Actually is was more 10 days and looks to stretch into next week. it was so busy that I am writing this at 1 am on Sunday morning when any self respecting Internet Marketer should be partying with z list celebrities and footballers wives.

So why was my week so busy? Well I decided to do a major update of the WordPress Goldmine front end. Sales Pages are so 2009! So I’ve created a new blog style front end and added features like a weekly round up video and relevant articles. Got some more ideas but they can wait a while until I finish off the other projects I am working on.

Another project I completed last week was something I have had in my mind to do for a few months but never got around to it finally I decided to just work as many hours as I could last week on it and get it live. Thanks to clickbank who approved it in 18 hours , a veritable record, it used to take a week Video Creation Mastery went live last week.

The idea behind the course is simple,  I make most of my affiliate income from short videos that either demonstrate how products work or do reviews of products. I drive traffic to some of my sites by creating videos and linking from them.  I get top page rankings in Google by creating short videos.  see the common thread there… Videos work.

I’ve had 5 minute videos earn me $5000 in the space of a weekend and one video and 4 page report has generated about $500 on average every month since September 2007 (Over $18000 in total) and none of them actually did any selling they just showed a solution to a problem and demonstrated that the product could provide the solution.

So the course is all about how to create simple sales videos that sell, but we also look at advanced techniques like green screen video.  The unique selling point of the site at the moment is that you can get lifetime membership for  a one time payment and  videos are constantly added and updated every week . Obviously when there are 50-100 videos in there it will be converted to a subscription style site. At present there are 20 or so videos, articles and interviews that should be up to 30 next week when the latest ones are uploaded.

As if that wasn’t enough It was suggested that I could create an affiliate training course and teach people how to promote Clickbank products … Good idea , like I don’t have enough work to do

So I spent today designing a 7 day course that will teach you how to sell products of all types but in particular Clickbank and Amazon products. This is going live on Monday and will run for the next 7 days.  Each days videos will be between 10 and 20 minutes and will cover specific subjects.

If you’d like to take part please sign up at;  http://videocreationmastery.com/affiliates/ there should be a signup form at the top of the page. (if it doesn’t appear then just refresh the page)  All I ask is that if you take the course and find it useful you consider promoting  http://videocreationmastery.com

Roll on normality…..but it is a bit boring compared to a week like the one I had

I am sure you know the story of the emperors new clothes (if you dont’ you’ll find the details on wikipedia http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Emperor’s_New_Clothes)

Everytime I see one of these new style “4 videos, leave a comment below” product launches I can’t help but think of this story.

You see the thing about these launches is as soon as you see the first video you know the product is going to cost $1997. At that price point the vendor basicaly gets $1000 and the Affiliate gets $1000.

I have no problems whatsoever with affiliates making money what i do object to is affiliates promoting a product without ever having seen it.

However that isn’t the worst problem with these types of launches…The big problem is that the products don’t really teach anything new. It’s just rehased products with a fancy new set of clothes. Worst of all is the fact that the people who create them don’t care about the people who buy them.

The whole product is just aimed at generating income and cash for the vendor and affilaites

What most people don’t realize is that there are huge prizes available to the affiliate who sell the most number of copies…

Below is the list of the top 10 prizes from a recent launch

1) $100,000 cash
2) $50,000 cash
3) $25,000 cash
4) $12,500 cash
5) $6,250 cash
6) 17″ MacBook Pro
7) 15″ MacBook Pro
8 ) MacBook Air
9 ) 13″ MacBook Pro
10) iPad 64GB+3G

Do you really think that anyone who promoted the product, and it’s the same people promoting every time, really took anytime to think about whether the product was a good deal for their lists?

I seriously doubt it…

You don’t need to support these guys, if you get an email promoting one of these products unsubscribe from the list, if everyone did that we’d soon get some sanity back into the IM market and some products worth the money being charged for them.

Finally before I get back to work… there are only 7 places available for the october seminar in Las vegas. If you want to know how to create and promote products that actually have value come along.

You can see details at http://beyondcommissionlive.com/us-las-vegas . Come along it could be the best decision you’ve every made….or you could save the money for the next crap product launch!!

More incredible laziness today… I wrote the post below 5 years ago after about 2 months in Internet Marketing. The weird thing is it hasn’t changed very much. when I wrote it $497 was the big price point now it’s $1997 but apart from that not much else. You’ll hopefully be able to recognize some of the people who I am referring to.

I am sure you can think of many more so please feel free to comment and leave me some of the ways you can spot a Guru!

Over the last few years there has been an incredible number of new “guru’s” appear in the world of internet marketing. Amazingly this has coincided with a whole host of very poorly though out products that offer very little or no value to purchaser. Coincidence? I’ll let you decide.

It could be that you are already an internet marketing Guru and you don’t even know it yet. Just to help you out here is a list of 10 (ok It’s more than 10 now!) things that will help you work out if you are in fact an Internet Marketing “Guru”

12. You refer to everyone as “My Good friend” despite the fact that you’ve never met them.

11. You start brand new emails with…. Re:-

10. Every family event, Birth, Wedding, Christening or Funeral is seen as a potential source of sales and the ideal opportunity for a webinar …hurry seats are going fast!.

9. You approach the local paperboy and offer him 50% of your sales to your new product in return for use of his “list”

8. You start to use words and expressions like “Skyrocket” and “Explode your Income” in day to day conversations

7. You write your wife a note to tell her you’ve taken the dog for a walk and it stretches to 8 pages

7b. Alternatively you leave her a 60 minute video and a note saying watch my 17 minute video (especially if your first name is Ryan)

6. You phone your local Wal-Mart and ask If you can get your shopping “even if it’s 3am”

5. You and your friends’ idea of fun is seeing who can sell the most number of $1997 products BEFORE you even write the product.

4. You get embarrassed in the showers when you find your friend has a bigger list than you.

3. You decide to sell your car but won’t tell anyone the price until they are in the bank and ready to pay

2. You take your middle kid to a new school and then try to up sell to your oldest kid and tell the headmaster that he will never see this offer again.

2a. If he says no you offer him your youngest kid as a bonus.

1. You can’t see the irony in the previous reasons

What do you do If any of the above apply to you? If you recognise that more than 1 of the 10 are applicable then I am afraid you are probably beyond saving.

Last week I had the pleasure of Interviewing Brian From Prosperent.

In the interview he talks about Prosperent , how it works, what they have planned and how they are helping affiliate increase their incomes.

You can download Interview at http://wpgoldmine.podomatic.com/enclosure/2010-07-30T07_53_52-07_00.mp3

Now for years affiliate marketers have been heavily restricted in how they can promote and sell products and make money online.

You could ad adsense, amazon, chitika ads, or ebay . If you were lucky you might have been accepted by a few vendors on commission junction.

Thats no longer the case , Prosperent are changing the rules and changing how you promote products and make money online.

One of the things that comes across in the interview is how Prosperent are working for the affiliates while at the same time keeping vendors happy with additional sales. It probably seems a novel concept affiliate networks but they actually want to see you succeed and are doing thing they can to help you.

You want to customize your ads?…do it..here’s the tools.

You want to blend ads into your articles? No problem

You have an idea for an app to display ads on facebook?… great, here’s our API!

Trust me if you’ve been an affiliate marketer for a few years this is like a breath of fresh air.

The first API based tool has recently been released by one of our members (Peter) at WordPress Goldmine it’s a wordpress plugin that allows you to easily add adverts to your blog, (think Reviewazon or phpbay pro on crack)

You can read more about the plugin at http://nichemarketingtoolkit.com/tools/prosperent-wordpress-plugin/

(There is a discount available for WordPress Goldmine members so check the  Special Offers Forum)

I thought the easiest thing to do would be to create a short video showing you how easy it is to use Prosperent and also show you how I use the plugin.

I would strongly recommend anyone who has suitable sites to test Prosperent on a few sites. There are already members earning several thousand dollars a month on autopilot.

A new departure for the blog today , we have our first ever guest Blog post.

Todays Guest Blogger Is Garry Booton from http://homeeasyearn.com/. Garry also works as a traffic testing analyst for the Cambridge Business Academy which allows him to test out all the traffic products and traffic generation methods. This gives him a real insight into what works and what doesn’t.

On with the post…

Back links to your web site or blog are crucial if you want to make your way on to the first page of Google. In fact you may find it impossible to get on the first page without back links pointing to your site.

There are various ways you can get back links such as, arranging reciprocal links with other site owners, you may have even paid someone to place your link on their high ranked website, or possibly you get back links by blog commenting.

In the past when you comment on someone else’s blog post you would earn yourself one back link pointing to your site. So to get 100 back links you would need to find 100 blogs that will accept blog comments. Now however this has changed and I want to share with you a fantastic way of getting 100’s and sometimes 1000’s of back links for just a few minutes work.

This has been made possible by a plug in called “Top Commentators” this allows blog owners to keep a record of how many comments each individual person makes on their posts. The plug in creates a list on each page of your site giving the names of the people that have posted the most comments.

Top commentators is a  great plug in to encourage people to make posts on your blog, as you could for instance run a monthly competition and give a prize to the person with the most comments.

So how does this help you to get hundreds of easy back links?

Well if you recall, the top commentators list is on every page of the blog owner’s site.

Now most sites will have possibly hundreds of pages that make up the site. If a blog has been running for 3 or 4 years, this could mean that it has thousands of pages making up the site.

If your blog post total is on the top commentators list, it is on there as a link back to your own site. Therefore if the site you posted your comment on has a thousand pages, you will get a thousand back links pointing to your site.

So how do you find the sites with the “Top Commentators” plug in installed?

All you have to do is type

inurl:blog “top commentators”

in to Google and press enter.

This will return all the sites that have the plug in installed on their site. All you do is go to each site and look for the list of people that have made the most comments. To get all your links you need to make enough comments to stay on this list long enough for Google to crawl the site.

So if the top poster has made ten comments it will not take you long to find 10 posts to also comment on. This will give you matching top rating and once your comment has been accepted by the sites owner or moderator it will appear on the top commentators list.

Once you have posted enough posts to get you on the list for that specific site. You will need to keep checking back to the site until your comment is posted live on the site. What you can do then, is take the URL of the page one of your comments appears on, and put the URL into pingomatic and ping the search engines. This will get the page crawled over by Google, which in turn will get your back links registered.

If you come across a blog where you would need to post 50+ comments to get on the top commentators list, it may be worth checking back throughout the month as there is a good chance the blog owner may have the list set to return to zero again at the start of each month.

You can find a video explaining this procedure in more detail by clicking the link below

Quick link building strategy