An interesting set of circumstances came about this week, which have led to me writing this preliminary review of Conversion Prophet, and also to us here at the World Wide Web Gurus starting our first pay per click campaign with Google AdWords. I will try to explain.

I received an email from Chris McNeeny yesterday, but with the hundreds of emails I now seem to receive each day I didn't get around to reading it until this morning.  In case the name doesn't ring a bell with you, Chris (sometimes known simply as Chris X.) rose to fame as the author of the "Affiliate Project X" and "Day Job Killer" ebooks. In the email Chris recommended a new product, Conversion Prophet, which is a script that resides on a server somewhere on the internet and does tracking at the keyword level, and also something that their sales letter refers to as a "revolutionary pre-tracking method".  Basically this allows you to split test different aspects of your sales page whilst keeping tabs on the amount of time a visitor stays there before hitting the "Back" button.  The product seems reasonably priced for something that does split testing and keyword level tracking so I got a copy to try out. If the "revolutionary" pre-tracking helps that will be a big bonus too, and make the product even better value.  Having downloaded the script the initial installation onto one of our servers went very smoothly, and it certainly tracked our first few test clicks properly.

Then I went to check out how things looked on a Google search for Conversion Prophet.  If you've read some of my previous posts here on this blog you will know that it came as no surprise whatsoever to me to see a headline on the top paid search result reading "Conversion Prophet Sucks?".  What was more interesting to me though, was at the other end of the paid search results.  There was a  big empty space!  Coupled with the fact that I had got a £30 AdWords voucher from Google from a magazine which expires at the end of this month this was enough to inspire me to write our first paid advertisement.

At this moment we're just direct linking to the vendor's Clickbank sales page via our own tracking software, which is integrated into WordPress. In another hour or two we'll have a dedicated sales page up and running using the Conversion Prophet script.  Come back here over the coming days and we'll let you know how we're getting on, with both our PPC campaign as well as with Conversion Prophet.

Our regular readers will know we are big fans of Mark Joyner and his free simpleology 101 online course.  In fact before I forget to mention it, this seems like a good time to remind you that the simpleology blogging course is also still available free of charge to anyone who blogs about it!

In the last two or three months simpleology has branched out from its beginnings in self development and internet marketing to embrace the arts. Initially came the simpleology Jacque Fresco Teaches Drawing course, which is purely about teaching an artistic technique. More recently two new simpleology courses have been announced, which combine the arts with internet marketing. If you can already write and/or make music, these two new courses will teach you how to promote yourself and your art. They will teach you how to turn your passion for writing or music into an income, if that is something you want to do.

If you are passionate about writing the course to look at is: Will You Be the World's Next Best Selling Author?

If you are passionate about music check out the music promotion course instead: Online Music Fame!

This is a gross generalization, but often creative people are not terribly good at promoting themselves and their work and have traditionally had to rely on (and pay handsomely!) others to do this for them. Now, however, the internet allows artists to dispense with the agents, the managers, the record companies, the publishers, the gallery owners and the media moguls. These new simpleology courses show you how to promote your art directly to lovers of that art throughout the world.

An integral part of the "art of promotion" in 2008 is the internet video. If you are a writer a simpleology competition has just started. To enter the Best Selling Author competition simply make a 2 minute video and upload it to YouTube before midnight on February 26th. Mark Joyner and Richard Webster will give live speed writing training to every entrant, and the 3 lucky competition winners get a whole bunch of goodies, including having their work promoted to Mark Joyner's 250,000 strong list!

Here at the World Wide Web Gurus we do have some experience with internet videos. Here are a couple we did for up and coming British band De Larje This e-mail address is being protected from spam bots, you need JavaScript enabled to view it in the simpleology Online Music Fame Competition, for example.  I suspect most writers are less comfortable with the idea of appearing in a YouTube video than musicians are with making a music video.  However, if you would like to give the simpleology Best Selling Author competition a try, but are unsure about the ins and outs of getting your video made and up on YouTube (and maybe a few other places too!), then please do get in touch with us via our contact form, and we'll help in any way we can.

P.S. For the internet marketers amongst our readers, I clicked the "Publish" button for this post at 13:00 GMT, then I went to make a sandwich and a cup of tea for lunch.  By the time I checked Google at 13:40 GMT we were already at number 6 in the natural search rankings for the keyphrase simpleology online music fame, and number 20 for simpleology best selling author.

We have now used TubeMogul to upload our "Diarrhoea Out of Control™" video to 11 different video hosting sites.  Some of our other videos are also now available on one or two other video hosts apart from YouTube. Today I'm going to go over our search engine rankings, with particular emphasis on the rankings of our videos.  I'll also update you on the fun and games we've been involved in over on the Warrior Forum.

Most exciting of all is the fact that we have at long last generated our first income!  Our PayPal account still reads $0.00, but our Revver account shows "Current Earnings $0.14" Mighty oaks from little acorns grow

If you haven't come across Revver before, it is one of the video hosting sites that TubeMogul can upload your videos to.  Unlike YouTube and most other such sites, Revver attaches advertisements to your videos.  If anyone clicks on one of your ads you get a share of the revenue; a sort of AdSense for video, if you like. Hence our extremely modest, but undoubtedly non-zero, income.

Onwards and upwards to the Warrior Forum.  Two complete topics in which I have made a number of posts are now completely invisible.  One remains, but is now locked, with no further posting possible. Since it seems as though the only way to ensure one's comments hang around for more than a few hours I have started my own topic over there, entitled "Internet Marketing With No Money Down™ ?".  Please feel free to come on over, make a post or two of your own, and join in the fun!

One commentator on the Warrior Forum opined about our "Long tail keywords… what a joke".  I was forced to agree.  It causes me much childish amusement to discover we are currently top of the Google rankings for long tail keyphrases such as Frank Kern Sucks, Mass Control Sucks, and Surfing with Frank Kern. (By and large the same applies to the other search engines too)

If the commentator meant to imply that we are unlikely to become millionaires on the basis of those rankings then I have to agree again.  What of keyphrases that might conceivably convert into income at some point in the foreseeable future?  Well , we are now on the first page of the Google rankings for Affilate Video Brander Review, and our news release to imnewswatch.com is at number 3 AND 4 for just Affilate Video Brander.  On a Google video search we are now number 3 AND 4 for affiliate video brander. Last but most certainly not least we occupy the whole of the first page and a fair chunk of the second for our new brand Diarrhoea Out of Control™!

If you examine that link carefully you will see that each of the videos we uploaded from TubeMogul are ranked seperately.  No duplicate content penalties in Video Heaven! Forget about SEO as you have known it up until now.  From this day forward Video Search Engine Optimization rules! OK?

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?"

As our regular readers will know, here at WWW Gurus we like to keep close tabs on our position in the natural search rankings.  In the course of this research I stumbled upon a wonderful blog post entitled Affiliate Video Brander - What a piece of …

Since reading it I've been wondering what Dave had in mind for those dots in his title.  Maybe you've been asking yourself that question too?  To try and settle the issue once and for all I've set up our very own Affiliate Video Brander poll, which you can see over to the right of this post.  Please cast your vote and let us know your opinion on this contentious matter.  We'll keep you updated as the voting progresses.

Unfortunately the Internet Marketers Anonymous web site seems to be having some connectivity issues at the moment.  Who knows, maybe another marketer with the same host is having a big launch today?  Nonetheless I urge you to keep on trying if you can't get through at first.  The post is the best thing I've read on the internet for a very long time.  In case you have problems accessing the site, here is the video from YouTube that led me there:

On to the results of my natural search research.  Currently our YouTube video about Affiliate Video Brander has moved up to number 5 on a Google Video search for affiliate video brander.  YouTube limits videos to 10 minutes duration, so we have uploaded a longer version of the video to Google Video itself.  After being processed at Google the quality is less than wonderful, but nevertheless it is ranked at number 7.  Dave's video is ranked at 8.

This may be slightly outside our current remit,  but in another capacity I just bought the recently relaunched Affiliate Video Brander (Wealth Warning! - That is an affiliate link). Imagine, if you will, that our reviews are admired throughout the Internet Marketing fraternity for their honesty and thoroughness, and that we were offered a review copy free of charge by Eric Holmlund and Michael Nicholas.  Here is our verdict:

Affiliate Video Brander Sucks

We created a video to demonstrate why we say this so bluntly.  Filmed partly on location at the Traffic Heaven Secret Headquarters, and partly screen capture, here is the first rush:

I don't know about you, but for the last few days my inbox has been bombarded by people promoting Affiliate Video Brander. I wonder if any of them have actually tried using it? Now I'm also getting emails from marketers enticing me with all the wonderful extra bonuses I'll get if I buy from them, as long as I can wait until January 30th, when everyone who has bought resale rights is allowed to start selling their own version of the product. 

The resale rights licence states that "WHILE THIS SOFTWARE HAS BEEN TESTED AND PROVEN TO RUN ACCURATELY, IN THE UNLIKELY EVENT OF ANY USER OR COMPUTER INCOMPATIBILITY ISSUES, THE RESELLER ASSUMES COMPLETE LIABILITY" so I guess that means the buck doesn't stop on Eric or Michael's desk after January 29th.  It will be very interesting, not to mention entertaining, to see how this one develops over the next few days and weeks.

P.S. I clicked the "Publish" button about 10 minutes ago.  This page is currently ranked 114 in the Google natural search rankings for the keyphrase affiliate video brander and is at number 20 for affiliate video brander review.  Our new YouTube video is ranked at number 6 on a Google Video search for affiliate video brander

Kasia and I have spent the last 10 days in Poland, the first night in Warsaw and the rest of the time in Lodz. We'd booked an apartment which came complete with a broadband internet connection, so we could keep blogging over the festive season.  However the apartment proved  to have one or two problems with regard to the other purpose for which we needed it - sleeping.  It was right next to a restaurant, and therefore both noisy and smelly!  We changed to a much more pleasant apartment which was due to have broadband connected before Christmas, but by time we left on the 29th TPSA had still not got the phones working, let alone the broadband internet or TV over IP.

With the conspicuous lack of consistent posting we've fallen back somewhat in the Google natural search rankings for some of the keyphrases we are targeting.  For example we have dropped back from 9 to 16 for traffic geyser michael koenigs, and from 61 to 96 for traffic geyser.  For Secret Classroom we are down to 167 from a peak of 85.   Google has decided to rank a totally different page yet again.  This time it has settled on the full blog, rather than an individual post.

However things have improved considerably for our own brand. Although this website has dropped back to 26 from a peak of 19 we are now firmly on the first page of the Google rankings for Traffic Heaven via a couple of different routes.  Our Traffic Heaven YouTube video is now at number one, and our one page website at trafficheaventhemovie.com (which currently contains a grand total of 46 words) is at number 5.

For some strange reason we have also moved up to number 5 in the Google rankings for blogger gurus.  Actually we would feel far less embarrassed if Google decided to list us on the first page of a search for WordPress gurus, where we already seem to be at number 79 on AlltheWeb and 87 on Yahoo.  This is slightly surprising in view of the fact that this post contains the first ever reference to the word "WordPress" we have made on this site.  I guess it has come about because there is a link to WordPress.org in the "Register" section on every page on the site.

More videos from us soon, including a couple from Poland.  Watch this space!

I'm just catching up with my emails after a couple of days travelling.  In my inbox is a message from Mark Joyner about a new simpleology course about blogging.  Our regular readers will know we are big fans of  previous simpleology courses, and we are also in the business of teaching people how to start to generate an income from blogging without having to spend any money first, not even one dollar!

The new simpleology blogging course fits that bill, since it is currently available free of charge to anyone who blogs about it, so here I am blogging about it using the particular form of words that Mark requested. 

P.S.  It is less than an hour since I first posted this article.  We are already at number 16 (out of 14,200) in the Google natural search rankings for the keyphrase simpleology blogging, despite a certain amount of duplicate content!

We have now left a vast quantity of largely inaudible footage on our cutting room floor.  (Sign up on the right if you'd like to see some of it).  The video is now definitely entitled "Traffic Heaven", and you can see the first cut below.  One or two more edits still need to be made and we need to add music,  maybe also a few more English subtitles for the hard of hearing!  Hopefully you can now get the basic idea though.  Feel free to let us know what you think by adding your comments at the bottom of this page.

On the traffic front we are starting to get a trickle from the Google natural search results. For example somewhat unexpectedly, since we are not explicity targeting the term, we are already at number 2 in the Google rankings for the keyphrase handycam connection.  For the terms we are targeting we have now risen to 9 for traffic geyser michael koenigs (ahead of both Eric Holmlund and Joel Comm ), and 61 for just traffic geyser.  We are still at number 1 for traffic geyser heaven and after starting at 60 four days ago we are now ranked 37 for the title of the video: Traffic Heaven.  For Secret Classroom we have had a slight setback.  Google has got a bit confused and now has us ranked at 147 for a Russian translation of our blog which no longer exists!