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?"

You're probably wondering how we justify the somewhat pretentious title, so I'll try to explain. I first started selling stuff online before the World Wide Web existed. When everyone started getting very excited during the dot com boom of the late nineties I built a one page website and vowed not to waste any more time on the new media until I got my first genuine lead from that site.

The site was listed in a few directories. We got lots of emails from people trying to sell us stuff, but none from anyone considering buying. Then in 2003 the first real lead arrived in my inbox. It wasn't from a potential user, but from an intermediary scouring the web for what their customer was interested in (customised software for routing fleets of trucks). Not ideal by any means, but it did at least count as a real lead so I started taking a interest in internet marketing.

Up to now I've only used pay per click, but a series of events which will be related in future posts have led to this current experiment with natural search. Is it possible in this day and age to produce a decent income from internet marketing without spending half your revenue on acquiring clicks, not to mention a large (albeit virtual) pile of ebooks?