We’re off today, Friday 10-9-09 flying to Bangor Maine for a week’s vacation. We will be in Bangor for 3 days to visit my wife’s family and then it’s off to Camden, Rockport and Rockland, all picturesque towns on the rocky coast of Maine. We’ll be there for 4 nights staying at The Ledges By The Bay in Rockport. The picture above is the view we will have for those 4 nights and days.

The weather has been a bit rainy, but we think we’ll get a few days of sunshine while we’re there. We are also getting there in time to see the height of the changing fall colors. I’ll be blogging about o the adventure on my vacation rentals travel blog if you’d like to follow along.

This is not a scammy make money ebook that tells you just a couple of techniques and charges you $97 for very little info, it is a complete training course with 10 modules that covers the gamut from ppc, to joint ventures, to building websites, to keyword research in affiliate marketing and on and on. The course designed by Steve Clayton and Tim Godfrey and comes with 50 videos, 20 ebooks, 8 or 10 different tools and a forum that the developers personally answer questions in on a regular basis. Now for the cost. It isn’t cheap at $497 but, it is about as comprehensive of a course as I have seen in a long time. I purchased version 1 of this training and although it was great, this is much bigger.

The course is great for newbies to intermediate affiliate marketers, but for the more advanced, you may find it lacking. However, there are some jewels that I have gleaned from the course and are already starting to work on. One of the those jewels is they show you how to build a link juice machine that will send quality links, the lifeblood of your rankings, to your site.

There are lots of ways to build a blog or site hub like this, but this one is based on buying domains with PR already established so you get a quick benefit instead of having to wait months while your new domains mature and get some good PR. And the great thing is that you can get these domains for cheap. I’ve alread picked up 2 PR 3 domains for $25 each and I’m watching a PR 4 domain that nobody has even noticed yet. It’s just sitting there waiting to come to papa for next to nothing. You can’t buy permanent links for this cheap, so this is a great technique.

I also tried out their strategy for joint venture product launches and could see some immediate results in ranking a few blogs and Squidoo pages I started. I didn’t continue with that because it took too much work and was taking me away from things I’m trying to focus on, but it is definitely a workable business model for someone to do just that one thing. Another reason I dediced not to continue with that technique is because I don’t like trying to sell products I don’t own or don’t have a lot of knowledge about. Just not my thing, but anyone could make it work.

The Commission Blueprint 2 course comes in 10 modules listed below with comments on each:

Module 1 - Welcome & Introduction - Pretty much sums it up.

Module 2 - Keyword Research - This is where you use their proprietary KW research tool. It’s pretty good, but could use a few improvements like being able to copy individual keywords into your clipboard.

Module 3 - Finding Products To Promote - Where you will get to use their Offer Evaluator tool that will tell you immediately based on traffic, ppc prices and offer payout whether or not you should even try to promote something. I learned something here - some offers are pure junk and will never convert at a profitable rate. You could probably save the price of the course in shying away from junk offers in yor ppc efforts by using the Offer Evaluator. This is one of the tools you get in the 7 Day Free Trial.

Module 4 - Building Converting Sites - Haven’t spent much time here, but besides the obvious, this module contains the developer’s templates they’ve used to build out their sites and have helped them earn their big bucks. They’re supposed to be proven converters.

Module 5 - Sales & Conversion Strategies - This is one of my favorite modules and where they teach you how to do the joint ventures mentioned earlier.

Module 6 - Search Engine Optimization - This module is massive. It contains 20 videos, 4 small ebooks and 2 tools and probably will take a couple days just to get through it. One of the tools here I have an issue with. It’s called Article Blueprint and it sends out your spun articles to several article directories and the developer’s network of sites. My issue is that some of the directories aren’t worth even having your article in and it seems to take a long time for your articles to show up in them. Hopefully though, the bonus coming out will make this a moot point.

Module 7 - Adwords & Paid Advertising - Another huge module with 22 videos, 3 ebooks and 3 tools. One of the tools is a tracking system and Adwords campaign building system that looks a bit complex, but overall it should really help you with tracking your ppc campaigns to the minutest detail. This one looks like it works somewhat like Speed PPC. I’m not a huge fan of tracking systems because they tend to be overly complex, besides, I just do something very simple that works fairly well.

Module 8 - Social Media & Article Marketing - Not a lot here, but does have some good suggestions on getting more out of your article marketing efforts.

Module 9 - List Building & Email Marketing - Honestly, this one is just another reminder on why I ought to be creating an email list.

Module 10 - Conclusion - Offers a blueprint on what to do after absorbing all the material. There are a couple of great, easy to follow one page plans that got me motivated until I tried to print out the PDF’s and they came out black on my HP Color Laser printer. I wish they would have tested that, but I just used the FinePrint free utility and it printed them out fine. 

The Bottom Line - Commission Blueprint 2.0 is worth it to me and may be for you, even at a cost of $497 because it really is a one stop shop for just about all the training your will need in this business. Besides that, the forums are pretty amazing and are frequented by some of the nicest people you will ever meet online. No really, my first post at the forums stirred things up quite a bit and almost everyone was exceptionally nice, in kind of a cult sort of way. (Just kidding on the cult thing)

I’d rate it at about an 8 for newbies and about a 6.5 for experienced affiliate marketers. Right now you can get the Keyword Blueprint tools and the Offer Evaluator tool as well as a 50 page PDF manual to try for 7 days, so it’s at least worth it to check it out. Even if you don’t get the training, I’m sure you can keep the 50 page manual.

Check out Commission BP 2 here.

You login to your Google Account where you have all of your Google stuff, Google Groups, Blogger blogs, Adwords, Gmail, Adsense and other things. You click on your various tools and you are automatically logged in but then you click on Adsense and this is what you get:

What? I thought I was logged in. Okay, so now you log in through this screen and here’s what you get:

What? I merged my accounts about 3 or 4 years ago, why do I have to do this again? On, I see it says, “Are you one of the following people? email @ email.com” That’s me. “If so , then you’ve alread updated your login to a Google Account. Return To Adsense and use your Google Account to sign in.” Follow those instructions and you go back to the previous screen above in a never ending loop.

Okay, I’m thinking, I’ll just contact Adsense Help and they’ll fix the problem? After spending 15 minutes going through the help files (why is it that they never really answer your question) and not finding any contact info you’ll finally run across a link to contact Help, but click it and it sends you to the Adsense Login screen because you have to be in Adsense to contact Adsense Help. Brilliant!

Right now I have confusion “all in my brain” and all I can hear is that Fender Strat Hendrix chord ringing in my head.

Adsense Login Loop Solution

Fortunately after spending about 4 hours perusing forums last night and about 15 minutes this morning I found out there is a solution to this dreaded issue for some. It worked for me, but I can’t guarantee it will work for you. Here’s an alternate Adsense login url that doesn’t go through the normal login path:

https://www.google.com/adsense/login2

You have to be logged into your Google Account first and then all you do is paste the link into your browser and you get in through the back door. It appears the you have to paste the url into the exact same window or browser in a new tab in the same browser. It won’t work if you click on the link or open another window. But then like magic you are now in your Adsense account and the Purple Haze music slowly starts to fade away and life makes sense again.

I think this had something to do with a change Google made to there home page. If you watch when you first go to Google there’s only a search box and the Google logo and in about 5 seconds the text and links start to fade in. I’m guessing this is just a way to get people to actually search more because all you see for a few seconds is a search box. Really, it’s just very frustrating because I thought there was something wrong with my browser or computer. But, then there is something wrong with the Adsense Login page through your Google Account.

Hopefully the solution url will work for you. Don’t you just love Google?

Update 10-8 - Thanks to Curtis1 for leaving a solution in the comments. Just go to the Google Adsense Forum to find the permanent answer.

I try to cover as much as possible in the review so you can decide if it’s worth adding it to your arsenal of tools and stuff for your online business. It’s worth it to me, I bought it and will be keeping it because there are some valuable things I’m learning and valuable tools I’m using.

There are also things I don’t like about it (I wasn’t making any friends in their forums with my first post), but the developers promise to make things better, so I’m sticking with it. Plus, there’s a couple of bonuses coming that I don’t want to miss and one of them promises to help in building links to your sites. That’s one of the most neglected facets of my business, link building, and I’ve only just started doing that on any worthwhile scale. So any tool that will help with that, I want it.

Anyway, the review isn’t done yet, but will be tomorrow sometime before noon. So, stay tuned.

Not only is BANS for sale, but everything related to BANS including N1Way (which was honestly a bit disappointing) and 27 related domains in various stages of development go along with it. It does seem kind of odd that the developers just came out with the new ebook or e-online-whatever, The N1Way or The Number 1 Way To Make Money Online only 3 months ago and they are now selling the whole show. Actually when you see that the total revenue generated from the ethingy N1Way was only $16,926.59, it’s not quite as surprising.

It’s a pretty interesting read at the auction page to look at the profit generated from BANS and all the domains that go with the sale as well as how the profit from BANS took a serious nose dive late last year and into this year. Profit for 2008 was $267,985 and profit so far for 2009 is right around 20% of that at $54,009. In reading the auction page you see the revenue drop off beginning in July or August of 2008 where they state:

At this point BANS was starting to get a bad reputation as being used by spammers so we re-developed the sales presentation and user forum accepting a significant cut in revenue so that it would have a legitimate shot as a long term project.

It was about that time that several people including myself started seeing some of their version 3.0 BANS stores getting deindexed by Google. I’ll take part of the blame for that in that I was putting up too many stores and not having enough time to fully develop them, while a lot of the blame goes to eBay affiliate spammers who used BANS for hundreds or thousands of garbage sites with no content and only auction listings. The general consensus was that Google didn’t like this and identified something in v 3.0 that was a footprint and removed many, many sites from its index. Some of my eBay affiliate income has returned since taking a big dive around the end of 2008, but it’s still not where it was at its height of around $1,000 per month.

While BANS is for up for auction, it in no way changes what I’m doing with it. Since the glory days, I’ve continued to work on a couple of my sites with one taking up the majority of my BANS related time. Getting backlinks and working on a blog added to my primary store has made somewhat of a difference and that will be the direction I’ll continue to head in for the time being as far as BANS relate affiliate revenue. I also have several other sites with eBay auctions and the good news is that my Quality Click Pricing Report last month was significantly more than twice the actual revenue earned. As long as that holds, I’ll have nothing to complain to eBay about its new click pricing model. If it doesn’t, well then, it will be suspect.

BANS will still continue to be a great product regardless of who owns it as long as you develop your stores and treat it like a business.

A few days ago I invested in a training course of sorts that’s not quite as expensive as some of the ones mentioned previously, but it is quite a bit more than your regular $49 or even the $97 ebooks that are so prevalent these days. I call it a training course because it’s much more than just a simple ebook. It consists of about 50 videos, 20 short ebooks and guides, and 9 tools including those for keyword research, Adwords spying, keeping track of your search engine positions, an article submission tool and so on. Plus there are bonuses within the course and some coming out on an ongoing basis.

So far the course looks pretty good. There are things that I love about it, there are things that are just okay and there are things that either need to be fixed (which the developers are working on) or that seem kind of cheesy probably because they are already familiar to me. This course is huge and with anything like this there will definitely be things that are old news to at least a few people. Fortunately the developers have taken that into account and have labeled the content for beginners, intermediate and advanced users.

Right now I’m going to refrain from telling you exactly what the course is because I haven’t fully worked through it yet. Quite frankly, the course is overwhelming because there is so much material. It is organized very well into modules such as seo, ppc, article marketing, building sites, sales conversions, keyword research and more, but there’s so much stuff it’s hard to know where you should start .

In the next few days I’ll be doing a complete review of the course and may do more in-depth reviews of some of the modules and tools as I get a better grasp of what you can do with them. There isn’t any way you can get through all the training has to offer in just a few days. Of course this will be an honest review of it mainly because that’s what I do here and yes, I actually invested the money necessary to purchase the course. No fake reviews here, I own the product. Stay tuned.

Of course one missed fake product review isn’t going to matter to a MMO blogger making a killing, but if they changed their business model to doing only honest reviews, they’d be making substantially less.

Since I’ve been having some pretty good success lately with ppc marketing I was pretty excited when the news hit that Keyword Elite 2.0 would be coming out soon. It’s always good to add the right tools to your ppc arsenal so you can scale your campaigns up when you find a winner and I thought Keyword Elite Two would be a tool to get. However, after spending about an hour watching all the videos on the sales page about every aspect of the product, all I could think was, ’why would anyone pay $197 for this when you can get the same data for free?’

Here’s three of the modules within Keyword Elite that you can easily find data for and are basically a big load of processed cheese: 

Keyword Surge is one of the modules that’s supposed to help you, “Generate the largest, most diversified keyword lists imaginable.” Thanks, but I don’t need large keyword lists anymore, I need keywords that convert and I can find those fairly easily with Google Trends, Insights For Search and the Google Keyword Tool. I’ve had my fill of inaccurate keyword tools, including what Google even puts out, I don’t need something less accurate than Google.

Advanced Adwords Site Targeter is another module that you can just as easily go to Google to find the same info for free or you can download Adwords Digger for free if you are unable to type in your own keywords at a search engine and find the top ranked site that displays Adsense.

The module that had me guffawing the most had to be the CPA Magnet that will, “Quickly and easily find super hot CPA offers with the click of a button!” I guess a bunch of affiliate managers are going to lose their jobs now because of this one…or probably not. I have 2 managers that send me a weekly email with the best converting offers on their network for search, email and web display and another report available on a weekly basis that I can download anytime and I can also call any of them at any time for suggestions. Reach out to your affiliate manager, it’s a lot less than $197, it’s free.

It was a process to come to the conclusion that Keyword Elite 2.0 isn’t worth buying. A friend tweeted me and asked if I wanted to split it with him so I went to the website and spent an hour watching the videos and was underwhelmed. I then ran across Griz’s Keyword Elite V2.0 Review and pretty much made up my mind not to go halfsies with my friend, who later tweeted me back with his review after he went ahead and bought it, “Messed with it for a while. It’s trash.” At that point I was pretty convinced, I didn’t need the greatest keyword tool humankind has ever seen.

Kinda makes you wonder about what those MMO blogging guys are peddling and how they really make their money, doesn’t it?

Oprah, Dr. Oz and the companies that represent them are suing these entities for misrepresenting their images, voices, business, likenesses and basically anything else to do with who they are. And it’s not only acai berry products that have used images and indentities of the two tv personalities, the suit is also targeting other products such as teeth whiteners, colon cleansers, resveratrol supplements as well as other diet pills, anti-wrinkle creams and other products where their supposed endorsements have been used.

Out of those some 50 entities being sued, Oprah’s and Dr Oz’s lawyers may find out many of them are the same people running the same companies that have changed their business names over and over to avoid this very kind of action. If you belong to any of the multitude of CPA companies around today, you may have noticed that a new acai berry or resveratrol product shows up in your offers seemingly on a weekly basis and that current ones disappear at the same rate. Gee, I wonder why that happens?

You also have to wonder if there are any affiliate marketers promoting acai berry or other diet stuff and using Oprah’s images that happened to get caught up in this lawsuit. There are affiliates that have made millions promoting this stuff as is evident with the multitude of splogs, fake news sites, pay per click campaigns on every acai berry keyword imaginable and other sites that supposedly review this stuff. You also can’t help seeing the advertisements all over sites like Drudge Report and other news sites that eventually lead to these splogs and fake news sites. This is big business for some affiliates and many CPA companies and it could mean that many of them will have to change the way they do business.

The news of this legal action has already been on Good Morning America and I thought I saw something this weekend about it being on ABC News with Charles Gibson tonight August 24th. Hopefully if you are an affiliate or CPA company selling this stuff you won’t see your name on the news tonight.

It’s probably a good thing to just get away from promoting these kind of products if you want to have a long term affiliate business.

What Google doesn’t want is to give you a platform to test a million crummy ads, sent to a million crummy landing pages trying to sell a bunch of crummy diet and make money with Google products. It used to be that you could throw heaps of mud at the advertising wall that was Adwords with hundreds or thousands of keywords and then pick out the things that stuck and you’d be making lots of money. Unfortunately I didn’t get in on that gig, but it was much easier back in the good old days according to those that have been doing this ppc thing for some time.

Now though, advertising space is at a premium and there are thousands of people and merchants competing for some of the same spaces where there used to be only a handful of those people. Google used to let ads that got poor click thru rates (CTR) run indefinately as long as they were getting some kind of click activity. Now, if your ads aren’t performing, you are going to get slapped with $1 to $5 first page minimum bids or a Low Quality Score rating and your ads won’t run at all.

Let’s examine some of the reasons that happens and what you can do about it. (This is pretty much my same answer as in the PPC Coach forums.) The discussion mainly focused around direct linking, but it is relevant to all ppc campaigns.

Google is just a huge pain - I run campaigns all the the time that should work, but they don’t because Google is a pain. After awhile you finally figure out it’s not worth fretting about and there’s nothing to do but move on and try something else.

Page rank - If the offer you’re sending traffic to has a 0 or 1 PR landing page, it’s a lot less likely big G will see the relevance to what you’re trying to do. Find something that has a better quality score if you are going to direct link.

Keyword In Ad Headline - On rare occasions you can get away with not using the whole keyword in the headline of your ad, but most of the time it is essential. Auto keyword insertion won’t work, you must type your keywords in manually so Google can see the relevance in them. Google can’t read the keywords in your list, they have to read them from your ad for a good QS.

Larger Picture Relevance - This is a big one here. Your landing page, ad headline, ad text and keywords all have to relate somehow and the whole mix can sometimes be a mystery. One thing out of bounds here and you will get high bids. More relevance overall means more conversions for you as well.

Adwords Account Age - The newer your account, the less you can get away with. If you start out getting great CTR’s then you will get a gold star from Google and they will be a little more lenient towards you.

Not  So Swift Account Manager - Some of these Adwords account managers are just lame and don’t understand advertising at all. I got an email once from some noobie accountmeister and he said my ads on one keyword couldn’t run because all I was doing was trying to send traffic to another site. Duh!, no kidding, isn’t that what a huge percent of adwords traffic is all about? I was sending traffic to my own landing page and he nailed me for 1 keyword out of about 50 I was running in the entire campaign. Nothing to do but move on. There’s too many other things to advertise to worry about 1 keyword.

Now that I’ve had some pretty good success at paid search marketing, my experience is that sending traffic to your own landing pages or direct to the merchant makes no difference at all. What matters is everything mentioned above. If you can’t get your ppc campaigns off the ground because of high bids the best thing to do is not to run stuff where your CTR is really low. The best way to improve your standing with Google is to get people to click on your ads so they make money, that’s why they’re in business, remember?

If you’re running crap offers that generate crap traffic and get lots of impressions, but no clicks, you look like a noobie to G and they will treat you accordingly. When I see that an ad group (1 keyword per ad group) is getting lots of impressions and no clicks I will pause it because thet affects the overall quality of your campaign and eventually it will affect the overall quality of your entire account. If you have 500 or 1,000 impressions and no clicks, turn that word off. I speak from experience here because I used to get nearly everything I put up slapped, but I finally figured out how to get good CTR and the ride has been much easier since then.

Promote quality offers in a quality way with relevant keywords and and landing pages and you will get great CTR’s. Google will then reward you with lower bids because they’re finally making some money from you and more importantly, you are making some money too.

A second thing covered in the email was basically a schooling for those that have built BANS stores, or any niche site, with either no content or unrelated and non relevant content. Speaking of the model of affiliate marketing that only the committed will make money at, they said:

If you don’t truly know the model (the requirements of the model) how can you successfully develop sites to profit from it?

This has always been a shortfall for BANS.

It’s always been just a tool - some of you have loved it, some of you have outgrown it and some of you have abandoned it.

With no direction, the idea of the “quickest path to success” is the one that many followed which meant the rapid development of poorly chosen, poorly planned, poorly built, poorly marketed and poorly managed sites.

The result of that process is inevitable - regardless of platform.

If you can’t see that you’re wasting your time.

That’s what I’ve been saying for the last year and a half here at AffiliateConfession.com even though when starting out building my BANS sites I played into the build-a-ton of sites mentality. Now, there’s nothing wrong with building a ton of sites if, and only if, you can develop them properly. Unfortunately in many cases that isn’t what has happened with many who have purchased BANS. As mentioned in the email example above, many have looked towards the “quickest path to success” with BANS and it has turned out to be no path to success at all.

Which brings me to the third part of the email where the developers are announcing a new product they’re releasing soon that will teach people the number 1 way to make money online. In fact, that’s the name of their website and where the new product will be released from when it’s ready. The url is TheNumber1WaytoMakeMoneyOnline.com. There’s not much to see there right now, but you can download a free pdf file that covers what will be in the guide.

When the guide is released it’s only going to be $24.95 and although it’s probably more geared to beginners I’m still going to get it because there’s always something to learn and I trust the guys that developed BANS because I love the product and the developers have never been about hype so I know they’re new guide will not be about hype.

There’s such a need for a straightforward product like this because there’s so much wrong information available about how to make money online today. And there are so many people who need to hear once again that there’s no quick path to success. I probably need to hear it again as well and for only $24.95 I trust it will be a pretty inexpensive lesson.