Auto Traffic Avalanche Quick Review: Don’t waste your money! 100% garbage..

I’m a little bit behind on my review of Auto Traffic Avalanche but I just got another (among 100′s) email in my inbox promoting it. That email in this case was the straw that broke the camels back.

Auto Traffic Avalanche is a fairly new course (August 2010) that promises to deliver high quality traffic using automated software. The course and software was created by Kieran Gill and Imran S and it’s been promoted by many well-respected Gurus in the internet marketing vertical.

I purchase most new software & courses that come on the market simply to see what my competitors are selling and to keep up with new techniques. I actually have a monthly budget dedicated to purchasing things I mostly never use. Every once in a while though I’m surprised by good content or software that actually works. Then I’ll take the idea and reverse engineer it and make my own private software that works better. It’s just the way I am.

So, since every marketer out there with a list promoted this product I went ahead and snatched it up. 9 times out of 10 when I buy a new course or software it is not worth the money. This case was no different. The Auto Traffic Avalanche fails to live up to any of the hype. In fact, following the techniques inside the course will likely get you banned from Facebook advertising – and it’s old news anyways.

Basically, the Auto traffic Avalanche course explains how to advertise on Facebook and Plenty of Fish. Then it goes further and explains how you can use cloaking to *trick* Facebook into allowing you to run ads they normally wouldn’t allow.

Lo and behold Facebook has already caught onto this (well before the launch of Auto Traffic Avalanche). So, if you follow the techniques you do risk getting your Facebook advertising account banned. It’s best not to burn your bridges with huge traffic sources.

So I’m going to give this product a rating of 1 out 5. I’ll give it a 1 simply because they managed to hype it up pretty well and sell a *lot* of copies. Kudos to them for that. Shame on them for ripping off so many people in the process. Luckily Clickbank has a solid refund policy.

There is currently a bed bug epidemic in the United States (and Canada). Bed bugs (nasty little critters) are running rampant and people are doing anything they can to stop them. Perfect. So how can you capitalize on the bed bug epidemic? Easy… I’m going to lay it out for you step by step.

Step 1 – Research the bed bug market

Research bed bugs and what they actually do to people. Once you read up on them you’ll see why people are so rampantly searching for a solution to get rid of them.

First, begin your research by going to Google trends and do a search for “bed bugs”. You should see something like this..

Google trends will confirm if the niche is truly hot right now, and how much interest there has been over the last few months (or years). Trends can give you a good snapshot of whether or not *right now* is a good time to get into the market. In day trading, a good rule of thumb is “don’t go against the trend” (unless you truly know what you’re doing) – the same goes in internet marketing.

Step 2 – Bed Bug Market Demographics

You need to find out a little bit more about your target audience to make sure bed bugs is good market. To do that, there’s 2 places I recommend – MSN Audience Intelligence and Google Ad Planner. Before you use these tools however, here’s what you should do. Go to your favorite search engine and do a search for “bed bugs”. Make a list of the top 20 or so websites that come up. Just jot the URL’s down in Notepad for now. Once you have these URL’S go on over to Google Ad Planner.

• Enter each URL you found into Google Ad Planner
• Make note of the demographics and whether or not advertising is available on the site
• Take special note of the gender, age group and income figures. THESE ARE IMPORTANT
• Next, go to MSN Audience Intelligence and enter your search term – in this case, “bed bugs”.

Pretty good information, huh? Take note of all the demographics and save them for later use, also try to keep them in mind when you move on to the next step – offer research and keyword research.

We now know that people who are searching for “bed bugs” are generally between the ages of 25-34, are primarily female and they like to shop at Walmart. Sounds good to me, let’s move on and see what we can do with that information.

Step 3 – Monetize the Bed Bug Market

OK, so we know bed bugs (or getting rid of them) is a hot topic, we know our target audience, and we know we want to create a website or campaign around bed bugs, so now we need to find an offer. There’s lots of ways to find offers – I’ll list a few of my favorites.

• Go to Clickbank (sign up if you havn’t already) and search the marketplace for “bed bugs”. There are 4-5 bed bug offers, but after further investigation none of them appear to be of very high quality. So let’s move on.
• Go to OfferVault.com and (sign up) and search for “bed bugs” once again.  Looks like there is 1 bed bug offer and it pays $7.00 per lead. Not too shabby – let’s note this one down in case we don’t find anything else.
• Do a search on Google for “bed bug affiliates”. Wow, looks like there is quite a few. Good news for us.  The best one I found (in about 2 minutes) is through the ShareASale network and it pays 10% of all sales and has a high quality website. I’m already a part of ShareAsale, so I’ll test this offer out as well.
• Do a search on Google for “bed bugs” once again as well as “get rid of bed bugs”. Take a look at who is advertising for these keywords and visit these sites. Many times they will have an affiliate program, or they *are* affiliates and are promoting various bed bug offers. Nothing wrong with copying what works.

Step 4 – Researching Keywords

Oh boy – keyword research. All the gurus would be telling you that you need to sign up for some $300/mo keyword discovery software. Well – it might help, but you definitely don’t need any fancy software to get started. First of all, do some simple brainstorming. Open notepad and think of all the root words that you would use if you were looking to get rid of bed bugs. Here’s a quick list to get you started..

get rid of bed bugs

remove bed bugs

bed bug removal

bed bug pesticide

bed bug specialist

how to get rid of bed bugs

no more bed bugs

clean bed bugs

kill bed bugs

bed bug killer

Once you’ve come up with 20 or so root phrases, head over to the Google Keyword Tool and enter each keyword tool. But before you click search, click on advanced options and select “Ideas containing my search terms”. Save all the keywords in a text editor, seperated by their root phrase. You can use these keywords later to build a website, create a traffic campaign or to set up an auto blog.

There are many other ways to gather keywords, some much more advanced and some even simpler. I will be sharing these techniques with you n future articles. For now, to get started quickly Google Keyword Tool will be sufficient.

Quick Tip: When choosing keywords make sure you have a clear objective. If you’re researching keywords that you expect people to make a purchase from; put yourself in the buyers shoes. Keywords like “buy bed bug killer” will convert much better then “bed bugs” alone.

Now let’s take a look at where we’re at:

• We have a niche market (bed bugs)
• We have the market demographics for the bed bug market
• We have 2-3 viable offers to promote to the bed bug market
• We have targeted keywords to reach the consumers in the bed bug market

Step 5 – Time to make some money!

It’s time to put all the pieces of puzzle together and capitalize on the evergreen market: bed bugs.

There’s 4 main strategies I’m going to cover, step by step:

1. Building an entire website around bed bugs and integrating bed bug ads and offers, sending traffic to it via SEO, Social Media and other ways to make money
2. Setting up a landing page specifically for the bed bug market and sending traffic to it via PPC, CPV, Media Buys and other methods.
3. Building a list of subscribers and creating an auto responder sequence to automatically make recurring income
4. Setting up an auto blog to automatically rank in the search engines and drive traffic to your bed bug ads and offers.

Any 4 of these strategies can make you A TON OF MONEY. All 4 of them together could mean a consistent income for years to come. In fact, bed bugs is an evergreen market (they’ll be there for some time to come), and a person could make a living *just* off the bed bug market. Incredible isn’t it.

Fake News Landing Page Template

Guys, this template is awesome, and I’m sure you’ve probably seen similar ones around. The reason you see them is because they work! I created this template about a year ago (and yes it’s been copied) and I still use it today. It gets HUGE conversion rates and can be used for almost any product or market. This is a template that the *big boys* use. It’s fully FTC compliant, gets a good quality score on PPC networks and it’s completely customizable (some HTML knowledge will be required).

I’m currently programming a web based application that will pump these templates out in no time at all. I’m not sure yet if I’ll be charging for it or not, but rest assured I’ll give some people free access to it to help beta test. If you’re interested, make sure you sign up for my newsletter to get notified before everyone else!

Niche Marketing For the Future

What If I told you that the best niche markets don’t even exist yet? What If I also told you that you could create these niche markets and get FREE traffic before they even existed, practically putting a guarantee on your own success. Well, all of this is possible you just need to be a little creative and always be *one step ahead* of the game.

Finding these kind of niche markets is easier than you may think, capitalizing on them is easy too – there’s only one catch – you need to have some patience. This tactic I’m about to explore has made me a lot of money and I’ll show you an example in a minute.  It’s so simple yet most people do not take advantage of this one small thing that can mean the difference between $1000 next year or $100,000.

Dear Advertiser,

Your switch to the Microsoft Advertising adCenter platform is almost here. To help ensure you’re prepared to make a smooth transition, please take a moment to review the information below and complete any steps you’ve yet to take:

Make sure your adCenter account is ready to go

We’ve now moved more than 30% of Yahoo! Search traffic to adCenter, and we anticipate accelerating to 50-60% by the end of this week. Please be sure you have an active adCenter account in place now, so you don’t miss out on this valuable traffic.

By October 25th, be sure your adCenter account is funded with the full budget amount you’ll need to cover all of your potential traffic from both Yahoo! Search and Bing.

Review your overall search engine marketing spend across all search engines, keeping in mind that Yahoo! and Microsoft sites combined reach more than 62%* of unique search users in Canada.

Monitor your bids on adCenter frequently, because as more and more Yahoo! advertisers transition, there could be some initial pricing variability. While keeping your ROI in mind, be prepared to adjust your bids or set incremental bids if increased competition impacts your position.

Be sure to take advantage of adCenter’s enhanced search network distribution and website exclusion features, to help you manage your ROI on partner network traffic.

My point is, these novice traders who had no experience were able to model Michael Covels’ success and replicate it to achieve their own results. The same goes for the marketing world.

I am a huge fan of reverse engineering. I LIKE competition. If there is competition in a market it means that they are making money. So I reverse engineer their marketing campaigns, their websites, their sales funnels and I find their weaknesses. Then I copy them, eliminating the weaknesses and improving on the campaign.

It’s a hell of a lot easier to copy a campaign you *KNOW* is profitable then it is to create a profitable campaign from scratch

Of course, I should mention that I have a few *custom* tools I use to make this process easier. Some of them I will be sharing with you in the weeks to come. For now, I want you to go out and look at what your competitors are doing. Make note of their ad copy, where they are advertising, how their website is setup, what they are charging, what their USP is (Unique Selling Position) and see if you can’t find any weaknesses in their campaigns.

Follow the money and you can’t go wrong.

Until next time..

The truth is email marketing is still here to stay for quite some time yet. Sure, open rates aren’t what they once were – there’s more clutter in peoples inboxes; but spam filters are getting better and better every day. I’m personally subscribed to over 300 lists and If I’m interested in what I see I’ll open each message and take a quick peek. If the message contains valuable information I will read the whole thing. The point is email marketing still works and the MONEY IS STILL IN THE LIST.

If you want to build a business online you need to build it around your customers. That means you need to connect with your customers on an ongoing basis. That means building a list – whether it be a call list, email list or a text broadcast list; sustainability comes from building a relationship and repeat sales.  Once you have a responsive list of customers (or at least interested prospects) your list becomes a personal ATM. You send an email out and voila you receive sales.

List building for some doesn’t come easy though. I’m going to break it down for you step by step; from squeeze pages to making sales. So stay tuned for my “List Building Guide on Steroids”.

1. You need to find an “untapped” niche with low competition.
2. You need to find more untapped niches because one won’t do.

So first they tell you that you need to find a niche with low competition. Next they tell you that you need to find 100′s of more niches just like that one. I say to hell with them.

Don’t get me wrong, small micro niches are great for some extra income but they are not GREAT if you want to make a killing (or even just a living).  Let me drill something into your head. COMPETITION IS A *GOOD* THING. If there are lots of competitors in a niche it means there are lots of hungry consumers. Lots of hungry consumers means there is lots of money!

Let me give you an example..

One market that I spend a lot of time marketing too is Forex (foreign exchange). For those of you who aren’t familiar with the Forex market, it is ultra competitive. Keyword bids in Google top out at around $30.00 click. Expensive isn’t it? You bet. How do you think those keywords got such high bids though? Could it be people are paying $30.00 a click because they are making MORE than that? Of course.

You can capitalize on these huge competitive markets – all you need is a little ingenuity. By leveraging free (and obscure) traffic sources you can build a huge list, or even a high traffic website and make more money then you ever would with small niche websites. Sure, it will take some time but it will be well worth it in the end. You can truly build an entire empire in ultra competitive markets.

The best part is once you’re established in a huge market you don’t need to keep coming up with new niches. You can focus on one or two main markets, become an authority in your market and have a stable income for years to come. Need more money? Create a new product or do a new joint venture.

So what are the top 10 ultra-competitive, consumer hungry niches of 2010?

I’m a little bit behind on my review of Auto Traffic Avalanche but I just got another (among 100′s) email in my inbox promoting it. That email in this case was the straw that broke the camels back.

Auto Traffic Avalanche is a fairly new course (August 2010) that promises to deliver high quality traffic using automated software. The course and software was created by Kieran Gill and Imran S and it’s been promoted by many well-respected Gurus in the internet marketing vertical.

I purchase most new software & courses that come on the market simply to see what my competitors are selling and to keep up with new techniques. I actually have a monthly budget dedicated to purchasing things I mostly never use. Every once in a while though I’m surprised by good content or software that actually works. Then I’ll take the idea and reverse engineer it and make my own private software that works better. It’s just the way I am.

So, since every marketer out there with a list promoted this product I went ahead and snatched it up. 9 times out of 10 when I buy a new course or software it is not worth the money. This case was no different. The Auto Traffic Avalanche fails to live up to any of the hype. In fact, following the techniques inside the course will likely get you banned from Facebook advertising – and it’s old news anyways.

Basically, the Auto traffic Avalanche course explains how to advertise on Facebook and Plenty of Fish. Then it goes further and explains how you can use cloaking to *trick* Facebook into allowing you to run ads they normally wouldn’t allow.

Lo and behold Facebook has already caught onto this (well before the launch of Auto Traffic Avalanche). So, if you follow the techniques you do risk getting your Facebook advertising account banned. It’s best not to burn your bridges with huge traffic sources.

So I’m going to give this product a rating of 1 out 5. I’ll give it a 1 simply because they managed to hype it up pretty well and sell a *lot* of copies. Kudos to them for that. Shame on them for ripping off so many people in the process. Luckily Clickbank has a solid refund policy.

What is place mat advertising?

You go into a restaurant, let’s say Boston Pizza. You sit down at your table and the first thing you see is a place mat. This is usually a single piece of paper about 16 X 16 inches and it’s filled with advertising, maybe some funny quotes or some trivia questions.

Generally, the advertisements on the place mats are for electronic stores, your local hardware store, the local rec center etc.  These ads cost next to nothing and obviously your local stores are getting customers from them or they wouldn’t be advertising.

How can you make money with place mat advertising?

Here’s the fun part. It’s actually pretty simple, just follow these 7 steps..

1. Go to your CPA account (NeverBlue, EliteClicksMedia, PeerFly, Copeac etc.) and find a free trial offer that pays between $20 – $40 per lead. (there should be quite a few to choose from)
2. Make a list of places that offer place mat advertising. Here’s a couple of websites to get you started ( http://www.placematadvertising.net/ & http://www.theplacematpeople.com/)
3. Buy a domain for your CPA offer (this is where you will send your customers too, so keep it simple and easy to remember)
4. Redirect your domain to your CPA offer landing page (need help? just ask me how and I’ll show you)
5. Create a simple advertisement (copy the landing page if you need ideas).
6. Run your place mat ad!
7. Track your results and refine!

An Example Place Mat Ad

This is an example ad I ran in a small coffee newsletter – Coffee News Website. I spent about $300 to run the ad (which reached approximately 30,000 people).

The results? I recieved over 1000 visitors to my landing page, and of those 1000 visitors – 28 (3%) signed up for the free trial offer. The free trial offer paid out $33 per lead. Do the math.

Spent: $300

Grossed: 28 X $33 = $924

Total Profit: $624.00

And it really is that easy. The trial offer I was promoting was called “Sleep Quick Strips” – quick dissolving strips that help you get to sleep. The product has a mass appeal (lots of people have trouble sleeping) and that was important to it’s success.

Now that’s just ONE placement in one offline publication. Imagine how much you can make if you ramp up your efforts. Or if you create your own product and promote it in offline publications!

Enjoy!