Affiliate Phenom is kind of rare in terms of internet marketing products in that it’s been written by people who are actually still currently practicing what it teaches. Which means that it’s not some piece of junk that worked a while back but is now burned out.

It was originally written by Zach Booker and then it’s been given a thorough “going over” by Jeremy Kelsall and Don Van Fossen. Chances are that you’ve come across posts by some or all of these on both the Warrior Forum and also Don & Jeremy’s Market Crush forum.

So, what makes Affiliate Phenom worth buying?

For a start, it’s real world, which means that the three authors are actually making money from doing this exact same process.

Next up, it’s well explained. If you’ve bought any internet marketing products before, you’ll know that the usual ploy is to fill them up with stuff that you either already know or could find out in minutes – how to click a couple of times to install a WordPress blog becomes umpteen pages of screen shots.

Not so here.

You’re given that kind of information but it’s not the meat of the product.

Instead, you’re given a start-to-finish process to complete one or more of the sites that Affiliate Phenom shows you how to create.

Starting with choosing a product to promote – the book goes into detail on the pros and cons of Clickbank and CPA products but you can apply the process to anything else you want to promote.

Then there’s the research stage, using the regular Google Keywords tool and some searches to check that you’re not competing against pages and pages of people who spend more in an hour than you earn in the year. This bit of advice is useful as it’s pointless making a great site if you’re on page 200 of the results forever.

After that, the usual domain name finding. Together with some help on what to do when it seems like the whole world has grabbed every possible variant of your chosen name.

Then setting up your site. Standard stuff but with enough twists to get your brain moving. Follow these instructions and you’ll have a decent looking site that Google enjoys crawling and which gets visitors clicking without being too “in your face”. You won’t be putting Adsense on it as that would defeat the object and would reduce your income.

Getting your site indexed is the next place where a lot of guides let you down. Affiliate Phenom has several tricks here. I’ve noticed in the past that Google is actually pretty keen to crawl my sites but less keen to actually index them. Typically I’ve ended up with just the index page showing and only the very first “I haven’t really got to it yet” version at that.

Using the methods from the book, my first site had 3 pages properly indexed within about a day.

Next there’s some detail on keeping Google interested in your site – basically don’t abandon it if you want a long lived site.

Then it’s the process of getting traffic. Another place where most of the competition will say just that – “get traffic to your site” and maybe suggest that you get a few links, put up a few ads, maybe comment on a blog or two.

Again, Affiliate Phenom is different because the authors realize that without traffic your site is dead in the water. I won’t go into detail on their “secret sauce” but suffice to say it works and I’d be very surprised if you’re using all the tips they suggest.

OK, what are the cons?

Well, you won’t get anything out of it if you just read the book. You’ll have to put some work in. Probably about 2 hours a site initially and then a bit more over time. Nothing too strenuous but certainly not the internet dream of millions in your Clickbank account by lunchtime.

Next up there is a very small footprint if you don’t take a couple of minutes to reword the example sites. So my first three sites can be found if you’ve bought this book along with quite a few other sites who are following the method. You’re less likely to find my other sites as I’ve reworded them enough to stop a simple phrase search finding them. As footprints go, not big. And since we’re talking WordPress blogs the main “footprint” is shared by millions of sites in millions of niches and couldn’t be targeted by Google unless they decide all WordPress blogs are no longer welcome.

Affiliate Phenom is a refreshing change. It’s well explained, doesn’t leave anything out of the process and stands every chance of working so long as you put in a little bit of effort.

You can get your copy of Affiliate Phenom here.

If you’ve ever promoted an affiliate product, chances are that you’ll have been offered a rebrandable ebook or report to help promote it.

Most of the time, this involves you in downloading a zip file, running a program, dragging and dropping the rebrandable ebook to the program, entering your affiliate links and then getting the program to rebrand the PDF for you.

Which is a hassle at the best of times, especially as quite a few of the rebranding programs are twitchy to say the least.

I’ve just discovered a new system that makes this a lot easier for affiliates.

If they can type in their Clickbank ID (or whatever else) then they’re set to go.

You can check out one of my rebrandable ebooks here to see just how easy it is.

The service is easy to use. The only slightly awkward thing from a product owner’s point of view is that the ebook needs to be uploaded in Open Office format. All I did was create the ebook in Word as normal and then re-save it using Open Office in their proprietory format. Much the same way as I create a regular PDF. Open Office is free and the menus are similar to those in Word so it’s not a big issue.

The Simply Rebranded service is the simplest system I’ve come across – easy enough for product owners, really easy for affiliates. Plus there are no restrictions on the kind of affiliate program you can add in – Clickbank, PayDotCom, your own program, $7 ebbok style products, Rapid Action Profits products, whatever.

You can check out Simply Rebranded here.

Micro Niche Finder is the tool I use to find keywords when I’m looking for themes for articles or pretty much anything else.

It hooks in to the Google keyword tool, so you know that real people are searching for the phrases it finds.

And it stores them in its own database so you can go back to previous searches whenever you want to.

But it also does a lot more:

The main feature that I use is the “strength of competition” option.

If you’ve done keyword research before, you’ll know that the advice is to check the number of competing pages by putting quote marks around the phrase you’re thinking about.

Micro Niche Finder will  find this for you by clicking the “get exact phrase count” option.

But strength of competition (SOC for short) goes further than this.

With just one click, it checks three different things: how many times the phrase is used in the anchor text pointing to your competition, how many times it is used in the title of your competing pages and how many times it’s in the url. These are then combined to give an SOC figure.

This figure then has a simple, at a glance, traffic light symbol next to it.

Green means next to no competition – you should be able to dominate this keyword phrase with ease.

Amber means caution. There’s a fair amount of competition but if you’re feeling brave then the rewards are likely to be worth it.

Red means stop. This is an ultra competitive phrase and will take a giant amount of effort to compete in.

For instance, at the time of writing, the phrase “niche marketing strategy” gets about 590 searches a month. Which isn’t a lot. There were 50,700 competiting pages with that exact phrase count. So you’d probably think it wasn’t worthwhile. But the SOC figure was a very low 33 with a green tick next to it. So if you were looking to target the phrase, chances are you’d find it easy to come up high in the results.

By way of contrast, the phrase “finding your niche” had 480 searches a month, 71,400 competing pages with that exact phrase and a gigantic 10,800 (and a red cross) for SOC. Well worth avoiding.

I’ve been using Micro Niche Finder for some time now and it’s helped me find some nicely targeted keywords with relatively low competition. And I’ve found them quickly.

One test I did was against the keywords found by a friend. He’d spent hours researching them. In less than 10 minutes, I found the best keyword phrases in his niche, verified by reading them out to him over Skype and getting him to check them off against his list.

Micro Niche Finder found all the ones my friend had found plus a few extra he’d discounted.

If you’re serious about niche marketing and keyword research, you’ll find that Micro Niche Finder is an excellent keyword research tool. It’s well supported (there’s a support blog, a support FAQ and a support center) and regularly updated.

If you’re stuck for topics, there are also two other features that will unstick you fast.

The brainstorm option, which gives you 25 topics that are currently being searched for. When I checked whilst I was writing this review, these ranged from balsamic vinegar through mountain bikes, poker chips and convection ovens. You can run this report whenever your mind goes blank.

The second option is hot trends. These are items that are up and coming in Google searches. Often current events but also quite often things that have piqued people’s interest. Again, these are useful for those times when brainstorming with yourself hasn’t produced anything you like.

Overall, Micro Niche Finder is an excellent tool to add to your arsenal and it is the keyword tool I use most regularly.

If you’ve been online for a while, you’ll have come across numerous systems promising that you can make your fortune without spending any money.

I’m not sure exactly what caused me to buy the Guru Bypass system – most likely it was the case studies (you can get your copy of these at the end of this page in exchange for your email address).

Anyway, whatever the exact reason, I’m glad I did…

I like systems that run on near enough auto pilot. Probably because I get easily distracted.

Let’s take a quick look at some of the claims of Guru Bypass:

It can be started with little or no cash

True. Apart from the cost of the report, there’s no other expenditure necessary. You do need to download one piece of software but it’s free and there is a good explanation of how to use it in both in the main report and the tutorial videos.

You will see results within hours

I’ve heard that one before. So I was pleasantly surprised when I started seeing results within 2 hours of purchase. That time includes reading the report through from start to finish without clicking links in it apart from a very few that you’re told to click on (as recommended).

It doesn’t involve pay per click adverts

If you’re fed up with the hype of some other products that tell you how they earned hundreds of thousands of dollars on Clickbank but quietly ignore the equally giant wads of cash they spent of PPC to reach their earnings, this is a refreshing change. You won’t be going anywhere near your Adwords account.

It’s not forum marketing, Web 2 marketing, question answering, etc

Again, all true. Nothing to type here. There are a few sites that you need to register with but they don’t require much more than a user name, an email address and a password. Standard registration stuff.

It definitely doesn’t involve social bookmarking or Twittering either, which was a relief.

So what is it?

I can’t really say much about that without giving away the system. Sorry.

But chances are that you haven’t come across it in forums or elsewhere. I’ve got more internet marketing products than my wallet would like me to have and I read quite a few forums and I’d only come across this once before.

Guru Bypass is probably the only system I’ve come across that really does cost nothing to operate. You can progress to a website of your own at your own pace, if you want to. Or you can stay at the basic level and make money. Your choice.

Once you’ve downloaded the one piece of software you’ll need and joined a handful of sites, the only other thing you’ll need is time.

Depending on your approach, it will take anything from a few minutes upwards per product you want to promote.

The niches you choose to promote can be anything you want. You don’t need experience in them.

Verdict

One of the few internet marketing products I’ve bought that actually lives up to the hype.

Very easy to get up and running.

Very low cost.

If you do anything at all with the system then you’re almost certain to make some money from it.

You can get the Guru Bypass system here.

Outsourcing. (Or what used to be called delegation)

The idea sounds great: give all the things you can’t do or don’t want to do to someone else.

Sites like Elance and Rentacoder make outsourcing a task anyone can do.

Most of the time, things go well or at least reasonably well. I’ve been outsourcing all sorts of things for some time now.

But when outsourcing goes bad….

OK. A bit of background information.

I’ve used Rentacoder for articles in the past with varying degrees of success. Anything from excellent down to “we thought you wouldn’t notice it’s all rewritten from Wikipedia”. Whilst I’ve still got a few trusted writers, most of my articles are now done with a service called Get Articles Done. They’re well priced, good quality and reliable.

Graphics I use a trusted person on Rentacoder and get good results.

This story is about getting code written.

The project:

Design a simple autocomplete for a text box for a site I’m working with.

A bit like the one on Google where you start typing and possible things you’re searching for appear in a drop down list.

A few years ago, probably close to rocket science. But nowadays there are a variety of scripts out there to at least point a coder in the right direction.

The project had a 5 page specification (complete with “this is how we want it to look” illustrations) to help get it right.

It also had a short example file of about 20k records. And a full example file with about ten times that. Not trivial but nothing a computer should balk at.

As I said, there are plenty of open source scripts to model it on.

So writing the program should be a piece of cake.

Maybe knock out a working demo in a day or two and debug it in the about the same time.

The technology has been around for several years – put the data into a database, query it using Javascript &/or PHP, deliver the results in real time.

Easy.

Or so I thought.

I’d factored in the usual – coders have more than their fair share of unexpected illnesses and deaths in their lives. The outsourcing world’s equivalent of the “my dog ate it” excuse for not having homework ready.

Programmer 1 made a half way decent attempt then went to ground with “emergencies” to sort out for other clients.

Programmer 2 started off well. He answered lots of questions helpfully, seemed to have a grip. I didn’t suss that was a conversation during a weekend. Weekdays, he’s not around anywhere near as often. Apparently the reason his code isn’t working is that there aren’t enough resources on our server, even though the demo link to his server has the same problem. Apparently we’ve got too much data.

Programmer 3  said he can do it in 3 – 4 hours. Silly me had assumed these might be either consecutive hours or even a couple of hours one day, a couple of hours the next. Not an hour here, a week’s gap to the next episode then another hour, and so on.

Programmer 4  promised his team could get it done in 24 consecutive hours. Despite coder apparently working until midnight his time the other night, there’s been no sign of properly working code.

Programmer 5  said 48 hours. Working demo arrived in that time. I extended the deadline by 24 hours to allow for testing and working with rest of data. It got close in that time but then a weekend got in the way before the final snags could be ironed out.

In between, Programmer 6 wrote a demo but neglected to mention that it required a resource-heavy component that isn’t standard issue on web servers. I don’t know if this would have worked but we’d have had to upgrade our server to find out.

Programmer 7 started work last night, about 7pm UK time. (Yes, this is still a work in progress at the time of writing!). He’s written a routine to check the sensibility – or otherwise – of our data. The data is computer generated and there’s lots of it, so that was a good idea. We’ve trapped for a few anomolies he’s found so that the latest set of data is ultra-clean (the previous data set was pretty good and certainly wouldn’t have stopped any code from working).

Stress level on this project: high!

There’ s no South Park style “here’s what I learned” moral of the story.

It will all work out OK in the end – someone, somewhere in the world will be able to write a solution (don’t message me with offers please, working simultaneously with this quantity of coders is enough!)

I’d normally only work with two coders for this kind of project. That way the project is still cheap but I stand a very high chance of getting it done close to spec and close to time.

It hasn’t put me off outsourcing.

It’s just made me a bit more cautious.

Not much more cautious – I’d checked out the previous projects and the Rentacoder ratings for all these people.

Anything much less than 10/10 meant instant rejection. Rentacoder’s scoring system is in theory on a 1 to 10 scale but in practice is either 10/10, occasionally 9/10 or a bad score when there’s been an arbitration. The comments are the things to read to find out what the real score should have been.

If this was to be their first project, sorry, not this time. If their bid reply was a cookie cutter one – meaning they’d not actually read the project details – again, rejection.

These coders all answered pre-acceptance questions sensibly and in a timely manner.

Which I guess means that when outsourcing goes bad, you just have to shrug your shoulders and keep going.

This isn’t a review as much as an answer to questions I get about affiliate marketing.

The main one being “Is it actually possible to still make money with affiliate marketing?”

To which the answer is yes, if you’re prepared to put in some effort!

The method that is most often pitched as being easy and earning thousands of dollars is Pay Per Click. Buying adverts from Google Adwords and sending people to your squeeze page or direct to the vendor.

Google Cash is one of the longest established and it’s regularly updated to keep pace with the changes in how the Adwords system works. If you’ve got the patience to test and the depth of wallet to cope with failed campaigns, it’s worth a try. I’ve got a few PPC campaigns still running and they make money regularly for me. Not much, but I’m only spending about $30 a month and getting about double that back.

Another option is send people to a squeeze page. They then (hopefully) sign up to your list and you can send them content and offers over time. James Penn has recently launched a very affordable guide on this called Accelerated List Building (although the six month course seems to have stalled and hasn’t been updated recently). It’s full of solid advice to get the highest number of subscribers and a reasonable amount of money in commissions from them. I haven’t done as much with lists as I maybe should have done but the content is good and it’s perfectly possible to start this on a shoestring. You’ll need a domain, hosting, an autoresponder and some traffic to get your first batch of subscribers.

The way I get most of my traffic at the moment is with articles. It’s not “sexy” but it works.

One article on its own isn’t likely to do much for you. You might hit the jackpot but it’s not a good chance.

I used to write my own articles but nowadays, most of them are outsourced. I’m currently paying $3.50 an article from a service called Get Articles Done. The articles are at least 300 words, which is above the minimum needed by EzineArticles, which is where I submit them.

I’ve had a kind of competition with a friend for the last few months:

He’s researched keywords for various topics, written squeeze pages for them and sent Adwords traffic to them. He goes into real depth on his keywords – hundreds per campaign would be a good average for him. He uses services such as Wordtracker to get these mammoth keyword lists.

I’ve researched keywords for various topics. Whilst I used to use Wordtracker for this, I’ve recently been using a software program called Micro Niche Finder. It uses Google keyword results but goes a step further on analysis: you can click next to each keyword and get a “strength of competition” indicator. This has a number in it but is also color coded. Green means almost no competition, amber means some competition and red means strong competition.

I’ve found a lot of low competition keywords with this that have a decent number of searches. It’s fast and as reliable as any other keyword tool I’ve found.

Typically, I’ll find between 5 and 10 keywords to get articles written. The other long tail keywords that are talked about so much will usually just crop up naturally in the articles.

Then I point the resource box of the article to either a Squidoo lens, a regular blog post promoting a product or a review site page.

We’re both spending about $300 a week on promotion. My friend spends his cash on adverts and I spend mine on articles. Most weeks, my friend loses money (but claims he is still “testing” keywords). Every week so far, I’ve earned more in commissions than I’ve spent on articles. Even allowing for not every product I’m promoting earning me money – I don’t always choose correctly, which means not every product I promote actually makes any sales.

The other good part for me is that my articles will go on getting clicks with no extra expense. They last for weeks, months, even years.

So if you’re on a tight budget and want to almost guarantee making money, I’d say you should make a Squidoo lens (no cost), write a few short articles (300 words or so each) to promote it and post them on Ezine Articles. It will take you a couple of hours to do your first Squidoo lens, less as you get more proficient. An article will take between 15 and 30 minutes to write, depending on how much research you need to do. So if you spend an hour a day most days, you’ll have something to show for it inside a week.

Ezine Articles drives traffic as soon as your article is published. Longer term, you’ll start to see the search engines pick up your site or lens as well. But this takes time. Don’t get disheartened. Just keep plodding away. You’ll likely make your money back from EzineArticles alone – but keep a note of your earnings as a matter of habit – anything from the search engines is icing on the cake.

Recently, I’ve been working on review sites. The best performers (by a lot) are ones like this site where I purchase the product and write a review about it.

The most thorough explanation of how to do this that I’ve come across is called Affiliate Phenom. It’s down to earth advice from a guy called Zach Booker. He’s probably not someone you’ve heard of but he uses the systems he teaches himself to earn a decent income.

All in all, I like affiliate marketing.

You get access to thousands of products, many of which pay 50% or more commission, without the time and effort needed to research them. If you want to create your own product, affiliate marketing is a good way to filter out the markets that actually spend cash before you put in any of your time creating a product.

It’s still possible for an affiliate to make money. Maybe with pay per click if you’re super good at picking keywords and writing adverts. Quite likely with list building. And as close to definitely as you’re likely to get with article marketing.

Just be patient. It’s all too easy to chase the new “shiny penny” in the hope that it will make you money for zero effort.

Instead, pick a method and stick with it. Not just for a week or a month. But for long enough to get results. Which with today’s search engine algorithms means 3 to 6 months.

If you’re not sure where to start, my advice would be to go with article marketing. With the articles pointing to either a review site (such as Affilimax Conversions describes) or, as a second best if you can’t afford a domain and hosting, to a Squidoo lens until you’ve raised the cash. Or just stop buying non-essentials such as a daily newspaper and you’ll have enough cash for a domain and hosting before you know it.

Good luck! And feel free to post your comments and success stories below.

Affilimax Conversions is no longer available.

I’ll be doing a full review later but Affiliate Phenom is an excellent alternative product.

The Internet Millionaire Recipe is a report by Jason Fladlien and is a refreshing change from a lot of the hyped-up internet marketing products that are out there.

If Jason fitted into the normal “internet guru” model, this report would be sold at around three times the price and you’d be getting bombarded with special deals to buy it now, this instant.

Instead, it’s an excellent product with a very affordable price tag.

The emphasis of the report is doing things rather than spending hours and hours of research as an excuse for not doing things.

You’ll also be pleased to know that it mostly avoids all those “Web 2.0″ things you’ve likely been avoiding. So there’s no need to spend your time social bookmarking or tweeting on Twitter. Just solid ideas that will get traffic to your site regardless of the latest fads.

So what does the recipe involve?

In a nutshell, it’s based around sending targeted traffic to a squeeze page and then marketing to them using an autoresponder.

What makes the recipe different is that it gets down to the nuts and bolts of what to do – and at least as importantly, what not to do.

You’re encouraged to create your own give-away for your squeeze page. Don’t panic when I say this. It’s not essential that you create your own product and if you’re really too scared to do this, that’s fine too. But Jason explains in easy to follow language what you need to do. Following his techniques, I created one for my trial site, Hypnosis Secret Tricks, and it took me less than 4 hours, spread out over three sessions of just over an hour each.

The good part about creating your own giveaway is that you know the quality is good – no matter how bad a writer you are, it’s likely you’ll write something that’s better than over 80% of the PLR ebooks out there – and it’s completely yours.

It’s important to note that apart from this giveaway, you don’t need your own product. You’ll be promoting other people’s products for commission and Jason will be showing you how to choose these for maximum results.

Jason also teaches that your chapter headings will double up as the bullet points on your squeeze page, which takes most of the work out of writing your squeeze page. All that’s left is a headline and a call to action. Jason gives three different methods for creating a good headline, so that shouldn’t take you many minutes to sort out.

The call to action is simply getting your prospective customer to enter their name and email address, which should be easy enough as you’ve given them lots of “reasons why” in your bullet points.

OK so far.

Next up, you need traffic.

The best squeeze page in the world means zilch without traffic.

Jason describes getting traffic as being similar to eating a bicycle. If you tried to do it all at once, you’d fail. But the guy who really did eat a bicycle (and got into the Guinness Book of Records for it) spent 3 months on the task and ground the bike up into lots and lots of small pieces, making the job long but the final result near enough a certainty. The same goes with Jason’s traffic system.

You’ll get nine different traffic generation methods. Nothing particularly new or earth shattering but all simple and workable. On their own, each one will get you a little traffic. Cumulatively, they’ll get you lots of traffic. Likely enough that you can get close to replicating the $50,000 Jason made over the course of six months.

There are also some bonuses that come with the Internet Millionaire Recipe.

The best bonus in my mind is the report on taking massive action. Too often, I’ve been guilty of starting something and then getting distracted and moving on to something else or plain just not doing much after my initial enthusiasm wanes. This report is good for getting over that kind of procrastination.

The other top quality bonus is an audio on how to become a money magnet. This is possibly more important than the course itself. Most people act as though money is in limited supply. This audio will help explain why this isn’t the case and will help you get over any limiting beliefs that you have about money. You could easily spend more than the complete cost of this program just on a product to help you become a magnet for money – I know, I’ve done that!

So, what’s my verdict on the Internet Millionaire Recipe?

It’s one of the best value internet marketing products I’ve bought in recent years.

The system is accessible and easy to implement.

If you can write – or can pay someone to write for you – and follow a few, very simple, instructions then you can follow this system.

Can you make $50,000 in six months with it? If you follow all the steps (or even just most of them), I don’t see any reason why not. But even if you don’t there’s nothing to say you have to stop at just one squeeze page. You can produce as many as you want although it’s important to follow the promotion steps for your first one before starting the next. There’s no point in leaving a trail of “almost finished” sites – they won’t make you any cash if they’re not finished.

You could produce one of Jason’s style sites in a weekend. Easily. And still have time to watch your favorite ball game and hang out with friends or family. Then a few hours a week to give it the momentum to carry you through to the kind of income goals the system promises.

What else will you need?

• A domain name. Go to Namecheap and get one for under $10 for a year. Support is excellent.
• Hosting. I use a mixture of 1&1 and Hostgator for my hosting. If I was starting over again, I’d only be using Hostgator.
• An autoresponder. The one I use is AWeber. They’re not the cheapest but they are the best I’ve found.
• An account at Ezine Articles. It’s free unless you want your articles published super fast (most people I know don’t sweat about the small delay in publishing using the free option)
• A few other items which are free or where there’s the option of using free until you can afford a paid-for service. It’s all explained in the report and there are support videos to make sure you know what you’re doing.

If I was starting over again, this would be an excellent place to start. You can get your copy of the Internet Millionaire Recipe here.

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.

Publishing articles on your blog

Let’s look at publishing articles on your blog first:

This works with self-hosted WordPress blogs, Blogger blogs plus any blog that can be posted to using services like ScribeFire or Windows Live Writer. You can’t use it with free WordPress blogs due to their non-commercial nature.

Once you’ve told the Article Marketing Automation system your blog’s url, you proceed to select the correct category or categories to receive articles for. The list isn’t quite as wide as the one at EzineArticles but it’s pretty close, so you should be able to get a good match.

You then set up another author account – it’s in the Users section if you’re using WordPress – and give this “writer” a name and password. (Don’t use your regular password for this – use a service like Random Password Generator instead).

Then there are two tick boxes – one to auto-approve new articles, which I’ve personally unticked so that I get to check the articles before they are posted; one to open links in a new window.

There’s also a box to enter the maximum quantity of new articles you’d like per day. Set this at something “normal” so that it doesn’t look like an automaton is posting. I’ve set mine at between 1 and 3 per day. Experiment to see what works for you.

If you’ve got lots of different categories in your blog you can set the articles so they’re posted in the correct category.

That’s it, apart from checking and approving the articles if you’ve chosen to do that.

There’s no limit on the number of blogs you can have. There’s no page rank restriction. You could even use it to kick start a new blog to test an area before spending any real cash on it. The choice is yours. Or you can ignore this side of the system altogether.

Publishing articles on other people’s blogs

This is the flip-side. After all, the articles have to come from somewhere.

You can publish articles on as many different topics as you want. The category selection is the same as for the blog side of things.

Ideally, you should be publishing good quality articles. Either ones you’ve written yourself or ones you’ve had written for you. Some publishers (like me!) will check your articles before they’re published, so you stand a better chance of getting your article published if it’s written well.

The other plus on writing good articles is they’re more likely to get read.

Unlike an EzineArticles article, there’s no resource box. So you need to entice your potential reader to click the links in your article.

You’ve got three links to play with. You choose the keywords and where the links go to.

One thing to remember is that in the same way as links in ebook you have absolutely no control over the links once they’re on other people’s sites. So don’t put a regular affiliate link in the article unless you’re 100% positive it’s never ever going to change.

Instead, put a link to a file on one of your sites. A site you intend to keep.

Point the links to a php file on your domain. Just open a file in Notepad, save it as YourFileName.php (making sure that Notepad doesn’t add .txt to the end of it) and upload it to your site,

The contents of the file should look like this:

<?php
header( ‘Location: http://trevsreviews.com’ ) ;
?>

Change http://trevsreviews.com to wherever you want to send the traffic to. Then if the affiliate link changes, it’s a simple matter of changing it on your site.

Your articles will be drip fed to other sites in the network. So you’ll build up backlinks over time and start getting targeted traffic for the keywords you want to rank for.

The other thing you can do is offer up alternatives within your article. A bit like article spinning, except this actually turns out readable articles.

Once you submit your article, you’re given the option of adding up to 10 alternative titles. Take the time to add at least one or two alternatives here.

You then also get the option to add re-worded copies of each and every sentence in your article. Up to 10 alternatives again. So, if you’re dedicated enough, your article can have totally different versions out there.

This bit takes time. You don’t have to add alternatives – if you don’t, the sites that publish your articles may (or may not) get penalized for duplicate content if they don’t edit your article themselves.

It’s your choice.

You can also go really deep in “spinning” your articles – there’s a full tutorial with lots of explanations if you want to go down that route. It’s something you could always outsource anyway.

So, that’s the Article Marketing Automation system for you.

Well worth the low monthly subscription fee in my view.

You can trial it for 30 days with a money back guarantee, so check it out here.

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.

It’s a series of audios, videos and transcripts that will change the way you think about running your business.

I’ve recently downloaded it and it’s a world away from the usual re-hashed stuff that passes for internet marketing advice.

They start by talking about the different industries that thrive in a recession. You likely already know that businesses like coffee shops aren’t recession proof (even though they’re high margin, so they fit some of the other business criteria you’ll learn about).

Some guides will spoon feed you and tell you precisely which products to sell and which keywords to use. The Recession Rescue System doesn’t do this – for the very good reason that you’re not the only person who’ll be buying the system and if they gave you a shortlist of products and keywords, the market would be swamped in no time and you’d be back to square one.

On the plus side, this means you’re unlikely to be squeezed out by hundreds of other competitors. On the negative side, if you’re ultra-lazy then this isn’t for you.

They talk about the kind of industries to look for. Sure, there are specifics here but not down to the “go to Clickbank and choose product X” detail.

The material is good. The main bulk is a series of audios between the three authors (Shawn Casey, Tellman Knudsen and Harris Fellman) and transcripts of the audios as well. So you can pop them onto your MP3 player and listen to them whilst you commute to work or you can read through the transcripts. Whichever works best for you.

The other thing you’ll be taught is how to build your own list. Sure, products like Google Cash make promises that you don’t need a list. But I know that I’d  be making a lot more money now if I’d concentrated on building up lists when I first started internet marketing. The course goes into great detail about how to build up and nurture your lists, even if you haven’t even got any email contacts at the moment. This section alone is worth more than the price of the complete guide.

As is normal on the internet, there’s a 60 day money back guarantee. So you can check out the Recession Rescue System with no risk.

Overall, I wish I’d come across (and implemented!) some of the ideas here sooner.

Check out the official Recession Rescue System website here.