I received a lot of emails with that (almost identical) subject title last month. My inbox is being flooded with the word free lately, it’s driving me insane! Free this, free that, grab your freebie here, your freebie is almost gone! 99% of them aren’t free however! Granted they don’t have a monetary cost attached, but they do require my name and email address in order to obtain what ever it is they’re giving away, which to me, isn’t free.

With my inbox count growing by over fifty emails a day, it has to be a pretty good offer to get me to pass out my address to someone new these days.

After seeing enough capitalized FREE ACTION PLANNER attention seeking emails (seriously, it’s like a bunch of deprived children all with their hands up), I decided to take a proper look. I have to say, not too bad! When you’re trying to make money online, it’s crucial that you avoid as many distractions as possible. To avoid distraction, productivity is key. Simply put, productivity is anything that makes your working life easier. Productivity does NOT include spending your time on Twitter or YouTube unless watching The X Factor is included in your course outline. (I really should take my own advice here… Twitter… baaad!)

What this action planner attempts to do is help you prioritize your time when you are working on those projects that you simply must get finished. I say attempt only because it can’t actually do the work for you, so it’s up to you to follow what you’ve written down. I tend to use my diary for marking down not only what I want to do for the day, but also what I have done already. This allows me to sit down at the end of each day to see what I’ve accomplished, handy when my brain has died and long forgotten what happened 15 minutes ago.

The action planner is a 72 page document that basically has a page for each day where you can list tasks you want to complete along with a few other tips and info. You print it out, and photocopy it until you have twelve copies – one for each month of the year. (If you’re one of those stationary/perfectionist nuts like me, you can get it covered and bound at your local printing store. I do that to any good ebooks I buy, I’m really quite crazy that way.)

At the end of the month there is a section where you can summarize all your key achievements and review your time spent. This will allow you not only to feel pride for what you have done but also see where all your interruptions are coming from. You know… Twitter, emails, twitter, catching up on blog posts, random link clicking, twitter, facebook, that great commercial on TV and…um… twitter?  In reality, the whole thing is what you want to make of it.

Download your Action Planner by clicking here!

This makes a nice change in blog posts doesn’t it? A freebie AND a good review! Don’t worry, Friday’s is choking on it’s sarcasm…

How excited would you be if I told you I had worked out a proven system to make money online, lots of money, and I was willing to tell you everything you need to know so you could literally copy and paste it to succeed? That I was earning almost twenty thousand dollars each and every month, and you could be too? Only you will do it minus all the trial and error I went through. Without all the financial loss I went through. And that I would share all this with you for… oh I don’t know… $77?

Are you nodding? Reaching for your credit card? Good, then before we make that purchase, I want to show you this ab work out machine that requires nothing more than three minutes a day to turn your flabby middle into wash-board abs! Oh no, no, wait! Even better, here’s a recently discovered berry from the amazon forests that will make your body simply repel any excess weight like it was last season’s fashion!

Yes, any of those ab machines will help you to get those rock hard abs of steel… providing you use it in conjunction with traditional exercise (cardio preferred) and a balanced, healthy diet. And that’s a diet in place of your junk food addictions, not as well as. Spending just 3 minutes a day but changing nothing else in your life will not work. Just the same as the berries on their own won’t work… although I don’t think they work at all, but they certainly won’t work some voodoo fat magic without the aid of exercise, diet and perhaps one of those ab machines…

Just like those infomercials, there is more to a “copy and paste” system when it comes to making money online. Yes they work, I’m sure that at least 50% of the people writing the ebooks claiming you can copy their methods are in fact making some money with the steps they are teaching. But, and it’s a very big but, there’s always going to be more to it. Why do I say that? Well let’s talk to Captain Obvious for a moment.

Put yourself in the shoes of one of those “I’m not a guru so you can trust me, but I’m making as much or more money than them and am here to tell you all my secrets” salesmen. Let’s pretend you’re making a respectable $10,000 a month, every month. You’ve gone through the trials and tribulations to figure out what works and what doesn’t. Sure, you’ve lost money along the way but finally, you’ve got it all sorted and would be comfortable making the claim that you could teach someone else how to do it. So, are you going to:

1. Share this system with anyone who wants to know?
2. Not only the methods, but give away your exact campaigns, and exact systems that allows anyone to duplicate your exact earnings?
3. And best off all, give away all this proven money making information for a measly $77?

No? Hrm, ok. No problem. I’ll just pop over to Copy Paste Systems because apparently, they will! And they make almost twenty thousand a month which is double you, so nyeh! In your face!

I’m not going to hide my dislike of these sorts of sca…. systems. I’ve been bitten a couple of times on the same sort of claim and I’ve yet to see or hear of any real copy and paste system that actually works. To me, all I see is Copy, Paste… Fail. Why? Because it’s common sense, something that is scarily uncommon these days.

I mean really, if you are earning just under twenty THOUSAND dollars a MONTH, and you are claiming that ANYONE who buys your system can do exactly the same thing with your EXACT campaigns, keywords, landing pages, etc… are you REALLY going to give away that big of a gold mine for $77….? No, you’re not. Don’t get me wrong, I’d love to be proven wrong. I would be the first person to hand over my money if it was as easy as copying what ever they told me worked and plugging it in to where ever they say it worked. But it’s not that simple.

I’ve seen a lot of these types of sales pages over the past year, and have even fallen for a couple myself. But now, there’s no way I’d waste my money, because the only “copy and paste” system that is in play and working, is the “tell people they can copy and paste your campaigns”. Yes they’re making money, every time someone buys their eBook!

Just take a look at what the emails are claiming:

All the testing, tweaking, market research, landing pages, keywords, ads and all the other good “secret” stuff including exact systems and processes are already “done for you!”  and handed to you on a silver platter! There’s no more expensive trial-and-error!

That’s right, you don’t have to test, you don’t have to tweak, do market research or try to come up with the best landing page, keywords or ads. In fact, throw that brain right out your left ear, they’ve done it all for you! And all for $77? Gee, what a steal! (I mean seriously, stop and think for just a minute about how ridiculous that sounds!!)

I received a fair few emails on this particular product launch, surprisingly more than I would expect for a $77 ebook. Perhaps there’s some juicy up-sells after your original purchase that bump up the affiliates commissions? Who knows. I do love the ‘hurry now’ tactic used in a few of them though:

But, You need to hurry now because it’s extremely limited and available only for the first few people!

Yes, hurry. Limited. Right. I’ve been opening up the same website for the past 5 days (as of writing this post) and what do you know? It’s still for sale. That means that there’s either a lot more common sense happening than I first gave credit for or, more likely, there is no limit.

I do so love the other little tricks used as well. Like how the sales letter goes on and on about how you won’t need to worry about Adwords, Yahoo or MSN to make your money. A little play on words trick that gets the reader thinking that you won’t be doing PPC advertising. But you are. You just doing it via Facebook instead. How do I know it’s facebook? Look at the picture they provide for their “Traffic Tornado Sales System”, then look at the one under the ’step by step’ tab on this: http://www.facebook.com/advertising/ Oh my gosh! They’re the same…

And the quote “This brand new never seen before system does not require a web site or technical experience!” Um, yeah… Facebook advertising isn’t brand new, and you’ve never needed a website to do PPC, although it helps.

After noticing that along with a few other issues I had on the page, there’s no way I would be parting with my money for it. I’ve spoken to a few people on Twitter about it, but so far no one’s taken that leap of purchasing it yet, and apparently, none plan to. For what must work out to be between $26 to $50 commission, some of the promoters were hell bent on making sure I got the info about it – one of them even sent me seven emails, four on the ONE day! So I’m sure there’s at least some good info in there, because all affiliates purchase the product before they push it… right?

Oh yes, and I realise a disclaimer is pretty much required, but take note of the last paragraph:

ANY AND ALL FORWARD LOOKING STATEMENTS HERE OR ON ANY OF OUR SALES MATERIAL ARE INTENDED TO EXPRESS OUR OPINION OF EARNINGS POTENTIAL. MANY FACTORS WILL BE IMPORTANT IN DETERMINING YOUR ACTUAL RESULTS AND NO GUARANTEES ARE MADE THAT YOU WILL ACHIEVE RESULTS SIMILAR TO OURS OR ANYBODY ELSES, IN FACT NO GUARANTEES ARE MADE THAT YOU WILL ACHIEVE ANY RESULTS FROM OUR IDEAS AND TECHNIQUES IN OUR MATERIAL.

LOL!

P.S. I get that “copy and paste” is what this is all about, but, um, Chad Michaels… it might be a good idea when you “copy and paste” an email to promote it, that you don’t copy in the original senders sign off. Because when I get an email from you, ending with “Talk soon, Steven”, it kinda gives the game away.

Has anyone bought it? Care to tell me I’m wrong or are you too busy rolling around in all the newly acquired wealth?

Most people involved in the ever growing world of online marketing are familiar with PLR products. While I don’t recommend using them for physical content of non-affiliate sites (your blog, information sites, etc), they can come in handy if you’re into article marketing, putting together sites solely based around an individual topic to promote affiliate products (fake blogs, etc) or are wanting to grow this ‘must have’ list by giving away freebies. For pretty much those three reasons, plus perhaps a few more, it can make sense to use PLR articles and e-books to save yourself time.

I got some emails recently informing me of a new PLR membership site called Resell Rights Weekly. Now I’ve had a look inside and I have to say, it’s hardly ‘new’, but that’s not a bad thing in this case. When you have a look at the downloads section for just free members (not even looking at the upgraded Gold membership), it goes all the way back to August of 2007. That’s a little over two years of free downloads built up right there.

Free is good right? Who am I kidding, free is great! But is free any good? That’s what’s important here. And of course good depends on the individual and their needs, so I can’t exactly answer that question.

Looking though the list of downloads I see:

• Wordpress Blog themes and HTML templates (can be picked up anywhere these days though…)
• Adsense e-books, reports and programs (are there many out there who still do adsense?)
• Some graphics packs, some with PLR. (always handy, you can never have too many free graphics to pick from)
• Information ebooks on every aspect of making money you can think of (naturally)
• As well as other miscellaneous topics such as Flying and The Hindu-Yogi Science of Breath (um… cool?)

Like most of these sites that give you free PLR content, you get everything but the kitchen sink when it comes to the topics they cover. Whether or not you could build a workable and liveable house out of all the parts is debatable. I’m not here to judge the quality of the existing content however, I’m here to happily announce that in an ever growing ‘fluff sales pitch’ world, I do in fact get everything the emails promise me. Sweet!

So, what exactly is being promised? Let’s have a quick look at one of the many copy and pasted provided emails.

I just found a new membership site that I just had to tell you about. It’s called Resell Rights Weekly and it’s totally free! If you have not done so already you can claim your free membership at: <link>. Here is a brief description of what you will get:

* Instant access to hundreds of hot selling digital products worth hundreds of dollars!
* Two hot new products each and every week with either Private Label Rights or Resale Rights!
* Instant access to over 10,740+ Private Label Rights articles!
* Instant access to 330+ free tools that will help your web business be more profitable!
* Instant access to the Resell Rights Weekly Members Forum!

Best of all, you keep 100% of the money when you sell these products, and you can sell them over and over again!  Check it out … you won’t be disappointed!

The only problem I have with the email is I received ten of the exact same one. It’s very clear this email was provided by Resell Rights Weekly themselves. Not a bad thing, but it is a perfect example of how modifying the provided text even just a little bit would make you stand out.

Other than that, you get what you’re sold. The digital products are divided up into months, with about eight in each. The 10,740+ Private Label Rights articles arrives via a link in your welcome email and covers everything from Apple iPhone to Travel Insurance and American Idol (I kid you not). (WHY they don’t just say “over 10,00″ is beyond me, why pick a number that looks like you thumped your fist into the numpad of your keyboard?)

The 330+ ‘tools’ are nothing more than links to tools, but still handy if you didn’t know them already. Links to things like OpenOffice, FileZilla, GifWorks and Gimp.

That just leaves the new products each week with either Private Label Rights or Resale Rights which naturally I haven’t experienced yet given I just joined, but I assume that’s where the back fill of previous months has come from. And lastly, the members forums which I’ve had a quick look over and it looks ok. With just over 700 members, it’s fairly active in a whole range of topics including how to generate income with Private Label Rights Products. A handy little forum for those just learning about PLR or learning internet marketing in general as they also cover PPC Marketing for Newbies and other non-PLR-specific discussions.

So far it’s everything it was promoted to be. A really nice change after a lot of the emails I’ve gotten recently, and, it’s all for free! Of course if you upgrade to the gold package you get so much more (naturally), and at the time of writing this post you can trial the gold package for seven (7) days for just $1.

If you do consider trying it out, I’d recommend doing it when you can set aside a couple of days to completely evaluate everything on offer as you get hit with the $19.95 per month as soon as your trial is up. Setting aside time specifically to look over it all however, you can download everything you think you might need and then cancel the gold membership allowing you to read and evaluate all the content in your own time for just $1. Sneaky huh?

For those who have signed up, please share your honest impressions and opinions via the comment section. I’d love to hear the feedback from people who actually use PLR content (I don’t) on the quality of what’s provided.