• Zeus controlled the elusive lightning of the heavens.
• Hades controlled gold and the underworld.
• Poseidon controlled the ephemeral water covering most the planet.

• Lightning is SEO (aka) organic, it’s free as rain, very powerful if you get right..and damn ellusive to catch.
• Gold is Paid Traffic, get it right buy your way anywhere, get it wrong and you endup broke in Hades, with no easy way out.
• Water is Social Media, always changing, always flowing, everywhere.

This could be Epic Traffic..

1. Find hot targeted prospects using Twitter Search
2. Get your offers in front of them PROPERLY then drive traffic.

This article is inspired by three concrete problems I had this weekend, where I had premium content locked in a paid membership site and wanted a local copy of.  That content was often a rather large complicated site consisting of 200-300 files of 500-1GB of size.  While possible to do manually, getting it all, would have been time consuming and tedious to do so, regardless if I did it or one of my staff.  So in this we are going to review and cover 3 automated solutions I tried to get a copy and keep it safe.  So like the pharaohs of old you can take it with you.

Like the pharoahs of old, you can take it with you, provided you know these tricks...

The problem with online courses:

1) your course is only available online in some password protected site. Lose the password, downgrade your membership you lose access to it all.

2) you can’t take the course with you on the road or in places with poor internet connectivity, often which is a perfect time to learn and review this.

3) courses get outdated, and taken offline. E.g. gurus retire, or retire courses.  You spend $2k on the information it’s only fair that you get a copy of it, regardless of what the guru does with it in the future.

If you could get a copy for later for your “Learning Library” you could keep a copy even if you never use it. I still keep copies of my university books just occasionally to refresh my memory on certain subjects. Can’t say that they’ve gotten much use out of (e.g. Linear Algebra and Chemistry) but I spent like $200 on some of them when that was a LOT of money to me (as in a full month of rent) and years later…still… can’t… quite let them go in the trash

My Inspirations

First, I own Jeff Walkers Product Launch Formula 2.0, which was $2k or so when I bought it about a year ago.   Jeff is retiring PLF2.0 in favor of PLF3.0 in just a couple of days. That means he’s deleting ALL of the excellent content and sites surrounding that product, partly to push people to buy the upgraded “redone from the ground up”.  Much of that pricey but good content I just don’t remember OR worse have paid lots of money for but haven’t gotten a chance to view yet, which come to think of it, is true for many of the courses I have bought, even if I have been working my butt off the entire year!!!.   While I could manually download files one by one, I wanted an easier way and one that would make sure I didn’t lose anything,  and being so busy, I put it to last few days…and just realized I only had a few days left.    I had planned originally just to download the core modules files, but getting into the site after almost a year ofnot seeing it,  I realized there was a huge amount I haven’t seen, and most available in several formats like PDF transcripts, that would benefit me more than just the video. It would be rather insane downloading the entire site that way so I went with the automated approach.

Second I am canceling one of my $300/mo mastermind groups, as over the 4 months, I’ve gotten most the value I need out of it and would rather have that money going someplace else -that’s about what I pay for a month of some of my Filipino workers!  As soon as I cancel though I lose access to ALL the information in the premium mastermind section. Which kinda sucks.  A much better way to go would be to just stop allowing me access to things I haven’t paid for but their membership software doesn’t do that.

Third one of the other membership sites  I wanted local copies of the videos, as they way they organize the site, you can’t watch a video and actually see the slides and take notes at the same time unless you use a spare PC, which make it hard for me to learn the site.

In every one of these cases downloading the videos is perfectly permitted and encouraged, as it’s for personal -not pirated use.  You almost never have the permission to reupload the site to make it ‘your’s” but in some cases (like in the case of employee training) it’s borderline, just make sure you only grant permission to authorized parties.

How to get a copy of that website for safe keeping.

The good news is there are a few different ways to go about this important if somewhat daunting task.

Manual This is great if you only need a few files, pick and choose style.  You can just use the browser to right click over a link and hit save as, or  from the main menu choose File>Save As> Webpage Complete.  This however won’t download video files on say S3 or youtube to keep them safe.   The reason for this is that it’s saves the html file verbatim, and keeps the links intact pointing to the web.

If it’s a video on say youtube there are a few different websites services for this like keepvid and  FireFox plugins like Orbit downloader.

In a pinch when people make it hard to find the video (e.g. EZS3) you can often use the firefox plugin firebug to see where the files are coming from and open the the file in new tab then save it. Firebug is meant as a web development tool (and it kicks butt at this).  Basically how you use it, look at this 9 step picture.

9 Steps to Using Firebug to download a Video

Last I should say there are some times when people stream video, that video cannot be saved via any of these approaches, as the video never hits  your harddrive ever. In this last case you can use any screen capture program (Screenflow on a Mac, Camtasia on a PC) to do a capture of everything.  This is particularly great for webinars on gotomeeting.

Automated: If you have a lot of files special software is website rippers, that basically behave as you would viewing the site, except instead of saving it to a local cache they save it permanently to a folder of your choice.

So there are many tools to help you automatically download entire website for later.  They have basically have the responsibility to automatically follow each and every link from a given start page and download each and every file much like google’s search engine bots crawl your site, and once downloaded rewrite the links to something local and not still on the web.   This can actually be relatively complicated job given most sites link out to many other resources (like amazon S3) to host media files, or cross promotions. You have to sometimes setup boundaries on what you do and don’t follow, you don’t want to download the entire web!

Generally you first start a “project” that will contain all the files (e.g. 1 project might be 1 website) , so in my case I needed 3 projects, one for each site.  These projects can exist in various formats: the raw files as they exist on the web, or various compressed archives like zip folders or “chm” help files, which saves space and makes them say easy to share with mastermind or employees.   In all cases these tools try to download everything at a fast rate so will both hog the netconnection and consume significant CPU, so I recommend doing this when you aren’t trying to do something super important at the same time, or better yet start it when you go to sleep etc and check it in the morning.   Also it’s generally a good idea to make sure these files are virus checked in case the site got hacked.

There are MANY programs that do this, I tried the first 3 that caught my eye searching google for “download website offline viewing“, alternate search terms to try are “download entire website”

3 Website Software to Download for Offline Viewing

• Htttrack, this is an open source free, near the top of the results.  It appears to be a command line utility minimal UI.  It worked fine for normal sites, but I couldn’t figure out how to get it to work with the password protected websites requiring a non popup login.  Though looking at it’s logs I was able to see that one of the sites was using the WP membership site plugin Aweber which I couldn’t have known before hand. It was the cheapest as it was opensouce/no cost.
• SpideSoft’s Webzip:    this is not free but it has a fully functional 30 day trial, which for my purposes was good enough as I didn’t need this for more than a week.  They’ve been out for it seems a couple of years, various copyright dates on the software.  This is based on InternetExplorer so it’s workflow is different, and it worked better than Httrack for the password sites.  Basically with it’s built in browser, you browse like you would normally to the part of the site you want to copy, login if needed, and then hit go.   If needed to purchase they were also the cheapest of the 3. at $39.95 for the normal version.  The UI is reasonably polished and fancy feeling, some questionably graphics showing all the bytes in an bytes out.  I found running on Windows XP that it crashed a few times but was easy to resume from where it left off.  Viewing the results it added a extra note at the top about where the files came from, and the date. There is also a resync website so for example if the contents had changed and you wanted to only download the new ones. By default it stores the site in a conventional file/folder.
• Bimesoft’s SurfOffline:  this is not free but has a 200 link trial, which for my purposes on 2 of the sites wasn’t good enough. It had a polished UI, good reporting on what it’s doing, it also had a visible browser so I could log into the sites before downloading them.    It did not crash like Webzip, but it’s not a fair comparison it also didn’t go as far as the trial version stopped at 200 links.  I found it a bit more limited and market/nagware. After you complete the download pops up a message to upgrade to the full version it had four different versions $39.95 for the standard ‘non-commercial’ version and $69.95 for the non-commercial professional version, commercial versions in both would run *significantly* more.  I couldn’t really figure out what the difference was between the standard and pro version.   It by default stores files in a compressed archive which is a great space saver but I didn’t like, as I prefer to be able to jump to movie files I want.

Screenshot of Webzip, after downloading the PLF website for offline viewing.

At the end I was pretty happy with the trial version of Webzip, it did the job I needed, without costing anything.  If I needed this on a regular basis I would probably investigate some of the others out there, that didn’t require restarting. In any case I imagine that most tools like this run $40, and a 1TB harddrive is about $50 as of this writing, which is nothing compared to the price of one of these pricey courses and the peace of mind having the ability to consume it however you want, whenever you want, however long you want, without being dependent on those pesky gurus.

ADVANCED:
I have what I call a Learning Library currently about  1.5TB in size. It contains ALL the courses I have bought to date, some $10K or so.  In particular it contains on the harddrive, copies of  DVD collections and OCR printed materials I get in those “big box courses” as harddrives are cheap, and DVD’s can get easily damaged or lost in the hustle of life and piles of stuff. OCR the swipe files makes them actually easy to copy and paste from.     Even better is once ripped and converted most are compatible with web browsers, I can tag, organize and even search the files and create hyperlinks to relevant courses on relevant subjects which i can’t easily do with my DVD collection collecting dust on the shelves. Not to mention most IM courses are kinda ugly, not exactly something I like having a showcase of..

TroyNotes, straight shooting in brand spakin' new Texan shirt...you should see the size of the belt buckle

Howdy Yall <–heavy Texan accent.

Right now I’m in Austin, unwinding after the amazing weekend at Perry Belcher and Ryan Deiss’s Traffic and Conversion Summit. I wanted to Welcome the new people I met this weekend thanks for dropping by, and for those of you who didn’t go get you a brief update and share a few ninja or is that cowboy tidbits.

If you didn’t make it, sucks to be you.  Probably $25K+ worth of  information were presented this weekend, for some of us next to free, and there were some tips I’ve never heard anywhere including some real doozies submitted by audience members today, that took even Perry and Ryan back.

I’m going to use R+P from now to refer to Big Bear and Little Bear …er little Napolean, er Ryan and Perry.

The No BullSh!t  MiniReview – Traffic Conversion Summit

The Texan sized organizational system

Sadly this is going to have to be a short review..there isn’t actually a repeat product, and none of you will get to see it, it’s more to let you know what happened.

A 3 day 100% content, pitch free, R+P only event?

That’s how the event was sold.   Definitely some Bullsh!t there.

First there WERE pitches:

• a small 14 person $25K mastermind group P&R are putting together..not aggressively pitched but still a pitch. They should have made that known before hand, it might have been a selling point.
• $200-$300 DVD copies of the 3 days audio and video,  only available to attendees and not for sale uncut…there are some Perry uncut moments which were hella funny. This is a reasonable cost, would prefer download, but I understand.
• a plug for Infusionsoft and a few other vendors, but here it gets tricky…if you use a tool heavily and there’s not any other option on the market, is that a pitch?   R+P have a self proclaimed “frankenstein” approach, I was blown away at how many systems they use.
• The worst pitches actually came from the audience, there should be a no pitch policy from attendees.  Some attendees I thought abused mic privledges..multiple long pitches while up, and religious ones, rambling on, please be respectful.

but on the scale of pitchfestness these almost didn’t register, at say 2-4% .

Perry & Ryan & US in a locked room together… with the lights dimmed.

Second it said only Perry and Ryan would be speaking.  Not true either, there was 1 other standalone speaker on CPV networks (which I’d never heard of…but very cool, if scary if you get wrong) and probably 3-6 other assists, including some enlighting time with Ryan’s implementation team which was somewhat  spontaneous.  There was a good section on offline marketing and some impressive stats when using these approaches effectively.

Drinking from the Firehose 3 days x 9am-7pm…

3 days of tasty information overload

That’s how it was pitched.  Which immediately triggered, a bit of fear…that’s a lot time and info to focus. A tiny bit of bullsh!t.  We ended at 1pm on Sunday. Got started late.

Still this was true in spirit, there was so much information we went over every day it overflowed, and will still be having a long webinar and a video to cover the things we couldn’t get to today. Like customer stick rate and the mysterious “Weapon”

Sometimes bigger is not better.  My biggest concern about big multiday long seminars is wondering how much of the material that will be retained or can acted on once home.  My experience with most events is the take away is very low, especially if there are multiple fast speakers.   Even if your taking detailed notes as fast as I.

However they did several great tactics definitely worth cloning  in your seminars, to maintain attention and tack comprehension. These I can share, use them!

4 Tips to explode seminar attendees attention and take away.

These are excellent strategies used by R+P.

Eliminate Interference Just like taking off an in an airline. Have them turn off cellphones and laptops, encourage peer pressure so nobody has a laptop open. Email and web surfing are huge attention busters…

Do frequent breaks so people can get their coffee, net, nicotine fix as well as feed them sugar

Prenote Take notes for them ahead of time.  Like use this printout to make taking notes for your audience 4x easier.

they printed out all the slides like this.

Effective prenoted slide thumbnails and room to write notes on the side

With the slide thumbnail on the left and several lines to jot notes on, about 6 per page, amazingly most the slides were perfectly readible at that size. Except for some white text on yellow background which is 100% readable exactly nowhere and drawing lines to point out important features on screenshots.

Give an action item page and hot tips. Basically a single page each for people to summarize key stuff, and keep it from getting lost in 100’s of pages of notes.

They offered relatively low cost unedited versions of the event in a non-downloadable version for attendees which is great. By day 3 my head was already full so I missed a ton.  It would be even better if they had a transcription of the event so it can be skimmed.

Timed Delivery just like coated asprin. One of the most subtle tips is they handed out the printouts  for the section right before the presentation. While this was somewhat a break in the flow it kept people from jumping forward and not paying attention, diminishing overload, and somewhat of an icebreaker when people were handing things out. Same trick works in continuity programs.

Rotate speakers. having multiple speakers with different styles helps keep peoples attention and on long breaks like this, keep people from burning their voice out.  Ryan and Perry are perfect, almost like good cop and bad cop. They play off each other well.

Oh and deliver good content, and allow people to ask questions and raise objections is huge at keeping people’s attention.

The resultant focus was so intense you could hear the audience turn the pages of notes at the same time!

Unanimous Standing Ovations

Perry and Ryan setout to create an unsurpassed value and totally overdeliver and pulled it off into  standing ovation territory.

Standing ovations can be cliche, and generally being contrarian, I don’t feel compelled to join the crowd.  However I’ve put on seminars of this scale and it was amazingly smooth. Most people will not appreciate how hard it is to make it look this easy AND record it AND order stuff.  There were a few camera and remote control glithes, minor details, but they are par for the course.  When it came to thank Perry + Ryan,  and the options were, clap or stand or scream, I chose a and b, and I was one of the first ones up.

It’s the  things you can’t predict that make going to these events so exciting.  I have  P+R’s stuff already from the solid and cheap get money from google system which has most of their products which I know reasonably well. I expected far less new information. For every hour of material there are onionskins peeled back, revealing of  insights and tactics they never put into courses.  The candid nature of talking about vendors, who’s good bad etc is something that usually costs seriously tens to hundreds of thousands of dollars in testing and headaches

I’m pretty sure this would be an IM  event of the year,  how often do you get the peek behind the curtain of guru’s actually making money in action?  Unreserved access for 3 days to interrupt them while presenting with questions.  The use of  the nifty named things like  “The machine”  was just 1 of about 12 specific new invaluable things I learned, each of them alone being worth the trip. I’m so excited to start putting these things into action…and improving on them in a few cases.

One of the shocking and sad things is that this will be the last seminar like this for awhile..possibly ever. Unlike most Guru’s and one of the reasons I like them, is  Perry and Ryan actually make more money of the real niche businesses than the do the IM training business, and since they haven’t touched those businesses in 6 months or more and have many new tricks will be returning to focusing on their biggest money makers and turning of the lights on new product creation for an unknown period of time.

2 Instant Businesses created FOR me in 4 hours.

Talk about Shock and Awe, I basically dropped everything I came to the conference with and came home with  not 1 but 2 *Instant* businesses mostly created for me.   This is how I feel:

Playing Texan sized guitar, in Austin music capital

Once backends in place, both are easily million dollar a year businesses, and eventually way way more and much better than the products I’ve been working on for awhile.

Friday my top product in development were:

1. Infoproduct Health And Vanity
2. Infoproduct Productivity
3. Infoproduct Weight Loss

Today it looks like

1. New Application
2. New Info product

My mastermind group is going to be so confused shifting gears

This was despite by best efforts at being a wall flower. Counter intuitivelyI ended up landing new amazing connections and new opportunities.

• Intimate Dinner for 2,with the $80 Million Dollar Man. .. and he paid for it. Wait that came out wrong, rather trying to keep things on the cheap while I dump 110% of my funds into products dev. However If I were into believing in Fate, this would be one of those supporting cases.     I got there late the first day opting to take the bus, and of the 300 seats only a couple were left.  Like guided by traffic cops,  I got directed to the right side with a few pointed arms, and waved to sit down next to a fellow we shall name R.  During the breaks we got to talking, turns out we are about the same age in internet marketing.  Existing in parallel universes he in the business world and I in the tech+creative. We hit it off so well, we spent probably 5 hours tag teaming helping each other’s business from our vantage points.  Ironically both of us are not prone to socializing.   I discovered later he runs about a dozen corporations, just one that does $80 million a year spread across paintball to freight logistics, and has a vast amount of passion and experience he loves sharing it.  There were 300 people in that room, talk about luck!
• Instant Business,. R and I got to talking about one of his new projects a Millionaire Support Group, and he got a little stuck trying to market it.  I have several tools in my content creation framework, I pulled out one of my favorites called Aida’s Aces, a checklist system for creating marketing campaigns for personality based businesses which fit perfectly for what he was needing.  I ran through the I’Do’m mindset activator right before, walked him through it and he loved it.  The lightbulb in his head immediately lit up, and he then proceeded to exploded that single nugget it into a massive industry I was kinda blown away.. much as the inventor of post it notes is probably blown away by how many are sold.  Just not something that occurred to me that is a huge business..in addition if he said I’d make it into a product has the network to get it out to them. And creating that product would only take me a couple of weeks due to my high standards.
• How I landed a JV deal with Ryan Deiss with no list, no connections, and no real product. That would totally sound like internet marketing crap but it’s crazily true.   Let me summarize,
  • Saturday morning I had nothing, not even an intention of changing course.
  • Saturday afternoon I had a new idea from using the I’Do’m on the presentation and just listening. Opportunities pop up all the time if you listen for them.
  • Saturday evening I had a viable working prototype…Admitedly this is because I’ve very good at this sort of thing.  I’m going to keep things quiet for now as to what it is.
  • I create a demo video, I took word pad to create some ’slides’ and used Jing to create a short 2 minute video, as real software always breaks in first demo, I swapped between wordpad and the playback to do the title sections no editing other than pausing Jing, how’s that for ghetto?
  • Sunday afternoon I presented the audio version to the crowd in an Ninja tricks section, which got Ryan’s attention, and gave my email out after the benefit had been established.
  • Sunday late afternoon I had both a invitation from Ryan to have him do a mailing for me on it when it’s done, and one of Ryan’s team essentially design the next version of the product for me, use their many products as beta test with me (proof!), and give me a price point.  *BAM*

This shows creating products is easy and doesn’t have to be complicated, just listen to what people *really* want, look for holes in what’s out there or ways to make things better or  faster or easier or cheaper, and can be made inexpensively and in time.  Tap into pain points and enthusiasm of your core audience, interview them, if you ask the right questions and they will often amaze you with the insights of what they want and what they don’t want,

In more potential fun, one of the books at the hostel lending library is perfect for an iphone app. ..and it’s mostly pictures and almost doesn’t make sense as a book.  4 PhD’s created it, free and out of print. Same idea, different medium.

Back to Los Angeles in 12 hours.

At the hostel I’m staying at, Beatles “Come Together” is playing, perfect theme….everything truly is coming together at a far more rapid rate than I had imagined.  Needless to say I’m ecstatic about all that’s transpired.   So I went out to celebrate, Guinness + skeeball, cafe’s, live music, wandering around downtown Austin, so many things to experience

Truly wierd seeing tie dye shirts in Texas and not Berkeley

Austin is a weird town, half of it is partying and half of it is closed on Saturday and more so on Sunday.  Wandering in and out of stores, I ended up getting a killer if slightly loud texan shirt as a souvenir.

Heavy rock is everywhere here, the cab driver on the way back had DevilDriver cranked up and pointed me to a video of the largest mosh pit 3500 people and propellor hair spinning (watch it). Tripppy

It feels good to be heading home to LA tomorrow.  Rock on!

Be sure to check out the TroyNotes special report Rock’n Austin 2009

be happier than this dog, download the TroyNotes special report

This is a NoBullSh!t Review that covers Chris Carpenter’s Google Cash Detective (aka GCD, gcdetective) + Google Cash Automator (aka GCA, gcautomator).

It is a big package so this review is going to take a bit of time to cover completely and objectively, this will happen across multi-part review so you can jump around.  Here is what is inside the Google Cash Detective Membership:

• Google Cash Detective Tool
• Google Cash Automator
• Several times a week Live Training
• Google Cash Home Study Course videos
• Monthly Landing Page
• Free support
• Moderated Forum of several thousand posts
• Google Cash Revolution

The focus is on Google Cash Detective (aka GCD), while a powerful tool, since It is not a cheap eBook, it is definitely not right for everybody. Since it has some bright spots and some blemishes, and the sales pages are filled with hype, you will want to pay attention.

At the end, you will have a clear picture of what you are getting into, to make the decision if GCD is right for you.

GCD is a small membership site, that has been closed for months but GCD has reopened for an unknown limited period.  Therefore, provided they are still accepting new members, you will have an opportunity to buy it and when you get it through my affiliate link. I will be throwing my well-received TroyNotes of GCD as a bonus to jumpstart you.

About Me:

While you can find more about me in the about tab.  Unlike the hordes of scammy affiliate sites out there I looked at prior to writing this review, I actually use Google Cash Detective on a regular basis.  Here is why I am qualified to give you a NoBullSh!t Review:

• I have used GCD for months (and GCA too, though I’ve stopped using it).
• I actively use it in my own profitable businesses outside the Internet Marketing space.
• I actively participate on the GCD forums seeing others success and triumphs.
• I’ve been through most of the training (there is quite a bit) and have summarize the key points in the TroyNotes.
• Since I make money off my other niche products, my opinions can’t be bought. I hate hype.

The Review covers 6 Key Areas

• What is it?
• How do I benefit from it?
• Where did it come from, how does it work, and where is it going?
• How well are other people doing using it?
• How would I use it, and what can’t you do with it?
• Is it right for my business?
  

We’ll cover each in a page. So without further ado lets’s go:

CLICK to watch the Video Tour:  (5 min)

This was written near the end the refund period (around April 8th) inside the Google Cash Detective— after honestly trying several things with no success and watching many frustrated users. Sadly, this is hard to sugar coat in humor.

—————————————————————————————————————-

Being honest, I find myself on the fence and confused as to whether or not I should continue or get a refund for GCD.

I don’t think there is one answer, I really think it does depend on where you are in the game, and what you have at your disposal.

For me, I measure things by opportunity costs, and progress towards desired outcomes.

The desired outcome for most here, I imagine, is making money as quickly as possible and eliminating the possibility of losing money as much as possible.

If you ONLY had $2k in your hand, right now, you could spend it on on either:

1. GCD/GCA (1yr subscription)
2. 20x $100 test campaigns or 10 landing pages
3. Developing 10 informational products

**Since GCD/GCA will never send you a paycheck** and you NEED to get campaigns/products up to get a paycheck. If I only had $2k, it would be no question I’d go with the latter two… However if you have more than that, the answer gets less clear…murky even.

So what do you need to make Money Online?

Rabid Market + Good Marketing + Good Product = Success

or

Rabid Market + Better Marketing than your Competitors + Better Product than Competitors = Success

Finding a market can be done in a bunch of different ways. In the test phase, you want 20-30 solid keywords not 1000’s, and there are multiple ways to achieve this: WordTracker, Wordpot. To determine profitability use slower/complimentary approaches like Affiliate Espionage.

Here is the key quandary to me, given the above…

Just how useful is GCD as a tool?

PROS

• Months, eventually years of data to search through.
• You CAN find profitable campaigns.
• You CAN find good affiliates to stalk.
• You CAN easily find hot markets.
• You CAN EASILY find what’s NOT working (e.g. Fapturbo froth+churn)..this could save some serious $$$.
• You are surrounded by a good community here going through the same challenges on the same tools.
• The spy and automation tools are here to stay, and are changing the affiliate marketplace, get used with them, or else you will be out of business in a year. Being here can help shape them in the direction you want them to go.

CONS

• You CAN find other people’s profitable campaigns…. but that doesn’t mean they will be profitable for you, just by cloning.
• GCD keyword research many not be any more profitable than using traditional approaches (in at least one seminar with Frank, he didn’t use GCD at all).  This is a core frustration— As I am reading through the forum, I see many frustrated cloners wondering why they haven’t made a single sale on a campaign using a strategy that should supposedly work. This is not that they aren’t making good money, that I could understand…just zero sales! It’s not GCD’s fault, it’s just a tool that collects data we tell it. GCD has limited knowledge of the past, but it is not omniscient to ‘reality’ of the living breathing marketplace as it exists right now, and isn’t a crystal ball at all. I wish I had better answers to this one.
• Like the Death Star, GCD it’s operational but not fully complete, and not easy to use. I know from personal experience in high-tech startups how difficult building apps of this scale are. ..I know that Chris and team are working very hard on it. I do empathize…it’s a small team, and there are only so many hours in a day! In one of the training videos Chris said he’s spending 15hr days…I’ve been there. Regardless, as a consumer I am disappointed. Maybe I got blinded by the sales video and copy which made it appear like GCD was solid and complete and bug free, and would be a genie in the bottle. It wasn’t, the training that is up is great, but incomplete, and guessing at present rate a month or two away from completion. So this feels a bit like supply your own manual. I’ll admit, part of my dissatisfaction is pride, had it been my product I would not have released the product in the state I was in. To their credit, Chris and team have given an extra time, and are headed in the right direction.

Just how useful is GCA as a tool?

GCA too is an advanced feature— I know how it’s supposed to work…but I don’t know how to use it (I really couldn’t comprehend the training videos) …or even if I can use in conjunction with tools like Affiliate Prophet, which I DO see immediate return on investment for.   I may be wrong as I don’t fully understand..but I don’t think GCA is meant for new campaigns. In the beginning of a new campaign, I’m not convinced that any tool can absolve a person from paying attention and learning what’s going on, or even if that’s a desirable goal. Just my opinion that if you care to make money, you should care about what people are REALLY searching on, and what terms are really converting to sales, adjusting copy/ads as you go. No tool can fully automate that.

Again, if I am just starting out with 20/30 keywords, Adword Editor is tedious, but easy enough to use. Long term with dozens of campaigns… I can totally see the value of GCA and $97/mo is cheap, cheap cheap…once those campaigns are profitable, and there is ‘money to spare’.

Looking at hot sellers on clickbank, out of curiosity, I shelled out some play money for the latest one rising up the ranks.  It positions itself with a tasty offer.

How To Get Unlimited Targeted Free Traffic Without Adwords, SEO, PPC, Blogging, Social Bookmarking, And Web 2.0.

Given PPC spending can be like buying a new car every month, I find it useful to continually research what small gem they might offer. It comes from www.eslumdog.com, a product from Latif, apparently an Internet Marketer who’s been around awhile.

Product Overview and Unboxing Video:

In the scheme of internet marketing products, it’s a relatively inexpensive course overall FE $97, 3 possible up sells bringing the FE+BE up to $97+$97+$67+$47 = $308.  No membership or continuity.

This is the product structure:

• Main Course: 61 PDF’s – all but 15 are 1 pagers, with many useful flow charts $97
• Up sell #1: Videos 15 Screen casts of the material in the PDF’s plus some walkthroughs. $97
• Up sell #2:  “The eBanker” 13 page PDF $67

- Promoting affiliate deals with your list, note: must have a list first.

• Up sell #3:  “The eMillionaire” 17 page PDF  $47

- Building and scaling your success, making friends with the gurus and entering new niches, even those you’re not an expert with.

I’m guessing the primary reason for most people to buy it is the free traffic secrets; It’s certainly the same reason why I got interested.  This is actually only a very small portion of the course… just 1 of the 15 modules; this seems to be a bit misleading as to how it’s positioned in the sales letter.

Depending on where you are coming from some of the secrets might not be so secret at all. I’d be surprised if there’s any intermediate marketer not familiar with most of the methods mentioned.

That said, it is still a good reminder that PPC + SEO are just tools… very useful tools…but there are many ways to get traffic, the traffic module goes into 9 non-social media methods all should already be known to mid-level marketers.

Just like you may need a portfolio of video games to keep you entertained, and an investment portfolio to keep you fed when you retire. You’ll need a ”traffic portfolio” to ensure stable growth and avoid the ever changing whims of Google, as well as help stave off competition…who WILL use these approaches.

“Free” is a bit of a stretch. Free as in it doesn’t cost you like PPC and CPA per action, but in the rather indirect and opportunity costs.  Like what’s an hour a day of your time worth to you when you’re already overloaded with everything else?

Here’s what the product says you DON’T need, but seems to partly use anyway:

• SEO- I would say this is semantics, many of the approaches mentioned are what I classify as SEO backlink love
• PPC- not covered
• Blogging- but is covered as one of the free approaches
• Social Bookmarking- depends on how you define this.
• Web 2.0.- I don’t know what is quite meant by that.

Using a blog is one of the several methods recommended; if you run a good blog, you know it takes significant amount of time to build up good content, and a ramp up period before you actually get traffic— If you are paying for premium content to be written.

JV’s are another ‘free’ approach mentioned and here you need to be very careful to make sure that you have a solid product before spreading the good word, and for this PPC is one of the quickest, disposable methods. In short, if you’re starting out you still are in my opinion, best served with PPC.  There are other approaches to getting the costs of those down, especially if you use the FEBECC model.

Product Breakdown:

The product has 15 modules, which is mirrored in the PDFs and in the screen casts. As you can see it’s nicely structured, logically organized and I feel is easily replicatable for a new user knowing little to nothing, as well as organized enough that an advanced user can easily get to the holes they might be missing.  Kudos for that! Many (maybe even most) info products…kindda suck in this area.

1. The Plan
2. The Groundwork
3. The Merchandise
4. The Perks
5. The Cash
6. The Realm
7. The Pitch
8. The Handshake
9. The Logistics
10. The Showroom
11. The Guardian
12. The Traffic
13. The Home Run
14. The Network
15. The Aftermath

I found the text on the light side.  Wide spaced, despite being big there actually isn’t massive amount of information in any of the modules.

The up sells I found less value on than the core product. In fact I’m planning on returning them; they didn’t really deliver on the sales hype.   But then I’ve already heard this information before, for somebody not familiar with the ways of Super Affiliates it might be a revelation. As always with Clickbank if you’re not happy you can get a refund.

Production Value:

Production value was good to average for internet marketing products.   Again coming from the area of high end multimedia development, and getting whipped for small pixel level details, I always am disappointed by simple things like typos in products I’m paying reasonable dollars for… though I know it’s easy to let slip, still.

PDFs:

Cons

• Several typos, misspellings.  Not horrific.
• Many files to track (I personally would have preferred more consolidation of the one pages), but this might help you go through them and find them easier

Pros

• solid organization
• decent font and layout
• good one page quick start guides
• schematics and flow charts

Screencasts:

If you opt for the video up sell, The ‘videos’ are self contained swfs (assumes you can know how to play swfs standalone), screen captures of basic PowerPoint, minimal animation, almost no graphics, and the audio done by an tends to clip and click like it’s a cheap headset…Which I found grating, but still beats reading.

If you want to learn the information, I think you should get the videos. Watch the videos first and then get into the PDFs which have the body of information.  It will make more sense. The videos also have the benefit of having a seek function so it’s possible to skim through the presentations visuals.

Cons

• Audio clipping from the presenter on mine… Grating.
• Seek stopped functioning once but restarted okay

Pros

• cute accent for the speaker
• integrated seek (great for skimming)
• Easy to put on in the background
• No schematics in the PDFs, at least in the ones that I’ve come across so far

The Website Sales Flow Review:

Just a reminder that if you’re interested in marketing you should always be studying how YOU are being marketed to, like what works to get you grab your Amex Platinum credit card and what doesn’t. So you can use it yourself…odds are others like you will respond the same way.

Unlike the plethora of Launches lately, eSlumdog’s eMillionaire follows a more conventional multi-page sales flow.   They offer 4 free videos to opt a presale-opt-in.  They demonstrate proof by showing orders coming in at times like 5 in a minute, and borrow proof from unnamed gurus. Who- yes do use the strategies

I found the pages sales copy triggered my hype-o-meter. Would have preferred it tone down a notch or two.  As in my opinion like the the up sells, it leads to buyer remorse, and this leads to untrusting of the person selling, and worse case ranting online.  Like the first person on Google under ‘eSlumdog review’ was a person who gave the program 1 star.  Surrounding that were a billion scammy affiliate style reviews.

Reverse engineering the sales campaign revealed some clever use of clickbank, hat off!   I’ve never encountered anybody use clickbank in ways approximating one-click up sells before.  The sales channel takes the user across 3 up sells, and 1 post sale opt-in (with a phone field?…what’s up with that?). Each up sell is actually a different clickbank product, woven together relatively seamlessly.

A true one-click has less friction -I found having to fill out the clickbank form several times annoying, but the sales copy does a good job of building interest,  So from a marketing perspective the experience and I bet results are similar to using a true One-Click up sell.

Conclusion:

If you are just interested in traffic you will likely be disappointed or confused as its only fraction of the content.

If you have decided on product creation (vs. affiliate marketing vs. licensing vs. etc.) but haven’t yet gotten a product on the market, or gotten a list. eSlumdog core product is one of the better get started quickly ones I’ve come across recently with enough depth to last awhile and give you clues to where to go.

It’s really aimed at entry-level to intermediate level.  Solid fundamentals presented in relatively small easy to digest chunks on info product development and marketing.    If you know the importance of Your Identity, Rabid Lists, what JV’s are, Articles and E-zines are then this product is probably not for you and I’d ignore the last 2 up sells.

As always you’re mileage might vary and clickbank makes the process risk free.

If you’re interested, check it out via my link or go directly there via www.eslumdog.com
and let me know what you think here.

P.S. If you are interested in a higher res reverse-engineered sales flow let me know or a particular campaign you want me to review, contact me at troy @ troynotes dot com
P.P.S. Found some other people reviewed the product on twitter..
[1] not a fan
[2] wahms (found it hard to read and thinly disguised affiliate flavored)

This is my first post/review on the MC#2 Seminar last weekend down in SD.

I’ve got to say I was pretty blown away,

and am still reeling. Oh my frigging head

Could be bad limes in the coronas inducing LSD like hallucinations, could be  what happens after you’ve seen the Spandanko video (http://www.masscontrolsite.com/d1.html, http://www.masscontrolsite.com/d2.html) about 20 zillion times, could be seeing Boy Shakira dressed like Britney spears (which is soo wrong…)

Alright, time for public humiliation..

Warning: Profanity Ahead

*Cock*While I’m used to conferences and even giving presentations.  This was my first one in the internet marketing space… it was very different, in some ways it felt like high school graduation rehearsal. I kept expecting the inflatable beach ball and inflatable nude lady to be bouncing around.  *Cock*  Beers were on stage more than once, at one point there was tiff on who had more to drink, (Frank score: 6).   Pranks abounded: Speakers got spanked while presenting, “cock” flashed on the monitors trying to throw off speakers sometimes at the interval I’m using them here… As an attendee you weren’t allowed to ask questions unless you’re wearing a viking helmet, with blond braids.

Many colors, one voice…the godfathers of Internet Marketing

Frank Kern, Eben Pagan, Jeff Walker, Perry Belcher, Ed Dale hanging at the secret crib...yes I was there the fly on the wall.

Since the common thread is marketing, the seminar attracted a diverse range of people.  Complete newbies to real estate, stock trading;  Those who make $1M per launch easily; and those dissatisfied with 80K months.   Almost all of the publicly known gurus of Internet Marketing we there, it was like the coachella of Internet Marketing.

It does strike me how lucky I am to be in LA, near SD, so much happens with the few hour drive, many attendees came from far away. One guy came all the way from London! I met someone at the hostel who didn’t even open the course or attend the sessions, his goal was just to see and meet his 2 favorite speakers (one didn’t even show up!). I almost forgot that such conferences are 90% networking focused— there are lots of successful people who garnered deals from places like this.

You’ll love my nut..notes…

Seriously 3 Days… 300Kb of notes.  The original phrase came from a video they ran early on. Over and over and over again. Very funny it’s on youtube.

During these conferences, most people retain just 1-3% of information presented so it was a surprise to see just a few people (that includes me!) taking down notes, even when the speakers were discussing relevant points.  I was indeed a newbie— maybe, those who don’t take down notes don’t really need the information. There were a few I talked to who’d been in it for years- a decade or so. They weren’t there for the information, they came to build their network.

Like a summer blockbuster, many presentation were great fun, but most weren’t something I’d want to see again… Especially since rewatching the videos, listening to the audios, they add up to 3days of presentations I’d rather be doing something.   Plus who knows when they will be posted, how much they will cost, and even if the info is still relevant given how fast the marketing community moves.

Looking around during the session it was also interesting to see when people were and weren’t taking notes and responding indicating where people have mastered or need.  Like on the 3rd day one of the presentation went into modelling business in spreadsheets and how such small changes can make the difference between hobbie (2K mo) and 1.5M business are.   Another earlier showed how small15% increases in 5 core areas could double the net profits.   I was kinda surprised at the reaction as spreadsheets are my first plan of attack when doing business viability.  Given how little the differences are the actual numbers,  I wonder if this is why so many are struggling.

I have links to those spreadsheets, in It may take me a few days to get the notes in a point that can be shared…stay tuned.

Upcoming:
Day 1:  Notes + Review
Day 2:  Notes + Review
Day 3:  Notes + Review
Wrap-up

If you want to help me out, post any particular questions you want me to focus on.

If you went to the conference, you should also join the super exclusive private forum: http://masscontrolprivate.ning.com/