Affiliate Marketing Diary » Review

CPA Ninja Review – Is It Really Worth $1000?

Steven — Fri, 26 Jun 2009 00:45:17 +0000

This is not the typical “review”… since I’m actually going to tell you my impressions of CPA Ninja based on having gone through the WHOLE COURSE. (You’ve probably seen offers from just about every major marketer by now… since this is the latest $1000 launch. Yet I have to wonder if any of these guys actually go through the whole course before they send out a promotion.)

3 out of 5 stars - I recommend Google Cash Detective: www.gcdetective.com (click the image above to go there)

In case you’re wondering, I actually purchased a pre-launch copy and went through the course about a month ago. I’m not offering any bonuses or anything so if you’re bonus hunting… you’re in the wrong place, but if you’re interested in an honest opinion of the product, keep reading…

Just so there’s no confusion, this is the offer we’re talking about: www.cpaninjas.com/vid2/ (this is their current squeeze page where you can get a short interview with Amish Shah – a multiple 7-figure affiliate marketer).

So let’s start with the CPA Ninja Review.

In a nutshell:

CPA Ninja is created by Matt Trainer and Marty Rozmanith, and as the title suggests, the course is about how to make money with CPA (cost per action) offers. It includes 4 modules consisting of 12 videos (with some videos going over an hour long). These modules are delivered every 3 – 7 days, so it will take a few weeks to get the whole thing. They also will send you a ‘hard copy’ of the course as well.

The modules cover:

CPA Basics – 3 videos in Module 1
Traffic & Website Setup
Website Infrastructure & PPC (pay per click)
Tracking & Scaling

The price for the course is around $1000 (or perhaps $1200?), with a 1-time discounted offer for WordPress Direct (which is a “pre-requisite” for this course – I’ll explain this a bit later).

As you know, I’m not in the habit of jumping on every single product out there… but over the past couple of months I’ve been focusing on CPA networks so I decided to “pull the trigger” and purchase the pre-launch copy of this product.

The Overview:

The course is laid out as expected, with Matt and Marty sharing the duties of teaching this process. Matt covers the overview of CPA, how to get traffic using PPC along with keyword research and tracking. Marty’s videos for the most part deals with the “nuts and bolts” of their system (using WordPress, or more specifically WordPress Direct).

Module 1:

Video 1 of CPA Ninja starts out with a relatively brief introduction by Matt on what CPA marketing is and why he chose this business model over others. He talks about the 4 most important things when it comes to promoting CPA offers and reveals his ONLY formula for online success.

Video 2 – This is where Matt and Marty discuss what the aim is of this program. Matt actually reveals a $10,000 per month niche, AND the site that got him there (using the exact process taught in this course).

Video 3 – An interview by Luke Jaten who interviews Matt and asks him all kinds of questions. It has been matched with a powerpoint presentation which makes it easy to follow along. I found this interview to be rather long (and somewhat boring) but I’m sure it would be helpful for new marketers.

Module 2:

Video 4 – Traffic… Matt shares his preferred methods of getting traffic, starting with his least favorite (Organic… and Google Adwords) to his absolute most favorite way to generate traffic. While he reveals a couple of strategies that are not talked about very often, most of the information here is pretty basic…

Video 5 – This is Marty’s first solo mission and talks about how to setup your money page using WordPress that will ultimately give you a simple method to setup a site that will get a good quality score from Google. In essence, this is all about setting up bridge page(s) / site(s) using WordPress. Marty is quite thorough and in this video shows you how to find offers, types of offers to choose, where to get a domain name etc.

Video 6 – In this video Marty continues on with how to get hosting, what type of hosting they recommend, and how to do the initial blog setup and selecting appropriate themes with WordPress Direct (I’ll talk more about this under “The Bad”). He also goes over some basic keyword research.

Module 3:

Video 7 – Matt and Marty share three sites, two of which has been promoted with success (the third is the site Marty is showing you how to build during these tutorials). The first is the same site as shown in video 2, the second site is a different style site he used to send non-paid traffic (where he made an average of $50 per day). They share the pros and cons of each site and gets in-depth about on-page setup, traffic generation, content creation, using the right type of creatives for offers and more. Then they go into a big Q & A session. Overall this is one of the best videos of the whole series.

Video 8 – Another video on the nuts and bolts of setting up your site and finishing the blog. Talks about how to promote an offer on the blog and adding content to using advanced features of WordPress Direct. Not a lot I can say about this video without giving away stuff that would potentially be considered propriatary to WordPress Direct and CPA Ninja.

Video 9 – An in-depth look at Keyword Research and how to create your keyword list(s) for your money site(s), as well as a quick and simple way to come up with relevant keywords for PPC promotion. Matt shares his PPC spreadsheet that allows you to add keywords properly formatted for Google Adwords. He also shares his PPC strategy and how he sets everything up in Google Adwords Editor.

Module 4:

Video 10 – This video is all about tracking. Matt shares how he uses sub-ids and tracking scripts to track his campaigns and includes the “how to” of setting things up and implement it on your site. He also shares some bidding optimization strategies for Google Adwords for getting bid costs down.

Video 11 – This video is also about tracking and introduces a “new” tracking tool.

Video 12 – Scaling your business. Different strategies for growing your business. They also clear up some things in regards to traffic generation and include a section on organic search engine traffic.

In addition to these videos, they include some process maps, resource page and a bonus video.

My Thoughts…

There are several great things about this product with the most valuable part of this course probably being the “real world” blog examples, since seeing a successful site is always a good thing. If you are new to CPA marketing then many of the modules will be very valuable to you.

And the tracking and the keyword strategies presented by Matt is also quite good (his keyword strategy for Google PPC campaigns is a method I’ve only seen once before… and is really good).

However, one thing that really bugged me about this product is that they make it virtually mandatory to purchase a monthly membership to WordPress Direct, which is an auto-blogging platform for WordPress. This makes sense since Marty is the creator of WordPress Direct… But to be honest, I almost feel like this course was one HUGE “pre-sell” for WordPress Direct.

So unless you are pretty internet or rather wordpress savvy, you are almost stuck with having to buy WordPress Direct to make this work (http://wordpressdirect.com in case you want to see what it is). While you could conceivably do this manually, I really think they should have shown people how to use WordPress Direct alternatives, since there’s other software / plug-ins available that can do this at the fraction of the price of Marty’s software (but that wouldn’t make sense for Marty… cause nobody would buy WP Direct then).

Having said that, if you are thrifty and have some WP knowledge you can use the information presented here and create your own version of these sites using off-the-shelf tools.

So what’s my consensus? Is it worth $1000?

I have no doubt that the methods presented in this product will make people money. And while the guys are likable and the product decent, I just don’t think the information here is worth $1000.00 (sorry Marty and Matt). Mostly because of the heavy reliance on WordPress Direct with NO mention of how to build this using other tools. And the fact that you can get very similar info out there for about HALF the price… including the required WordPress Plug-Ins and an auto-installer (and maybe a new premium theme or two).

So, unless you’re dead set on getting a CPA product, I think your money may be better spent on investing in Google Cash Detective (http://gcdetective.com) and one or more of their upsells. Since you can pretty much find already successful CPA offers with GCD and clone campaigns (taking a lot of the trial and error out of the process).

I give this product a 3 out of 5 stars.

Just my 2 cents…

Other Sites mentioned in this review:

WordPress Direct: http://www.wpdirect.com/

Google Cash Detective: http://gcdetective.com

Have fun.

Steven

Post from: Affiliate Internet Marketing

CPA Ninja Review – Is It Really Worth $1000?

Google Cash Detective Free Trial Review

Steven — Wed, 17 Jun 2009 00:34:37 +0000

This is time sensitive…

I just created a quick video last night (or was it this morning…) about the Google Cash Detective free trial that you might be interested in. No funny business, Chris Carpenter is allowing you an inside look at this amazing tool. And he doesn’t even ask you for billing information (just an opt-in).

I found a bunch of keywords and niches in the last few hours that will make me at least five figures this year. I show you exactly the method I used to uncover them in the video.

You can watch the video here: http://supersimplemarketing.com (no opt-in required).

If you are serious about affiliate or niche marketing and don’t have a subscription to one of these keyword spy services already… you MUST check it out.

If you don’t want to watch my video, just go to http://gcdetective.com and opt-in for the free trial.

/Steven

P.S. Don’t waste your time on this, it’s a time sensitive offer (you can only use the software until June 23rd).

P.P.S. Don’t laugh at the ghetto production style. I recorded the video at 1 am this morning (because I wanted to make sure people knew about this).

Post from: Affiliate Internet Marketing

Google Cash Detective Free Trial Review

Alok Jain’s Project Quick Cash Review

Steven — Sat, 01 Dec 2007 08:53:45 +0000

This is a quick review of Alok Jain‘s latest product called Project Quick Cash.

As you know, I don’t generally write a lot of product reviews… mainly because I don’t buy a lot of the "hot" products that people are promoting from week to week. But for whatever reason, I broke down and bought Project Quick Cash and plowed through the thing in one sitting last night.

So, here’s my attempt at a "coherent" review of PQC:

In a nutshell: Project Quick Cash is an 82-page ebook that sells for $77, with a one-time-offer for a monthly membership of some tools to semi-automate the "tricks" used in this book. This book revolves around 5 methods (it’s really 4): 1. Cashing the Spike 1 & 2 (PPC and Organic search); 2. Underground Niche Profits; 3. Superplacement targeting 4. Leeching on a launch.

The Review: Although I’m not one to jump on the bandwagon for the "latest and greatest secrets" or "earn quick cash" (pun intended) type of products, I decided to give this one a shot even though I already got one of Alok’s previous products, which was not that great (so what the heck was I thinking), and honestly thought twice about giving him the benefit of a doubt. But with Jon Leger’s endorsement and case study I decided to plunk down the cash and press the order button.

I figured it might give me some new ideas or tricks to try as I build my internet marketing business.

In any event, I decided to buy it at $77. As with most products now a days PQC offers an OTO (as described above) however I opted NOT to buy it. By the way, the OTO is a membership site with a monthly recurring fee of $24.95 and offers the members scripts to streamline the PQC process (since many of the tasks are very redundant).

The material is well written with step by step explanations and illustrations (screen capture images) for each of the five methods presented in this book. I personally think he could have added a few videos, which would have made his product a bit more robust (plus some of these steps lend themselves better to be explained on video in my opinion).

The first handful of pages deals with having the right mindset, taking the appropriate action, learning from your mistakes, not jumping from method to method but rather focus on one until you "figure it out" etc. All informative and good advice particularly for a newbie marketer. I have to admit I skimmed through this relatively quickly as I was anxious about getting into the "meat" of the product.

Note: I had a hard time writing the overview of each method because of the nature of this type of a product. I want to give everybody a fair assessment of the product without "spilling the beans" and struggled with how much I ought to reveal of the methods contained in Project Quick Cash. I hope you can get an idea from my descriptins below…

So without further ado, here are the tricks:

1. Cashing the Spike: Alok shows two methods using this technique, one using PPC and driving people to affiliate products (Method 1); and the other using organic search / social networking to drive traffic to your own site monetized with contextual advertisements (Method 2). Since both of these are based on the same principle I’ve included both under this one item (which is the reason I only list four tricks, not five as advertised on his PQC sales page).

Some of you may be familiar with this technique as it revolves around a technique known as "Trend Marketing".

I don’t want to say too much, but Trend Marketing refers to a method where you capitalize on current news and events through affiliate / contextual advertising. In other words, you try to figure out what people are searching for RIGHT NOW and find a product to fit the situation.

The idea is that since the searches are on current events, the competition for these words / phrases are low, which means cheap clicks and easy rankings in the search engines.

Alok has written a very simple step-by-step blueprint to accomplish this, and although there are other material that covers this I’ve never seen it presented the way Alok presents it in Project Quick Cash. He offers some specific criteria you need to follow on how to pick the best of the "current trends", and how you define each trend in terms of whether it should be applied to "Method 1" or "Method 2".

If you are already familiar with Trend Marketing, this technique will probably be of little value to you (as I think you can easily come up with your own conclusions based on what I’ve written here…) But then again maybe not.

If you’ve never heard about Trend Marketing before or are new to Affiliate Marketing and Contextual Marketing in general, it may behoove you to educate yourself on the method and this could be one way to do so…

I’ll leave the topic of "Cashing the Spike" with this: If you are interested in this technique and have no intensions of buying Project Quick Cash, you can get some information off of Jeremy Estes’ blog at: JeremyEstes.com. He has written quite extensively on the subject and you can glean some good infomation from his blog. However, Jeremy’s monetization methods are quite a bit different than Alok’s (I think Jeremy’s method is a bit more difficult than Alok’s to be honest), but you can get some good tips from Jeremy on the subject.

Rating: 3.5 out of 5 stars

2. Underground Niche Profits: This section deals with Forum Marketing. I.e. selling niche products in various forums (in non-internet marketing related markets). He shows you how to pick products in ClickBank, and goes on to show you how you can find high traffic forums you can advertise on as well as how you get people to click on your links. There are a couple of "twists" that people may not have heard of.. And even though there’s nothing really new here… I have to say it’s nice to see someone actually focusing on this method (because it can be very profitable if you do it right).

Rating: 3 out of 5 stars

3. Super Placement Targeting: This method deals with Google Adwords, specifically it deals with placing your ads in the Adwords content network, using "site targeting / placement targeting" features of Adwords. He talks a bit about what you can promote, then describes some different ways of how you find the ideal sites to place your ads on. He is quite detailed in his instructions and give several tips and tricks on how many campaigns you ought to start with, how to monitor them etc.

This is good information if you are new to Adwords and particularly if you are new to advertising within their Content Network. But if you have been doing Adwords for any length of time, I think there’s not much you can learn from this section…

I originally learned about this method from Armand Morin at a seminar where he explained it in-depth, and I use this almost exclusively for PPC with Adwords (instead of the "traditional" Adwords method). Fortunately, my friend Steve Goltiao’s book "Ad Infiltration", teaches this same strategy in great detail. It’s well written, and shows you exactly how you can get Google Adwords ads for pennies. Highly recommended if you’d like to drive cheap targeted traffic to your sites. Here’s the URL to Steve’s ebook:

http://www.AdInfiltration.com

Rating: 3 out of 5 stars

4. Leeching on a Launch: This is a very similar method to one of the methods found in Affiliate Project X. This trick revolves around getting "free traffic" to your affiliate pages by buying similar sounding domain names (that point to the affiliate page) and by leveraging social networking by setting up blogs etc. about the affiliate program.

He again offers detailed explanations on how find new product launches, leveraging social media for traffic and along with a technique that I had not considered before (but my guess is that this particular technique will be tough to pull off now that everybody knows about it…)

This again is great for the beginning marketer or those who missed out on Affiliate Project X, but if you already own it you probably have learned to do this already.

Rating: 2.5 out of 5 stars

By the way, I should mention that after each section there’s a sales pitch for their monthly membership program explaining that the tools there will help "automate" some of the repetitiveness in creating your campaigns.

Also, all of these "Time Saving Tools" have been created by Jonathan Leger, which explains why he gave such a positive review of Project Quick Cash. (I personally think he should have offered full disclosure here when he sent out his review…).

Conclusion:

For someone who’s new to affiliate marketing or is struggling with the "traditional" methods commonly taught, a lot of the material here will be quite foreign and perhaps offer a bit of "fresh air" to the somewhat contrived methods taught (in various forums as the "best" ways to get started etc.)

I’ve had some experience with all of the methods taught within Project Quick Cash, with three of the methods being definite money-makers for me (Booth of the Cashing the Spike methods and Super Placement Targeting), so I can vouch for the efficacy of the material presented in this book. Although I do have my own "system" if you will.

Another upside is that three of the methods in PQC require no extra investment to pull off besides this book (unless you decide to buy into the membership program). In other words, it’s like a bum marketing approach to affiliate marketing without the need to write a ton of articles. These techniques might even be a bit quicker than bum marketing in many instances.

However, for the more seasoned marketer (guys who have been around the block for a while) there’s little if anything new here.

So, is it worth $77?

Possibly. It depends on where you’re at in your IM journey. If you are new and / or struggling, the methods here could be the blueprints that you need to finally earn some money online and get you over that "hump".

Personally I was pretty disappointed when I finally finished the book. The five methods Alok outlines in Project Quick Cash definitely works (and $77 is not that much to gain this kind of information) considering you could earn that back quite easily. But I do wish there was more there… particularly in terms of a few "live" examples and videos. So, I’ll have to say for me it was not worth $77… perhaps $37 – $47.

But having said that, it is the first time I’ve seen all of these methods presented in a single volume…

So to sum it up, if you are new or struggling using the "traditional" methods and want to try your hand at something new, this report can definitely offer some great alternatives that has been proven to work.

If you have been around the block but still haven’t heard of some of these methods, it might be worthwhile for you to bite the bullet and spring for the $77 to learn them (depending on your business model).

If you are a seasoned marketer, you probably don’t need it… unless you have some cash to blow.

Overall Rating: 3 out of 5 stars

If you do decide to purchase Project Quick Cash through my affiliate link, be sure to send me a copy of your receipt (use my contact form with the title Project Quick Cash) and I will send you my LinkSpy software as a bonus.

[tags]project quick cash, alok jain, jon leger, trend marketing, affiliate marketing, placement targeting, affiliate project x, jonathan leger[/tags]

Post from: Affiliate Internet Marketing

Alok Jain’s Project Quick Cash Review

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Do You Want To Earn 1K A Day?

Steven — Tue, 31 Jul 2007 17:40:40 +0000

Everyone knows that following in the footsteps of those who have gone before us is an essential shortcut to success in any endeavor. And, without good mentors and peers that push you on, you won’t achieve "big time" success… period.

I’m a member of several membership sites ranging from $10 a month to a couple of hundred a month… but the problem with most of these sites is that there is no network of peers to actually communicate with, or a feedback mechanism with the site owner (who supposedly knows what he’s talking about).

I’m sure that most of you reading this knows that there are a ton of different components / variables that make internet marketing work… and there are a lot of pitfalls to avoid as well.

So, what if you could take a HUGE SHORTCUT and see what successful marketers actually do on a day to day basis to achieve their tremendous success? What if you could follow in their footsteps?

I usually don’t blatantly promote a specific product on this blog, but my friend, Dennis Becker, has provided us with just this kind of a vehicle.

Instead of writing a long spiel about this site, my buddy Michael has created a "Behind the Scenes" look into Dennis’ membership site aptly called: 1K a Day!

Click on the Image to Start The Video!

In any event, Dennis has given us a HUGE advantage over those who decide to not take a closer look at his offer. And besides offering a ton of video tutorials, there is a BIG community with some well known (and not so well known) successful marketers that walk the talk and offers tons of insights as to what’s working for them!

I can honestly say I learned as much from being a member of Dennis’ 1K a Day community as I have from some of the "High Profile" membership sites that are charging hundreds of dollars each and every month. Actually, I just recently cancelled two of them because of this site.

Whether you want to create a Virtual Real Estate Empire; Learn to Flip Websites; or create high profit membership sites (there’s a lot more info here than this, but there’s too much stuff to mention), this is a MUST HAVE membership.

What Dennis is offering here is worth so much more than the price of the membership. He’s offering you a way to mingle with successful marketers (albeit virtually), pick their brains and piggy back on their success.

If you are truly serious about earning an income online, I highly encourage everyone to, at the very least, take a look at the video above or go to his site to take a look at what he has to offer before he closes his doors!

All the best,
Steven

[tags]make money online, affiliate marketing, adsense, internet marketing, success online[/tags]

Post from: Affiliate Internet Marketing

Do You Want To Earn 1K A Day?

The Loss of Bum Marketing Videos…

Do You eBay? Adding Ebay Ads To Your Blogs

Steven — Sat, 14 Jul 2007 01:25:23 +0000

Well… I’ve been experimenting with eBay ads on WordPress blogs for the past few months.

Believe it or not, the eBay affiliate program might be the most under rated affiliate program on the planet. I won’t get into the details of why that is, as I want to focus on how you can actually display their ads on your website and give you a brief overview of the tools needed to accomplish this.

However, there’s some good money to be made with this method (particularly if you already have content sites with traffic) using PPC and/or free advertising methods such as: article submissions (to directories), US FreeAds, Craigslist ads, Squidoo lens building (and leveraging other Web 2.0 sites as well).

Note: Before you do anything, you need to sign up for ebay’s affiliate program at Commission Junction.

As with most people getting involved with ebay’s affiliate program. I started by using the eBay Editor Kit… It is a simple web-based program that allows you to put together auction listings to publish on your site. Needless to say it is quite limiting and the look of the ads were not what I was looking for (at all).

In any event, I went ahead and purchased a script called eBay Listing Generator. It’s a relatively simple program that allows you to use eBay RSS feeds on your site by adding some lines of code, and uploading a few files to your host. Very simple to use, inexpensive and there’s no database setup necessary for this program which makes setup a cinch. Having said all of this, I have stopped using this script as it has some limitations (particularly in terms of tracking).

Several weeks ago I picked up a software called Auction Affiliate (developed by the same people who brought us Auto Social Poster for WordPress).

I know, I should stop spending money on these things… but I can’t help myself .

In any event, I got it because it allows me to quickly generate Adsense type ads that I can integrate into all of my content (WordPress) sites.

Auction Affiliate is a server side software, which means it will require you to set it up on one of your hosting accounts (and you will need to set up a MySQL database as well). The setup instructions are pretty decent so there’s no need to worry about it being too complex.

Once set up, you just get your eBay RSS feeds and plug them into the software. It will generate the codes for you and all you need to do is to plug it into your pages (or your post). I use an AdManager for wordpress to insert it into my pages and it’s a breeze.

The great thing about this software is that it also has a companion software called JSClickTracker that can track your ads (even though it’s an RSS feed), which by the way also installs into a seperate MySQL database…

If you’d like to see how the ads appear on the site, check out the following pages on my test site:

Example of a 460×90 Banner Ad Unit

Example of a 300×250 Medium Rectangle Ad Unit

The downside of this program, which many won’t see as a negative, is that since the ads displayed are javascript codes they are not "SEO friendly".

Because of this very reason I started looking at two different programs. One called Affiliate Success: eBay (also know as AS:e in various forums), and another called Build a Niche Store (often called BANS). The former allowed for the flexibility that I was looking for, while the latter was a much more automated approach to building Niche eBay affiliate sites.

They both had advantages and disadvantages, but after careful deliberation and based on several recommendations I decided to purchase "Affiliate Success: eBay!".

It is quite a bit more complex than Auction Affiliate and as a new owner do not find it terribly easy to use… yet. However, the benefits of this program outweighs the pain in setting it up and learning it (in my opinion). Some of the immediate benefits I see are: it allows for SEO friendly content (the bots will spider the auctions as new content); relatively painless WordPress integration and also allows for SID tracking (so you know where your clicks are coming from).

AS:e also allows you to create very targeted pages for niche websites and also create niche ebay stores (using your ebay affiliate code). I’ve yet to implement this into any WordPress sites, but will start testing it in the next few days…

Needless to say, it’s a bit too early to report on my findings. And as I uncover pros and cons I will report them here… In the future, I will also offer a more complete review of Auction Affiliate as well as AS:e.

I’m sure there are other tools and scripts that are cheaper, easier, more powerful or what not; but all I can say is that the tools I describe here will allow you to do most of the things that you will require as an affiliate marketer.

[tags]ebay, ebay affiliate, affiliate marketing, affiliate program, ebay affiliate program, as:e, auction affiliate, ebay editor kit, affiliate success ebay, ebay listing generator[/tags]

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Do You eBay? Adding Ebay Ads To Your Blogs