If you’ve been on any of the make money online “guru” mailing lists, you’d have received a series of warm-up emails for Amish Shah and Jay Style’s Magic Bullet System which launches tomorrow (Monday 11 Jan) and from the preview videos released so far, it looks like an automatic CPA money making system, but is it the reality? Is it all it’s cracked up to be?

Here’s my somewhat insider’s look on the situation.

I was in the same internet marketing mastermind with Amish and Jay about 3 years ago. Then Amish had been working on his Hexatrack PPC management platform which he was using to run his own campaigns. It was brutally effective and he’s come on the calls going into detail about how he’s killed the last offer he’d been promoting.

Fast forward 3 years, and $250,000 later, and some of the core components of Hexatrack have been developed into the Magic Bullet System, which resulted in a $5,000 workshop in California last year with a number of practising top affiliates, copywriters and conversion experts delivering the sessions. The seminar has been productized into the Magic Bullet System which will combine webinar style training, together with the video recordings (about 20+ hours) from the session.

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What’s been happening thus far?

Amish and Jay have roped in JV broker Mike Merz to round up JV partners and Frank Kern who’s developed quite a reputation for stellar product launches. In case you weren’t aware, Frank has been responsible for kicking off the “Dog Training” training products, tattoo-related products and monetizing a host of other niches.

For those in or familiar with the pick-up artist niche, Frank (together with his cousin/brother-in-law Trey) helped Neil Strauss AKA Style (author of seduction/pick-up bestseller The Game) develop and launch his “Annihilation Method” series of Pick-Up Artist home study course.

Frank has since gone on to work on a couple of other big Continue reading →

If you’re headed to the Affiliate Summit West 2010 (in Las Vegas)  for the first time (or even if it’s your 3rd or 4th time), you might want to take note of the following tips to get the most out of the experience.

Note: If you haven’t registered yet, be sure to get your Affiliate Summit passes now and use the code “ASW10WEE” (good for 10% off any type of conference registration). Affiliate Summit co-founder Shawn Collins just told me over instant messenger that summit registrations will close in the next 24 hours (or less).

Tip #1: Get your summit pass, book your hotel, confirm your travel arrangements if you haven’t yet. Official room rates are $169/night at the conference venue, the Rio, so you might want to get rooms at the Wynn or the Encore at that price point or marginally higher.

Remember the event is from the 17th to 19th, that’s next week, so don’t make plans during that time.

Tip #2: Confirm your meetings, parties and one-on-one meetings ahead of time. I’ve been sending out emails, twitter direct messages, IMs to set up calls, confirm dinners and parties. There’s likely 2-3 great things happening during the same time slot every day, so you’ll need to prioritize.

Also if you’re planning to meet someone – your affiliate manager, a fellow affiliate or a potential business partner – be sure to get their cell, arrange a breakfast or lunch meetup. Although the event isn’t the largest, having a couple of thousand people at the same venue means you might go 3 days without bumping into them.

Tip #3: Get in early. Las Vegas’ McCurran Airport is notorious for delayed flights due to turbulence, and I’ve spent 1+ hour circling over the airport and missed the entire Meet Market one year. If possible, fly in on the 16th (Saturday), and relax before the event proper, that way you’ll be fresh instead of doing a Keanu Reeves-style Speed rush to get to the conference venue.

Tip #4: Sleep is a rare commodity. Expect to get little sleep during the conference, especially if you’re like some of the party-deprived affiliates out there. It’s not unusual to crash at 3am, then start your day at 10am (you could sleep through, but what’s the point?). That means you should avoid working all night on your Valentine’s/tax campaigns and have a good night’s sleep before the conference.

Tip #5: Stay the course: Although it’s a 3-day conference, the event picks up momentum around the evening of day 2 (Monday). If you’re not staying through till Tuesday evening (or staying over till Wednesday morning), you might be missing out on a lot of fun. Watch for fellow bleary-eyed affiliates at McCurran on Wednesday morning.

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Although it is quite a pain to fly 20 hours each way from my home in Singapore, it’s worth making the once a year journey. Will you be there?

Last week, PPC.biz’s Barman tweeted a Wired article about the video content creation strategy of Demand Media, which holds lessons for marketers: bank on the first mover advantage hard, especially if you want to grab market share and mind share.

That’s not to say that you should put out the poorest quality stuff you can just to get a campaign out the door. But on the internet, speed accounts for a lot, but not everything. (Just ask Windows about their Vista operating system or Apple about their Newton PDA).

The lesson here is if you’re the first in the space, whether it’s with FB ads, MySpace MyAds, or the recently launched Plenty of Fish (PoF) self-serve ad system, you’re going to have leeway and freedom to see a period of fat profits (together with a bout of accompanying frustration with broken features, tracking).

An affiliate has said of PoF’s ad “I could shit diarrhea more consistent than PoFs traffic” alluding to an ad which reported 3,000 impressions, 500 clicks, though the network stats reported 60 clicks.

At the same time, other affiliates are reporting Continue reading →

Unless you’ve been sleeping at the wheel, the last couple of weeks have been turbulent ones for many PPC affiliates, especially Adwords users. There’s been a spat of account bans (as discussed in my internet marketing forum), and even though Nick Fox told Search Engine Land’s Barry Schwartz that suspended Adwords advertisers can send an email to initiate an “appeals process”, the anecdotal evidence suggests that aside from canned email responses, affiliates suspended from Adwords can do little more than post a bitchy post on their blog, or create a complaint thread on one of a number of public and private marketing forums. So is this the beginning of the end of PPC?

It’s easy to go the Fox Mulder route and assume that they’re out to get you (which isn’t paranoia if someone is really out to get you…). I think it has to do with the natural process of evolution. Let’s look at search engine optimization (SEO) for a second.

Remember the old days (ie: the early 1990s) when SEO meant you stuffed Continue reading →

Seth Turin is developer of the UBot automation software, which enables you to compile internet marketing processes, such as niche/keyword/offer research, campaign setup, optimization, into executable scripts (also known as “bots”). While bots are most commonly associated with the search engine indexing GoogleBot and the blackhat SEO’s bot spamming/bot networks, savvy marketers will find lots of uses to enhance their business through the process of automation.

I invited Seth to come on the podcast to share his insights on how technology can be used to expand business activity and ultimately increase sales and profits.

During the course of our conversation, Seth also talked about:

• How he got started in the industry, including early spamming efforts
• How you can use technology effectively and a strategy to plan out the process
• What types of tasks you should automate
• How UBot was developed and how it works
• Ideas for creating your own bots

Check out the podcast below:

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Links:

• Ubot on Twitter
• Ubot secret coupon page [Use code “wiaw199ubot” to give yourself a  $46 discount).

Held in conjunction with the Affiliate Summit West tradeshow/conference, the Pinnacle Awards (the public relations industry has its own Pinnacle Awards which tends to dominate the SERPs…), recognize the best and brightest in the affiliate industry.

Here are this year’s winners:

• Affiliate of the Year – Mike Allen
• Affiliate Manager of the Year – Angel Djambazov
• Exceptional Merchant – CelebrateExpress.com
• Affiliate Marketing Advocate – Melanie Seery
• Best Blogger – Scott Jangro
• Affiliate Marketing Legend – Kellie Stevens

Nominations are being taken and close today (November 30th, 2009).

As Affiliate Summit co-founder, Shawn Collins, has pointed out, these are nominations, not votes, so there’s no necessity to rotate proxies a couple of hundred times and vote yourself in. You might do better to schmooze the Affiliate Summit advisory board who will review and vote on the recipients. Having said that, if you’ve flamed, insulted and challenged some of them to a fight, you’re not likely to win either.

Having said that, I won’t repeat the criteria for the 6 categories, and instead give my personal choices for the nominees.

Blogger of the year: It’s a close fight between Justin Barr’s AffBuzz (though it’s technically a blog/RSS aggregator vs a true blog) and Barman’s PPC.bz. Both are sites I visit almost every day to follow developments in the industry.

PPC.bz has distinguished itself this year by breaking the news that reputed con man Dennis Yu has perpetuated himself as being a reformed “scammy offer” promoter to going white hat, then being shown as using his local business promotion service as a front for adult/dating websites.

The man fronting PPC.bz “Barman” has said he’ll shed his anonymity and go on stage to claim the award if he wins. Then again, he might pull a Lady Gaga and throw a garbage bag over himself and claim the award through arm slits in the bag.

Some other interesting posts on PPC.bz –

• How Zac Johnson scores prizes for his giveaways,
• How to score with affiliate managers at conferences

And from the Barman himself, why you should vote his blog for various awards.

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Affiliate Manager of the Year: The winners in this category tend to be in-house affiliate managers or outsourced program managers for Pay-Per-Sale affiliate programs. Going outside Continue reading →