Anyway, on to the actual topic. About once a month, something or other happens, that gets a lot of people all worried about the “end of online marketing”! Be it a new feature Google introduces (personalized search, anybody?), some rules changing (e.g. new Facebook advertisement rules), marketer’s accounts getting banned (AdWords, Blogger,…) or anything else along those lines. Whenever something like that happens, you can count on a lot of wailing about how the days of making easy money online are finally counted etc. etc.

Well, here’s an interesting counter-argument:

Is this thing accurate? I don’t know.

Is it a good illustration of the fact that the Internet is simply far too vast for the human mind to comprehend and that opportunities for businesses and growth are mind-bogglingly numerous? Hell yes!

Cheers,

Today’s post is a very special one, because it is the first in a series of interviews with Internet marketing experts from many different fields of expertise like SEO, PPC, social media etc.

My first guest is Gary Gregory from Google Sniper Keywords. He is probably the most experienced Google Sniper out there, with over 100 sniper sites under his belt. In the interview, we talk about some of the most common difficulties people have when they start out with online marketing, find out what Gary’s manual and training is all about and learn why it pays off to be stubborn, in this business.

Below, you can find the download link as well as the straming player for listening to the interview. Enjoy!

[Audio clip: view full post to listen]

Download Link

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For my first product review, I chose Confessions of a Lazy Super Affiliate by Chris Rempel. In this article, you will find my in-depth analysis of this ebook and learn everything you need to know to decide whether it’s worth trying for you or not. Read on for all the details.

First of all, let me address the question “why this?”: Confessions of a Lazy Super Affiliate or “Lazy Affiliate” as I’m going to refer to it as, is not the newest or hottest or most hyped get-rich-quick program out there. I will be going after the “classics” and the super-popular products for the RQR reviews, but I always want to feature smaller, less known products as well. Lazy Affiliate caught my attention because it looked particularly reasonable. It’s reasonably priced and the sales page is pleasantly un-hypey. I like that, so I decided to give it a shot.

Overview

This ebook is split up into six chapters, each building on the previous one. It’s mostly content, with just a little bit of introduction in the beginning and a short motivational “get-your-ass-in-gear” rant at the end. So, right off the bat I can tell you that you’re getting mostly content (and that’s a good thing).

What’s it About?

All the methods described in Lazy Affiliate are aimed at generating organic traffic. Mostly, this is free, but some paid services are recommended along the line so it would be wrong to say it’s all about “free” traffic. The ebook covers a very wide range of subjects, starting out with how to pick products and keywords and ending with how to build your affiliate marketing sites into a huge Internet marketing empire.

The subjects covered are:

• Product selection
• Keyword research
• Setting up affiliate sites
• Testing your conversion rates, effectiveness of campaigns etc.
• A little bit of sales-copy how-to
• List building / e-mail marketing
• Several different techniques for link-building and traffic generation, including potentially “viral” methods for rapidly spreading your links and gaining visitors. This is the part that gets the most emphasis.
• Some SEO basics
• Some product creation and promotion (i.e. creating and selling your own product)
• Techniques for getting more out of campaigns that are already working
• The big picture of building a “marketing empire” to dominate a niche
• Plus some assorted do’s and dont’s here and there

As you can see, a very wide range of topics are covered in the Lazy Affiliate ebook. Now, if you look at the list of topics and then look at the number of pages this book has (see table above), you’ll see a bit of a problem right away. Covering a dozen subjects in the span of roughly sixty pages means that either the author is excellent at absolutely nailing the essentials for each topic or that some topics are not discussed in much depth. Unfortunately, in this case, it’s the latter.

What struck me as strange is that, several times in the book, I came across sentences that went something like this:

There’s a lot that I couldn’t cover here…

I just wanted to briefly touch on the two types of strategies that are most-effective…

[This topic] is something I can’t really comprehensively cover in a few pages – or even a reasonably sized book.

Wait a minute! Why can’t you cover that other stuff? What’s holding you back from going into more depth, here? Is you ebook running out of pages? Often, while reading through the manual, it just felt like some very interesting subjects were brushed over much too quickly and the reason why they weren’t elaborated was never clear to me.

I personally liked the first few chapters, where Chris Rempel explains his method of finding products and customers, the most interesting. There is definitely some very good advice to be found on those pages. I had the impression that the information-density thinned out the further the book progressed. By the end, some very complex themes are just briefly touched upon.

There’s another bit of good news/bad news that I want to mention: Throughout the ebook, a hypothetical campaign for selling registry cleaner software (check Clickbank for numerous examples of these) is used as an example. On the upside, it is very helpful to have such a tangible example. It’s much easier to imagine how each method can be applied this way.
On the downside, I found that the book leans too heavily on this example. Many of the methods described seem to be especially suitable for a registry cleaner or error-fixing type software and it’s not always clear how these methods could be translated for other, non-software related markets. It would have been great if some examples for completely different products would have been given as well.

Sales, Sales, Sales…

When you buy the Lazy Affiliate, you will be sold to. First of all, there’s an immediate upsell, offering two different products (one “bonus package” with more ebooks and website templates for $67 and a personal consultation offer for $197). I’ve explained here why I’m not a big fan of this kind of thing, though I have to say that I think the consultation offer is a “valid” one. You don’t expect that kind of thing to be included in the ebook and it is a real upgrade to the initial offer. The page these two offers are presented on uses a fake time constraint: The customer is told that this is a “one time only” offer. It isn’t, of course. You can navigate to that page anytime you want to.

The ebook itself contains ten different affiliate offers (i.e. products that Chris Rempel “recommends” and when you buy them through the links in the ebook, he’ll get a commission). There’s nothing fundamentally wrong with such offers and I found most of them to be relevant – no unrelated affiliate links were crammed in. Ten offers on sixty pages is a bit much, though. You can also see why, as a general rule, I don’t buy recommended, paid software and services that I encounter in the products I test. If I decided to implement each one of the recommended tools in the book, it would set me back by around $500 including some recurring costs from subscription deals.

Having said that, the selling done in the book is never pushy or annoying. There’s none of that “you must act on this right now, otherwise you will fail miserably for the rest of your life!!!” that I encounter all too often in online sales-pitches.

Ratings

Let’s take a look at the ratings in detail.

Fluff-o-Meter

The Fluff-o-Meter is right in the middle between fluffy and to the point. On the one hand, there is very little padding in the text. There aren’t many repetitions of the same statements, and almost all of the text is about delivering information. On the other hand, however, the information provided is mostly very vague. I missed any kind of real, step-by-step instructions in this book. Most of the advice takes the form of “do this, then do that”. I would have liked to see something along the lines of “here’s how to do this: step 1 …”.

To name an extreme example, at one point the author states that you should “learn the ins and outs of programming” and hire a programmer to build an application for you. He does this in one paragraph. No word on how I might go about this.
Sure, I know it’s possible to take a piece of advice like that, hit up Google, check out some forums, find out what I need to know about app programming, find out what the best sources for hiring programmers are and how to set up a project like this and then get on with it. But I’m not paying 30 bucks for an ebook to read up on “tips”. I want the information already assembled and actionable.

As a final example, at one point in the ebook you are told that you shouldn’t use WordPress for your affiliate sites. No alternatives are offered, it’s simply implied that you should build the websites yourself. It’s also not explained why WordPress should be avoided, what CMS one should use instead, or where to find more information.

TL;DR:
It’s all information but the information is vague.

Spam-Factor

My inbox has remained fairly unharmed after signing up for Lazy Affiliate. Right after the purchase, you get one motivational mail that I really liked and that seemed very sincere. I only got two further e-mails since. Once of them contained a link to a helpful video plus a sales-pitch and the other one was just a sales-pitch. Not too bad, so far.
I will update this section and the rating (if necessary) in a few weeks time.

TL;DR:
Inbox spared, only one sales-pitch recieved.

Scam-Scale

There isn’t much scammyness to this product. As mentioned above, there are instant upsells and quite a collection of affiliate links in the ebook. The sales-page also over-promises regarding the “hands-off” factor. The customer is given the impression that the system is very easy to implement and that it should have some automatic quality to it. Ultimately, the “hands-off” part only applies once you’ve built your marketing empire and can afford to outsource most of the work.

That’s really the extent of the scammyness here and compared to many of the products out there, it’s pretty tame. So I give it a two out of five on the Scam-Scale.

TL;DR:
Instant upsell and some overpromise, but that’s it.

Overall Rating

Overall, I rate this product a 2.5 out of 5. Quite simply, what I’m seeing in this product is a balance of strong and weak points. Or, to put that differently, Lazy Affiliate doesn’t do anything wrong, but it fails to do what it does “right enough”. I actually think that there is a certain type of market and a certain audience that this ebook is perfect for, but this is not clear when you buy it. The sales-page doesn’t target a specific sub-niche of Internet marketers, so many will probably make a purchase that isn’t suited for them, with the Lazy Affiliate.

This is for you if:

• You already have some experience with affiliate marketing
• You can set up websites and know some basic programming (html)
• (Optional) You are promoting or would like to promote software
• You want a general guide to help you get more out of your existing campaigns and take them a step further

This is not for you if:

• You are completely new to online marketing
• You are looking for very precise, step-by-step instructions
• You’ve never built a website before

Conclusion

As you can probably tell, i wasn’t especially taken with Lazy Affiliate. It does offer some really strong advice on picking profitable products and finding good keywords and there are a lot of very, very useful nuggets of information here and there. In fact, one of the main methods described for driving traffic really is very original and I’ve never encountered this method anywhere else. So, there’s potentially some really good stuff in this product. I simply would have wanted to see more concrete, easy-to-follow instructions on how to implement these methods.
I think this book could have been much better and more useful if Rempel had written 60 pages just on market-research, customer-profiling and his one unique strategy for building traffic and backlinks and really gotten into it. The way it is, the book describes the possible path from your first little affiliate offer to a huge money-making empire in far too broad strokes.

This book can be a useful general guideline for anyone who already has some experience with Internet marketing under their belts. A beginner looking for some step-by-step guidance will not find it here.

Finally, let me state that I believe Chris Rempel actually had good intentions with this product. I think he really does want to help people make money online. He just didn’t quite nail it with Lazy Affiliate. Since I found many of the ideas in the book quite promising, I’ll be on the lookout for more Rempel products and consider reviewing a different one in the near future.

If you are interested in purchasing Confessions of a Lazy Super Affiliate, follow this link.

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Affiliate marketing is probably the number one thing that most internet marketers do to make money. As you might have already read in the RQR Glossary, affiliate marketing comes down to promoting and selling someone else’s products in exchange for commissions for every sale made. In this RQR Basics article, you’ll find a more in-depth explanation of what affiliate marketing is and how to get into it.

Example

It’s often easiest to understand a process by just looking at a concrete example, so here’s an example of what an affiliate sale constitutes:

1. You sign up with an affiliate network (more on those below) or sign an affiliate contract with a manufacturer.
2. You choose a product to promote. Let’s say you choose an ebook that teaches people how to improve their golf swing. (There are thousands of products in hundreds of categories to choose from, out there – I’m just picking a random example out of the air here). Let’s also assume that the ebook costs $25.
3. You receive a “personal” link. When someone clicks this link, they will arrive at the sales-page for the golf ebook.
4. You place this link on your blog, in an article, on a website, in a forum or where ever else one can place links. As a concrete example, let’s say you write a post about golfing on your blog and add the link and a recommendation for the ebook.
5. Someone reads your blog-post and is interested in the book you recommend, so they click on the link.
6. They see the sales-page of the golf swing ebook and decide to buy it.
7. Since they arrived at the sales-page through your personal affiliate link, you get paid a commission for the sale. In the case of a $25 ebook, you would probably get around $15 for this sale.

That’s basically how one affiliate sale could happen. It’s actually quite difficult to make a good example of an affiliate sale because there are so many different products that you can promote and there are just as many different ways of promoting them. Let’s take a step back from this and look at the abstract of affiliate marketing.

Affiliate marketing always involves a manufacturer (buildings to the left) with products on offer. The affiliate (A) promotes these products to potential customers (guy on the right). The customer buys the products and pays the manufacturer. The manufacturer in turn passes part of the proceeds on to the affiliate.

Affiliate marketing is a true win-win situation between you and the manufacturer of the product you are promoting. You get paid without having to manufacture and ship products yourself. The manufacturer benefits from your marketing efforts, without taking a risk. Since he only pays part of the money he makes from each sale you refer, this is basically risk-free marketing. Compare that to more traditional marketing methods, where you might spend thousands or even millions for large billboard, TV or newspaper ads and not get a buying response from the customers at all, and you quickly see why manufacturers like to offer affiliate deals.

Affiliate Websites

As I mentioned briefly above, you need some place to put your affiliate link, so that people can find it and click through to the manufacturer’s sales-page or shop. There are many options for link-placement, the most popular being:

• In an article.
  You can publish an article (e.g. “How to Improve Your Golf Handicap”) and publish it on an article directory. In this article, you can endorse a product and place an affiliate link (see Article Marketing for more details).
• On a blog.
  Maybe you blog about golfing or you start a blog about golf specifically to affiliate-sell golf products. On your own blog, you can basically place the affiliate links wherever you want. In posts related to the product makes most sense, of course.
• On a mini-site.
  A mini-site is a small web-page built around your affiliate link. In the case of our example it could be a mini-site focused completely around improving your golf-swing. It could be just one page, promoting the affiliate product or it could include a handful of pages, including some free tips, maybe a survey or some other content to keep visitors interested.
• On a forum.
  Most forums won’t allow you to place affiliate links directly in your posts. You can use a forum as a stepping-stone, though. If you post relevant and interesting content in a golf-forum and link to your golf-blog in the signature, you can increase the visitors to your blog. These visitors will then find the affiliate links on your blog.

Volume

Affiliate marketing is a numbers game. Any potential customer will need to pass through several “gates” before they make an actual purchase. It begins with the potential customer being somewhere “out there”, with a general interest in the product you’re promoting or perhaps with a certain problem they need a solution for.

The first gate they need to pass is that they need to find you and your site or article somehow. Usually, this happens via search engines. One of your articles, forum-posts or blog entries could show up in the search engine results when someone enters a golf-related keyword.
The second gate is that they need to visit your site/article/blog. After all, the search engine serves up multiple choices and even if yours is among the first to be listed, they might not decide to click on your particular entry.
The third gate is when they see the affiliate link on your website and decide whether to follow it or not. You have to get them interested enough to actually want to click on that link.
Once they’ve done this, it’s up to the manufacturer to get them through the fourth gate: Actually deciding to buy the product.

As you can imagine, there will always be countless visitors who jump off and don’t pass one of these gates. Out of a thousand people who search for a solution for improving their Golf handicap, maybe 400 will find one of your articles. Out of those, maybe 100 will follow through to your blog. Out of those 100, maybe 30 will decide to click on your affiliate link and of those 30 people left, maybe one person will actually buy the product. These numbers are hypothetical, of course. Depending on your market and how well your websites and articles are written and designed, these numbers can vary greatly.

The number of “gates” customers must pass through can vary. It is worth noting that fewer “gates” doesn’t necessarily mean more sales. Often, the opposite is true: Some customers need a lot of convincing and won’t buy if they get directed to the sales-page too quickly. If they get to read up on the subject first, see a couple of pages and many different arguments, they might be much more willing to buy, once they arrive at the sales-page.

Bottom line is: You need to get a lot of people to see your affiliate sites. This is why most internet marketers are also very interested in SEO (search engine optimization) and other techniques for maximizing visitors to websites.

Benefits

• It can be free.
  You can use paid methods for promoting products and increasing traffic, but it’s absolutely possible to rely completely on free methods.
• Saves you a lot of hassle.
  You don’t have to make products yourself. Especially for material goods, this saves you a ton of effort that otherwise goes into production, storage, shipping etc.
• It’s very scalable.
  See my post titled The Nr. 1 Reason to Get Into Affiliate Marketing for more on this.
• It can be risk-free.
  Since you can promote products without spending any money (or with spending only very little), affiliate marketing can be practically risk-free. If your campaign fails and no one buys the products you’re promoting, you don’t lose any money.

Drawbacks

• No guarantee.
  The flipside of the “no risk” factor is that there is no guarantee any of your campaigns will be successful. You might try to promote the hell out of something but never see any good conversions.
• Time consuming.
  Setting up affiliate sites, filling them with relevant content, writing good sales-copy, optimizing your pages for search engines, publishing articles… These are all things you need to do to a certain extent, as an affiliate marketer. They are all more or less time-consuming and it can take a while before you see any pay-off. Expect to put in many, many hours before seeing your first sales.

Where to Find Affiliate Deals

There are so many affiliate networks out there, I doubt I’ve seen even half of them. And apart from the networks, many companies offer affiliate deals individually, if you just look for them. Finally, you can strike your own affiliate deals with practically anyone if you know how to implement them and can negotiate.

Let’s begin with affiliate networks. These are marketplaces where manufacturers/authors can list their products and affiliates can choose which ones to promote. Clickbank is one of the most popular affiliate networks. Further popular choices are Commission Junction, Paydotcom and Shareasale.

Some companies offer their own affiliate programs. A good example of this is amazon’s “Associates”, which offers affiliate deals on all their products. Not so great for books (they’ll net you a few cents per sale, at best) but pretty good for some of the other, higher-priced products that amazon offers. To find more affiliate deals, simply look for manufacturers and online stores in your targeted product niche and search their websites for affiliate pages. Or write them an e-mail and ask them about it. If they have an affiliate program, they’ll be more than glad to help you sign up and get started (remember: More affiliates means more money for them).

I will be posting mini-reviews of different affiliate networks and programs in the near future, so stay tuned.

Okay, I think that about covers it. If you have any further questions, let me know down in the comments.

That’s it for now,

Affiliate marketing is an attractive business model, although the real reasons for this are rarely stated. They tend to get drowned out by all the hype. Contrary to what your average sales-pitch would have you believe, affiliate marketing isn’t super-easy and it very rarely, if ever, makes anyone rich over night. It also involves actual work, actual investments and actual effort. Just like a “real” business. Go figure. In spite of all this, there are still many reasons to love affiliate marketing. The foremost can be summarized in just one word: Scalability.

Why Scalability and What’s With the Awful Graphic?

With scalability I specifically mean how your return of profits scales against your investment of time. And yes, there is an actual reason why I chose the most clichéd, worn-out, caricature of a graph representing success. When you see that graph, you assume that the upwards trend pictured is a monetary one, right? Time advancing from left to right, we see that more and more cash is rolling in and that’s what us greedy bastards are all ultimately after.

So far, so good. What’s more important than the information given, though, is the information omitted. A very important question to ask is: How much am I investing to get this increase in profit? And I don’t mean the investment of money. As long as the returns are climbing at a higher rate than your investments, it’s all good. It’s your investment of time and energy that will have the greatest impact on your quality of life.

If your investment of time and energy scales 1:1 with your profit, that’s bad news. This is the predicament you often find yourself in when working 9-5: You can make more money, but only if you work longer hours. As long as the money you make is directly linked to the time you invest, there is always a cap on how much you can make. Much worse, the more you make, the less time you have to live, so unless what you do for a living is already your favourite thing in the world, it means you have to trade in life-quality for money. And that sucks.

Enter Affiliate Marketing

Let’s just look at affiliate marketing as a pure numbers game, for a minute. You are selling a product and you have a certain conversion rate. Let’s say you have a 1% conversion rate after refunds. In other words, you make exactly one sale for every 100 visitors to your website. Obviously, in this situation, there is still a link between time invested and profits made. But here, you can be clever about how you invest your time. While you do have to set up a site worth visiting, provide some content worth seeing, perhaps spend some money on advertising and much more, the number of visitors your site has is largely still independent of the time you spend. For one thing, people can be visiting your site and buying products whether you are present or not. More importantly, if you find the right angle, if you target the right keywords and if you invest in the right advertising, your site’s visitors can potentially sky-rocket. You can get ten times as many visitors (and therefore ten times as many sales) as last week, if you invest an hour or two cleverly.

To achieve this, you need a lot of experience and/or a good deal of luck. We often forget that overnight success is usually the result of years of hard work. But working in a highly scalable business such as affiliate marketing, you know that the time invested can eventually yield exponential results.

That, for me, is the Nr. 1 reason to get into affiliate marketing.
That, and the fact that I have a natural talent for writing scammy, overblown sales-hype.

What you will be hard-pressed to find, however, is reliable information on whether these products are any good or not. This is a void that RichQuickReview.com is here to fill.

Things to Come

At the time of this writing, there isn’t much to see on the site yet. It’s only just been launched and every website has to start somewhere (“somewhere” usually being “scratch”). Now, you will soon find my first in-depth review of a get-rich-quick product, more specifically a guide to affiliate marketing. As you can imagine, testing such a product takes quite a bit of time. Remember, I am actually testing the products, not just writing positive reviews in order to promote my own sales of it. This is what separates RichQuickReview.com from countless other sites: They do “reviews” (picture: exaggerated air-quotes), I do reviews.

The reason I am doing this is because I think it is dearly needed. Offering affiliate deals is tremendously good for an individual product, but in the long term, it’s bad for the overall market. Because every get-rich-quick program offers affiliate deals, there are lots of eager marketers buzzing all over the place, trying to sell these programs by any means possible. This is great for the sales of the individual products, because dozens or even hundreds of affiliate marketers will inevitably generate more sales than the author of the program ever could on his own. But it is bad for the market as a whole because so many people have a vested interest in the products that nobody criticizes them. Why should you write about how bad a product is on your blog, for instance, if you can use the same space to write a few lines of praise, plug in an affiliate link and make some money?

Welcome to the Swamp

As a result of this, the “online-marketing market” is a scam-ridden, overhyped, bold-red-letters-flooded swamp of bullshit and misinformation. Anyone encountering this market for the first time is likely to A) get sucked into it instantly by all the hype, get into some program before knowing anything about it (“Hey, I’ll be making millions by the end of the week! I can’t risk not trying this!”) and probably end up regretting it or B) instantly dismiss it.

That’s too bad, really, because there is an actual market here, a diamond, so to speak, somewhere in this humongous pile of dung. There really are people making money with online marketing and there really are guides and programs that can help you get into online marketing. Perhaps some of them even have the capacity to make you rich quickly, but how would you ever find them among all the crap?

Well, soon enough, you’ll find them right here. I can’t tell the good from the bad products by just looking at them, either, so I will just have to try them all. I will tell you exactly what the products I test are about, whether they are worth your time and money and, most importantly, whether they will really help you generate some income or not. And believe me, I will call out the bad apples. I will call them out and I will enjoy it.

In the meantime, and in between the reviews, I will be filling this website with as much useful information and resources on the subject of online marketing as I can. Thank you for stopping by and I hope to see you around again, soon!

That’s it for now.