Trev’s Reviews

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Article Marketing Automation is a hidden gem that I’ve only just discovered.

It has two sides:

• A system to publish quality articles to your blogs, either automatically or after you’ve approved them.
• A system to publish your articles to other people’s blogs.

Both are really easy to implement and you’re in control, so you don’t get rubbish on your site.

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Unless you’re a politician, you probably think we’re in a recession: gas prices are through the roof, food prices are on the up, energy prices have risen, everything seems to cost more.

Which is where the Recession Rescue System comes in. (more…)

If you read almost any book on internet marketing, you’ll be told to research your keywords.

OK, but where to start and which keyword tools should you believe?

If the book you’re reading is old (or at least old in internet marketing terms), you’ll likely see a reference to Overture. This used to be Yahoo’s keyword tool but it is no longer around.

So you can use a free tool like Google’s keyword tool. Or you can use a paid-for service like Wordtracker.

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A guy called Richard Earl is giving away information that you’d normally expect to pay big money for.

It’s practical, down to earth stuff that could make the difference between you spending money on internet marketing and actually making some cash for a change.

The package is free (so long as you’re happy to give up your name and email address) and includes:

• Traffic Goldmines, which is currently selling on its own for $97. If you don’t use anything else in the package, these ideas will bring you in a decent amount of traffic. There’s info on using YouTube, making the most of the giveaways that crop up from time to time and how to turn yourself into an authority in your chosen niche.
• Effective sales letter writing - a 5 step process that will help you at least understand sales letters even if you don’t want to write your own.
• An ebook on 26 psychological triggers will open your eyes to where you’re being “sold” without even being aware of it.
• A tutorial on using CamStudio (the free predecessor to Camtasia). This is a quick and easy start to producing “videos” for sites like YouTube. I’ve put the word videos in quotes as the ones you’ll be taught are really closer to Powerpoint presentations than they are to Hollywood blockbusters.
• FTP and Wordpress setup. FTP is easy once you know how, so I skipped that one. But the Wordpress setup was good - I’m gradually adding the suggested plug-ins to the various blogs I write.

My verdict: highly usable information that I’d have been happy to pay at least $197 for. I’ve certainly got more value out of this free package than I’ve received out of many of the internet marketing ebooks I’ve bought.

Sign up free here.

You will get emails but you won’t be flooded with them.

Is there a catch? Kind of. There’s an extra package called Dominance Marketing, which will be available in February. This won’t be included for free. But by the time it comes out, you’ll know enough about Richard Earl and his methods to decide whether or not to send him any cash. And if you’ve actually implemented the methods he’s teaching for free, you won’t care about the cost of the extra package.

But don’t take my word for it. Grab over $100 in value in exchange for your name and email by signing up for Rising Dawn Marketing. I think you’ll find it a refreshing change from the usual internet marketing theory.

I’ve recently joined a program called $1k in 10 Days.

It’s free to join and despite being free it gives solid information, which in itself is a refreshing change.

What do you get in exchange for your name and email address?
An online course for getting cash in. Fast.

Without the usual hassle of getting traffic to a website, spending dollars on unreliable pay per click ads, etc.

The program needs you to spend a bit more money ($47) in the (very likely) event that you won’t have the tools on your hard drive already.

You’ll then be set to follow the comprehensive video instructions and read the various web pages and PDF’s.

You’ll need to set aside an hour or so after you sign up to watch them all.

I’ve bought quite a lot of internet money making stuff and was kicking myself when I got this course.

The methods have been staring me in the face. In fact, I’ve even used one of them before to promote a product but hadn’t applied this information to other products. Duh!

The course teaches you how to create products to sell. Don’t panic. They’re easy to create - I managed three in one day without breaking a sweat. If you can type and press “next” then you can do this.
Apart from the $47 on software, there’s a one off $19 to promote your newly created product. Or when you get serious about this method, you can send me an email and I’ll let you know the software that I use that does the same thing. If you’re planning on promoting more than 4 or 5 products over the next 12 months, the software I suggest will pay for itself rather than using his submission service.

Is $1k in 10 Days worth it?

Yes. So long as you are actually going to use the information you get. But then that applies to most everything.

You will almost certainly need to spend the $47 for the three recommended pieces of software. If you’ve even got one of them (or anything similar) on your hard drive, I’d be surprised.

Once you’ve digested the free information, set your subconscious to work on what to produce first. Or use the samples that come with the software.

Then set aside a couple hours to produce your first product.

Use the $19 service to dip your toe in the water for the easiest promotion you’ve had on the internet since FFA sites used to work. No, you’re not spamming anyone with this service and it’s not going to trigger any search engine penalties in the way that FFA sites have been known to do. You won’t get tons of rubbish in your email box either, although you will get confirmation emails that your product has been listed for free. Instantly on quite a lot of occasions. Now there’s something you haven’t seen for years!

Get your free copy of $1k in 10 Days here.

There’s been a lot of buzz in the internet marketing world about the 20/20 Challenge.

It’s been presented with a bold guarantee that essentially says if you follow the system outlined and fail to make $20,000 in 20 days, you can get a refund for the product.

With that in mind, does the product stand up to the hype?

And what do you get for your money?

Let’s deal with the second question first:

The main thing you get is a complete, step by step manual that outlines exactly what to do on each day. If you need help, there’s an active forum where fellow-challengers seem to be quite willing to assist you.

Day 1 of the challenge is to read the manual, all 250 pages of it, so that you get an overview of what you’ll be doing. The temptation is to skip that and just read each day’s section and follow it. Whilst you could probably get away with doing that, I’d suggest that you take time out to read the complete manual and follow some of the example links.

The main idea of the challenge is to take products that are around on the internet for a few dollars and using something akin to alchemy (but much more achievable) to transform them into products worth $100 or more.

Most people seem to be finding this a bit of a sticking point. After all, if you’ve just paid $3 for a product how on earth can you sell it to someone else for $97 or $147 or more?

Hmmm.

If you sold bottled water (for instance) you’d know this was easy. Product cost: apart from the bore hole, basically zero. Retail price: whatever you can get away with.

So why not do the same with electronic products?

(By the way, if this is still a bit of a mind warp for you, it could be worth considering using a hypnosis track to sort your mind out.)

There are other products that you get - the sales page explains all about these.

So once you’ve got over the “I can’t sell it for that” barrier, what next?

You go about transforming your chosen product and making it all shiny and new and worth whatever it is you’re charging. Most of this can be outsourced using sites like Rentacoder, so don’t panic if you can’t create graphics or whatever.

Then there are steps that you can follow to build up the hype and get your product launched, even if you haven’t got a list of prospects.

OK, who’s the 20/20 challenge suitable for?

Anyone who’s fed up with promises and wants something to get their teeth into.

If all you’d do is buy it, read the manual, then think “That’s good. I’ll do that sometime” but not actually do anything with the information then don’t waste your money.

If, on the other hand, you’re fed up with pie in the sky ideas that never seem to work and are ready to put your head down and get on with the ideas in the 20/20 challenge, then I say “go for it”.

The steps are easy.

Most “days” won’t take more than a couple of hours to complete.

Michael Green practices what he preaches - you get a list of his sites included in the manual so you can study how he’s done it.

20 days from now, you could be stuck in the same rut. Or you could have implemented the ideas in the 20/20 challenge and be on your way to earning a tidy sum.

The choice is yours. Like they say, you can lead a horse to water but you can’t make it drink.

By the way, the system will work for any niche that is prepared to pay money for something. If you do take up the challenge, give yourself the best possible chance of getting some real income by staying away from the internet marketing niche. That’s certainly what I’m doing as I prefer to enter a market with near enough no-one else from the 20/20 challenge competing with me.

Find out more about the 20/20 challenge here.

You’ve probably heard about viral marketing: you produce something that spreads around the internet so fast, it’s like a virus.

You may even have produced a viral “something”. Articles are a good example of viral marketing. So are videos on places like YouTube. But they don’t always spread as fast as you’d like.

Viral Sneakiness is an ebook that shows you how to create a viral report. Nothing too heavy - they suggest that it should be around 10 pages, which if you write at a couple of pages an hour will take you about 5 hours to write. Plus research time on top of that.

All in all, you can follow the techniques shown and have your first free viral report live and getting downloads in a few days. Maybe less - my first viral report following this method took me just over a day to produce, start to finish.

The book is an easy read and totally practical. It teaches you how to research your topic so that the report you write will be above average, even if you knew nothing about the topic before you started. Quality is important. If your report is rubbish, you won’t get any sales from it. And sales are the whole point of giving your report away for free.

Viral Sneakiness shows you how to weave affiliate links into your free report without them appearing spammy. They liken it to product placement in movies and that’s a good analogy.

They also give you a bunch of places to submit your finished report (like any list of this sort, not all these links are still live, but enough of them are) and other ideas for promoting your free report.

The promotion of my first report took less than an hour. I got my first download for it within a day. That’s pretty fast.

Once created and “promoted” like this, your report will gradually work its way round the internet. If you follow the advice in Viral Sneakiness, it should end up in free ebook collections and may well be given away on websites.

Overall, I think that Viral Sneakiness is one of the easiest ideas I’ve come across in a long time. The most difficult bit is writing the content but 10 pages or so really isn’t that hard and could be outsourced if you wanted to.

They miss out a couple of things that I’d include but to find out my thoughts on that, drop me an email here (this is an autoresponder email, so you’ll need to reply to the confirmation message that gets sent back to you).

Overall, so long as you’re prepared to actually do something (!), I recommend Viral Sneakiness.

Building an Ebook Empire is a book by a writer called Tiffany Dow.

Until recently, Tiffany has been a ghost writer for many internet gurus. Until she decided that there was more money available by not being a writer who got paid once.

The book is no-nonsense and full of lots of tips and tricks. It doesn’t concentrate too much on how to write - the bonus book takes care of that. But then (relatively speaking) writing the product is the easy part. Especially if you hire in a ghost writer.

The biggest challenge with ebooks is promoting them. Go to Clickbank or eBay and you’ll see how many ebooks are in the market.

Tiffany covers promotion of your ebook, as well as the original keyword selection, in depth. Get either of these wrong and you’ve pretty much wasted your time. Get them right and you’ve got commissions flowing to you.

You could apply the tips and tricks in Building an Ebook Empire to your own work or to one of the many private label ebooks out there. Tiffany goes through the sales letter in depth - applying this to a PLR ebook could easily be the difference between making next to zero sales and selling a steady stream.

All in all, this is a good ebook. It’s practical, informative and, given Tiffany’s background, very close to having a private audience with some of the better known internet gurus as well.

Check out Building an Ebook Empire here.

OK, if you’re not from the UK then before you read on, you might want to know what “lazy git” means. Essentially it’s someone who does as little effort as possible for the (usually monetary) return they get back.

In this case, we’re talking about setting up basic web sites quickly and making money out of them whether or not they get traffic.

Which sounds too good to be true. After all, surely a site needs traffic before it can use methods like Adsense or Ad Box Pro to earn money from visitors?

Not if you follow the methods described in this report…

Lazy Git Marketing is simple. You could set up a site from scratch using one of several different methods shown in about an hour.

But it’s not overnight riches. Once you’ve set the site up, you need to leave it alone. In much the same way as you wouldn’t expect a bottle of wine to be ready to drink the moment the grapes had been pressed.

That’s fine. It’s less than $10 a year to register a domain, so it’s unlikely to break the bank if you have to hold onto it for a few months until it can earn you money. Heck, if you’re like me, you’ve probably got several domains that have been gathering digital dust for longer than you’d care to admit, so having a few domains with content that stand to make you cash in the not too distant future is a bonus anyway.

If you’re impatient, the report will give you a couple of ways of getting sites that will start earning you money sooner. Or you may already have some domains lurking in your portfolio that this method could be applied to.

Lazy Git Marketing comes with a series of videos that explain each of the steps visually, which I found to be a help in a couple of instances.

There’s also a forum which is reasonably active and the author of the report responds quickly and helpfully to questions.

Check out Lazy Git Marketing. It makes a pleasant change from the “earn a fortune in the next 24 hours” kind of reports. This method is real world and is likely to remain so for some time to come.

I’ve used various different sources for ebook covers.

If I’m looking for a quick cover, then I’ll use Rentacoder. I’ve often had quite good ebook covers turned round in a few hours.

But if I’m looking for something that’s higher quality, then it’s time to use a full time graphic designer.

The last few ebook cover graphics I’ve had designed have been by Absolute Covers.

Check my Healthy Eating for Kids site to see the quality that’s delivered.
Absolute Covers aren’t the cheapest on the market. But the quality is high and the turnaround times are fast.

You get a choice of what’s included in your ebook cover package. This can be as simple as just the cover graphic or it can be more complicated, so you can go for a website header graphic, footer graphic, order button, etc.

Absolute Covers require you to set up an account before you can place an order, but once you’ve done that it’s plain sailing.

Choose the cover style - you can see on the Healthy Eating for Kids site I chose one that looks like a book. But there are plenty of other styles to choose from, including ones that look as though they’ve been ring bound and so on. If your product is software or audio, they also do CD and DVD covers with the CD or DVD poking out of the box if you want.

Pricing is quite reasonable and the interactive pricing system means that you will know what effect your various design decisions will have on the price before you commit to ordering.

Check out Absolute Covers now. Your site will look better for it.