Entries from August 2008 ↓

One of the great things about reviewing Internet Marketing products is that, occasionally, I find something so hilariously outrageous that it would have buyers falling about laughing if they hadn’t already paid through the nose for it!

Generally the majority of Internet Marketing products have substantial worth, though not all are as good value as we might hope. However The Rich Boy takes the biscuit. Read on to find out why…

First of all check out the promises made on the salespage (www.therichboy.com). It’s full of the usual ‘I’m rich, and now I’m going to show you how’ stuff PLUS the guarantee of ‘an Endless Stream of Residual Income’. So far so absolutely typical of the ‘get rich quick’ sales technique.

Further down the page there’s a ’sneak peak’ of what’s inside the book. This looks promising - everything from income through Adsense to how to use PPC marketing, followed by a bunch of extra ‘bonus’ items.

Then, oh boy, this is where you know this probably isn’t the sort of thing you should be buying when you reach the ‘what I own and how I live’ pictures. Are people really taken in by this? Don’t they have dreams of their own on which they’d spend their ‘endless stream of residual income’? And, erm, who’s paying for his lifestyle?

Well, actually, you are once you plonk down the $49.95 for this ebook. So, you click the order button and pay and then you can’t wait to get your grubby hands on the book which is going to make you rich. Except that you’ll have to wait. Because this is what you see…

Now don’t, whatever you do, be tempted by the ‘I’m looking for a limited number to join my ‘Advanced Coaching Team’. This is just a way of getting your phone number so that one of his salesmen can call you up and persuade you to spend even more money on ‘advanced coaching’.

I’m used to One Time Offers of more products or additions to products (like video training) but, usually, there’s a way past the OTO so you can get to your purchase.

Not with The Rich Boy! You HAVE to fill out the ‘free consultation’ application and click submit before you can get to the download page. I call this despicable.

Even then you don’t get to your download. First you have to join The Rich Boy’s email messaging system and then, and only then, do you get a download link. Except you don’t, because once again you’re faced with the ‘Free Consultation’ application. As the man said ‘I don’t BELIEVE it’! Thankfully, this time, you get a link underneath to the download page. Phew.

Great,  now we can get started on how to earn a fortune. Oh, but what’s this? It’s not a normal ebook; it’s an exe file that opens the book as a downloaded web page. And there, near the top is…

You guessed it - the ‘Free Consultation’ application form again!!! Really, is this guy for real?

So, scroll down and let’s get to the meat of this ebook - the training.

First there’s a bit about starting a blogger blog with some Adsense thrown in. And a bit more about choosing a niche. So how do we find a good niche? We do some keyword research. How? We use the keyword optimizer at www.searchterms.com. But, unlike the free tools at Wordtracker or Google this one costs $9.95 a day or $299.95 a year. And no guesses for who gets a nice affiliate commission on that!

But perhaps you aren’t happy with the look of your blog. Well why not try some website templates instead? And who better to provide them than  www.easyadsensetemplates.com for the princely sum of $99.95? (The Rich Boy gets another $50 of your money for that one).

By now you should be getting the message of how this book works. Let’s say you’ve created your website and are now looking to get visitors to it. Maybe you’d like to be on the front page of Google? How? Oh, that’s simple according to The Rich Boy, just buy SEO Elite for $167! (and there’s a nice fat commission going to The Rich Boy there too).

Next you are going to learn about affiliate marketing. Now this looks promising. First find a product to promote. Where? At www.click2sell.eu of course. Oh, why not Clickbank or any of the other well known affiliate marketplaces? Because Click2Sell is where you can become an affiliate for… wait for it…

The Rich Boy!

Oh, yes, you too can learn how to make $37.46 by selling ‘Make Your Cash Stack’ - the very book you’ve bought and, of course, stuffing more money in The Rich Boy’s pocket as a result (erm, at a conversion rate of 0.21%, I don’t think so).

What’s the best way of advertising your affiliate link? Why, by using Adwords of course. Here’s a quote from the book that really sums it all up better than I can describe…

“I won’t be going into extreme amounts of detail here about how to effectively advertise on Google Adwords…”

Of course you won’t, Rich Boy; because you can send your readers off to buy ‘The Google Cash Guide’ for $67 instead (and fatten your Rich Boy’s wallet a little more). Except that…

…the link doesn’t work!!!

Ha, I almost fell off my chair at that one!

But, don’t worry, if you’ve turned the pages and got this far then you’ll find ‘The Mystery Bonuses’!

Yes, you too can ‘earn’ money by making a killing on the ’science’ of Sports Betting! Or you can make money ‘the easy way’ by filling out online surveys! Or how about getting paid to enter data into forms? How? Spend just another $197 (Sports Betting) plus £27 (Online Surveys) plus $49 (Data Entry) and you can do all of them. Wow, am I the lucky one to be getting these bonuses! Thanks Rich Boy!

But that’s not all! Spend even more money and you’ll get books that will reveal the profit secrets when you ’submit photos to the Internet’ or ‘get paid to shop and eat’.

Any more dodgy systems you can think of Rich Boy? Oh, yes, one last one. Just in case you’ve emptied your wallet buying all this useless stuff you can at least save some money by converting your car to ‘burn water’ not gasoline (www.easywatercar.com)!

Read enough? Bear with me. There’s one last offer you can’t refuse (to learn about, that is). Because you’re so impressed, by this point, with The Rich Boy’s book ‘Make Your Cash Stack’ you can sign up to resell it - an auction template for eBay is provided. The cost of your resale license? $49.99 for the first month and $9.99 a month thereafter!

I checked on eBay and there’s one poor sod in the UK who has failed to sell a copy at £6.00. Another in Canada has managed to sell one copy for $6 (plus postage). Remember every copy that sells adds to The Rich Boy’s alleged $50,000 per month income through the affiliate commissions loaded inside.

There’s one thing that doesn’t quite add up here, though. If The Rich Boy is really so rich, how come he’s using the FREE version of ‘ebookmaestro’ to compile his ebook? Can’t he afford the measly $34.95 for the PRO version (which you’re supposed to use for ‘commercial’ ebooks)? I won’t say ‘there’s one born every minute’.

I thought I’d seen everything but The Rich Boy almost leaves me speechless. I have only one word left to say…

Un-FRICKEN-believable!

‘Oh no, not another affiliate marketing product’, might be your reaction to the brouhaha surrounding Affiliate Payload. Hardly a month goes by when yet another ’secret’ affiliate marketing system arrives, usually just a re-iteration of all the advice that is out there already (see MOLB and Profit Praxis if you want some good advice there).

So, when I downloaded the Affiliate Payload manual, I was expecting more of the same. Wrong! Affiliate Payload attacks affiliate marketing from a completely different perspective.

The biggest struggle with affiliate marketing is in persuading people to buy whatever it is you are promoting. The other things you have to do, driving traffic using PPC or article marketing, getting people to sign up to a free offer, are easy by comparison.

What Affiliate Payload does is shows you how to make money from affiliate marketing without having to sell anything. If that sounds odd then you haven’t come across CPA.

With CPA (Cost Per Action) an advertiser pays an affiliate for an ‘action’ linked to an advertising page. All you have to do is drive traffic to that page and prompt the visitor to take action. Usually this is as simple as entering an email address in order to enter a free draw or get a gift, or it could be filling out a form, for example applying for a credit report. Both of these are a more specific form of CPA called ‘Cost Per Acquisition’.

Rarely is selling involved. As a result the ‘reward’ for the affiliate is typically a few dollars rather than tens or hundreds of dollars, but the conversion rate (number of people taking action per site visitor) is so astronomically higher that CPA can be an extremely lucrative business.

But before you rush off to find CPA offers there are a few things you should know. For a start CPA advertisers don’t just sign up anybody who asks. Nor can you just go to an affiliate market, like ClickBank, to find them. That’s where Affiliate Payload comes in.

Affiliate Payload gives you the exact methodology with which to approach advertisers, a comprehensive list of places to find CPA advertisers, and what to look for to find the most lucrative offers.

Not leaving anything to chance Affiliate Payload also gives you the lowdown on how to use PPC effectively so that you don’t end up spending more than you gain.

Inside Affiliate Payload you’ll find 130 pages of concise explanation where a whole raft of CPA opportunities is open to you. There’s also a couple of ‘do it this way’ videos to lead you though the basics.

So, if you are interested in a ‘different’ form of affiliate marketing where there’s no product to sell, and that means you don’t have to do the hard sell but the easy one instead, then Affiliate Payload might just be right up your street. If you think it is then you’ll find more details by clicking here.

Over a year ago I had an idea for an ebook, (actually I get lots of ideas for ebooks but not always the time to write them!). The problem was that, I guess like a lot of people, I didn’t have a system in place that would take me from idea to a saleable product.

Nor did I have the faintest idea of how I was going to sell it. Oh, yes, I knew how to put up a website for it, but that, in itself, wasn’t going to do the sales job.

Still that idea wouldn’t go away. It was nagging at the back of my mind. I knew it would make a good product but I needed something to kick start me into writing it.

As it happened not long afterwards I saw this…

In the 20/20 Challenge Michael Green seemed to be promising exactly what I needed - a step by step approach to creating and marketing my ebook. Now I love step-by-step tutorials because I can’t stand the airy-fairy tuition courses that promise to get you there but usually turn out to be a load of fluff dressed up in a fancy set of videos.

Could the 20/20 Challenge really get my book on to the virtual best-seller list? I doubted it, but there, in plain print, was Michael’s guarantee to back it up.

So I bought into the 20/20 Challenge and started working through it. I actually documented each day’s progress on my original blog (you can see it here if you’re interested). Amazingly, 20 working days later my ebook was not only written but it was ready, with its sales page, and I had a JV partner to help promote it.

Within three days of its launch I’d taken over $1000 of sales. And, I’m happy to say, that book is still selling today.

Of course what I discovered in the 20/20 Challenge I used to generate other successful products too. And… well you know the rest.

But I often wondered. How many others had achieved any success with the 20/20 Challenge? Well today I found out. Because Michael emailed me with an interview he’d made with his latest budding entrepreneur - Robert Brown from Maryland.

Robert is 28 years old and says he was “virtually bankrupt” before stumbling upon the 20/20 Challenge. Like I was, he was skeptical of Michael Green’s promise but, because of Michael’s guarantee, decided to give it a go.

Did he succeed? Could he actually make $20K in 20 days? Listen to his interview and find out here.