In my inbox this morning was an email from Scott Boulch, author of "The Death of Adsense" and a number of other reports. Scott was letting his list know that he has a brand new report out entitled "The Internet Marketing Cure". In this report he proclaims that the "Digital Ebola Virus Strikes Internet Marketers, Business Fatality rate over 90%!" which struck me as being a suspiciously similar metaphor to the "Diarrhoea Out of Control Marketing System" we here at the World Wide Web Gurus coined at the time of Frank Kern's Mass Control launch back in February. You don't suppose Scott has been reading this blog do you?
Scott also pointed me in the direction of Rick Butts blog and his post "Unsubscribe From Whomever Emailed You Stompernet".There is a heated (and extremely interesting) discussion going on over there about the current state of the internet marketing industry. In particular there is a lot of debate about the recent Stompernet relaunch. A number of big names from the industry have commented, including Frank Kern, Nathan Anderson and Scott Boulch himself (which I guess isn't a surprise in all the circumstances). There's been no input from Brad Fallon or Andy Jenkins yet, but Dan Thies, Stompernet's SEO guru, has put their side of the case with a number of comments. Rick has recently added a comment of his own to the effect that "NO MORE STOMPER-BASHING" and "I will delete any further posts that take personal shots here. Let's all get back to work – and focus on the positive".
Despite this I couldn't resist the urge to make a comment of my own, which included the facts about my own experiences as a member of Stompernet, and which wasn't entirely positive. My comment is currently visible, and it doesn't look like Rick moderates his comments before displaying them. It will be interesting to see if Rick classes my contribution as "taking personal shots". Watch this space!
P.S. Just over an hour has passed since I clicked the "publish" button. According to SEO Elite this post is now ranked 10 out of 619,000 on a Google search for "digital ebola virus" (no quotes). We were ranked number 1 for "mass control sucks" (no quotes) but at the moment Google now shows this new post at number 148.
Filed under Internet Marketing by on May 28th, 2008. 1 Comment. 
Mark Joyner has has been releasing products thick and fast for the past few months. As part of this series of launches Mark has also been giving away lots of great information at no cost whatsoever. As from today you can download a copy of his best selling book The Irresistible Offer. Just go to Mark's simpleology web site and sign up. No money down. No charge at all!
Apparently Mark has persuaded his publisher, John Wiley & Sons, to conduct a marketing experiment. Mark's theory is that giving away the ebook will actually boost sales of the print version of the book. Is he right? I guess only time will tell, but we'll conduct a little experiment of our own to try and test out this idea. Today The Irresistible Offer is at number 4099 in the Amazon.com list of best selling books. We'll keep track of the book's position in the Amazon charts and let you know how it fares over the next few weeks.
You may be asking yourself whether it's worth your time downloading and then reading a 200 page book. I suggest you just do it, but if you need a bit more information here is a quote from the dust jacket to give you a flavour of what the book is all about:
For too long selling has been about manipulating a message and manipulating a consumer. The Irresistible Offer presents a new, effective, and ethical way to sell based on what you're selling, not how you're selling it.
If that has whetted your appetite here's some praise for the book from Joe Vitale, star of "The Secret" and the author of quite a few marketing books himself:
I've read every book on marketing printed in the last 150 years. This is the first breakthrough in over fifty years. A truly brilliant, practical, and inspiring book. Destined to be a classic and a collectible. It's a masterpiece.
Like I said, if you're at all interested in marketing in general, or internet marketing in particular, get your copy of The Irresistible Offer now. Just do it.
Filed under Beginning to Blog, Internet Marketing by on May 12th, 2008. 1 Comment.
As part of the launch of our innovative Diarrhoea Out of Control™ Marketing System, and to highlight our SEO skills, I did a "Surfing with Frank Kern" publicity stunt over on the Warrior Forum at the weekend. It seems to have stirred up a bit of a hornets nest, and currently the entire thread is nowhere to be seen. Now you may think that toilet humour is beneath a serious internet marketer, but there is a very serious point to this, which hopefully you can discern from some of the other posts on this blog. Fortunately I had camtasia working when I made the first post. The resulting, fair quality, video can be seen below:
The link which caused me such amusement is:
http://www.google.com/search?hl=en&gl=US&q=diarrhoea+out+of+control
Does it still work for you? Is it amusing? Is it and/or the video enlightening?
P.S. This post was first published at 09:05 GMT. It is now 10:45 GMT. We are already at number 4 in the Google natural search rankings for the keyphrase surfing with Frank Kern and number 7 for Frank Kern Surfing. Would you like to know how we did that? Sign up for our newsletter!
P.P.S. As I hinted at over on the Warrior Forum yesterday, in the topic which you can no longer see, I used TubeMogul to upload several copies of the above video to different video sites last night. Click on my "toilet humour" link again now. Are you beginning to see any light at the end of the tunnel?
P.P.P.S It is now 15:27 GMT. I've been trying to get on the Warrior Forum for ages to say good morning to our fellow surfers from SoCal, but there seem to be some problems. Earlier it said "Temporary Closed Due To A Security Issue". Now it tells me "Active Server Pages error 'ASP 0126' – Include file not found - /forum/Default.asp, line 40 - The include file 'config.asp' was not found."
Filed under Internet Marketing by on Feb 4th, 2008. 1 Comment.
In our customary fearless fashion we have performed a thorough review of Frank Kern's Mass Control System, and here is our verdict:
Frank Kern's Mass Control Sucks
Now we haven't been provided with a free review copy by Frank, in much the same way as Michael Koenigs failed to provide us with a free trial of his Traffic Geyser service, so how can we be so hasty in our judgement given that the product doesn't launch for another hour. At least when we declared that Affiliate Video Brander sucks we had tried the product. We even made a video demonstrating it's shortcomings.
Well, it's all down to the marketing. We're very familiar with the way the pay per click game works, and if you've been following our progress here on our blog you'll see we learn fast. These days we're no slouches at the natural search game either. The fake review page, such as Frank Kern's http://www.masscontrolreview.com, is familiar territory for us. How can we sure it belongs to Frank you may ask. It's got his picture on it, sure, but as we well know using an affiliate video brander is all the rage these days. Well it's an educated guess, but Frank provides a link to the site in yesterdays press release "Mass Control Marketing Revealed By Maniac Surfer Frank Kern".
Now let's go take a look at the search listings in the run up to zero hour by first of all doing a Google search for Mass Control. MassControlReview.com is right there on the first page at number 5. This time let's search for Frank Kern Mass Control. You can see at number 4 in the paid search listings an ad entitled Frank Kern Sucks? Now this is a title we'll be going to use later on if we find a need to give our traffic an emergency boost. The thing is though, if you clicked on our ad you'll end up on this post, which is undeniably of the opinion that Frank Kern sucks. Now click on that other ad. You'll end up on another fake review page that says "A brutally honest review of Frank Kern's Mass Control." However for some strange reason there is an affiliate link at the bottom saying "Click Here to Invest in Mass Control AND get your Limited Bonuses" in big blue letters.
Excuse me just a moment. It's less than 45 minutes to launch, so I'm going to go away and click publish, and come back and finish this post after I've had a cup of coffee. Always assuming I'm not feeling too sick to drink it, of course.
P.S. I never did get to drink that cup of coffee. Not for the reason you're thinking though. I watched our search results for an hour or so, firing off emails with progress reports. We got to number 1 on Google for our longest tail target keyphrase before that hour was over.
Content with that I went for a walk with Dave, the amazing guy who does the music for our internet videos. It was good to clear the stench from our nostrils. The sun had already gone down, so we didn't make it all the way to Traffic Heaven. Nestled in the hills, gazing out towards the ocean with a fresh breeze in our faces, a nagging thought started at the back of my mind. Some people might find it disturbing, but in all the circumstances I found it remarkably refreshing.
"What if the masses don't want to be controlled?"
Filed under Internet Marketing by on Feb 1st, 2008. 7 Comments.
A big white box finally arrived on my doorstep this morning! This contained "the complete first season" of the Next Internet Millionaire reality show including one DVD of special features. From the subtitle maybe another season or two can be expected?
The Secret Classroom home study course itself consists of 12 additional DVDs containing the full presentations of all 12 internet marketing gurus that appeared on the show. There is also a spiral bound book of "bullet points" from the 12 presentations. The DVDs are very professional, but some extra proof reading would have improved the book! Nonetheless there are some great quotes to be gleaned within its pages. Here is one from each of the gurus:
"Most people do not apply the information that they learn" – Mark Joyner
"Success leaves traces" – Armand Morin
"Prove to people that what you are selling them works" – Jeff Walker
"Attack the weakness in the leader's strength" – Marlon Sanders
"People tend to overestimate what can be done in a year and underestimate what can be done in 5-10 years" – Brad Fallon
"Find something that works. Replicate it. Scale it" – Kristopher Jones
"The second word in 'Viral Marketing' is marketing. Something can go viral and not make any money" – Mike Filsaime
"Most people are 'afraid' of making videos" – Michael Koenigs
"Bad copy kills companies" – Ray Edwards
"If you can't be found, you are dead" – Dave Taylor
"It is more important to know a market, than to know about marketing" – Perry Marshall
"You are only as good as your reputation" – Rich Schefren
A more detailed review will follow when we've had a chance to look at the course DVDs, and also at the one time offer "Closed Door Sessions". These are interviews with 11 of the 12 gurus conducted by Heather Vale, apparently not seen or heard even by the contestants on the show (Heather didn't interview Kris Jones for some reason). I'm particularly interested to discover what Michael Koenigs has to say about using videos to generate traffic!
Filed under Internet Marketing by on Dec 31st, 2007. Comment.
Our very first video, tentatively entitled "Traffic Geyser Heaven" is now in production!
We still have made no sales, so it looks like we've missed out on the $1 trial for Traffic Geyser. I wish I knew what Frank Kern had to do to get his absolutely 100% free trial of the service, and therefore some extra free publicity for the relaunch of his Mass Control marketing system. Not being in possession of Frank's contacts it looks like we'll have to make our own video, and promote it any way we can that costs $0 or less.
We waited for the weather to improve yesterday, and by late afternoon at least the rain had stopped so we shot about half an hour of footage. As you will see in a day or two conditions were against us, so we have a lot of editing to do. In the meantime I just recorded a screen capture video courtesy of the free version 3 of Camtasia. We are now sandwiched between Eric Holmlund and Joel Comm in the Google natural search rankings! Take a look here.
Filed under Internet Marketing by on Dec 10th, 2007. Comment.
It's now just over an hour since I posted the article about Traffic Geyser, and I've set SEO Elite off to do it's thing again. Where do we stand on the natural search rankings now? Well we are moving up for all sorts of keyphrases on a variety of search engines. Now I know that I have a weird sense of humour, but it for some strange reason it causes me great amusement to discover that we are currently ranked 17 on AltaVista for "blogger gurus" (without the quotes) and 21 on AllTheWeb for "adsense gurus" (again without the quotes). This is hugely entertaining, but is not really very likely to put bread on the table.
I have a feeling that it will be ultimately more relevant that my recent post is now ranked by Google at 16 out of 796 on a search for traffic geyser michael koenigs. Interestingly this is a few places ahead of Joel Comm's own YouTube review of Traffic Geyser. We are also in position 101 out of 238,000 for just traffic geyser. To round things off we have also inched up to 104 at Google on a search for Secret Classroom.
On the traffic front Google Analytics reports that we got a few clicks on the natural search results yesterday, a lot of which were undoubtedly just us testing things. We also got 13 referrals from the Warrior Forum. A tiny trickle of traffic is a whole lot better than nothing at all!
To the best of my knowledge total sales still stand at $0.
Filed under Internet Marketing by on Dec 8th, 2007. Comment.
We urgently need to get one dollar or more into our currently empty PayPal account. We're going to try to do that by selling at least one copy of a very low cost product from one of the experts from the Secret Classroom. A quick bit of research revealed the ideal ebook – Joel Comm's Adsense Traffic Secrets.
To discover this little gem I headed over to 7dollaroffers.com and browsed around. As luck would have it a couple of products from Joel Comm himself are on sale at $7 dollars a pop. The advantage of 7dollaroffers.com in our current predicament is that 75% of all sales we make are paid directly into our PayPal account, which is just perfect. The disadvantage is that this is a statistical thing. On average we get 3/4 of all sales, but the first sale might go straight to the PayPal account of the owner of 7dollaroffers, and we'd still have nothing to pay for our 14 day Traffic Geyser trial. If that happened we'd have to wait for the second sale, and there's no telling how long that might take, because we're still only getting a trickle of traffic.
Is there any kind soul out there who could do us and our experiment a tremendous favour and buy Adsense Traffic Secrets or one of the other $7 products from us? Alternatively if you happen to know Michael Koenigs' phone number please give him a call and ask him if he could make us an irresistible offer that we cannot possibly refuse, even in our currently dire financial state.
Thanks very much in advance.
Filed under Internet Marketing by on Dec 8th, 2007. Comment.
Earlier today I received an email which included a link to some early Xmas gifts from Joel Comm. One in particular caught my eye. Only $1 for a 14 day trial subscription to Traffic Geyser which is the latest brainchild of Michael Koenigs, one of the experts featured in the Secret Classroom.
It sounds like the answer to our prayers. Loads of traffic and a front page Google listing "in a matter of hours". Now I know that I'm biased, but personally I don't think we're doing too badly in terms of getting on the front page of Google. We are certainly lacking traffic just at the moment though. Apparently the Traffic Geyser service makes it really easy to create videos then upload them to a series of Web 2.0 sites. It's the latest thing in traffic generation. Lots of people get to see your video, which generates huge quantities of traffic and you zoom up the Google natural search rankings in no time.
It sounds like just what we need and we're desperate to try it out but there is one small problem. We still haven't made a sale. We are determined not to put any money down, not even one measly dollar, until we can do so out of profits generated from this business
Filed under Internet Marketing by on Dec 8th, 2007. Comment.
We've now got SEO Elite configured to check what progress we have made in the Google natural search results for a variety of keyphrases. Yesterday we just wanted to know if we'd been indexed, which happened very quickly. Today we want to know where we stand for keyphrases that people might actually type into their Google toolbars when trying to find out more about the Secret Classroom course.
Things can change very quickly this early in a campaign, but at the moment on a search for "Joel Comm Secret Classroom" (without the quotes) Google ranks us at number 29 out of 9,930. A search for "Secret Classroom" (again without the quotes) puts us at 108 out of 798,000. Total sales (that I am currently aware of) stand at $0!
Filed under Internet Marketing by on Dec 7th, 2007. Comment.
