Anyone who has looked at enough internet marketing emails or sales pages lately will most likely be sick of the same thing I am – the hype! Sorry, THE TOTALLY AWESOME, MUST PAY ATTENTION TO ME RIGHT NOW BECAUSE IT WILL BE GONE TOMORROW HYPE!!!

Although I can feel myself becoming more and more jaded as I work through the thousands of inbox suffocating sales pitches, I’m not the only one that’s sick of it. I’m also not the only one noticing two things:

1. Hype is being used more and more with every sales letter being created. And,
2. It’s becoming a ‘one-up’ competition of who can hype the most.

When does the hype go too far however? What has to be claimed to make even the average reader looking for their online meal ticket to go “yeah right”? I mean, anyone who’s been researching the IM world for a while is aware of some of the tactics used to sell a product and hopefully realises that 95% of the sales letters out there are just that, sales letters. But what about the other people out there, the ones that are just looking to make money online via what ever latest method is being pushed and is not an affiliate, ebook creator, IM Mastermind or Guru? The average Tom, Dick or Harry just wanting to quit a job they hate by finding a way to make money online? They still fall for the over the top, no experience necessary, don’t have to lift a finger yet make a million dollars a year lies.

What has to be shouted in big red letters in order for these guys to sit back and go hang on a minute… I don’t think this car salesman is telling me the whole truth here? A thousand dollars a day? Ten thousand dollars a week? Or perhaps $549,784.82 in a two week period from just one of the multiple accounts the seller occupies?

That screenshot is courtesy of Ewen Chia’s Autopilot Profits. Half a million dollars in profit? Nice! Made in just two weeks? Um… well I can’t actually figure out how to type the sound a siren makes, but if I could I would because my BS Meter is deafening. I mean seriously?! HALF a million dollars every TWO weeks?! Right, and when a female asks “does my bum look big in this” she’s really asking for your honest opinion.

Now apparently, in the marketing circles, Ewen Chia is (or was) referred to as a “Superaffiliate”. Supposedly he has a track record of success and he claims to have made millions of dollars through affiliate marketing on the Internet. However being able to make millions through affiliate marketing and creating a worthwhile product don’t necessarily go hand in hand, and from everything I have read so far this is another example of that. This is why researching before you buy anything is imperative!

Autopilot Profits is marketed as a plug-and-play, in-a-box system. I’ve yet to come across any PAPIABS that works.  (See what I did there? Let’s see if that acronym takes off!) Right off the bat my mouse is hovering over the close tab box, and it only gets worse with the “just plug in the traffic” comment which right away should tell you that this isn’t going to be as easy as people think because getting traffic takes work, even if you are given “killer strategies for getting more traffic than Manhattan at rush hour”…

Don’t need a website, don’t need to spend time hunting for a winning product (read: any crap will do), no need to spend money on sales copy, I’ll do it all for you, you just sit back and try to catch all the money bills. Right… and I can eat all the junk food  I want while still losing weight by simply adding this ‘found at home herb’ to each meal. (I really need to find a good eye rolling smiley to insert here…)

The Truth?

Back in June of 2009 this was labelled as an “old” product with resell rights (here), that gives it away immediately that this isn’t going to be cutting edge information. Apart from the obvious date (if it’s labelled as ‘old’ in June last year, when was it created?!), it’s also a resell rights product. Which means you’re more likely to make money selling someone else this system that you will using the methods it teaches, and apparently, Ewen works hard to convert you over to one of his affiliates for this product.

So what exactly is taught? The package you purchase includes a 59 page ebook and a seven part video series, covering the following:

• How to find a ”Desperate and Hungry Buyers” who will buy almost anything you offer them;
• Finding the right product to sell;
• How to market that product to your audience;
• Secret tactics for generating a surge of laser targeted traffic to your site in less than 24 hours;
• How to get paid automatically twice a month;
• A ‘lazy’ way to automate the entire online process to start earning money now;

Sounds good right? For an information product, but this is a ’straight out of the box, plug it in and go Turnkey System… isn’t it?

Well this is where the researching side comes into play. My first step is off to the Warrior Forums to see who else has bought it and what they think. That’s also how I found out it was an old resell rights product. From threads in there I discovered this is not a Turnkey anything but instead, a case of “basic” affiliate marketing information being hyped up into something it’s not. What it does cover is:

• What is an affiliate program
• Finding a niche
• Choosing the keywords
• Using PPC, Forum, article marketing
• etc…

If you’re a wet behind the ears newbie wanting to get stated, then it might be helpful to you. Does that mean you should buy it? No way because you can learn everything it teaches and more via free websites such as the warrior forum if you’re really serious or by Googling each step. Hell even I could teach you some bits with what I’ve learned over the past year…

But hang on a minute, the sales page doesn’t tell you it’s a “Learn Affiliate Marketing” ebook… this is a PAPIABS!! I mean even Tellman Knudson’s email tells me this is a “hands-free, while-you-wait, while you golf, or whatever… exact simple system that gives KILLER results!”

Half a million dollars of autopilot profits. That’s a million dollars a month! Twelve million dollars a year. A plug-and-play turnkey machine that deposits instant profits into your bank account 24/7!  All you’ve to do is set it up and it runs automatically to suck in mega wads of cash for you. How exactly does that then become an ebook and video series giving you an overview of affiliate marketing?

Where is the turnkey part of it? The system? The plug and play aspect? Ooh I know, the Hype Monster sat on it. And this is one BIG hype monster. Sort of like the IM’s Abominal snowman… so it’s probably all hiding under one ass cheek!

I get hype, I do. No one’s going to buy a product from a sales letter telling you it’s an ok product that might teach you something new even if you already know most on what ever topic it’s teaching. That you will generate mediocre, frustrating results IF you work extremely hard, swapping your nine to five desk job for a nine to midnight at home lifestyle. If you want to get people to buy from you, you need to sell a cinnamon donut as a sweet circle of ecstasy covered in fat free sugary goodness designed to give your taste buds orgasms.

When does the ‘hype’ become a lie though? Yes cinnamon donuts can be sweet circles of goodness, especially if they’re fresh and even better if they’re still warm, but they’re hardly fat free. And yes, affiliate marketing does work, but you could hardly label it as a plug and play system that automatically fills your pockets with cash. If I had purchased Autopilot Profits prior to researching, I would be mighty ticked off and trying not to click my mouse too hard requesting a refund.

Oh yeah, and how much is this life altering, money making system going to cost you? Well normally it’s $1997, but since the day it launched until goodness knows when, you can pick it up for a just $27. That’s a massive saving of $1970 (or a 97.3% discount)! Just in case though, you better go buy it right now! Don’t wait because the price could go up tomorrow!

P.S. For a product created in 2007 and considered old in 2009, I got emailed on the 24th of January and 11am this morning.

After last week’s assault on my inbox by the affiliates for Copy Paste Systems, I decided to search for the terms “Copy Paste” and start clearing even more emails out. I’m never going to purchase another so called lazy man’s money making system, nor do I really care to even hear about them. My last blog post was quite clear on my feelings for them I think.

Are you familiar with Gmail search results? More specifically, the section at the top where it says 1 to 20 of 85? Always good to know how many you’re going to have to sift through, except, when you see 1 to 20 of hundreds. That’s right, there was too many for Gmail to count properly when I searched for the term “copy paste”. Nice.

I decided to jump to the oldest of the results as I figured they would be the easiest and quickest to clear out – generally I find the products being pimped are either no longer available, or the links just plain don’t work. After all, I have emails dating back to April of last year still waiting to be properly looked at. (That right there is too scary to dwell on.)

Jumping to the end, I open up email number one which is about an “amazing *FREE* ebook revealing a revolutionary method on making money online via affiliate marketing”. Yah-huh. But, ok free, I’ll take a look.  The email link works and I am taken to the AIDA Profit Formula page.

Right off the bat my eyes instinctively roll, I swear, they did it completely on their own.

Doubtful, but ok I’ll read on. Only, there’s not really much more to read. Learn the entire process, blah blah, duplicate this process again and again, blah blah, “no-fail”, a very unique twist, profit is almost guaranteed, blah blah blah. Same as most other copy based systems out there. But, it’s free so I figure why the hell not, right? Maybe this will be the one that changes my opinion.

Don’t get excited, it wasn’t. I know, colour me surprised.

Let’s examine my findings:

Claims to reveal exact Niche
It doesn’t. Well it does and it doesn’t – you’re informed it’s “wholesale”. Granted yes this does give you a starting block, but wholesale what? Are they selling information about wholesale directories, or are they selling products themselves after purchasing them from a wholesaler. Or are they selling ebooks that teach others how to sell products and from what wholesale directories to buy from.

One thing I have learned with affiliate marketing is you’re much better to go deep within a niche topic. For example, you wouldn’t go “dogs”, you’d go deeper such as dog training, or even better, puppy training. What about house breaking, teaching the dog to fetch, to stop barking, digging or jumping etc? Much easier to promote lots of smaller products that generate specific search terms than it would be to promote anything and everything dog related. The same goes for wholesale… you need something more specific.

Did they reveal their exact niche? No.

Claims to reveal exact Landing Page
This was something I went searching for in the report because landing pages still baffle me a little. After reading through how review sites are the best method to go, the author states that it was exactly what they did for their wholesale web page, and then links you to two of their web pages. Only wait, they’re not about wholesale, they’re about paid surveys. What the?

When you read more carefully, you see a sentence tacked onto the end of the one about his wholesale pages stating “By the way, I did make a similar review site for the paid survey market, which is doing pretty well.” Thus, the links to those pages. Further down, in fact all the way at the bottom of that page, is a tiny little paragraph with a link to the wholesale site. And this is what it shows:

Yeah, not what I was expecting either. There is no review site, in fact there’s nothing at all. And you can tell by the “help the victims of the earthquake in Haiti” message that I’ve just clicked the link.

Given the claim on the sales page is that it’s still raking steady $2000 a month profit, you’d expect there to be a sales page.

Did they reveal their exact landing page? No, not for the wholesale campaign.

Claims to reveal top ten profit-generating keywords
The last part of the puzzle – the top ten keywords. When someone claims to not only give the exact keywords that work for them, but do so tacked onto the end of an “I show you everything – no BS” claim, I expect to see a heading “Top 10 Keywords” and those keywords listed right underneath. Perhaps in the section titled “Drive Traffic Using PPC”?

You don’t get that. What you do get is the four groups they categorized their keywords into. A completely different thing.

Don’t get too up in arms just yet, because under the “apply AIDA” section, is a screenshot of best and worst performing keywords. They’re not advertised as that however, in fact there is no mention bar a single image description line that’s what they are at all. The images are being used to show how the AIDA formula works.

If you look at the image carefully however, you will see the keywords. Nevermind that the section is outlining something completely different and you’re instead being told to look at the columns with all the numbers on the complete opposite side of the picture…

Did they reveal their keywords? Technically yes, but it should be made way more clear if that’s one of their main selling points!

More problems arise: 40 cent keywords?
As I continue reading I notice a number that really raises my eyebrows – “I increased the rest of my keyword bids to 40 cents per click.” The Copyright is from 2008, so that amount was probably correct back then. But I picked this report up less than a week ago, it was originally brought to my attention in May of 2009, and it was promoted to me at 10:18am this morning by Charles H. Mutrie.

There’s no way that you will get those keywords for forty cents a click advertising today. In fact, I know you won’t because I checked. Google’s Keyword Tool tells me that:

• Dropershippers is $1.97 per click on average, and
• Dropshipper is slightly cheaper at $1.71 per click on average.

A far cry from the 40 cents! This brings in a huge problem when a reader is basing their success of the ebooks figures and math. Claiming to bring in 100 visitors at 40 cents a click (costing him $40), and generating an average of 2 sales of $43 each (which is $86), means he’s making an average of $46 profit. An average of $46 profit for every 100 visitors, of which he supposedly gets an average 100 visitors a day is not bad – I certainly wouldn’t turn my nose up at an extra $46 each and every day. Especially if we can just rinse and repeat the methods in any other niche.

Sadly, in today’s market however, those same 100 visitors is going to cost you closer to $171, and with the same daily sale amount of only $86, you’re averaging a daily loss of $85. Not so attractive.

Maybe if you had an extremely long standing relationship with Google and a spectacular Adwords history, you might get close to that forty cent mark today. But anyone just starting won’t have that history and as such, will have to pay those higher CPC prices.

That said…
If you’re doing PPC, or are wanting to start, then the AIDA formula it shows is probably handy to know. I wish I had known it back when I attempting it all a year ago. Of course what is AIDA? Yeah that’s what I wanted to know too. Only, the report doesn’t really tell you. It goes on, and on about it: “How I Used Power of AIDA Formula,  made money by applying simple AIDA formula, how powerful AIDA is, AIDA can supercharge Google Cash, using AIDA formula”, etc. But what is the AIDA formula?!

Well, the first thing you find out, on page seventeen (of a 23 page report), is that Affiliate Prophet is an AIDA-tracking tool. Right… ok. Still doesn’t tell me what AIDA is.

After the report goes into detail on how to use Affiliate Prophet results to split test your results, you find out that it stands for Attention, Interest, Desire and Action. That’s on page eighteen. With no heading what so ever “What does AIDA stand for”. If you’re going to write an entire report based around a particular acronym, tell people what it stands for!

A quick google search to actually learn what it is, I found the following excellent explanation:

AIDA stands for attention, interest, desire and action. It is a step by step procedure of getting a customer to purchase a product. It is a technique used by marketers in their advertising and promotional campaigns. The concept is to first get the attention of the customer; this is not as easy as it sounds because the customer is bombarded by hundreds of messages everyday.

After getting the attention of the customer, his interest in the product should be stimulated. This is extremely difficult to do. In order to stimulate interest the targeting of the ad has to be perfect. A good ad that has been targeted at the wrong audience will fall flat. If he is interested he might come to the store to take a look at the product. The product must be packaged and priced right in order to evoke desire in the mind of the customer. If everything fits into place he will act on his desire and purchase the product.

How hard would it have been to include that paragraph in the report? Preferably before starting in on everything else.

Overall the report was a pretty big waste of time. There’s a couple of snippets of handy information if you want to make use of PPC, but it does require the purchasing of additional tools which of course, are linked to with affiliate links through out the ebook.

• AdWord Analyzer – $77
• Keyword Elite – $197
• and Affiliate Prophet – $97

Affiliate Prophet is pretty much required to follow their methods of course.

If you want to pick up the report for the PPC tactics, by all means go ahead. It’s free after all. Just remember that the CPC prices won’t be correct and they don’t actually reveal anything you can copy. If you want it however, see if this link works: Download Page. If not, fill in your email address on the main page here: AIDA Profit Formula. Unfortunately it doesn’t come with any rights so I can’t pass it onto you…

P.S. I should have realised as soon as I read the copyright that it wasn’t going to be too good…

All rights reserved. No part of this document may be reproduced or transmitted in any form, by any means without the prior written permission of the publisher. do right away to start making money.

That’s copied straight from the ebook. Granted that technically breaks the copyright, but what’s with that last out of place sentence?

I love the names used for all the product launches now a days, don’t you? Google Terminator, Google Sniper, Google… snatch. What the?! Seriously? I get that you want to grab the users attention, and yes granted that will probably do it (for at least the male population), but snatch… really?

*shakes head and moves on*

Google Terminator, created by Chris Fox (who?), claims to stuff your pockets full of cash without having to spend anything at all. What we all want, isn’t it? Rumour has it this is just a streamlined repeat of Chris’ previous launch, what ever that may be. Honestly, I’m not sure. I only received a few emails about this launch and don’t have anything else about Chris Fox lurking around the inbox. Hence the ‘who’ comment…

The method involves getting in on other new and preferably big product launches in the Internet Marketing niche prior to their actual launch date. You start blogs to promote them with your affiliate link, offer the best bonuses possible and then get your blog to the #1 result for organic search results. Sounds straight forward enough. (And it is a method that works.)

Like most “I can show you the real way to make money online” products, the sales letter promises everything while asking little from you in return. But is that really the case? The first main focus point informs you that you do not need to know a thing about SEO, PPC, Web 2.0, List Building or Email Marketing to promote your sites, nor do you need to know about article marketing, blogging, HTML or other web related functions to create your site in the first place.

Wrong.

It involves most, if not all of them! Ok granted, PPC and list building may not be required in order to duplicate the success taught by his methods, however, you definitely need at least a basic knowledge of HTML, blogging, article marketing, link building, SEO and Web 2.0 marketing. When someone says you don’t need to clap your hands to turn on the light, and you do in fact have to clap your hands, that’s called lying. Most days I wonder if that’s Internet and Marketing’s middle name…

Hey wait a minute, isn’t it cool to have more than one middle name these days? If so, can we add in ‘one-time-offer’ as well? Google Terminator certainly continues that trend as well, in fact, there’s not one, not two, but four back-end offers attached to this initial purchase. Even worse, from what I have heard, none of them are worth it yet most are required in order to complete the main purchase and follow all the techniques needed.

I just got it for £3.15 (press back on sales page) and I must say I was really shocked to see not 2, not 3 but 6 UPSELLS!!! This guy must be making a killing out of this…

Anyway, I have just logged into the membership area and inside the first 2 things you come across are 2 more products hes promoting. He’s promoting a product by his brothers for $197 and then selling a google terminator website BUT you have to purchase hostgator hosting + domain name through his affiliate link. ~ Joe Walter, Warrior Forum Comment

Even the JV page provided informs you that at least the first up-sell is the ‘completion’ of the main product:

Back-end Offer Number #1: The “Promotion Terminator” System
A HIGHLY related up-sell which will nearly forces people into buying. It’s the “COMPLETE” promotion strategy that will ensure their Terminator sites get top rankings in the search engines

All in all you’re asked for $47 for the ebook purchase, $27 for the “Promotion Terminator” System, $37 a month for access to the “Insiders Club” membership site, $47 for the “Automated Blog Feeding Software” which, if you say no to the first time, will be re-offered alongside a Slide In Pop-up generator, a set of wordpress themes and “Resell Rights” to various bits of special marketing scripts for the same $47 price tag.

Total cost: $158 + $37 each month after that… ouch.

Of course, a high price tag is nothing IF the product delivers. Unfortunately, feedback so far says this one doesn’t. From reading various replies to blog reviews about it, to chatting on Twitter with people who purchased it, the general census is a lot of refunds and unimpressed customers. There’s a thread over on the Warrior Forums (here – from about reply #11 onwards) that shows what some people had to say, and another review over on Mad IM Marketing which covers a couple of negatives (although still promotes it in the end, so I’m not convinced it’s a real review, or one of those “I’ll show you it’s not 100% perfect so you trust my word and buy from me” tricks).

In comparison, I have heard from a quite a few people that George Brown’s Google Sniper is pretty much the same method’s but presented in a much better manner. In fact, while I could only find a couple of less than flattering comments about Google Terminator, there is is an 11 page Review thread (plus another smaller one) dedicated solely to Google Sniper. One member even claims that “the section on pre selling and conversions is worth the price of the course alone.” So honestly, if you are wanting to look into this sort of method to make money, I’d put my money on a Sniper over a Terminator.

As I mentioned at the start, the general methods outlined do work, you just need to find a product that shows you everything in order to have all the steps required to succeed, and preferably, all within the one price tag. In the end, Google Terminator teaches one important factor – that skimping on the main ebook in the hopes it will force customers to purchase the second one really doesn’t work.

For those that are interested, you can check out Google Sniper here.

P.S. Of course I’m going to link to Google snatch as well! I’m not a tease! Google Snatch!

Other ‘Google’ names I discovered in my inbox include Google Ambush, Google Conquest and even a Google Slapper … what the?

P.P.S. With so many people looking to make money online, the real ones making it are the ones promoting and selling “how to make money online” products. Ironic much?