DamianSaunders.net …because I can

Affiliate Elite Review, ok, now that I′ve figured how to open this post with my primary keyword, lets get started. I just got myself a shiny new copy of Brad Callen′s Affiliate Elite software. If the twenty three page long sales letter (a brilliant and finely crafted example, designed to mesmerize you into a semi hypnotic state and gently walk you, and your credit card, through the purchase and sign up process) has anything to go by I′m now in possession of a "god like power", about to effortlessly replace my career, and blow my competition out of the water. Awesome!

I′m somewhat cynical about hype and sales letters but I recognize their role in the sales process, the purpose of this Affiliate Elite review is to explore the reality of Affiliate Elite versus the promise and hype.

I′ve been keen to grow my search marketing (what Chris Carpenter′s eBook Google Cash was all about) revenue alongside my website generated income, primarily because search marketing, as opposed to building and promoting a website, offers the most immediate high income opportunity available today, but, it also comes with the risk of doing your dough faster than a Lindsay Lohan trip back to rehab, so I have been looking for an edge, looking for a competitive analysis tool that will take the drudgery out of product analysis, let me know what competition I′m up against, what, and how they′re doing it, and to compete successfully with them. Affiliate Elite promises to be that tool.

In order to do an Affiliate Elite review I, obviously, had to buy the product. My last experience with a hyped up "rock the affiliate world", competition killing, piece of software was a debacle of mammoth proportions, so I′m pleased to say that the Affiliate Elite sales and installation process was flawless, simple, and it worked right away. I′ve used two of Brad Callen′s products, SEO Elite and Keyword Elite, happily, and successfully, over the past two years and I have to say, as far as software, support, and training are concerned, these Guy′s have their act together.

Once you have downloaded the application you gain access to a series of fifteen training videos that, not only show you how to use the system but, provide strong insight into the competitive power you now have at your fingertips. What′s immediately apparent is that a lot of effort has gone into ensuring your success with the software by educating you in the practice and discipline you need to follow to bring in those commission cheques. The best thing is you can continue to revisit these videos while you develop your winning strategy.

Continuing on with the Affiliate Elite review, the software has four "projects".

Project #1: Find Profitable Affiliate Products to Promote

The concept of Affiliate Marketing is a simple one but, the challenge is finding products to promote that you know are going to convert into commission. You really only have control over the referral stage so you want to be sure you are sending your referrals to products that are going to sell, especially if you′re paying to get them there. Affiliate Elite gives you access to the entire Clickbank and PayDotCom databases, more than twenty five thousand, high commission, products, along with the performance statistics you need to determine which of those products are selling now, which ones are worth promoting, and the one′s most likely to earn you commissions right away. Awesome!

The question could be why just Clickbank and PayDotCom? Personally I think that’s a moot point, I have affiliations with several other marketing companies because their products and services suit the themes of my websites, however, my very last sale on Clickbank was worth $US121.00 in commission to me. That′s a very healthy commission, and it came from one sneaky little link in an unrelated article! So, In my mind it′s better to focus in one area rather than add the complexity of multiple companies into the mix.

Project #2: Reverse Google Search

On the Internet the keyword rules, if you haven′t got keyword research and application sussed then you′re in the same position as an unfit climber trying to climb Mt. Everest with bare feet wearing only a pair of board shorts. You′re going to fail.

This project is the Holy Grail of keyword research. I would have paid for this feature alone. Ever since I started working with keywords I thought the whole process would have been a whole lot better if we could just find the keywords our successful competitors were using, if, in other words, the whole process was reversed. Now we can …enough said!

Project #3: Analyze Adwords Competition

Now that you have your list of keywords you can pull out the best ones, run this project, and find all the advertisers, their ads and their landing pages. This is the competitive intelligence that will give you the edge. Not only in terms of being able to quickly mimic the most successful campaigns, but, deconstructing the strategies of the most successful marketers so you have what it takes to be one yourself.

Project #4: Find Super Affiliates

With this project you can use the Merchant ID′s of the top websites for the niche you found in Project #1 to find out who their affiliates are, all of them, including their contact information. Why would you do this you ask? The purpose of this project is so that you identify and contact people who have demonstrated superior marketing skills, Super Affiliates, with the potential of entering into joint ventures or, at the very least, see how they became Super Affiliates in the first place.

So, the question is does this product deliver the goods? Here′s the thing, for the purpose of this Affiliate Elite review the product gets a major thumbs up from me, the information it provides is simply astounding, Affiliate Elite should be a part of your marketing arsenal, but consider this;

If…

X = Affiliate Elite

Y = Your innate intelligence, aptitude, understanding of marketing concepts, tenacity, determination, fortitude, etc.

Z = Time and effort.

Then…

The formula for success with Affiliate Elite will be X x (Y + Z) = Degree of Success

Brad Callen′s Affiliate Elite gives you factor X, an incredibly powerful piece of competitive analysis software that gives you the edge, Y and Z are up to you. Undoubtedly, a significant proportion of the people who have already purchased the product will be expecting it to be some kind of "magic wand" that will do everything for them, the rest will be collecting their commission cheques.

How much does it cost? Look, for what it is it′s very cheap, a one off payment and a small monthly fee, but, this is really insignificant because Affiliate Elite is itself a Clickbank product. The commission you get as an Affiliate is on both the sale, and the monthly fee, and, the way it′s structured means you only have to sell two copies to cancel out your original cost. I’ve already done it.

I hope you′ve found this Affiliate Elite review helpful, I strongly recommend this product, now excuse me, I′ve got money to make.

If you recall, in a recent post, I mentioned that I had just gone live with an Article directory site, TotallyAwesomeArticles.com, on or about the 24th September 07. At the time I had resigned myself to the fact that, based on my previous experience, and in direct contrast to the legends of Internet Marketing who would have you believe it will happen overnight, it would take quite some time to get ranked and make some headway.

You can imagine my surprise when, just one month later, it has a page rank of 1. Not that it really makes much difference in terms of traffic, revenue, or anything but it’s rewarding to see that it can happen faster than expected.

In contrast, my freebies site, TotallyAwesomeFreebies.com, has just gone to page rank 1 too, but this is after more than a year, so what was the difference, or better still, what did I do?

Assuming that it’s not some kind of Google Sandbox anomoly and that the site is not going to disappear again, I employed two elementry site optimization techniquies, one on site, and one off site.

The on site approach was to ensure there were no off site links on the home page (ok, there’s one, but that’s an obligation of the script I used to create the site.)

The off site strategy has to be a testament to the power of Article Marketing. I wrote one quality article and had it distributed by iSnare. That’s it, nothing more, nothing less.

Looking at the other posts in this blog so far it’s interesting to note that my post on the keyword Guitar Pequannock shows up on the first page in Google for that term, and my post titled “Revisitors.com does it work?” is number one for that phrase. While this is not really anything significant at all it demonstrates that it is posible to get indexed, ranked and well positioned, very quickly and it’s not very difficult. It is certainly something that you can do yourself and you definitely should not pay someone to do it for you.

Obviously the challenge is exponentially harder when you are dealing with a lucrative, highly competitive niche but, the strategy employed is exactly the same.

Revisitors.com certainly have a compelling value proposition, it goes something like this, everyday they purchase expired domain names that still have traffic on them, then sort those domains into 160 plus categories

based on their traffic, after which they analyze their clients websites and redirect the most relevant domains to them. Sounds pretty reasonable, in fact I had often thought of buying an expired domain in an appropriate category myself in the hope that I could shorten the time it takes for a site to come to prominence (yes, it takes time…usually lots of it) but hadn’t really pursued it.

I wont go into too much detail regarding the revisitors.com sales pitch as it’s all there when you visit their site but, in a nutshell, the message, which is both stated, and strongly implied by the graphics on the site, comes down to the simple equation, targeted traffic = leads = big profits!

Let’s examine the revisitors.com promise then. First you are presented with a before and after graphic which pretty much implies that with their product you’ll see steady traffic, your PayPal receipts will grow from hundreds to thousands of dollars, and your Alexa rank will head steadily north (ironically enough you could say that although the before graph is patchy, it’s actually trending up, whereas the after graph has peaked in the middle and is now trending down…but that’s just being pedantic isn’t it?). Then they go on to emphasize that it delivers 100% genuine and unique visitors.

Show me a webmaster who doesn’t want thousands of highly targeted visitors every day, and I’ll show you a standards compliant Microsoft browser…I decided to give it a run.

TotallyAweseomeFreebies.com is my crash test dummy site, they say that you learn from your mistakes and, if that’s the case, I’ve learned a lot from this site, but I think that it’s vital to your success as an Internet marketer to have a site where you can afford to take risks, then apply the knowledge to your more lucrative sites. Revisitors.com offer a variety of traffic plans, starting from 2500 visitors and going up to the hundreds of thousands, I chose 25,000 visitors for the reasonable price of $99 or .004¢ per visitor!

My plan started on August 20^th 2007, take a look at the following stats taken from Google Analytics for TotallyAwesomeFreebies.com.

Now, when you look at the July/August 2007 column you can see the problem I was intent on solving.
Every 7 visitors to the site converted to a $1.36 average lead, but, getting them there with PPC actually meant that every visitor was costing me .06¢. I needed to get this into the positive. Looking at this extremely optimistically you do the maths and 2500 visitors a day kisses the day job goodbye, as long as the traffic is either organic, or much cheaper. That’s why the Revisitors.com offer looks attractive…but, does it work?

A look at the second row pretty much answers the question. Revsitors.com traffic actually arrives via a server called yourtrafficserver.com so Google Analytics makes it very easy to distinguish this traffic from anything else. You remember that I bought the 25,000 visitor plan, sure enough, on 22^nd September my account stated that they had in fact delivered 25,000 visitors to my site over the course of approximately one month. Google Analytics, on the other hand, reported 5978 visits from the server at revisitors.com, a discrepancy of 19,022.

Looking at the number of pages visited, and the time spent on the site, an average of one second, raises significant questions about the validity of their claim to targeted traffic. Ok, it could mean that my site completely sucks, but the numbers from PPC/Organic would seem to indicate otherwise. Then, when you look at the bounce rate, the number of visitors from revisitors.com who clicked the back button, and see that it’s 98.91% you have a serious problem. Search engines, seeing a site with a bounce rate this bad would rate it of very low relevance. I had to turn the PPC back on just so this figure would improve. There’s no point pursuing the discrepancy in traffic volume with them, the quality of the traffic is so bad it’s not worth the effort.

On another note, my Alexa rank didn’t budge.

I’ll conclude by saying that in trying this product I chose to ignore the absolute bleeding obvious; why, if you could simply buy targeted traffic in this quantity and have it convert to a respectable percentage, would there be a multi million dollar Internet marketing training industry at all? It didn’t work for me and I doubt that it will work for you, but you could always try it for yourself.

Finally, if you’re interested in knowing more about the site metrics I referred to in the table above, you might want to check this out.

Guitar Pequannock is a particularly interesting phrase I’ve been acutely interested in since I discovered it while doing some keyword research for a site I was developing, and I’m hoping that it will prove to be a classic illustration of how Keyword Analyzer easily identifies keywords that drive traffic to a site. Time will tell.

So what makes guitar pequannock such an interesting phrase then? The first thing that struck my interest was that my initial search, using Overture data, which incidentally has been frozen since February 2007, revealed that there were 9885 monthly searches for guitar pequannock and that there were only 602 competing results. Thats an extremely compelling R/S ratio! Even today Google shows that there are only 963 competing pages for that phrase. Really, I couldn’t resist the temptation to write this piece.

No one, considering it’s undoubtedly one of the most popular musical instruments of all time, needs much of an explanation about the Guitar. Pequannock, on the other hand, is a town with a population of approximately 14,000 inhabitants located in Morris county, New Jersey USA. Wikipidia information on the subject isn’t particularly enlightening, stating some small facts about the town being a campsite for George Washington’s troops during the American Civil war, that it’s name is derived from an American Indian word meaning land cleared for grazing, but there is absolutely no indication of any connection with Guitar.

Pequannock’s main claim to fame, for me anyway, seems to be that it is, or was, the home of actor Jason Biggs from the movie American Pie.

So, why are there so many searches for guitar pequannock? What exactly are people searching for, is there some significance, is it some kind of mysterious code, an event, or simply an anomaly of keyword statistics? I would love to know.

Looking at the top sites for the phrase gives no real indication of what people are searching for either. When I first discovered it the top site was some kind of project Black Mask site that’s not there any more and, in it’s place there are a few more sites that, like me, seem to be shamelessly using the keyword phrase “guitar pequannock” for no other reason but to attract traffic to their sites.

The only vague hint I can see is some reference to one acoustic guitar playing Pequannock religious group suing another because they called them a cult, surely that wouldn’t have generated the interest I am seeing. Apart from that, and please enlighten me if that’s not the case, there is no apparent significance to the keyword phrase guitar pequannock.

and another thing…

Being brought up in New Zealand, rugby union is in your DNA, in terms of priority it sits, in the heirachy, slap bang between family and beer, so this morning’s exit of the once (a very distant once) invincible NZ All Blacks from the 2007 world cub was a disappointment to say the least.

But, like other momentous mind shifts that occur during your life, such as realizing that the tooth fairy was actually your mum, there is no Santa, or Easter Bunny, and your father’s cute secretary, who you had a crush on, was shagging the local petrol head, I’ve come to accept that the mighty All Blacks aren’t invincible, they’re simply the best team in the world…except when it counts!

What would you do with five million dollars, the instructor said, I could have puked, seriously! Sit back, close your eyes, he said, remove all distractions and visualize your life, what you’d do, how you would use that five million…I’m sure you’ve heard it all before right?

I sat in on a “success coaching” session today that comes as part of a very well intentioned, and good, approach to supporting a product I’m pretty keen on, perhaps just because I had the time and thought I might get a rare dose if insight…wrong!

What’s wrong with this approach is that after all the visualization, list building, affirmations and all that other woo woo was finished the end result was a resounding “spend it all”. Now, call me cynical, but isn’t that the antithesis of success?

Admittedly there were some pretty interesting, fun, attractive, and often benevolent suggestions, but none I could see that took into account the increased financial burden associated with owning those assets, or the fact that once it’s gone it’s gone. All I can see is a quick road back to square one, albeit with a nice house (for a while).

There really is only one answer to the question, and you don’t have sit cross legged, remove all distractions, and go into some kind of visualization trance to conjure it up.

Put it in the bank.

I’m no mathematical genius, and even if we choose a modest 5% interest rate, doesn’t that equate to around $250,000 a year, or $20,800 per month, every month, for doing absolutely didley squat, for as long as that five million dollars stays in the bank?

So, if we really are “success” minded shouldn’t we be asking the question a different way?

Shortly after I started this blog I decided to create an article directory. God knows why but, considering that a Keyword Analyzer search reveals there are approximately 350 million sites (indexed pages) competing for around 4500 searches a month for the keyword phrase “article directory”, I figured the world needed another one! So, TotallyAwesomeArticles.com was born.

Now, I realized very early on in my Internet Marketing journey, or at least I realized that it was my opinion, that people with no web site development skills, who wish to become Internet marketers, unless of course they can afford exorbitant programmer fees (and have a lot of patience), are at a distinct disadvantage to those who have, especially if that skill comes combined with a sound understanding of marketing concepts. I also realized, with the definite exception of SiteSell , which is actually a complete online business model, that using prefabricated sites, or site builders, (and I’m generalizing here ok…and not referring to CMS like this one…) is rife with compromise. There is something very empowering about being able to write a site from scratch, and in code, and then see it take on a life of it’s own in terms of traffic, search position, and revenue.

So why an article directory?

It was quite simple really. It occurred to me while I was doing some article marketing to promote my other sites (you do use article marketing don’t you?), here was a perfect opportunity to have legitimate, and value adding, interaction with other Internet marketers and webmasters while at the same time owning a steadily growing site full of highly indexable (if that’s a word) and relevant content, that can be monetized in several different ways. I liked the idea that, ultimately, article authors would provide me with all the content. There were also a number of readily available, and free, article directory scripts to choose from which provide the back end to the site.

So, with any website, or with any site that’s purpose is to generate revenue, there is the design and development aspect, the promotion, and the eventual monetization, to consider. The rest of this post centers around design and development as far as an Internet marketer is concerned.

An experienced web designer is a beginner web designer who kept on designing web sites. More practice grasshopper!

If you’d said to me a year ago that within twelve months I would be able to write reasonably standards compliant sites, in code, I would have laughed. My motivation was simple, I wanted control of my Internet marketing destiny, and that meant freeing myself from those that would use my inexperience, or inability, to pull at my heart strings, to extract my wallet from my pocket to pay for products that were generally disappointing at best.

Now, if you want to wait until you have a complete understanding of web design before launching into your first site you are destined to go into an ever increasing spiral of analysis paralysis until you finally disappear up your proverbial you know what. As somebody famous (Tao Te Ching?) once said “a journey of a thousand miles starts with the first step”. The mere fact that you decide to create a site will start you on a cycle of challenge, problem solving, and learning that, if you persist, will see you become adept in no time. There are plenty of great books and related resources to help you along the way but we’ll save that for another post.

TotallyAwesomeArticles.com represents the latest point in my personal evolution as a web site designer. An evolution that started with the question; “how do I get a site on the Internet?”, and progressed steadily from there. I very quickly formed the opinion that table based layout was to web site design what the model T Ford is to automobiles, and set myself the goal of writing CSS based designs (see this), and that in turn developed into a determination to understand and write standards compliant code, which has as it’s essence the separation of structural code from the presentation.

When you combine this with my preference for minimalistic design (yep, I actually chose this Wordpress Template over hundreds of others), fluid and accessible (wont fall apart when the reader changes the font size) layout that uses all the available screen real estate, and achieving the maximum from minimum code, then you can see where my next set of challenges, and consequent development, lies.

I’m pleased to say the code in TotallyAwesomeArticles.com , at least the code that I was responsible for (the PHP behind it generates code that I can’t change) validates to XHTML 1.0 Transitional. I have achieved a reasonably fluid layout, moved most of the presentational code into CSS , and as far as tables are concerned, I don’t agree with the “thou shalt not use tables” brigade, I have relegated them to form layout, which I think they’re quite suited for, taken the mountains of extraneous code out of them, banished spacer gif’s and banned nesting, and I’m happy with that.

Comes a time though when you have to be satisfied with your development, settle for the best you have done so far, take your learnings and challenges into the next project, and get on with promoting and making revenue from the new site. After all, regardless of whether you’ve created a masterpiece of standards compliant design, you’ve just created the equivalent of a grain of sand in the Sahara desert, and now the job, with an equal amount of challenge and learning, is to promote the site to the top of the rankings. I’ll let you know how I go.

Some credit where credit’s due;

During this round of development I really began to appreciate what a better experience using the Firefox browser is. Do yourself a favor, change.

Chris Pederick’s Web Developer extension for Firefox rocks! This is a great help.

Piotr Petrus’ em calculator makes fluid layout a breeze.

Surfing does that to you, surfing waves that is, especially after a long hiatus, and when you become reacquainted with it again in a tropical paradise where life is exotic, and so cheap you can live like a king. Like thousands before me I was struck with the thought “how can I get to do more of this?” It was June 2005.

Fact is I’d been thinking about it for a long time, and to a certain extent the answer had been staring me in the face.

Over the past couple of years I began to experience a growing dissatisfaction, for not only my corporate management role in a fortune 500 IT company, but the general nature of life in a western city like Sydney. There’s no doubt this is a great place, for the most part we enjoy peace, a healthy economy, an abundance of opportunity, and solid friendships with the people we love. But, the source of my discontent, and I don’t think I’m alone on this one, has it’s roots in the expense of living here, in monetary terms, in the expense of time, wearing our busy lifestyles like a badge of honor, and to an increasing extent, expense to the environment we live in.

My experience in the tropics not only reintroduced me to surfing and friends from the past, I also met my wife and, obviously, her family (there’s a few of them). They come from what we, here in the west, would probably categorize as a poor background, living off the land in what is essentially a subsistence agricultural community. Life is certainly tough for them in some respects, however I have come to appreciate the time I spend in their world immensely, the close knit family connections, their closeness to the environment, children laughing, playing, and enjoying childhood, and most of all the silence.

Not so much an absence of noise, but the absence of the relentless pressure associated with the progress that’s necessary to sustain our western lifestyles, the pressure to succeed, the pressure to make sure we have enough money to retire, the pressure of debt, the pressure of keeping up with the pace, the pressure of ensuring our Children get the best education. You know what I mean, you can feel it if you stop to listen.

So, the question about getting to spend more time surfing started to become multi faceted, more like; how can I spend more time living (and Surfing of course) in a tropical paradise, while at the same time maintaining the level of affluence I have become used to, and use that affluence to provide opportunities, such as education, to people who would otherwise not have them?

The answer, at it’s most generic level, was to create a business that I could operate using a laptop, from anywhere I had an Internet connection.

Not long after I returned from that first trip, and I don’t remember how I was introduced to this, I read Chris Carpenter’s Google Cash . They say that when the student is ready the mentor will appear. While I’ve had many mentors and influences since, this was the one that switched on the lights for me. What became immediately obvious, apart from my obvious inability to see the wood for the trees, was that there was an entirely different dimension to the Internet. It’s a Cash Cow.

Considering my experience, and the fact that the Internet was already an integral part of my life, it made perfect sense that this was the business opportunity I was looking for.

And so the journey began, a journey into web site development, affiliate marketing, pay per click and adsense advertising, Search engine optimization, link building, article writing and publishing, and Internet marketing gurus. So far it’s been a journey of ups and downs, successes and failures, I’ve been surprised by some amazing products, and ripped off by others that promised the earth and then disappointed, I’m certainly not a Guru, but I do have several sites that are generating revenue and climbing their way steadily up in the rankings.

Share with me the insights from my journey, and yours.

Welcome to my Blog.