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

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.

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!

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!