Affiliate Marketing
It's been stated that the path of least resistance often leads nowhere. This can be illustrated in many various ways, as anyone who has had some modicum of success will tell you that they have a myriad of stories to relate as to the hurdles they had to jump over, the mountains they had to climb and the valleys they had to transverse in reaching a goal. Truth be told, this is a general condition of getting anything done. Just ask anyone who manages a business, even the daily routine of getting things done has the unfortunate condition of “hurdles to jump.” I have myself spoken with a few business owners about their experiences, one in particular, a billiards room owner, and he told me about all the horrors of a two year trek just to get to the opening day of his business. He is of course still in business, has been for some time, but he makes no bones about the fact that having an easy time of it was never a part of it.
The difference for this owner was that he loved his business. Always a pool player himself, he never thought twice about how great it would be to virtually “live” in a pool hall. Therefore, crossing the “great barrier reef” to his goal of owning and running a business was always a labor of love. Affiliate marketing is no different. Entering into a quest for internet success must be for you a love for which you will endure anything. And believe it, you will have to endure. Having some experience with this myself, and NOT being an affiliate of anyone’s program, I felt it was necessary to speak out on this subject by reviewing a few opportunities I have seen.
There are those who will tell you with certainty that there is little doubt that affiliate marketing on the internet is the next big thing in making money from home. There’s a big market for it, as more and more folks attempt to close the stretch between accounts receivable and accounts payable in their home lives. But thousands embark on this exercise annually and also fail to make any of the gains to success that the promoters of these programs often claim can be had. The inability to succeed at this has many reasons: No skill, no money, lousy strategy, poor instruction, and just plain frustration with the often overwhelming technical problems that lead one to just walk away.
Like any financial adventure, it is a business. To believe otherwise is to plant the seeds of your own destruction. Businesses cost money. Businesses cost time. Businesses cost effort. There is no getting around that.
Let’s talk about some things you will need to keep in mind, before I venture into my own experiences and review programs like: Joel Comm’s “My Internet Payday and Ascend”, Steve Iser’s “Commission Crusher” and Mike Harvey’s “Instant Cash Machine”, all examples of what is being marketed in the affiliate marketing venue online today.
One must first consider what will suit you as a person first and foremost. Despite what sales tactics want you to believe, not every program is for everyone. Before you make major commitments, you must ignore the clanging gong of buying the most expensive versions of a program based upon what the sales pitch tells you. Affiliate marketing is promoting another person’s product or service. Marketing is of course, salesmanship. No way around that, and it even involves measures of haggling and research. If that turns you off, then think again before you make a money commitment. But if you are looking for something hands off, something to leave and forget, then something like Adwords would be the thing for you.
Adwords is a “campaign” (intently an advertising campaign) that sets up a web page for a product or service and then drives visitors to the site with the intent of marketing them purchase or perhaps become affiliates themselves. Adwords is not free.
Having a web presence is paramount to making this affiliate marketing thing work. This of course means something like a web hosting company. There are several different types of web hosting services to choose from; free web hosting, shared (virtual) hosting, dedicated hosting and even collocated hosting. Free web site hosting, like this blog itself, is of course free but is not really the way to establish one self as being a professional. I do this site as a service, for no cost, and I owe no one my allegiance so I get to say whatever I feel is right, no matter what anyone else thinks. I do it for you. Not for the money (obviously). But if I did do it for the money, I would have to go in a somewhat different direction as far as how things were set up. For one thing, I would have to make the URL hidden, as a “blogspot” URL is hardly a corporate ID. This can be done rather easily.
Shared site hosting is a viable choice for the new online marketer, it is very affordable, and provides practical supporting resources. Shared hosting stands out as the minimum that an internet business really needs in order to develop a professional presence on the internet. Dedicated web hosting is the next step up, it offers much more in server space and traffic allocation however it’s expense reflects this fact. Lastly you can find Collocated Internet hosting, the highest priced choice and truly unnecessary until one’s company is literally at the enterprise stage.
You will need to learn the business. This means that all that “money over night” that is promised to you in the program marketing can actually be a bad thing, as ignorance of how things work will cause you to spend more than you need to and also spend more than you want to in retracing your steps when costly mistakes are made. Most people will likely need to study and seek an education from some professional within the industry they are considering. There are numerous experts in affiliate marketing, like Joel Comm for instance, individuals that definitely have produced crazy amounts of money on the web putting to use fairly basic techniques.
You must do the homework. There is NO genie in the bottle, no golden goose. Despite what marketers will tell you to get you to open your wallet, there is really very little difference in their approach from a slick car salesman in an auto dealership. Just like when buying a car, you must do the research. Look into who is out there doing it. Who has failed. Endeavor to find out the why’s and whereof’s that made one person a success and another a failure. Don’t give anyone any money until you know how this thing works, and especially how it doesn’t work.
Remember, people will do anything for love. Just see what happens when a truck is about to run over your loved one, be it a child or even a dog, and you’ll see just what we humans will do for love. So you had better love the program, you had better love the process and the work. Otherwise you will quit and lose the money you have spent. You might ask: “What if I love money?“ Well, many of these marketers are counting on that. But what they fail to realize is that money itself is often not enough. They do however try to make it a sticking point as they sell you on the idea of spending way too much initially to find out about their programs. The thinking is much the same as any other sales, if you have committed more money than you should, kind of like a gambler in Vegas, then you will not quit until that money comes back. But you have to love money for that to work, and I cannot in good conscience promote that.
If you do find something you like, something you are willing to go to bat for on a daily basis, then you will have to give it time to mature. True business, REAL business, something that is going to be around for a while, is like a tomato plant. Placing the seeds in the ground in November will only give you tomatoes sometime in May, not overnight. Never believe in overnight windfalls, no matter what they tell you. This blog itself took a year and a half of many hours of work doing just what I am dong now before it began to get the attention it should have, and now it continues to grow. But it didn’t grow for 18 months.
Writing well is a true value in appearing professional, even for the novice. You must be able to effectively write, and sales copy writing is a lynch pin for that. You can, of course, hire someone to do that for you, but there we go again with the idea of hidden costs, and there will be many.
Don’t just automatically assume that the guy they tell you makes $40,000 a month with online marketing is having a great time of it. He has climbed many a HARD mountain in his quest, and much of it is now necessary for maintaining the payout that comes along with his success. You WILL payout substantial amounts of the $40,000 a month for things that you can only guess at right now.
You can, of course, get online articles to place on your web site. Some programs will “spin” the content to make it different form the original. (more costs) But writing it yourself can be very rewarding, and also has a touch of the professional approach. Article content is everything, and you need to be able to get to the audience that will read it. More on this later.
Errors happen. They often cost money, and it may be money you don’t have. But you can’t prepare for everything, and that’s why it is a good idea to have a healthy back end to survive the launch. Attitude and perspective are everything so you have to understand from the outset that money will be lost, and lessons will be learned (hopefully) at a cost, of time, effort and money. You gotta love what you are doing, otherwise divorce is a certainty. But once you find that thing you believe in, you just have to forge ahead, believe in your ability and your strength to withstand the downside and don’t analyze yourself into a corner.
Typically the failing rate pertaining to on-line businesses draws near 98%, it has been a long kept feeling that practically all you had to do was create a web site and tens of thousands of potential customers would be lined up around the world throwing revenue at you as you sat comfortably on a pristine sand shore watching your Paypal or Clickbank account explode....... not quite.
Wait, give me a minute while I stop laughing.
Like the pool hall owner I spoke of, you can realistically give it 2 years to develop into something that comes close to the promises of the salesman. But keep in mind, just like Robert Allen’s real estate seminars, many times the money is in the sale of the program and not the action of the program itself, otherwise you would never hear about the program at all. I say this because all too often the sales of these programs appeals to the grubby, greedy little person in us all who wants a life of leisure that money supposedly gives to those who have it. But just keep in mind, that some persons will never do certain types of businesses. You will never see “Sister Theresa’s Strip Club for Girls”. Would a promoter of a program who has little shady parts of his process really be so altruistic as to make his program available to the public just because he loves people and wants to make their lives better? Probably not.
If you are considering a profession in on-line marketing and advertising perform your due diligence and prepare. Locate a highly regarded teacher and strategy and adhere to their advice. (I like Joel Comm) Find a product in which you’re interested, one which appeals to you on a variety of levels. Examine its viability; who else is doing the idea and how many competitors are there? Is the concept of the program something folks are actively taking a look at as an opportunity?
Identify a reasonably priced web hosting account, a shared hosting account is all you’ll need for now. Search for a provider which offers limitless data transfer as well as server space as well as unlimited domain hosting. Take a look at their standing in the community, take a look at what individuals have to say about them. Not all web hosting accounts are created equally, analyze and try to get the most effective value for your money.
I’ve dealt with Hostgator a few times now, and I found their professional approach quite appealing. One thing to keep in mind is that often the opportunity to provide hosting for others is a part of a program. If a program offers hosting through another party, you can bet the hosting company is THEY, themselves. So they make more and more from your participation. Not necessarily a bad thing, but it can be misleading.
Joel Comm: My Internet Payday and Ascend
The very blog you are now reading was set up with a program called “My Internet Payday”, which was assembled and promoted by Joel Comm. The offer for the program on learning to market on the internet with web sites and affiliate marketing was indeed comprehensive. It took me several months, about two years ago, to filter through the mountain of PDF’s and videos and instructional material that Joel provided. Painstakingly provided, the information was almost impossible to absorb with any alacrity. But a fine work it was, with many others involved in including their own seminars and teaching videos, plus other authors and Joel’s own guidance.
My Internet Payday included much in the way of guidance on affiliate marketing from venues such as Clickbank, Google Adsense, Aweber and even Amazon.com’s offer of affiliate marketing. For those who don’t know, the example of affiliate marketing in the case of something like Clickbank is that there are products out there that producers promote, you run their ads and include your own link in the purchasing offer and when someone makes a purchase, a percentage of the sale is given to you. Google Adsense works a bit like this also, or at least it is supposed to. Aweber is a tool for blasting a newsletter over the net in order to attract attention to your site. That is really all Aweber is good for, and it does that job quite well, but requires multiple applications. Amazon’s affiliate marketing is also the same as Clickbank’s.
I have to say right here and right now, that the most successful results I received came from posting this site to Aweber, which resulted in a major spike in web hits, but would have been even more effective if I would do it periodically. Google Adsense has some amazing tracking software. You would not believe the micro management the program offers in tracking traffic for your site and graphing the results. It has a myriad of uses that even today I am still wading through. The results do however, show some false results at times, as the program seems unable to report information on those who visit your site with say, a Blackberry or Iphone. Google Adsense has NEVER made me any money on this site, I could buy one lunch with the paltry income it has provided in two years. But the tracking information has more than made up for it. I have complained openly on Twitter about how Google Adsense doesn’t work, and actually had others chime in and retweet me with the agreement. How it keeps going, and how some can claim that others have made “$40,000 a month” with Adsense, in good conscience, is beyond my understanding.
Because none of these has ever really worked, be it Clickbank or Amazon.com affiliate, I trashed most of it. I was quite disappointed. Recently I have given Clickbank another try, having found that the social marketing I have grown in two years has certain tricks and ways of operating, I thought I might give it another round. But so far nothing.
Let me tell you what DOES work. Twitter works. Placing a short message with a link to your site three or four times a day really brings in the hits. I can’t say that it helps make any sales, or that those who come by stay very long, but the hits DO come. The same is true of Facebook. But Facebook is a bit more selective. The trick to getting hits with Facebook is to join groups. Make those groups a crowd of people who would be interested in what your site provides and then in the comments section of a post they make, place a note and a link. You can only do this five times in one day before Facebook stops you with a temporary freeze on posting, but still the posts DO reach an audience. Simply posting to your own friends only brings minor results. And when I say results, I mean hits to your web page, money making is another story. As far as I can see, people just DON’T click on ads.
Joel Comm appears to me to be a straight up guy, and I suppose he loves what he does and has found that it works for him. He has pushed through the myriad of problems that arise to stop you from succeeding, and there are many, believe me. I recommend Joel and his teaching on this, but since the inception of my site, I see that My Internet Payday has been discontinued. It wasn’t long after I joined My Internet Payday that Joel put out an ad that he would be having a seminar on a new product he was introducing. This product was a nicely packaged CD assortment called “Ascend”. In the hour that it took for Joel to introduce to his live audience the new product, I was show an entire video and flash presentation that outlined in detail the information in My Internet Payday. After the presentation there was a live chat for those interested in buying the Ascend program at a price of $800, discounted of course, for those in attendance. Now, My Internet Payday was a website that you could subscribe to, one joined at something like $150.00 and then $35.00 a month thereafter. Ascend was a cd set of the same information with no subscription.
Now let me say first, that the files and folders I have from My Internet Payday are chock full of megatons of information. I think I can safely say that the website offer was perhaps under priced, so I understand Joel’s move to up his profit margin with Ascend. But I did ask him in live chat if indeed that Ascend program was not just My Internet Payday all over again, since he had just described it to the letter in the presentation video. Joel didn’t expect that question and he stuttered a bit in trying to convince myself and the audience listening that it was indeed different, but when pressed by others as to HOW it was different, the answers were short in coming.
It is, of course, NOT different. And today Ascend is still available, but My Internet Payday is gone. Even still, I DO recommend Joel’s program if you are really serious as to making internet affiliate marketing work for you. The information is comprehensive and well worth the money, for much work was put into it. Will it work for you? I don’t do my site for the money, so I am still around. I do it for what I believe to be a higher purpose, and I kowtow to no one. I am not an affiliate. Go try it for yourself and you tell me if you made $40,000 a month once you cleared the hurdles.
Steve Iser’s Commission Crusher
Steve Iser is another person who loves what he does. He’s a young guy, I think around 24 years old, who has come up with a system that he says has made him quite the fortune. I’m sure that it satisfies something deep inside Steve to have come all this way with his system, jumped all the hurdles, climbed all the mountains, and crossed all the valleys in order to reach this point in his internet marketing career. A tip of the hat to him for this accomplishment.
His Commission Crusher program is not so much a software as it is a search engine with a concept behind it. A concept with a bit of a different twist. At first, when you run into Steve on his email videos, his attitude is a bit offensive, as he challenges you with rhetoric that “you might not even deserve to be there” listening to his offer. This is of course, sales talk, and such a thing always gets me chuckling. Sales people always seem to think that no one anywhere has ever had sales training except themselves. Considering the 2% return on advertising response from the general public, I would say they are quite wrong about that. Anyhow, you’ll spend a good part of the day going through Steve’s video presentations, about 4 hours, if you are willing to stick it out that long in order to get to some place where you can make any kind of decision on whether or not to buy into the program.
You’ll sit through all the usual challenge stuff, about how you had better get in on the offer before he shuts the whole thing down. This may or may not be an important point, one in which I’ll cover in just a minute. But there are several things you must remember while being berated with Steve’s challenge while you are listening to his pitch. An initial price offer, like say $47 dollars for getting into the program, is never the cost of the program. That $47 dollar offer is only the tip of the iceberg. There will be multiple offers to come during the presentation. Offers for upgrading and adding to the program’s ability. Those offers come at a high price, several of them are almost $300 dollars a piece. In the end you can pay out almost $500 bucks for a program that is still, at the video presentation stage, “sight unseen”. (Always say no to the first offers like these, there will be another offer at a lower price right behind it, sometimes three or four of them) I find that annoying, because I didn’t even know what the program was about at that point. Without that knowledge, Steve can keep repeating how “you’ll never be made this offer again” until he’s blue in the face. I wasn’t going to bite based on his berating challenge or slightly disrespectful attitude toward the viewer. Once you are inside the website, however, the opportunity to upgrade IS indeed there. Not nice, Steve.
There are several things I need to tell you at this point about the presentation, and this doesn’t just go for Commission Crusher, but also for their buddies at Instant Cash Machine, which I’ll talk about in the next section. Once inside the website you’ll be dragged through some very long and somewhat annoying videos that explain a whole lot of the “side line” ideas to the concept before we ever get to the meat of the matter. You’ll be offered a “free website” by a company that builds websites. You’ll be told that the site would ordinarily cost $1995.00, but Steve is going into his own pocket to give you a free one. All you need to do is sign up for hosting with Brainhost. Brainhost, I am pretty sure, is Steve’s own company. I have no direct proof of this, but I have had hosting on the Hostgator site, and part of their offer is to provide hosting for others and make money off of it. So I don’t believe you can say that Brainhost is a separate entity, though they may be.
The problem folks is that there is software these days that will do this at the click of a button. Instant Cash Machine has something called ICEE software that assembles the whole thing together and launches it, once you fill out a small form, giving you a full Wordpress website. It doesn’t take a team of designers working on your behalf. Does that cost $1995.00? Hmmm.
Anyhow, this hosting thing is all part of the mix. Instant Cash Machine also offers a hosting site with a company called Hostjester. No doubt this is also the same company. You’ll be offered the free website there also. But they also, like Steve’s company, tell you in the beginning that it’s a good thing you answered your email because you almost missed the expiration of the offer. Both emails from the companies had about the same countdown going on the clock. This is all sales pitch folks. Don’t believe a word of it.
So once inside Commission Crusher, you’ll be guided to download FTP software, temporary versions of Photoshop and several other things way before you even know what you’ll be doing in the program. Then you must sit through some long videos where Steve shows you that he is in Vegas, out of the window, and he coughs into the microphone, takes sips of water, and seems to be in a sweatshirt and baseball cap. But let’s get to it.
Commission Crusher is a system using a search engine called Ad Assault. The engine goes out into the internet in search of websites that match your search requirements. So say you type in “dog grooming”, then many sites will come back about dog grooming that fit certain criterion. They have a certain number of consistent hits, and they allow for advertising. When looking for ads in Click bank for affiliate marketing, you will take the ad from the Clickbank search and place your affiliate link in the ad, then when someone buys the product advertised, you get a percentage of the purchase. Now if you were just using Clickbank ads, then things would be a bit more straight forward I think. Steve’s program however, goes beyond this. The search engine goes after independents from the Clickbank system .
In Clickbank there is something called “Grav”. Grav tells you how well a product is selling. Steve advises that when you use Clickbank only use the ads that have a 75 grav rating. But with Clickbank, you may get 100 choices, with only the top three having more than a 75 grav. The rest are, unfortunately, something like .75 grav. That’s not even a 1 rating. So Commission Crusher (Ad Assault) finds advertising by independents that are not on the Clickbank circuit.
Someone writes a book and then puts it on a site, paying for the advertising, mind you, and offers it for sale. With Steve’s system you then watch the ad to see if it sticks around a while. If it does then you know it is doing well. So you take the info from the ad, place your affiliate link in the mix, and then go out and place that ad on a site that accepts that type of advertising. You must do research, you must haggle for prices of advertising, you must run this thing like a business.
The advertising for a site that does really well can easily be something like $50 dollars a day. Add that up for one month. Can you afford to do that for six months? Consider that advertising returns about a 2% response. Can you afford that? Now Steve understands this cost, and to his credit, he shows you some less well known sites that have cheaper advertising. The thing is, one could build up to the income promised by taking a few years or more of top heavy costs for advertising with the lesser known sites and then capitalizing on the more expensive ones afterward. But do you have that kind of time and capital? Does this sound like something that can happen in just “six clicks” of a mouse? That is part of the sales pitch.
Now as far as the business model and the process goes, you may say that there is nothing wrong here, that business has been dong things this way for a long, long time. After all, Burger King copied McDonald’s system, Pepsi and Coke have similar systems. Just look at TV shows since American Idol came on the scene. Every talent/judging show since then has HAD to have a Brit judge on the panel. (Leave it to TV to beat an idea to death)
But is that what is happening here? Burger King went and made their own product, then they went into competition with McDonald’s using their system. They didn’t plug into McDonald’s efforts and redirect the income generated into their own bank account. You may not have a problem with this, but you need to consider something: perhaps Steve threatens to close it all down and get out in the near future for reasons more practical than sales oriented.
In the past I have seen total companies reverse themselves or go out of business because of one person who did things wrong. That’s all it would take, one person to tick off an advertiser and all your efforts and money spent are gone for good.
About 15 years ago I spent 9 months researching a company that offers ATM machines that can be placed in Mom and Pop stores all over the country. When someone uses the ATM machine you get the cost of the transaction right into your checking account. I spent $4,000 bucks on two machines to see how they would work out. Four months later the Justice Department shut the company down for violations and I lost everything. No multiple streams of income on that one.
A friend of mine went into the expensive air purifier business with a company called Ecoquest. He spent quite a few bucks on the purifiers for inventory, only to be told that the government was outlawing the use of Ozone producing purifiers. Ecoquest told him that it was no problem because their purifiers only put out 2% ozone. Six months later they introduced a new model that did not produce ozone and he was notified that he would have to now buy inventory for promotion of the new air purifiers. The old ones? He was stuck with them.
This kind of thing can happen! All it will take is one person who does the Commission Crusher process wrong and ticks the wrong person off. Steve knows this. Can you afford that? He tells his readers, “Just do what I do”, and he is right to say that. But how long can he control the general public’s tendencies? Not everyone is as smart and competent, or even as committed to drawing a line in the sand and going no further than Steve may be. He knows what NOT to do, because he is smart about consequences. But not everyone out there shares that talent.
Just a few words about Brainhost before we continue. They are, no doubt, the hosting company for Commission Crusher, as I have said. That’s actually too bad, because they have the worst customer service. I have seen worse, but not much worse. I wish it was legal to post the private emails we shared over a week or so in trying to get things cleared. Here’s just and example:
Me
Hello, I am writing today because I have joined the Commission Crusher site and was promised a FREE website within two days. That has not happened, can you help me?
(No response)
Hello? Is anyone going to help me? It has been a week now and I have never received my free website.
Them
Hi, welcome to Brainhost. Please feel free to ask any questions you might have right here in this forum, (tickets)/
Me
Yes, I signed up over a week ago and never received my website. Can you help me out?
Them
Could you please provide your domain name?
Me
Sure, it’s : www.domainname.com
Them
What do you seem to be having a problem with?
Me
I signed up a week and a half ago and never received my free website. Here is the rest of my information in case you have trouble finding me. (Name, Email, domain, sign up reference number.)
Them
Let us get you together with a specialist. What is your domain name?
Me
I have given that to you twice now, and now it is two weeks since I was supposed to get a free website with Commission Crusher.
Them
I’m sorry, your email seems to be incorrect. Can you sign on with the correct email?
Me
My email is not incorrect, it is the one I signed up with.
Them
Are you having a problem? What seems to be the trouble, sir?
Me
Yes, it has been two and a half weeks since I signed up with Commission Crusher and was promised a free website within two days, that has never happened.
Them
Are you signed up with Brainhosting sir, we have the best deals and service around!
Me
Tell you what, forget it. Just cancel my subscription and I will go somewhere else. I want a refund too.
Them
Let us contact you with a specialist sir, what is your domain name?
Me
Forget it. I want to cancel. Just give me my money back. Here is ALL the information you will ever need. (All information ever gathered is given back)
Them
We never received your information sir, we never knew you had signed up for a free website. Would you still like to continue?
Me
No.
Well, you see my point. I did a short run with Storesonline.com a while back and their customer service was even worse. They had hired interns from the local college just to answer the phones in customer service. I never spoke with so many young people who had been thrown to the sharks with no information. All I kept hearing from them was “I’m sorry, I don’t know how to answer that.” That is, at least, honest.
Brainhost is just faKing it. Master stallers, probably waiting for my money back guarantee to expire, they came up with more pretend incompetence than I have seen in a long time. I cannot recommend them, for anything, not just for Commission Crusher.
I have dealt with Hostgator several times now and they have a very professional set up. A live chat with customer service and also a phone number with a live person. They really are a hosting service, with all the amenities, not just a company’s hosting offer for their own program.
Instant Cash Machine
A good buddy of the guys behind Commission Crusher is Instant Cash Machine. They too had lots of long, drawn out videos to sell you into the program. They also offer a free website that would cost you $1995.00 (created by a program). Their hosting company is called Hostjester. I didn’t even bother with Hostjester, I went straight to Hostgater with this one. All one needs is a Cpanel anyway, unfortunately this program would never launch in the Cpanel, and I had to get a refund.
Instant Cash Machine is also a money making idea for website creations with Clickbank and Google Adsense and other affiliate “pay per click” concepts. Where Joel Comm and his Ascend program will direct you to provide your own content, by writing your own articles and providing your own personal touch, Instant Cash machine tries to make that an automatic process. I like that idea, I like that better than Commission Crusher, in that your own efforts are the money makers in the process.
Here’s how it is supposed to work: They have a program called ICEE that asks you to fill out a simple form once you have used their search engine to find information on the net which pertains to your website’s intent. Once you have filled out the form the program goes out on the net and grabs articles and videos that have something to do with your target subject. It then assembles everything into a Wordpress website.
By the way, Wordpress is a difficult, troublesome website provider. Their sites are not user friendly and they fight you every inch of the way, changing your type face randomly, refusing to allow for certain design elements. Blogspot is at least cooperative, despite its perceived non-professionalism.
The site is rather basic looking, but serviceable. Then when you have the Wordpress site, you go and place Google Adsense, Clickbank and others in the advertising areas of the site. Once you have done this, the concept is to do it over and over again until you have many, many websites, all supposedly providing you affiliate percentages on products bought through pay per click advertising.
But here’s the rub: Can you do that? Can you trust a blind, deaf and dumb program to pull articles off of the net, and Youtube videos also, and legally place them on your website for commercial profit? Aren’t some of them copyright protected?
Joel Comm will refer you to sites like Goarticles.com and Ezinearticles.com (very strict), for articles that are written for the purpose of commercial use, but who knows where this program is pulling them from? I think it is a blind alley, and a potential problem. That’s a shame too, because I think this kind of idea could work very well, if only there weren’t laws to pay attention to.
It’s a little amusing how the narrator of the sales videos is almost the opposite in approaching the customer than Steve Iser was, this time Mike Harvey is not only of British descent, but he is also very conciliatory. He does mention in one part of the videos that some programs seem a bit “shady”, well certainly Commission Crusher and his own program could not be included in that. But I think that is all the more sales pitch than actuality.
Once again, you’ll be inundated with offers to go way beyond the initial sign up fee, but I can’t recommend you take any of the offers. Many are quite expensive and they are asking for lots of cash from you before you even have seen dollar one in profit. One thing you must remember is that these programs and many other money making opportunities that are out there, never support themselves. Don’t tell yourself that you’ll be pulling in cash to make it happen once the basics are up and running. The basics are more costly than you even have any idea of, and you will pay and pay and pay before you can see wether or not the system really works, and also just how able you are to overcome the mountains and valleys that it will take to succeed in ...... ANY kind of business.
Make sure, if you look into these things, that you make PDF copies of all receipts after purchase. Clickbank is very good about returning your money, they handle business very professionally. Not everyone does tough, and they often don’t want to let it go. Of course, they are NOT in the business of giving money back to customers, and they will pull hard against the strain.
When I review things here, I often get free stuff, like free books or a free movie. But those things are self contained. You’ll never see someone foot the bill for me to give their program a try in order to report on my experiences. There is just too much risk, too much intangible to deal with. And that’s an important point.
I wish things were different folks, I wish I could point you to something that worked just like it was supposed to and I could direct you in that way, but these things take far more money and time than I have in the tank. I can give you some of it, in the beginning, and if you feel you have the bankroll and the drive, then you find out for me what is further down the road. And good luck to you.
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