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.

As our regular readers will know here at the World Wide Web Gurus we are very excited about the possibilities offered by videos if you are trying to start an internet business with very little money, or indeed no money whatsoever.  Up until now we have been concentrating on video hosting services supported by TubeMogul, particularly YouTube and Revver.

However earlier this week Viddler announced the release of their WordPress video plugin .  Since Viddler also offer a revenue sharing model similar to Revver we thought we would take a much closer look at what the Viddler service has to offer.  To find out what we discovered take a look at this video: 

To summarise our first impressions are that the Viddler service is worthy of a lot of further investigation.  Since we recommend beginner internet marketers join the Amazon associate program, the fact that Viddler have partnered with Amazon to offer revenue sharing to their video publishers is of great interest to us.

As mentioned in the video, the Viddler plugin for WordPress is supposed to allow you to record a video comment to this post direct to your webcam, as long as you already have a Viddler account.  Feel free to experiment with this new service, and let us know how well it works for you.

P.S. The following day (February 29th - most auspicious) Viddler suddenly appeared on my TubeMogul dashboard.  Here is TubeMogul's take on the occasion, and here is Viddler's.  We get a bit closer to Video Heaven!

P.P.S. If you do venture over to Viddler and you're a long time follower of the Open Source movement like me you might like to check out their video conversation with Jonathan Schwartz (CEO of Sun) and Mårten Mickos (now ex CEO of MySQL) about Sun's acquisition of MySQL.

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!