Archive for May, 2008
Friday, May 23rd, 2008
First things first, Eric did one thing I really like in this product. The main report itself is available at $0. Doesn’t cost a dime. Kudos for that. What he charges for is the two additional reports “AdWords Best Practices” on how to use AdWords better, and “Relationship Marketing” on how to better create a relationship with your lists, and the set of 26 instructional videos weighing in at around 2 1/2 hours tutorials of what’s discussed in the reports, both the free and the two additional ones.
The main report was good. Not great, but ok. Eric introduces what he calls his “Autopilot Money Machine“, which is more or less standard affiliate practice:
- Find a market/niche that looks profitable
- Examine the competition to find out what keywords and ads work best
- Set up your landing pages on their own domains or on free blogging platforms
- Set up your AdWords campaigns using the keywords and ads based on what works for the competition
- Track, test and refine your keywords and ads to find out what works and what needs to be dropped
- Rinse and repeat
Eric says he’s going to show us a market and exactly how he profits from it using his “Autopilot Money Machine” – and yeah, he shows a market. But that’s about it. There’s the basic overview of where to go to find niches, but nothing on how he chooses a “profitable” one.
Next there’s a chapter on examining the competition (find, spy, swipe) to find out what’s profitable using either Affiliate Elite or SpyFu, and finding keywords using Googles Suggestion Tool. Standard practice here too: use a broad phrase to find more targeted keywords and phrases. He also explains that you need a domain containing your main keyword or phrase, and how you shouldn’t have any ads or other distracting elements to make sure the visitor has only one action to take – clicking your affiliate link. Oh, really? 
Eric explains the philosophy (ok, not quite but i like the word “philosophy”) behind creating review-type landing pages, using his own xbox 360 repair landing page (XBox360 Redlight Fix #1 and #2 ). Those two are very good examples. I like to put in one or two products I give negative reviews on as well, to add to the “honest guy getting ripped off”-image.
The Affiliate Conspiracy is pretty much Affiliate Marketing 101. The videos makes the package feel more solid than I’m used to with these types of products.
The free report surprised me by actually being more revealing than most other free reports. There’s no question as to whether the report is meant to sell the full package or not, but it still provides enough information and instructions to be considered good learning material if you’re new to affiliate marketing.
I like the two additional reports, especially the report on relationship marketing.
The instructional videos covers everything from a short presentation of ClickBank to installing your own blogs, from using spyfu to building lenses and hubpages. He also shows how to build a multiple-page landing system.
All in all I think it’s a pretty decent package, and I’m confident that you will find solid information and learn quite a bit if you’re either new to affiliate marketing, or have already dipped your toes for a while but still not grasping everything in full. If you’re a seasoned veteran, this is not for you…
If you’re not quite sure where on the scale you are, visit the site and sign up to get the free report. If you skim it through and realise there’s nothing new to you, consider yourself a seasoned veteran 
Posted in Latest Promotions, New Products | 3 Comments »
Sunday, May 18th, 2008
I know you’ve seen them, and I know you have an opinion. Everybody has an opinion on the VirtualSmartAgents. My dad has an opinion too, and I’ll get to that in a moment.
First though, if you don’t know what VSA’s are, they are annoying little popup-windows simulating a customer service representative wanting to give you a better deal than the one present on the page. The popups appear when you are about to leave the page, or atleast they are supposed to… In some cases I’ve stumbled upon, the script is set to show the popup every time the mouse pointer loses focus on the current page (as in your mouse pointer slides away from the browser window), which includes when you click a link. Not good.
The better ones won’t popup until you’re about to close the browser window (or tab if you don’t use an older browser), or hit the back button… I find these friggin scripts annoying. REALLY annoying! I wouldn’t be caught dead using them. I heard someone discussing how the “AI” in these scripts could be improved. If you ever hear anyone talking about VSA’s and AI in the same sentence, please slap them and tell them I said “ARGH!”
There is no Artificial Intelligence in the VSA-scripts (there actually is a javascript/java experimental AI implementation, but it’ll probably take several years ’til it can actually be used as a service representative), there are a set of phrases (answers) that are triggered by certain keywords/partial phrases (questions) making the VSA seem almost human if you by chance happen to type in a question and trigger the script to deliver a correct answer. Try rephrasing it and it’ll answer you completely different.
So, where does my dad come into this?
My dad is 63 years old and got his first computer in ‘96 (not counting the computer he bought for me ten years earlier). I wouldn’t go so far as to call him savvy, but he knows what he needs to know to use it for both work and fun. Popups tend to confuse my dad, but most of the time he figures out how to close it if it doesn’t seem legit. My dad loves photography, and he’s a good photographer. I set up a test-page promoting a non-existant product and showed it to my dad.
He read the sales-letter and seemed somewhat interested, but said “I’ll think about it and check it out later” after bookmarking it. When he went to hit the back-button, the VSA popped up, alongside a notification window asking if he really wanted to leave this page, phrased in a way to make him believe he had to click “cancel” to leave the page. He got a bit surprised and clicked cancel. Then he noticed the VSA “talking” to him. So he tried to communicate with it, starting with “hello who are you” and he got the standard greeting phrase, and a discount+bonus pitch. He tried telling the VSA he just wanted to go back to Google, and got the same pitch again. After a while he got really annoyed and simply closed down the browser, after me assuring him he didn’t have to buy to leave the page.
If that’s how you want to get customers, then go ahead and buy a VSA. Don’t be surprised by the large number of charge-backs and refund-requests when people figure out what happened though…
If you prefer people buying because they want and need your product, just forget you ever heard about the VSA’s – they’re not worth it.
My dad’s opinion? “If that thing was real I’d give it a head-butt“.
Take care.
Posted in Latest Promotions, New Products, Personal, Reviews | 4 Comments »
Wednesday, May 14th, 2008
The spam-story seems to have gotten a happy ending That’s great, I love happy endings
Chris (the victim of the story, so to speak) finally got in touch with Dirk – who was just as puzzled as to how, why and who these spam messages was sent in the first place. The page being spammed has been removed, although all the bounce-backs keep hitting Chris’ mailbox.
On a side-note, one of my domains got taken down the other day (covertpayments.com, the domain that host several of my products), because of a spammer.
I know who he is, as his paypal-address was clearly visible in the spam-mails, and I have full understanding why the mail was reported to SpamCop. I would’ve done the same thing. While I’m working this out with my host, I’m going to report him to PayPal as well.
So, if you’ve tried visiting covertpayments.com, you now know why it’s down.
Posted in Personal | No Comments »
Monday, May 12th, 2008
I got a disturbing comment on an old post about one of Dirk Wagners old Crazy Weekend deals, claiming that Dirk Wagner was sending out spam. After contacting the reader to see if there was any truth to this, and reading through the material provided, I decided to approve the comment. I also decided to write a post about it, because it seems pretty disturbing and very alarming to me that someone I’ve seen as a pretty decent and serious marketer would engage in this type of criminal activity.
The spam-mail in question looks like this:
Oferta que vale la pena mirar.
Pack compuestos por Software, Video Marketers Tool Kit,
Plantillas,eWriter Pro y Internet Marketing Lost Secrets entre otros.
Lo más asombroso es el precio de cada uno y como si fuera poco,
licencia de reventa a través de una replica de esta web con tu login
de PayPal para tu cobrar directamente y sin intermediarios.
Visitanos en en el siguiente link
http://www.dirkscrazyweek.com/previous.html
It offers that it is worthwhile to look.
Pack composed by Software, Video Marketers Tool Kit,
Plantillas,eWriter For and Internet Marketing Lost Secrets among
others.
The most astonishing thing is the price of each one and as if it was
little, resale license through one replies of this web with your login
of PayPal for your to get paid directly and without middlemen
Visit one another in in the following link
http://www.dirkscrazyweek.com/previous.html
I don’t know a single word of Spanish (ok, i know how to order eight beers but that’s about it), so I can’t comment on the language and grammar on that part, but the English part… It doesn’t seem to be written by anyone naturally fluent in English. This leads me to the conclusion that Dirk didn’t send out the mail, which in turn leads to the conclusion that it must be someone trying to get a quick affiliate-commission. But as you can see, it’s not an affiliate-link being promoted. The only one making a couple of bucks on this mail, is Dirk Wagner.
The way this type of spam works, is that it uses a bot-net (hijacked computers running a quiet irc-app with bot-scripts waiting for commands from the bot-master) to send out mails from innocent peoples computers, using an existing email-address in the “from” and “reply-to” parts of the mail-headers. When a mail bounces (gets sent back due to the recipient being non-existant), it goes straight to email-address in the reply-to part of the header. When it gets delivered, the unsuspecting company seems to be the sender, which can easily lead to the innocent company’s ip and domain being black-listed, which makes the delivery of legit, genuine mails from the victim company pretty much impossible to servers that use the black-lists.
With that technicality out of the way, I’ve been a victim of this type of sender-spoofing myself a couple of times, but the mails sent using my return-addresses have never promoted products by Internet Marketers, only viagra, drugs, Nigeria-scams and other well-known types of scams. I’ve always reported these to SpamCop and other organisations myself to avoid my domains being blacklisted.
Although the mail doesn’t seem to be written by Dirk Wagner or anyone working for Dirk Wagner, could that possibly be a way for the sender to disguise her/himself? “Sure, I made the money, but I didn’t write the mail!”. If Dirk or one of his staff didn’t send out the mail, why the h**l is he the one making money from any possible sales? It is well known that between 0.1% and 0.3% of the recipients of spam actually click through and sometimes even purchase. It is also well known that you can purchase a mass-send of an email to any number of recipients for a pretty low price. So if this mail goes out to 1 million receivers, Dirk stands to make money from 1-3000 visitors.
So the question is – Is Dirk Wagner A Spammer? What do you think? Have you been the victim of sender-spoofing?
Posted in Personal | 4 Comments »
