www.affiliateconfession.com

Okay, what’s the big mystery training course I’ve been using for the last two or three weeks in my affiliate marketing business? It’s known as Commission Blueprint 2.0 and it’s pretty massive in its scope as it will take you a good couple of weeks to watch all the videos, read all the manuals and test out or at least look at all the tools you get with the course.

This is not a scammy make money ebook that tells you just a couple of techniques and charges you $97 for very little info, it is a complete training course with 10 modules that covers the gamut from ppc, to joint ventures, to building websites, to keyword research in affiliate marketing and on and on. The course designed by Steve Clayton and Tim Godfrey and comes with 50 videos, 20 ebooks, 8 or 10 different tools and a forum that the developers personally answer questions in on a regular basis. Now for the cost. It isn’t cheap at $497 but, it is about as comprehensive of a course as I have seen in a long time. I purchased version 1 of this training and although it was great, this is much bigger.

The course is great for newbies to intermediate affiliate marketers, but for the more advanced, you may find it lacking. However, there are some jewels that I have gleaned from the course and are already starting to work on. One of the those jewels is they show you how to build a link juice machine that will send quality links, the lifeblood of your rankings, to your site.

There are lots of ways to build a blog or site hub like this, but this one is based on buying domains with PR already established so you get a quick benefit instead of having to wait months while your new domains mature and get some good PR. And the great thing is that you can get these domains for cheap. I’ve alread picked up 2 PR 3 domains for $25 each and I’m watching a PR 4 domain that nobody has even noticed yet. It’s just sitting there waiting to come to papa for next to nothing. You can’t buy permanent links for this cheap, so this is a great technique.

I also tried out their strategy for joint venture product launches and could see some immediate results in ranking a few blogs and Squidoo pages I started. I didn’t continue with that because it took too much work and was taking me away from things I’m trying to focus on, but it is definitely a workable business model for someone to do just that one thing. Another reason I dediced not to continue with that technique is because I don’t like trying to sell products I don’t own or don’t have a lot of knowledge about. Just not my thing, but anyone could make it work.

The Commission Blueprint 2 course comes in 10 modules listed below with comments on each:

Module 1 - Welcome & Introduction - Pretty much sums it up.

Module 2 - Keyword Research - This is where you use their proprietary KW research tool. It’s pretty good, but could use a few improvements like being able to copy individual keywords into your clipboard.

Module 3 - Finding Products To Promote - Where you will get to use their Offer Evaluator tool that will tell you immediately based on traffic, ppc prices and offer payout whether or not you should even try to promote something. I learned something here - some offers are pure junk and will never convert at a profitable rate. You could probably save the price of the course in shying away from junk offers in yor ppc efforts by using the Offer Evaluator. This is one of the tools you get in the 7 Day Free Trial.

Module 4 - Building Converting Sites - Haven’t spent much time here, but besides the obvious, this module contains the developer’s templates they’ve used to build out their sites and have helped them earn their big bucks. They’re supposed to be proven converters.

Module 5 - Sales & Conversion Strategies - This is one of my favorite modules and where they teach you how to do the joint ventures mentioned earlier.

Module 6 - Search Engine Optimization - This module is massive. It contains 20 videos, 4 small ebooks and 2 tools and probably will take a couple days just to get through it. One of the tools here I have an issue with. It’s called Article Blueprint and it sends out your spun articles to several article directories and the developer’s network of sites. My issue is that some of the directories aren’t worth even having your article in and it seems to take a long time for your articles to show up in them. Hopefully though, the bonus coming out will make this a moot point.

Module 7 - Adwords & Paid Advertising - Another huge module with 22 videos, 3 ebooks and 3 tools. One of the tools is a tracking system and Adwords campaign building system that looks a bit complex, but overall it should really help you with tracking your ppc campaigns to the minutest detail. This one looks like it works somewhat like Speed PPC. I’m not a huge fan of tracking systems because they tend to be overly complex, besides, I just do something very simple that works fairly well.

Module 8 - Social Media & Article Marketing - Not a lot here, but does have some good suggestions on getting more out of your article marketing efforts.

Module 9 - List Building & Email Marketing - Honestly, this one is just another reminder on why I ought to be creating an email list.

Module 10 - Conclusion - Offers a blueprint on what to do after absorbing all the material. There are a couple of great, easy to follow one page plans that got me motivated until I tried to print out the PDF’s and they came out black on my HP Color Laser printer. I wish they would have tested that, but I just used the FinePrint free utility and it printed them out fine. 

The Bottom Line - Commission Blueprint 2.0 is worth it to me and may be for you, even at a cost of $497 because it really is a one stop shop for just about all the training your will need in this business. Besides that, the forums are pretty amazing and are frequented by some of the nicest people you will ever meet online. No really, my first post at the forums stirred things up quite a bit and almost everyone was exceptionally nice, in kind of a cult sort of way. (Just kidding on the cult thing)

I’d rate it at about an 8 for newbies and about a 6.5 for experienced affiliate marketers. Right now you can get the Keyword Blueprint tools and the Offer Evaluator tool as well as a 50 page PDF manual to try for 7 days, so it’s at least worth it to check it out. Even if you don’t get the training, I’m sure you can keep the 50 page manual.

Check out Commission BP 2 here.

I had intended to get a review of the product mentioned in the post on Affiliate Marketing Training up a bit earlier, but I wanted to fully evaluate it so I could give the most honest review possible. I’m writing that review right now and wanted to get it published today, but won’t be able to finish it because it’s huge.

I try to cover as much as possible in the review so you can decide if it’s worth adding it to your arsenal of tools and stuff for your online business. It’s worth it to me, I bought it and will be keeping it because there are some valuable things I’m learning and valuable tools I’m using.

There are also things I don’t like about it (I wasn’t making any friends in their forums with my first post), but the developers promise to make things better, so I’m sticking with it. Plus, there’s a couple of bonuses coming that I don’t want to miss and one of them promises to help in building links to your sites. That’s one of the most neglected facets of my business, link building, and I’ve only just started doing that on any worthwhile scale. So any tool that will help with that, I want it.

Anyway, the review isn’t done yet, but will be tomorrow sometime before noon. So, stay tuned.

As affiliate marketers it is important to be constantly learning and improving our skills and of course learning that from the people who’ve gone before you and have been successful. While you can get a bunch of that training for free from everything that’s available on the net, sometimes you come across something that’s worth paying for. Shoemoney does Elite Retreat for I think it’s $4k, Affiliate Summit ranges from $900 to $1,700 depending on when you register and there are other courses that are as much or more.

A few days ago I invested in a training course of sorts that’s not quite as expensive as some of the ones mentioned previously, but it is quite a bit more than your regular $49 or even the $97 ebooks that are so prevalent these days. I call it a training course because it’s much more than just a simple ebook. It consists of about 50 videos, 20 short ebooks and guides, and 9 tools including those for keyword research, Adwords spying, keeping track of your search engine positions, an article submission tool and so on. Plus there are bonuses within the course and some coming out on an ongoing basis.

So far the course looks pretty good. There are things that I love about it, there are things that are just okay and there are things that either need to be fixed (which the developers are working on) or that seem kind of cheesy probably because they are already familiar to me. This course is huge and with anything like this there will definitely be things that are old news to at least a few people. Fortunately the developers have taken that into account and have labeled the content for beginners, intermediate and advanced users.

Right now I’m going to refrain from telling you exactly what the course is because I haven’t fully worked through it yet. Quite frankly, the course is overwhelming because there is so much material. It is organized very well into modules such as seo, ppc, article marketing, building sites, sales conversions, keyword research and more, but there’s so much stuff it’s hard to know where you should start .

In the next few days I’ll be doing a complete review of the course and may do more in-depth reviews of some of the modules and tools as I get a better grasp of what you can do with them. There isn’t any way you can get through all the training has to offer in just a few days. Of course this will be an honest review of it mainly because that’s what I do here and yes, I actually invested the money necessary to purchase the course. No fake reviews here, I own the product. Stay tuned.

Ahh, the greatest keyword tool in the history of the universe, 2nd edition, has been released and just about everybody, especially the MMO blogging gurus, are singing its praises. Unfortunately, the MMO types are going to give you a fake Keyword Elite 2 review because they’re going to make money off of it if you buy it. If they told you the truth about it, that you can get almost all the keyword information offered in the product for free, you probably wouldn’t buy it, and then they wouldn’t be the famous MMO bloggers they are.

Of course one missed fake product review isn’t going to matter to a MMO blogger making a killing, but if they changed their business model to doing only honest reviews, they’d be making substantially less.

Since I’ve been having some pretty good success lately with ppc marketing I was pretty excited when the news hit that Keyword Elite 2.0 would be coming out soon. It’s always good to add the right tools to your ppc arsenal so you can scale your campaigns up when you find a winner and I thought Keyword Elite Two would be a tool to get. However, after spending about an hour watching all the videos on the sales page about every aspect of the product, all I could think was, ’why would anyone pay $197 for this when you can get the same data for free?’

Here’s three of the modules within Keyword Elite that you can easily find data for and are basically a big load of processed cheese: 

Keyword Surge is one of the modules that’s supposed to help you, “Generate the largest, most diversified keyword lists imaginable.” Thanks, but I don’t need large keyword lists anymore, I need keywords that convert and I can find those fairly easily with Google Trends, Insights For Search and the Google Keyword Tool. I’ve had my fill of inaccurate keyword tools, including what Google even puts out, I don’t need something less accurate than Google.

Advanced Adwords Site Targeter is another module that you can just as easily go to Google to find the same info for free or you can download Adwords Digger for free if you are unable to type in your own keywords at a search engine and find the top ranked site that displays Adsense.

The module that had me guffawing the most had to be the CPA Magnet that will, “Quickly and easily find super hot CPA offers with the click of a button!” I guess a bunch of affiliate managers are going to lose their jobs now because of this one…or probably not. I have 2 managers that send me a weekly email with the best converting offers on their network for search, email and web display and another report available on a weekly basis that I can download anytime and I can also call any of them at any time for suggestions. Reach out to your affiliate manager, it’s a lot less than $197, it’s free.

It was a process to come to the conclusion that Keyword Elite 2.0 isn’t worth buying. A friend tweeted me and asked if I wanted to split it with him so I went to the website and spent an hour watching the videos and was underwhelmed. I then ran across Griz’s Keyword Elite V2.0 Review and pretty much made up my mind not to go halfsies with my friend, who later tweeted me back with his review after he went ahead and bought it, “Messed with it for a while. It’s trash.” At that point I was pretty convinced, I didn’t need the greatest keyword tool humankind has ever seen.

Kinda makes you wonder about what those MMO blogging guys are peddling and how they really make their money, doesn’t it?

It’s always great to read interviews of bloggers who have gained fame, fortune, notoriety or notice to find out exactly what they’re doing and their influences, but it’s an even better thing to be able to read the interviews of 40 personalities in the field of blogging all at once. Stephane Grenier has put together such a read in his book Blog Blazers that covers the gamut in the world of online discussion.

Blogging goes far and wide on the internet and Blog Blazers touches on everything from SEO, to small business, to parenting, to business opportunities, to Google Maps, to coding and beyond, way beyond. Stephane secured interviews from such personalities as Aaron Wall, Dane Carlson, Erik Sink, Anita Campbell, Neil Patel, Seth Godin (nice one Stephane) and many more, picking their brains to find out just what has made them successful and keeps them going in their work.

The book is packed full of resources because Stephane asked all the bloggers he interviewed 3 important questions about their influences. The questions were:

Which 5 blogs do you read regularly?
Which websites would you recommend for new bloggers? and…
What is your most successful blog post ever?

Lots of great info here, but by far you can get a wealth of information by just scanning through Blog Blazers and looking up the most successful posts ever by these writers. After all, these posts have already been chosen by the readers of these blogs as noteworthy and the best of what each blogger does, so you know they’re worth checking out. It’s also interesting to note the number of bloggers that mention Darren Rowse at Problogger.net as one of the biggest influences and inspirations in their work. It would have been nice to see an interview from Darren himself to see what his biggest influences are and who he reads on a daily basis.

If you want to power up your blogging regardless of what niche you’re writing for, then Blog Blazers is definitely worth the time to read. The only thing I’d change about the book would be not to ask the exact same questions of every blogger interviewed. It would have been nice to mix up he questions a bit, but don’t let that stop you from a great read.