I am always on the look out for what might be the next big thing in affiliate marketing or article marketing. There is one technology I’ve been monitoring for a while and I really do think that this could be big..actually really big.

There is a company in Santa Barbara called Ring Revenue who have recently received $3.5million of financing. Ring Revenue provide an affiliate Platform like no other. The platform they have developed and patented allows affiliate networks like CJ to track phone calls just like they track clicks. In fact the call tracking is much more accurate than the clicks.

The potential here is amazing. First off I means that I as an affiliate can advertise on radio, TV, Newspapers and magazines all i need to give is a toll free number and the network will track my calls and pay me commissions on sales.

As a Product owner I can employ an online sales team which generally convert at much higher levels than sales letters , sales letters generally convert at 1-3% sales teams at 30-50%. I can target specific demographics and collect real time data via the calls.

Just imagine how cool it would be for Clickbank to take on this technology and add a call center , each affiliate has a phone number that goes to a specialised team… I’d be happy to pay extra for this service as not only could I sell digital versions of my own products but hard copy versions as well.

I’ll be watching this very closely and I suggest that you do too. You can read More at www.ringrevenue.com

Meanwhile here is a graphic of how it works.

RingRevenue How it Works

Yesterday I watched a little kid trying to walk..he stood up wobbled for a bit then fell down. He then stood up again wobbled for a bit longer then fell down again. This happened 4 or 5 times each time he got up and tried again. About an hour later he could manage a couple of faltering steps before he fell down.

Looking at that kid I realised that we are naturally programmed not to give up and to keep on trying until we master the problem facing us. Why then do so many people give up Internet marketing after a few weeks?? I actually asked someone who once asked for a refund why they were giving up after only 4 days. They said “Internet marketing is too difficult, I want an easy way to make money”.

What can be easier than looking at whats working for other people, pressing a few buttons to create a site and then spending a few hours in front of the computer driving traffic to the site you’ve built. Once you master it, it is possible to spend 4 or 5 hours working on a site and have that site earn you hundreds of dollars every month.

Internet marketing might be a lot of things but it’s not hard.

I lost count at the number of times I built sites that failed when I fist started. I would built a site then sit back and watch as it made about 5cents a day.. So i’d look at what I did wrong, once I’d found the problem I’d make sure that I didn’t make the same mistake again. Soon I was like that little kid,  instead of being able to walk two steps I could create sites that would make 50 cents a day.  After that it was just a matter of time until I worked out how to make sites that made me $10 a day.

If I’d listened to the part of me saying  ”give up it’s too hard”, I would still be struggling to make an income I could live on and I would probably be working for someone else doing a job I hated. Instead I have a great lifestyle I work on my terms and I am doing something I love.

Start to look at Internet marketing in a realistic way and be prepared to fail, and you will succeed it may take time but you will be a success.  Failure is a powerful tool, embrace it and learn from it.

Of course if you want to learn from my previous failures and reduce the time it takes to be successful then be sure to check out Wordpress Goldmine. Next month I am going to be reviewing peoples sites and suggesting improvements.

Straight on the tails of The Clickbank Code comes another over hyped over priced Clickbank Product.

This is a warning you are about to get inundated with emails for yet another Clickbank product. Yes in a week or two CB Quantum will go live. The pre-written emails are ready to go along with the bits of video ready to get you warmed up. You’ll get pre written emails and bonus offers  all in an effort to get you to buy the product and earn the affiliate a very healthy commission.

I’m not even going to mention my views about the 3 guys producing this product. It would probably get me landed with a writ for defamation of character, lets just say I loathe the methods they use, and believe that the whole area of Internet marketing would be better off without people like them.

My issue with this is that this is yet another product about how to make money using clickbank. The thing that gets me is that these guys have been producing Clickbank guides for several years now …If I am not mistaken Clickbank hasn’t changed , the methods are still the same. Why are the methods that they once sold for $47 or $97 now worth $1000? If you get emails promoting this before you unsubscribe ask them why the other clickbank books they promoted are no longer valid!

Don’t be taken in by their slick sales letters, they make most of their money by selling crap like this to their lists of subscribers and then creating another book about how they made a million dollars and now own a Ferrari and yacht…then sell that to their lists.

Making money with clickbank is easy and you don’t need to spend $1000 to find out how to do it.

Here is how i do it…

Disclaimer… I don’t own a Ferrari or a Yacht so if that’s how you judge success then don’t follow the guide below. I do however get a nice payment from Clickbank every week.

1. Find a Product, Cbengine.com or CBsnooper.com are great for doing this.

2. Set up a landing page or a blog with a review of the product. I prefer the review method.

3. Find a series of keywords that people interested in that niche would use when searching for information.

4. Use the keywords to drive visitors to your site either by Article marketing Or PPC (I prefer Article marketing It’s cheaper and 1 article can get thousands of views!)

Thats it for this latest rant I’ll be unsubscribing from anyone who sends me emails about CB Quantum. It really is time we told marketers who really don’t care about their subscribers that enough is enough.

I  love it ever few months when a obviously overhyped crap product comes out as it allows me to clean out the lists of who I receive emails from. I recently got a huge deluge of emails about the Clickbank code. So I checked it out. The problem was the further I dug the more obvious it became that the sales letter was the biggest lie since ….well since the last big lie.

If I can spot that after less than 10 minutes research it means that the people promoting it..and there are lots either A) know it’s a poor choice to promote it and don’t care about their subscribers or B) Don’t care enough about their subscribers to do a bit of research.

So lets look at the obvious things that they should have noticed.

1. The headline…. Clickbank newbie makes $48,000 in his first Month

This product is by Michael Jones  ( it’s not really but we’ll come to that later!)  A bit of research would have shown that Michael Jones Had a product out late last year called Cracking The Adwords Code And also a product on clickbank called The Adwords Manifesto   So hardly a newbie!!  He’s been using the same methods in the book to rake in thousands a month If you believe the other products..

2. The fact that he already had a product on Clickbank that was hyped by other marketers surely doesn’t mean that those $48,000 worth of sales came from that product does it???  I’ll let you decide!

3. Ok so who is Michael Jones  Ok so according to all his sales copy he is an Ohio man…. really? since when was Ohio part of Israel? From reading various posts in different forums I beleive that Michael Jones is an alias for Roy Oron & Maayan Marzan. The Two have had a string of products over the past few years. Just search on their names and you’ll see pleanty of negative comments.   The Voice of Michael Jones is provided by a Voice Over artist from Ohio who advertises on Elance. So The Ohio Connection is sort of correct.

The product itself is just a rehash of other products and a rewriting of “Michael Jones” other Adwords products…  Basically find a product on clickbank, spend $500 a day on adwords and wooo hoo we are rich…. or possibly heading towards bankrupcy.

You’ll find that every month or so a product comes along that is hyped by loads of people usually this means that it’s payign good commissions not that it’s good. In the Past year i have found only  ahandful of products that I would consider worth promoting. One of those was a very similar product to The Clicbank code called Commission Blueprint If you want to get into adwords then i would recommend that. Personally I’ll be sticking with Article Marketing

Be careful out there,  and unsubscribe from those lists!!

Twitter is an enigma, The potential to use it for good,to break news and also to make money is undisputed. On the other hand The “signal to Noise Ratio”  can be prohibitive. For those of you who don’t know what signal to noise ration is let me explain with the help of Wikipedia.

“Signal-to-noise ratio compares the level of a desired signal (such as useful twwets) to the level of background noise(sales pitches and other useless tweets). The higher the ratio, the less obtrusive the background noise is.”

So basically the less background noise the better the signal to noise ratio… On twitter the noise is the pointless constant spamming or poor quality tweets someone makes. I once followed someone who tweets solely consisted of what music they were listening to.. At the other end of the spectrum I got 50 tweets from one1 person in a day promoting GDI..the seller of those pointless .ws domains. Did either of the tweeple think they were being useful and helpful?

I’ve recently used the method I laid out in the Free Twitter Tips and Tricks book I released last week to build up over 3000 followers in the past month. I now have a responsibility to provide useful interesting information to those followers and not constant sales messages. Personally I like to follow people who inspire me and with whom I can enter into conversations so why shouldn’t I try to follow that example. Unfortuatly many of these people get lost in the constant background noise so the question is how to Deal with it.

I think the obvious answer is to go through my twitter account and remove people who don’t provide a good signal to noise ratio. Personally I don’t mind getting tweets that are sales pitches, I’ve often found very useful ideas and products this way bit I don’t want to be bombarded with them.

If everyone adopted a policy of only following people who posted interesting and useful tweets 80% of the time Twitter would be a far more useful place..

Thats my Views and I’ve probably missed something obvious. As an internet marketer am I being a hypocrite? Let me know what you think by leaving a comment or sending a tweet.