There seems to be an “old Boys Club” of elite internet marketing Gurus who got in the game early, the names John Reese, Frank Kern, Eben Pagan, Perry Marshall, Yanik Silver and Brad Anthony Jenkins-Fallon come to mind. Through joint ventures and mutual promotion they have  maintained a mystique surrounding their secret guruish knowledge for which they can charge a premium fee. You have to wonder, if they were not teaching moneymaking, but rather how make recreational web sites.  It’s been suggested in some of the discussion forums that one can learn enough to succeed with a book or 2 along with some time spent in online marketing forums.

One good source of internet business information, including a dizzying library of instructional material is  Stompernet. Their membership fee is, I believe $800/mo with additional conferences and coaching programs available at a higher price. Good news about StomperNet: their Stomper 999 promotion offers a membership for $199/mo that includes access to their library of 1400 training videos.  A couple of their newest products are excluded (SMARTS and Formula 5) and you can bet there are plenty of seminar/coaching opportunities. Check the offer when I checked it out about 10 days after the announcement one could still access 121 sample files from their library and the complete Stomp The Net II package for FREE some of the free files were 1 hour seminars promoting the stomper culture and describing the new tools added to the stomper package. Try the Stomper 999 link here.

Endorsement videos and conference videos I have suggest a large component of their clientele are online store/service operators. Established businesses might easily justify the membership cost, if it yields just a 1 or 2 percent profit improvement.  Stompernet has a stunning library of instructional material available as well as a growing faculty of recognized experts.  Low budget beginners in need of a well rounded education in the basics  can find membership training sites in the $50/month range that might be a worthwhile investment.

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One  program created by a pair of non guru behind the scenes guys, that recently received some attention is the Arbitrage Conspiracy. Citing examples of 6 and 7 figure incomes. the possibilities are intriguing.  This 12 week training program originally started in January 2009 is available? in a canned recorded form for $1997.  I have seen a fair portion of this package and to the extent of my abilities  find it creatable, sharing more of the secrets of the high earners than some of other programs offer.

Wikipedia says; In economics and finance, arbitrage is the practice of taking advantage of a price differential between two or more markets.  The Arbitrage Conspiracy course, taught by a pair of energetic Egypt French Canadians?  Aymen and Emmanuel the course teaches the process of buying keyword targeted pay-per-click advertisements from Google, Yahoo and MSN, and selling the captured advertising leads to cost-per-action advertising networks, making offers requiring visitors to fill in contact information.  This process is more commonly referred by other authorities as PPC to CPA.

A successful campaign for the beginner yields a 10% to 100% return on investment with a 1 month turn around time , established operators with high traffic histories can ngotiate slightly better returns as well as 1 or 2 week payment turnaround times.

The key to making enormous profits in their system’s formula is testing the performance of large numbers of offers using streamlined techniques employing various labor saving tools , and of course a large amount of operating capitol or credit.  The lessons are geared to make students with virtually no technical background into experts in the fairly narrow set of skills the system requires. Their motto is Crank, Ramp and Bank.

The process to achieve their level of income involves trying all all CPA offers in a sort of random testing method. There’s no room in this system for being overly ethical, while not violating the law some of the offers they show as examples, like the Win a $500 gift certificate, just enter your email address offer,  has fine print also requires completing 12 marketing offers and referring a friend who also must also complete the offers.

Postscript:
It would be unrealistic to expect all of their students, including outright novice, would come out ahead in the high risk-high reward approach being taught.  Several complaints were posted on forums by members were were unable to get a refund which were limited to the first 30 days, the guarantee was your money back plus $500 if you were unable to make a profit.  At least one complainant had produced the due diligence records required by the guarantee terms.  Reportedly the membership forum’s “how much did you earn” survey showed 75% lost a considerable amount of money. The were some preliminary announcements of a new 12 week session to start in July 2009, couldn’t confirm this.  Here are a couple of critical discussions of the program: Warrior Forum Review, The Truth about Aymen, arbitrageconspiracysucks.com, arbitrageconspiracydiary.

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Another course teaching PPC to CPA technique is CPA Ninja (Matt likes to call it The Baddest Assed CPA Course EVER), created by Matt Trainer and Marty Rozmanith this product sells fo $997. ( It is a canned series of informal broad brush  lessons while the Arbitrage Conspiracy 12 week series was more of a class like setting with weekly assignments and live webinar sessions.) both of these programs suggest the option of testing cpa offers with direct ppc links, switching the winning offers to intermediate pages with higher google quality scores in order to lower ppc costs.  The plans differ in the landing page design.

• While Arbitrage Conspiracy discusses using copy-paste i-frame code, a violation of rules google seems to tolerate, CPA Ninja describes the use of WordPress Direct BLOGs to supply quality landing pages without programming.
• While Arbitrage Conspiracy almost exclusively talks about using ppc traffic, CPA Ninja considers ppc the least desirable of 3 traffic sources, Matt citing Google in particular as a nightmare.  User installed adware (evil stuff) providing url targeting cpv/ppv popup ads are Matt’s 2nd favorite source, his favorite traffic source are media buys “an unlimited traffic source”  including banners, adsense like text insertions and offline TV, Radio and Print ads. Media buys start at $5000 but more commonly bought in $10,000 blocks.   That calls for a steady hand.

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Annother, more sober look at the heady world of PPC marketing is provided by Gauher Chaudhry’s Pay Per Click Formula 2. He’s another Canadian, but sounds like a regular guy. In his more professional instructional style, he gives a thorough overview of the major PPC providers, as well as a quick look at a dozen other paid advertising providers, with insightful comments on each  of them. This pachage covers a broader range of subjects than the previous packages described, he describes the various free traffic techniques in addition to PPC and other paid traffic,  as well as describing a larger number of tools. While some of the others mentioned here as well as Gauher consider SpyFu an essential tool for quickly becoming competitive, Gauher’s magic bullet is TrafficRegenerator, a software service that carries the exit popup strategies to a new level, sending visitors to additional offers when it’s anticipated they are about to leave, this process can be repeated more than once, wringing out the maximum profit from each paid visit. His 18 modules containing close to 200 videos and ongoing webinars provide a solid foundation as well as advanced training in select areas. Produced roughly at the same time as the Arbitrage Conspiracy, Gauher contrasts his point of view to ‘others’ in the field more than once. His more conservative approach to CPA offer discovery suggests that 3 out of 10 offers tested will turn out to be winners.

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Eben Pagan who made his first internet fortune with his dating strategy courses taught by his psudonyme David De Angelo, offers seminars and coaching priced in $5k to $10k range, he recently made aviailable The Guru Mastermind Home Study Course, a set of live seminar recordings covering information product marketing selling for $2000. This program is now closed, but you can get a feel for his style and have a look at some lengthy program excerpt videos he has retained in the blog.

]]> http://workhomebusiness.org/high-end-training-for-the-well-funded-career-change/feed/ 0 http://workhomebusiness.org/comission-blueprint-down-to-earth-education/ http://workhomebusiness.org/comission-blueprint-down-to-earth-education/#comments Tue, 16 Jun 2009 20:00:00 +0000 admin http://workhomebusiness.org/?p=46 $1000 packages. A real time saver and confidence builder...]]> I just noticed that the original Commission Blueprint course this article talked about has been pulled from the market, presumeable to clear the road for Commission Blueprint II, a new more expensive cousse that’s really complementary to the firsrt version, relies on SEO techniques to secure free traffic, while the original course taught the management of PPC paid traffic.

A bit of background for those new to it. Google pay-Per-Click Adwords advertisement of Affiliate marketed products is the biggest single discussed online business approach, there are 1000 eBooks and tutorial packages on the subject, often written as the first information product of an adwords marketer expanding into new territory. Several factors have made adwords marketing a much tougher undertaking than it was 5 years ago. A careful, systamic approach explained by seasoned professionals is more than ever an essential for profitable marketing.

The single most useful resource for those new to adwords driven affiliate sites that I have encountered is Commission Blueprint, a video, ebook and template package made in 2008,  selling for $97 that’s more useful than some >$1000 packages. Many find the ” looking over the expert’s shoulder” style of video tutorials, a real time saver and confidence builder.   Offering detailed sober advice on the steps and numbers involved in making a working PPC-affiliate marketing business. No short lived get rich quick tricks, or blackhat stuff here. One demonstration included is a test case he sets up  that loses money in a rather un-magical way, until fine tuning is applied. Besides the detailed keyword acquisition and tracking talk, he also gives some guidelines criteria for deciding whether to bail out of a campaign or keep on plugging, he also offers some basic advice on money management.

Commission Blueprint Sample Screen

The main thrust of the package is the careful tracking and analysis of keyword selections. You will learn that adwords advertising is not all about creatively writing 12 word ads., but rather is a demanding process requiring careful spread sheet numbers analysis.  (If you could not bear balancing your checkbook several times a day, this adwords thing might not be your cup of tea.)

This package consists of:

• 17 bite sized videos, totaling 4 hours 40 minutes.
• 45 pages of supplemental pdf text pages
• 4 pre-made web page templates

Leaving the the basic education on adwords, site design and affiliates to other sources, he does briefly demonstrate the use of (in order of importance): marketsamurai.com, speedppc.com, Adwords editor, nameboy.com, Sedo.com, deleteddomains.com

An aside: The authors suggest that their biggest competition are the endless parade of adwords novices who try the game for a few weeks, lose their shirt, and move on to something easier.

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Pay per click marketing seems to be these guys’ core skill.  I have viewed 2 other products they have producted in much the same style:

SEM Blueprint A guide to becoming a Pay Per Click Management and Search Engine Marketing consultant. Building on the skills aquired in Commission Blueprint. He suggests the possibility of earning $10k per client, helping local brick and mortar businesses with their marketing efforts. Priced at $197, this 3 Hr., 10 Min. of video and supplemental material is not as great a value as Commission Blueprint,  some new material on keywords, link building, etc is provided by a guest contributor Mike Hamby?. I suppose price is proportioned to the degree of specialization. The specific advice on finding clients, selling and pricing services and the example proposal and contract included are not commonplace information.

Niche Blueprint Their 3rd? product, is a from the ground up guide to creating and operating an ecommerce store. Instructional modules include Selecting a market, finding drop-shippers/wholesales, pricing, store site setup and operation. Source code for a an ecommerce site is included with the 5 1/2 hours of instructional videos and pdf documents. I have viewed most of the pachage it looks like a solid starter guide. Dave Hermonson contributes his ecommerce expertise to this product.  Interoduced in Jan 2009, Niche Blueprint was re-released in March and is currently Sold Out again, you can go to the product page and sign up for re-release news.

Those with established ecommerce businesses or high volume brick and mortar store might benefit from advanced training programs, such as those offered by Stompernet. Their membership fee is, I believe $800/mo with additional conference and coaching costs. A 1 or 2 percent profit improvement may justify this training cost for established major players.  Stompernet has a stunning library of instructional material available as well as a growing faculty of recognized experts.

To get the attention of big name e-marketeers your venture must have already developed some value in the for of either targeted mailing lists, or products your willing to bundle with others’ products. If you do have the prerequisite assets, the next step may be to get some mentoring from someone who’s already ‘been there’ if your not in a position to share a dinner with a JV pro, this package might be a fair alternative.

Clickbank Inner Circle is a training package that focuses on developing the reputation and building the relationships essential for successful joint ventures. I found it insightful, and realistic enough to clarify that it’s not for rookies. The package includes a couple of videos, 4 eBooklets 17, 36, 64 and 105 pages long, and interviews with Alex Goad, Chris X from Day Job Killer, Eric Rockefeller and Rob Benwell in text or audio.

Joint Venture Process Map summarizing the steps laid out in the package.

clickbank-inner-circle-process-map obfuscated for the author's sake.

Clickbank Inner Circle was created by Chris Freville.