TA and TSP with exactly the same ads submitted at exactly the same time. Within 10 hours TA had about 10 times the displays for each ad as TSP had managed. I guess I’ll take a hard look at subscriptions come month-end.

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• Freebies worth a damn and the Whitelist (4)

Imagine my relief when I find someone who has already explained the procedure more succinctly and precisely than I would probably have managed. Check out PR Barlow’s MoneySchemes.Net Blog in general (I haven’t yet found a post I didn’t like) and in particular the post on CB refunds – http://www.moneyschemes.net/clickbank-refund-how-to-get-a-clickbank-refund/

I left this comment, which I reproduce here as it hasn’t been moderated into visibility at the time of writing this…

“Heck – I had a whole domain name and blog set up to tell people how to do this. Now the best thing I can do is just give a link back to this. Actually, I read of another method which I haven’t tried, which is just to mail your purchase id to refunds@clickbank.com, without any explanation whatever, but I find that one implausible. I did (only) once get a vendor block the refund (97% winning sports bets which actually relied on a martingale progression) but on appeal to clickbank they relented.”

Meanwhile, the battle against dross continues apace. I just succumbed to another purchase with huge claims ($25,000 in a single day!) only to find the first 32 pages out of 40 telling me how to buy an old domain name and set up a wordpress blog using fantastico! The “meat” of the stunning new greyhat technique was hardly worth waiting for either. I tweeted it thus:

“Blogging Espionage? Buy old domains, fill with backdated blog posts, sell links, posts and banner ads. That will be $37 thanks very much”

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To start with, why are they spilling the beans on something which has been successful for them over a long period of time …unless it has recently stopped being so successful. If a system goes off the boil, wouldn’t it be tempting (while your recent stats still look reasonable) to cash in by selling on?

Secondly, why should one person’s success with a particular niche or product mean that the same success can be replicated by dozens, hundreds or even thousands of new entrants, using cookie-cutter squeeze and sales pages competing for the same size pool of customers (or even smaller, if the originator has been particularly successful).

Thirdly, why should I believe any of the weasel words of their sales page anyway? The large fonts and bright colours go to the big juicy rhetorical questions “How would you like torrents of unstoppable cash pouring into your Clickbank account?” Very much thank you – is that what you are promising? Err… no, actually. If we read the very small print at the bottom of the page we will find that not only is such performance not guaranteed, if they are particularly honest they will be saying that most people will not make a penny or will actually lose money after buying the product. Read the bottom section first and carefully next time you open a sales page – you’ll be amazed at what they are obliged to tell you these days (and don’t think for a second that they would be doing this without a regulatory gun to their head!).

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Seriously, that would have had to be some ace piece of copywriting to overcome the disappointment I felt at being suckered into opening that mail up. A sinking feeling in the pit of my stomach at being tricked again isn’t the way you want to maintain our relationship.

Meanwhile, I’m still in two minds about Conversions Confidential. Nice piece of sales literature – I’m sure there are things I could learn from it. But George Brown’s endorsement isn’t worth what it once was. After all, he tried selling me Miracle Traffic Bot and SEO Linkvine. And he doesn’t answer my emails when I tell him what’s garbage and what’s not. On the other hand, he films his videos in exotic locations with reasonable production values, which lends credibility when compared with unshaved hoodie-wearers transmitting from run-down student bedsits.

I finally opened up CB Pirate. Who told them that a Pirate map was the best way to orientate the new user? If I have this right, then they have already set up all of my squeeze pages and sales sites and all I need to do is get some traffic to my individual links. This is one of those many instances where I bought the product but didn’t have the time or the inclination to sit down and study it. Looks like I might have missed a trick. I can remember exactly what tipped the scales in their favour – they showed a Clickbank account with pennies, pounds and low hundreds in commissions, rather than the thousands of dollars of unstoppable income that most advertise. That little bit of restraint and humility on their part (even if it was faked) earned them a sale. Marketers take note… or maybe I’m not that typical a consumer!

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