Do you have a ClickBank account? Are you making any money on it? If not, and it has been awhile, then CB makes your account ‘dormant’ and then starts deducting fees every month, which go up the longer it stays that way!

We just posted over on our sister site, Untethered Dreams, a howto on getting your ClickBank account out of dormancy.

I’m going to start this review with the bottom line and say that I am so furious with CommentHunt, that I actually yelled at my monitor after receiving an autoresponse e-mail for the 3rd time.

So what is CommentHunt? It has 2 parts: one is the freebie Web-based service that lets you ‘hunt’ (search) for blogs that let you leave comments with do-follow links to your own site. That part pretty much works, and really just piggybacks on Google’s search engine, so you could do this yourself if you knew how to do the search.

The 2nd part is what I’m going to tear apart. It’s the premium commenting service they offer. For $20, they will find and leave 100 comments on sites around the Net (you can get also get more comments for higher price tags). You pick the anchor text and the destination URL.

I should have known this was too good to be true. For starters, they were supposed to send me a message when they were done with the task. They never did. I sent multiple e-mails to their support e-mail address only to receive an auto-response that told me nothing.

The second thing was that they were supposed to accomplish the task within 7-10 days. That didn’t happen either.

However, they did end up doing something, after I bugged them enough. But it wasn’t good; in fact it was detrimental. For the keywords/anchor text that I provided them, I noticed that my SERP rankings in Google plummeted. I mean, just dropped to less than 25% of what it was before.

What that told me was they probably left a lot of horrible comments in a lot of horrible sites and Google slapped the hell out of those rankings. And for some of those keywords, I was ranking top 10! You can imagine how angry I was when that happened.

Strike 3 was that they never bothered refunding the fees of a rather disgruntled customer.

Well I’m not the only one that has had dubious, if not a downright terrible experience with CommentHunt. Here are some other reviews and commenters that corroborate what I’m saying:

• http://www.eligio.org/tag/commenthunt/
• http://www.facebook.com/note.php?note_id=62387758310
• http://essentialseotools.com/seoblog/uncategorized/commenthuntcom-%E2%80%93-a-great-source-for-do-follow-blogs (see comments too)
• http://dofollowsearchengine.com/blog/commenthunt-review/ (see comments too)
• http://blogpond.com.au/2007/12/13/commenthunt-and-dofollow/ (see comments too)

Yes I should have known better, and while I don’t think paying someone to help you build links is unethical (think about if you ran a company and had an SEO dept), you have to be careful about who you hire. Optimism overwhelmed my skepticism that day.

Bottom line: avoid CommentHunt’s commenting service. You would be better off spending a couple hours of your own time building quality relationships and leaving a few quality comments.

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AffiloBlueprint is an educational course produced by successful Internet marketer, Mark Ling. AffiloBlueprint is structured as a series of weekly lessons, each of which includes multiple videos and lesson notes in PDF format. While it is definitely geared for beginners, you may be surprised to find information and knowledge even if you have been involved in the field for a while.

I purchased this course back when it first came out (they’re now on version 2.0), and was quite surprised to find a professionally produced and well-thought out series of lessons with very little fluff or even attempts to upsell you on additional products. I found that refreshing.

When AB 2.0 was about to be released, I was given the chance to download all of the materials, videos and PDFs, before they disappeared. I did, afraid that version 2.0 would not live up to the quality of the first iteration. My fears were unfounded, as version 2.0 was not just a paint job, but significantly improved upon version 1.0, this time including ways to do many website-related tasks in both XSitePro and for Wordpress-based sites; adding many more videos and documentation and increasing the number of bonus material.

What would I add/change if I had the power? Perhaps the one thing that I would like to see more of in almost every other affiliate marketing course I’ve ever looked at is ‘hard numbers’. By that I mean actual quantities – for example, how many articles should you publish?; how many inbound links should you obtain?; how many SERPs should you shoot for?; etc.

So what can you expect to find in AffiloBlueprint (AB)? It is divided up into 12 weeks of coursework, although you could choose to view each video one after the next. But even doing so full-time would take days as there is over 17 hours of video spread over 55 videos.

Most of the course is centered around Mark working through all of the steps he takes to start from scratch, choose a niche, get web hosting, build a website, optimize it, promote it using article marketing and other methods, and then push paid traffic to it using his PPC techniques.

In other words, if you are just starting in the affiliate marketing field, this is the type of course you should seriously consider. If you’re not a beginner but perhaps a struggling affiliate marketer and/or looking to fill out your knowledge base, then I highly recommend still taking a look at the course – you have 2 months to take it for a spin.

Once you become a member, you not only get access to the AB coursework, but a set of bonuses including webinar sessions, a custom Wordpress theme, and software tools. While those bonuses certainly have value, the course itself is worth the price tag even without them. In addition, you get access to a members-only forum where the Affilorama staff answer pretty much all questions. Heck, even other members (like myself!) stick around and answer questions where we can.

AffiloBlueprint is a one-time purchase; you have it for life, and won’t be charged for anything else. I have no reservations in recommending AB highly.

Comment Kahuna was the other main commenting tool that I evaluated. I compared it to Comment Hut Lite and decided to use this one instead. Here is my review of Comment Kahuna, which is totally free.

Like Comment Hut (see full review here), CK searches for blogs that you can comment on, and goes a step further – it lets you set up a profile complete with your name, e-mail address, website and canned comment. Editorial: don’t be a spammer! Please make sure your comment is relevant to the blog post.

Once you find a blog that you’d like to comment on, CK lets you click a button to automatically enter that pre-typed info. In most cases, this works, but it does fail on some sites. This is quite a time saver.

Pros:

1. CK supports more blog platforms than CH Lite does.
2. It includes a network of blogs that do not use the ‘no follow’ tag in their comments.
3. The ability to create ‘profiles’ to pre-type user info for commenting

Cons:

1. CK uses an embeded Web browser so that it can perform the nifty trick of pre-filling the comment forms. However, it’s not a very good embedded browser and it sometimes gets stuck on pages. This is bad of course, because then you spend a lot of time waiting for it to stop, thus defeating the time-savings advantage. What it really needs is a Stop button, so you can quickly get past a blog/Web page that isn’t loading or is very slow (or the ability to click the Skip This Blog button to stay active). I unfortunately found myself having to manually kill the application and start over. Luckily, the profile info I had saved was still there, thus making it relatively easy to resume where I had left off.

Despite that sometimes major bug, compared to Comment Hut Lite, it really is the better tool. Now if CH (Comment Hut Pro) were somewhere around the $10 mark and included the form pre-fill feature, I would be willing to consider purchasing it, but it really does have to beat this free tool first.

Any Internet Marketing ‘guru’ out there will tell you that if you want free traffic, then you need incoming links to your website, and one of those ways is via relevant comments on other blogs and websites. Now you could use Google (or your search engine of choice) to manually find all of those blogs to comment on, OR you could use a tool that will greatly simplify this task not to mention cut your time way down.

This review looks at one such tool, Comment Hut. [In a few days, I'll be following up with a review of Comment Kahuna, another such tool.]

I feel like you should really only need 1 good blog commenting tool, and not have to depend on or use any more than that. In other words, get to know one well and use it with ruthless efficiency!

Comment Hut comes in 2 versions, a free (Lite) version and a premium version (Pro). Comment Hut Lite has a lot to like about it:

• It checks to see whether the blogs allow you to comment on them, so you save time not having to wade through those.
• It opens up the blog posts it finds in a ‘real’ browser and not the horrible embedded browser that Comment Kahuna uses. But this unfortunately comes hand in hand with a drawback, because it doesn’t offer the ability to pre-fill your name, URL, e-mail and comment.
• The founders/makers of this application, Paul Forcey & Stewart Alexander, do seem like genuine stand-up guys, and they offer something you just don’t see other Internet Marketers doing – being available on Skype. Sometimes you just can’t put a price on honesty and customer support.

On the con side of the fence,

• Comment Hut Lite only searches Wordpress-based blogs. You have to pay to upgrade to the full version that searches additional blog platforms (see below).
• You have to click a second button to get the Page Rank (PR) of the sites.

I decided against using Comment Hut Lite for those 2 main reasons.

Comment Hut Pro on the other hand ($99 currently) looks up blogs based on the following platforms and websites: Wordpress, wordpress.com, Drupal, LiveJournal, Typepad, Squidoo and HubPages (the last 2 were recently added). It is also available for Windows Vista now as well. This is a very positive sign as it means it is still being developed and supported.