I was searching for something online today (I can’t even remember what) and somehow I came across TrustedGurus.com. I read the (non)sales letter and signed up for their forum (its free, they’re not actually selling anything).

It looks like a great idea. The premise is that the forum members will comment and vote on “trusted gurus” in various industries. The only people allowed to vote are those who have actually purchased a product from a guru, and are thus qualified to properly and impartially review it.

Currently the only gurus that are listed belong to the internet marketing industry.

The reason this site caught my attention was partially because the post I recently wrote about Google Snatch 2.0, and how I was quite disappointed with it, was still quite fresh in my mind. A site that provides a trusted, impartial, third party opinion as to the credibility of these gurus could be quite valuable to those of us who habitually (compulsively? hmm… fodder for a different post) spend thousands each year on info materials.

The site is not selling anything at all, has no affiliate links, and is not out to make a profit in any shape or form. You can read it all on their homepage. Their sole purpose is to bring some credibility to some of these guys out there. I think the more people that get involved with this project, the better it will become.

Are there any “gurus” that you trust implicitly? Meaning you’d buy pretty much anything they came out with, without even reading the sales letter, you just knew it would be that good? How about people you would avoid at all costs? If so, please leave a comment below.

Currently there aren’t that many people active on the forum, but I’m sure it is growing, and I think the idea is a valid one. Why don’t you go check it out?

These days it seems like there is no shortage of review sites out there, promoting this product or that. I recently had the opportunity to listen to Russell Brunson on a webinar and he was talking about a different spin on the old trick. It was new to me anyways, so I thought you might benefit.

The idea here is that you pick the affiliate product you’re going to market. I’m assuming you have an idea how to pick a decent product, if not let me know and I’ll post about that later on. So, assuming you’ve chosen a decent affiliate product to promote, the next step is to find out how it fits into the value ladder.

The Value Ladder

Russell talks a lot about his value ladder. In brief, the steps are as follows:

1. Some sort of freebie
2. Some sort of text based ebook. Could be free or cheap.
3. Audio based version of the same thing. Could be worth a bit more.
4. Video based version of the same thing. Again, worth more.
5. Home study course developing the niche a lot further.
6. Seminar, could be a webinar.
7. Workshop. At this point we’re talking about in-person events.
8. Live coaching.
9. Direct one on one coaching with yourself.

That’s the value ladder in a nutshell. I know, you’re sitting there thinking, how could I possibly get all that going for me? Well, it takes  quite a lot of work, and the good news is, you don’t have to have it all working for you to take advantage of the concept.

So you’ve got your affiliate product, (note the affiate product - you don’t need your own product to make this work), the next step is to figure out where on the value ladder your chosen product sits.

Let’s pick a mid-level internet marketing how to product for our example here, just because there are so few of them out there ;-). Let’s call it Affiliate Cash Grabber. It is an in-depth guide to affiliate marketing, and it really has a ton of great ideas and content.It is a mixture of video and ebook.

The first step is to see if you can get a copy of it for free, from the author. Try the WHOIS information on the site the sales page is listed on. You should find a phone number there. Give it a try. Barring that, you can try the contact email.

If you’re utterly unsuccessful at getting a free copy of the product, but you really want to promote it, you might want to consider buying it yourself. Use your own affiliate link, so it doesn’t cost you much. If the product is on Clickbank, you can ethically use your own links as long as your account has processed sales from more than five different credit card numbers. Don’t do this on a brand new account, but rather from an established account you’re using for other sales.

Sit down and immerse yourself in their product. Chances are you will learn something you never knew before. Take notes. After you’re done, create your review product. This will be essentially a Cliff Notes version of the product. You can talk about what you learned, or how you think this could be applied, or how you know this is going to help your own business, or whatever. You get the idea.

Depending on where the product is on the value ladder, you want to create a product that is one step down on that same ladder. Now, because Affiliate Cash Grabber (I hope that isn’t a real product) is both video and ebook, you can pick what method you want to use. Video might be a good choice, because it is perceived as higher value, and it might take less effort to create a quick review on video than to produce a written report. Take your pick.

Once you’ve decided, you create your product and use that as your giveaway on the squeeze page. You then upsell from that free product to the real deal. It is a lot easier to sell to someone who has already “done business” with you, even free business, than to get someone completely cold to drop their MasterCard on the digital counter.

Alternatively, you can use a service like Traffic Geyser to upload your review video to a ton of different video sharing sites around the internet. If you do this, make sure you put a title in your video somewhere, showing people how to find your site.

So there you have it, the Value Ladder approach to selling an affiliate product in a nutshell. Once you’ve got everything set up, you’ll still need to promote your site in the usual fashion, however this method should give you a good edge over the competition.

Well it’s about time for my monthly “I got suckered into it” review. This month we’re talking about Google Snatch 2.0 - a new ebook of ways to sucker punch Google by denying them your credit card. Fair enough, so it is about free traffic, but really, books such as these don’t give Google the shaft so much as encourage the market in general to get on board with Google’s bandwagon. Sure they won’t make the money, but they’re achieving their market / search organization goals. I digress.

So I purchased a copy of Google Snatch 2.0 ($67), and the upsell afterwards ($47). I guess the main reason I caved on it is that it had a good sales letter, and I tend to start paying more attention after about 8 different marketers email me about the same product. I figure there’s gotta be something behind the madness.

Latif claims that he’s making seven figures a year from these tactics. That’s a pretty tall claim, even in this age of nouveau riche. He also claims in the sales letter that he’s been to $10,000 seminars and left feeling like he’d heard it all already from free ebooks. Very likely. Unfortunately, I was thinking the same thing about his product.

The Free Click Formula 3.0 is presented as basically THE answer to getting free traffic. It sounds like a step by step process, ie a formula. Having read through the ebook, I can tell you that for the most part it was a very good overview of the different ways to gain traffic on the net these days. Yes, he doesn’t require you to spend a dime on traffic; however he doesn’t really dig into the nitty gritty or give unique ideas for how to implement the things he talks about.

I was recently on a webinar with Russell Brunson and Stu McLaren. Stu covered a similar batch of topics, but everything he said was just bursting with a unique “gotcha” spin on things; he was using the methods in ways I hadn’t thought of or heard before. Latif unfortunately spends a lot of time just explaining what things are, not how you can really explode your business using them.

What topics are covered? Here’s a sampling: (this is NOT the table of contents, just some of the topics covered).

- Domain names
- Basic SEO
- Directory Submission
- Keyword Research
- Calls to Action
- List Building
- Blogging
- RSS
- Social Media
- Video Marketing
- Audio Marketing

Most of the sections are fairly generic. A lot of time is spent talking about Wordpress, and I’m assuming that you readers probably already know and use Wordpress on your own. Therefore, this whole section is a bit redundant, except for a pretty good list of plugins and resources. However, these are available for free with a couple minutes of searching as well.

The section on RSS, for example, starts of by spending quite a bit of time telling you what it is, then explains things like RSS syndication. There is even one section in there on how to setup your own RSS Aggregator in Microsoft Outlook. I was looking for key marketing intel, and I get an Outlook how-to? That’s a bit offside.

To be fair, there is quite a lot of information in there, and in general I would say it is a good “survey of the kingdom” type of ebook. It talks about many of the different ways that are popularly being used these days to generate traffic for free, but without really delving into how truly powerful many of these are, and the unique ways you can use them against your competitors. I was left feeling like this was a gradeschool handbook, whereas I’m always on the lookout for the Master’s level stuff. Oh well. Misplaced expectations.

So why do I go to the trouble to write all this down, when most people are raving about how great this is and then giving their links for you to purchase from? Well because unless you’re completely new to internet marketing, I honestly think you could do better for your money. As I mentioned earlier, I learned more on a one hour call (did I mention it was free?) with Russell and Stu than in the entire 165 page Free Click Formula 3.0 and they both claimed to cover roughly the same thing.

If you’ve purchased Google Snatch 2 or if you have other comments that are relevant, I’d love to hear them.

As promised, here’s a post exclusively on Traffic Geyser for your enjoyment. (Having said that, I hope you enjoy it!).

For those of you unfamiliar with Traffic Geyser, it is a really cool bit of software that allows you to submit a video clip to over 40 popular video sharing sites. It also strips out the audio and submits that to podcast directories. You can then attach keywords and a description to the video, and the idea is that it very quickly gains top rankings in the search engines, piggy backing on the popularity of the major social networking sites. Ideally, you target low traffic keywords, so you still really need to do your keyword research.

I signed up for Traffic Geyser a few months ago, and here’s my experience with it so far.

I didn’t have a product of my own to promote, so I simply picked an affiliate offer I was promoting to use as a guinea pig. I made a short (1:30 min) video about the product (its a financial product). The video was literally the cheesiest thing you’ve ever seen; I basically went to the their application form online and did a Camtasia screen capture of it while talking the viewer through a few key points. I then told them to go to my website, where I’d setup a special landing page for the video so they could then apply for themselves. It was the same landing page I’ve used in PPC campaigns promoting this product, just tagged with a different SID. At the end of the video I simply put my URL on the screen for a few seconds.

Now, I submitted this video about three months ago. Within a day or two, I already had one or two first page hits. I think DailyMotion.com was the first up. Anyways, just to check on this, to make sure it is current and good info for you, I just typed in my keywords while writing this post, and today, three months later, I own positions number 3, 4, 5, and 9 on the first page for my money making keyword. Interestingly, DailyMotion is no longer on the first page (I didn’t look past page 1) but YouTube is now in #4, and Technorati has scraped the video from YouTube and is #3. Also, some blogger has scraped my YouTube video and posted it on his site, so it is gaining even more exposure. His page is #5. How fun is that? My own page is number 9.

Anyways, Traffic Geyser costs around $100 a month, but I’ve been watching it closely and this short video has pretty much covered my costs for the last three months. In fact last month left me with a few bucks leftover. Now all I need to do is start creating more videos!!! (Don’t ask why I haven’t done that yet, I haven’t figured it out either.)

All that to say that Traffic Geyser is well worth the money, and if you only put a tiny bit of effort into it, you will reap the rewards.

The cool thing is that you really don’t need your own product to benefit from this. It applies just as much to affiliate marketing as it does to marketing your own products online. It is basically a great way to drive targeted, interested traffic to your site, for free.

Oh, I should mention that the biggest drag about using this software is you have to create accounts for yourself for all the video sharing sites. I only created accounts for about half of the sites, the ones I knew best and figured had the most starpower. It took me a couple hours. Alternatively, you can pay to get a complete set of accounts made for you by Traffic Geyser. It’s probably almost worth it. Once your accounts are created though, you can save the profile so you never have to enter that info again.

I’m planning on creating more videos pretty soon, I’ll keep you posted on their success!

Apparently fall is conference season if you’re into marketing. Dan Kennedy is doing his InfoSummit 2008, Armand Morin just announced his BigSeminar 12, and Russell Brunson and Stu McLaren are co-hosting the Affiliate Incubator. I’m sure there are many more happening, but I’m not on everyone’s mailing list =).

I’ve been involved in Russell’s mentoring program for a few months now, so I kind of get the inside track on their information. Kind of like an early warning system. Anyways, I’ve just registered for the Affiliate Incubator in September, and it looks like it is going to be a great seminar. It’s completely geared towards affiliate marketing, covering the usual topics such as traffic generation, pay per click, etc, but from new perspectives. I’ve been following many of the presenters for quite a while now and I know they’ve got tons of great strategies up their sleeves. I was on a webinar yesterday by Stu and Russell and the info they gave away there was really great stuff. A lot of new stuff I hadn’t heard before, and that was only the teaser for the seminar!

For instance, Mike Koenigs and Frank Sousa are the guys behind Traffic Geyser. Traffic Geyser is a really cool bit of software that allows you to submit a video clip to over 40 popular video sharing sites. It also strips out the audio and submits that to podcast directories. You can then attach keywords and a description to the video, and the idea is that it very quickly gains top rankings in the search engines. Ideally, you target low traffic keywords, so you still really need to do your keyword research. In fact, Traffic Geyser is so cool, I’ve just decided to do a post specifically on that. Look for that in the next day or so. Mike and Frank are truly video marketing experts, and video marketing is one of the biggest new waves to hit the internet in the last year or so.

I’m looking forward to what the creators of Traffic Geyser have to say, but the other presenters are also top of their field as well. Russell and Stu are both presenting, and what they have to say is worthy of their own posts. Look for that soon. Then there are a few “Mr. X” presenters that are being billed as revolutionary and controversial. All in all it’s shaping up to be a great seminar full of incredible new tactics that I’m really hoping will help explode my business.

So anyways, I’m going to Affiliate Incubator 2008 (Sept 25-27). If you’re planning to go as well, leave a comment below and perhaps we can meet in Dallas!

I’ve been so busy lately trying to work out some kinks in getting my first webstore online (selling digital picture frames - and yes - I’m trying to get some link love here =) that I’ve somewhat neglected my affiliate marketing endeavors. However, as the site is slowly coming together I find myself starting to think about how I’m going to market it. As I previously posted, I have had no end of SEO related sales calls, some of them totally discounting the value of PPC advertising. I think that is rather misguided. SEO alone is like having one leg on a stool. You need more legs if you want to stand securely!

Pay Per Click advertising gets you results fast, and it also helps you really drill down to find the money words, if you’re doing proper analysis. This can really help inform you when it comes to SEO, and choosing what keywords to optimize around. So I set out on a quest to find some tools to really help me do that proper analysis, and along the way I’ve discovered a couple great ones. If you’re into affilate or pay per click marketing, I highly recommend you seriously consider these.

Disclaimer: This is not a sales pitch, and even though my affiliate links are in here (you can only be an affiliate once you’ve purchased) I honestly do recommend these products. Evaluate them on their own merit.

Affiliate Radar

I’ve been looking for a way to quickly build campaigns that are trackable at the keyword level for a long time. I’m fairly handy with Excel so I’ve limped along with some homebrew solutions for quite a while, but when I found Affiliate Radar I knew I needed it. Their slogan is “Don’t Fly Blind” and it’s true. If you’re an affiliate marketer and you’re not tracking the performance of every keyword you’re advertising on, I can almost guarantee you’re both losing money (even if you’re making money) and at the same time leaving money on the table.

The great thing about AR is that I’m now able to easily implement keyword-level and ad-level tracking on pretty much any search engine I choose. I can send all the traffic to one page if I wish, and the software will handle it all for me. Later on, I simply go into my affiliate network, grab the relevant report, import it into AR along with my cost data and boom - it spits out a gigantic report that gives me cost / revenue data per keyword / ad across all my campaigns all at once! It takes seconds! From here I can quickly identify which keywords are winners and which are losers. This allows me to save a ton of time testing new affiliate offers, and means I’m much more likely to hit upon a profitable combination (even if I’m only running two keywords!).

Another interesting thing about the method of tracking AR uses is that it assigns a unique ID to every keyword - such as 7A000123 for example. The only place this has relevance is in their database, so the manager of your affiliate program will have no idea which keywords or tactics you’re using to drive sales. This effectively keeps your secrets safe.

Affiliate Radar is setup for simple report importing for most of the affiliate networks you can think of (and they’ll add more on request). CJ, Clickbank, Linkshare, CPA Networks, Azoogle, the list goes on and on. One of the coolest features is the ability to quickly export any given campaign to Google, Yahoo, or MSN. What I do is build a campaign in Adwords Editor (another FREE must have for anyone using Adwords), export the whole campaign into Affiliate Radar, add all the special keyword links, then export back to Adwords, adding Yahoo and MSN at the same time. This can really triple your efficiency when building new ad campaigns.

Speed PPC

I just got Speed PPC the other day, and I’ve yet to really take full advantage of its power. However, using these two systems in conjunction can provide some stunning results. Speed PPC allows you to manipulate keyword lists into massively long lists, broken down by category in order to provide maximum relevancy. For example you might have two lists, one of type of shoe (running shoe, tennis shoe, hiking shoe etc) and another of brand names (Nike, Reebok, Adidas, etc). Speed PPC can merge these together into every combination you can think of (Nike running shoe, Nike tennis shoe, Nike hiking shoe) and group them together. You can then do similar things building the ads themselves. The final screen lets you export all that data into Adwords Editor where you can have a campaign with hundreds of keywords broken down into dozens of adgroups live in about a minute.

Now take this data from Adwords Editor, send it over to Affiliate Radar, add keyword tracking, then export it back to the three main search engines and you’re well on your way. A competent user of both programs could have a fully fledged, optimized keyword and ad tracked campaign (with hundreds of keywords) setup from start to finish in just over 10 minutes. Where I come from that is pretty impressive.

Adwords Editor

I thought I should mention Adwords Editor in here as well. I know a while ago I was conned into buying a similar product that allowed me to edit my Google Adwords campaigns from a Windows client; however the software didn’t work that well and I ended up discarding it. Little did I know, probably at the same time, Google was releasing their free tool called Adwords Editor. By far the most impressive feature of this software is the ability to easily import / export bulk data. I can add hundreds of keywords to multiple campaigns from one screen, or change the max bid on all my keywords simultaneously. Did I mention it is free?

I recently read a post talking about how recession is going to be great for affiliate marketing. Although a bit shy on details, he did make a couple good points. The general idea is that merchandisers tighten up their marketing budgets going into the recession. So far so good. The traditional forms of advertising are becoming more expensive anyway, (print, TV, radio etc) so those dollars will naturally gravitate to he most efficient marketing method - the internet. This means a huge influx of marketing dollars all over the internet.

I would add though that supply and demand economics dictates a stabilization over time - there will always be tremendous marketing value in TV ads for example, and if they temporarily become over-priced, more dollars will flow to the internet, but eventually this will cause TV prices to come back to a  sustainable level. As long as there is value in any marketing channel it will never cease to exist, even though there may be large fluctuations in price or use.

I’ve been thinking about this topic a bit lately. One of my best affiliate offers is a loan product, and people sometimes ask me if business is slowing down. Fact is, I don’t really know, because I keep looking for new ways to promote it and it keeps growing. If it keeps growing, people are still getting loans in droves (personal loans).

I think a smart affiliate marketer will take advantage of whatever current market / economic trends are happening. Recession appears to be on the menu for the near future, so we might as well start evaluating to see how we can take advantage of it. People make money in market ups and downs - just a lot less people make money on the downs! If we’re smart we can be among the few!

Have you ever dressed your website up as a giant carrot? Probably not. If you have, please let me know ASAP because I’d love to hear that story!

Occasionally you hear about unique marketing methods that work really well. Someone comes up with a brilliant idea, and implements it. Often these ideas are quite cheap, but just require you to be unusual, which a lot of people aren’t comfortable with.

A good example is a story I recently read where a guy dressed up as a giant carrot, and started going to events around Saint Paul, Minnesota. His business, the Crazy Carrot Juice Bar, got a huge amount of free advertising in the newspapers, radio and even on TV. He quickly grew the company to 5 stores with 65 employees, and then sold it to Jamba Juice, presumably making a bucketful in the process.

Here’s the best part: the suit cost him $73 to make.

Examples of this kind of marketing are all over the place - the question is, how can you, in your business, make an impact? Chances are there is a way you haven’t thought of to really get your business the public attention it needs to become profitable. As affiliate marketers, we’re typically confined to the internet (not always though - that’s a different topic), but how can we use these concepts to promote our products? Viral videos can make a big splash, and blog contest giveaways can be huge as well. There are lots of ideas out there - which one will you use?

The other day I decided to try promoting a new affiliate product, as I hadn’t done anything new that way in a while. So I picked one from CPA Empire, which had a good network EPC (Earnings per click), and paid per lead. I’ve had good success with lead based affiliate programs in the past. I like the fact that there’s a very low level of commitment required of the customer  - they don’t have to make a purchase decision right then and there, and I still get paid!

Initially, I went to Google, because Google has traditionally been a great place to get a campaign up and running in a jiffy. Unfortunately, with affiliate marketing you don’t always have control over the landing page. I went to the landing page to check it out and it was one of these one page wonders. It is a very simple page, nothing wrong with it from a user’s perspective; however Google’s crawler clearly thought it was lacking. So only 3 of the 40 keywords I wanted went live, and only after I put my minimum bid up to $1.00 / click. When I looked into it further with Google’s tools they told me the landing page sucked. Uh-huh. Already knew that.

So anyways, I let the thing run, and managed to get one lead that day. Unfortunately I spent nearly twice as much on Adwords as the value of the lead. The extremely interesting thing was that I actually got clicks on keywords that were classified by Google as Inactive. Has anyone else seen this? Is it some sort of fraud, or is Google actually letting me get those clicks for some reason? I thought that was extremely interesting.

So I recognized this wasn’t going anywhere, so I thought for a second, then realized if the landing page was the problem, from Google’s perspective, then maybe I should try it out on a different engine that didn’t care nearly as much as Google does about these things. So I fired up my trusty 7Search account and plugged in basically all the same information as went into my Google campaign, and turned it loose.

The immediate difference: I was paying approximately 14 cents per click for second and third place positions on 7Search, whereas I was paying $1.00 per click on Google just to get active. I knew from the start that at least I wouldn’t lose my shirt if nothing much happened, 14 cents a click is a lot more forgiving than $1.00.

So that has now run for about 3 days on 7Search, nothing spectacular, but I have got 97 clicks so far, at a total cost of $14. Out of that traffic, I’ve managed to generate two leads, at $10 a piece. So I’m actually showing a very modest profit. That’s encouraging. Better than a loss, but still nothing to throw a party for. Now I’ve got to figure out how to grow that so it does that regularly and consistently.

Anyways, I guess the lesson of the day is that you need to look at the landing page you’ve got and then go from there; if it doesn’t have much text on it, chances are strong Google isn’t going to like it, and you might want to try it on a different engine first.

I got an email today extolling the virtues of a new service from my web host, Powweb, called TargetClicks. (I’d like to preface this post by saying that I love Powweb as a web host - I’ve been with them for years and they’re really top notch). I’ve copied in the main bullets of the email here:

WHAT THE TARGETCLICKS TEAM CAN DO FOR YOU
TargetClicks ensures that when people perform Google, Yahoo! or MSN searches on keywords related to your site, an entry for your Web site will be listed next to their search results! All you have to do is …
1. Fill out your site information. TargetClicks will determine your competition, target region and optimal keywords.
2. Pay just $1.75 per click. TargetClicks takes care of ad placement for you and eats the cost, even if the lowest bid price is more expensive!
3. Review your performance. TargetClicks provides easy-to-read e-mail and online reports that track your progress.

Is anyone else chomping at the bit to get signed up? I saw $1.75 per click and nearly laughed out loud. Then my brain kicked in, and I started thinking about it. I realize they’re really targeting the people that have no clue about pay-per-click or internet marketing, and would just rather pay someone to know for them. That is fine, there are things that I don’t really care to know much about and would rather pay someone to do, such as fix my car for instance. Are you an ad mechanic? If you don’t like getting under the hood, perhaps a program like this fits your ticket.

Thing is, I do happen to know a thing or two about pay-per-click ads and the $1.75 seems pretty high. Apparently though, one gets coverage on up to 30 PPC networks, which is definitely a big time saver. My guess is their incentive to create a good campaign is the more they get costs down, the more they get to pocket. The other thing to keep in mind though is what kind of quality are they delivering? I could setup a campaign for $1.75 a click and send thousands of visitors through all day long; but how targeted are they? Seems to me the disadvantage of this setup is that there is no relation to profitability.

At the end of the day, this is what makes a successful affiliate marketer; being able to advertise and get a targeted customer ready to purchase for less than the value per action so he can pocket a profit. If you’re just sending traffic down the pipe for a set fee, there will never be any accountability on quality.

Just my two cents.