There’s obviously a lot of people out there that knows little or nothing about Google, judging by the number of new products that has “Google” in their names. If there comes another product this year with “Google” in it’s name, I think it’s only a matter of time before big G’s lawyer comes a-running. Besides, I’ll probably stop reading mails or sales pages as soon as I see “Google” in it/them.

With that said, I did actually purchase “Google Snatch 2″ despite the quality of the original Google Snatch. Sure, the old one did contain a few gold nuggets, but I expect more from a product with over 100 pages said to contain “no fluff”. It wasn’t the original product I promised to review though, but the new and updated v2.

Google Snatch 2 is close to 150 pages, and the first thing I noticed which was (and is) driving me mad is the half empty pages. Placing a couple of paragraphs in the same chapter on separate pages of their own seems like a pre-sell thing for me (ie. the salespage claims a big page-count, when 25% of the pages doesn’t contain more than a paragraph or two).

Now, you might wonder why I seem so obsessed with such an unimportant tiny detail? Well, to tell you truth it’s mainly to make sure I have atleast one thing to complain about. Because this ebook is actually quite good.

You get a couple of really useful bonuses with the purchase as well, such as a number of blueprints and mind maps to help you follow through the various methods, step by step, exactly the way they are supposed to be done. “The Free Click Formula” and “Free Targeted Traffic” contain decent material, although they are aimed at newbies, and the mind maps can be really useful.

The first chapter goes through the basics of IM and affiliate marketing, and are followed by a number of chapters going into more detail on the various aspects of marketing online, such as Blogging, Social Networking, Video and Audio marketing, classified ads etc. It’s the perfect introduction and crash course on Internet Marketing for any newcomer wanting to learn more about making their first couple of bucks online. The knowledge gained in this product will have you in the game for a long time, and makes it easier to digest information in other, more advanced products.

As usual, if you are a seasoned veteran, this could quite possibly be a waste of money for you. I picked up a couple of things that I had forgotten, and I have to say that the list of “web 2.0″-sites for you to work your magic made the purchase worth it for me. If this list was sold separately on it’s own, I would’ve picked it up instantly.

All in all, if you are anything from a newbie to semi advanced this product will be a great addition to your arsenal, and the blueprints and mindmaps will be really helpful. If you are a seasoned veteran or consider yourself an advanced marketer I seriously doubt the few nuggets you will pick up would justify the price. Luckily there’s always the refund option if you don’t like it.

I found a better and cheaper way a while back though…

A couple of days ago I talked to a friend and colleague, who had just seen a glimpse of one of the multimedia projects I’ve been working on, and he wanted to know how I made a couple of the elements I used. I told him I didn’t have a clue how they were made. “I purchased them” - “Wow! They must have cost you a fortune!” - “No. The most expensive of the elements cost me $9″. He was amazed and wanted to know where I found them (these were audio- and video-effects I used in a Flash-video). I was even more amazed that he hadn’t heard of this site before!

It’s an amazing resource when you need royalty-free multimedia elements such as video- and audio-loops, animation effects and filters. They have a service for website-themes and templates, and from what I’ve seen so far it’s it totally rocks!

Sign up, browse around, fill up your account and kick your multimedia projects into overdrive! Signup here Now!

I’ve been absent for a while now due to medical conditions, being in and out of the hospital all the time. Due to me not really paying attention to what my doctor said about my new medicines, I managed to mix things up taking the wrong amounts of the new ones and my old ones. I was supposed to lower the dose of the old ones, syncing it with raising the dose of the new ones…

So I got posioned, and for some reason I managed to get an internal infection as well, just to make things even more wonderful

I was actually pretty close to not waking up, but luckily other people noticed I started getting worse and forced me to the hospital. The infection is getting better, and I’ve started actually reading the instructions on the medicine boxes

With that said, I hope to have the review of Google Snatch 2 up next week.

I hope y’all have a great weekend!

If you’ve been at it, successfully or not, you know that the success partially depends on what article directory you publish your articles in. eZine-articles and Go-articles probably being two of the most prominent ones.

High PR normally means faster indexing, and provided your keyword and keyphrase density is at a good level, you have a good chance at hitting good positions in the organic result lists on the search engines relatively fast and easy.

A well-known and frustrating fact for most article marketers, is the fact that many directories frown upon affiliate links in articles and resource boxes, forcing us to use various techniques that almost certainly cost us a few sales considering the extra hoops our readers have to take to get to the product sales letter.

You can now say goodbye to that frustration! Anik Singal recently launched AffSphere, an affiliate-centered article directory. Not only can you use your affiliate links uncensored, you also get awarded points and commissions on your referrals.

If you sign up today, you can also purchase Anik’s new report on article marketing. A solid, informative report that really should be sold at a much higher price. Yes, that’s my personal opinion.

Go check it out!

“How You Can Fuse The Power of Adwords And Adsense Using A *Sly And Sneaky* Formula To Crush The Gurus And Create An Autopilot Income For LIFE – Guaranteed!“

After reading this 35 page report, I think it’s safe to say that there is no new sly and sneaky formula revealed, that will help you crush any gurus.

Chapter 1: Getting Started

Dylan sets out to explain the basics, AdWords & AdSense, selling affiliate products, building AdSense sites, using PLR and MRR material and basic traffic strategies. It all turns into mess, confusing AdSense and AdWords, constantly claiming things “aren’t easy” just to turn around and say “it’s simple”.

Chapter 2: Getting paid

This is basically about affiliate networks - Clickbank, PayDotCom and 7DollarOffers (?). Nothing new here, and nothing that will help you become a top earner.

Chapter 3: Keyword Selection

I heard that this chapter was great, only to find it missing in the first copy I downloaded. After a couple of tries, Dylan sent me the updated report that had chapter 3. Only it wasn’t clearly marked out as a chapter, and wasn’t in the same order as the index page. I could’ve lived with it, if the info was good enough. Which it wasn’t. Again, brief explanations of concepts such as negative keywords, selecting keywords and basic Search Engine knowledge.

Chapter 4: Writing Your AdSense Sites

You get a quick run-through on AdWords Ads, landing pages, bids, lists and whether to advertise in the content network or search network. All this in a chapter that was supposed to be about creating AdSense sites. Confusing? You bet. Anyone new to Adsense and Adwords will likely be just as confused as Dylan seems to be.

Chapter 5: Monitoring your AdSense Sites

Again a chapter supposedly about AdSense, that turns out to be mainly about AdWords.

Chapter 6: Adsense Arbitrage

This is the only chapter I would consider good information. It’s nothing earth shattering, nothing new and no real solid information, but a basic description of what arbitrage is and why it’s risky. It’s only a single page, though, so although it’s good advice, it doesn’t quite make up for the cost of this report.

All in all, there’s no secrets revealed, and it’s likely to confuse more than help if you’re new to the game. “Secret Google Tactics” is a misleading name, and the report seems like it was thrown together in an hour in the middle of the night.

I consider this a waste of time and money, but your mileage may vary

What you get, besides the service itself (at a whopping bargain-price of $67/month) is two videos explaining how to use the service, two reports (How To Spot The Shadow Elite - about finding successful AdWords campaigns to copy - and Creating The Perfect Review Page - since the landing pages are in the form of review pages) and a free copy of Google Wealth Wizard, if you’re not familiar with AdWords.

There’s an upgrade available too, at an extra $47/month, giving you access to “DJK Blueprints” reports, which I’m guessing is a monthly service.

Google Nemesis is basically a service letting you create AdWords landing pages promoting ClickBank-products in the form of review-pages. That’s the first minus. Not only are you limited to ClickBank, you’re also limited by a worthless search engine for ClickBank products. Once you’ve created your landing page, there’s no way to go back and change products. You’re also limited in that your landing pages can only be for two- and three-product review pages.

There are only two templates available, in red or blue. Hopefully more templates will be made available, but you have no chance to set up your own templates.

All review pages by members are spread around on several different domains, but using your own domain for your landing pages is not an option. The only way to do that would be to use the redirect- or cloak-option from your registrar or webhost.

Imagine two hundred pages on one domain using the same template and footprints… It’s already a recipe for disaster, but if the two hundred pages are promoting similar products and bidding on similar keywords in AdWords, a whole bunch of them are going to suffer from the display URL limitation. Google only displays ONE ad from a given URL. So if you’re bidding on a similar keywords as another Nemesis customer, only ONE of you are going to get displayed, the one with the highest bid. If you were on different URLs, you could still be displayed if your bid was lower.

The editor used to edit the templates and fill in your text is very limited. You’re far better of using something else and then just copy&paste your review-texts.

I’m not really comfortable with giving out login information for ClickBank to anyone, and especially not to a script hosted by someone else. You need to do this in order for the statistics in the Google Nemesis dashboard to get more accurate numbers. The dashboard lets you see stuff like where your visitors come from, what keywords they clicked to arrive on your page, and the number of sales that can be connected to each keyword.

Google Nemesis is only hype. It doesn’t help you in any way with creating your review pages, in fact it takes me longer to create them in GN than doing it manually. For the statistics, if you use ClickBanks tracking id’s together with Google Analytics, you get statistics that are just as accurate as the ones you get from GN.

Now, if you don’t know how to create landing pages and track visitors, but you’re a master at writing compelling reviews and AdWords campaigns, you might actually find this service quite useful.

If you’re not a master at writing reviews and creating AdWords campaigns, it’s not for you. In fact, I believe you’re better off without it either way, but hey - it’s your decision. As far as I’m concerned, Google Nemesis is just a waste of time and money, but your mileage may vary

Parts of this review was added after reading another review that made some good points I didn’t even think of at first.

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

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.

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.

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?