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.

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."

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?"

The sequel to our Traffic Heaven video is now available on YouTube (or just scroll down a bit to see it!).  We have given it the title "Traffic Heaven is in Your Mind".

There are a couple of reasons for this.  In our efforts to be on the first page of Google for our own brand name we find ourselves competing with lots of sites selling the 1968 first album by the British "psychedelic rock" group Traffic - Heaven in is Your Mind.  This came as something of a surprise to me because in Britain the LP was entitled Mr. Fantasy on its UK release in December 1967!  The album only achieved cult status in the US at the time, but the original Rolling Stone review was prescient in declaring the album "one of the best from any contemporary group".

The second reason is that, as regular readers of our blog will know, in our view success at internet marketing is largely in your mind.

The video includes more musings from the Traffic Heaven secret headquarters on how Frank Kern managed to get a completely free trial to Traffic Geyser to promote the relaunch of his Mass Control marketing system, and a plea for Michael Koenigs to give us one too. After all, our need is much greater than Frank's! We also entertained a completely unexpected visitor. Take a look:

Many thanks to Liz for allowing us to include the conversation we had about the absurdities of starting a business with no cash on top of a hill at Christmas.

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.