Case in point: The new Product Launch Formula videos by Jeff Walker.

Okay, I guess I know where this is coming from. It’s the same with the launches in general. Why does every marketer use the same kind of pre-launch process, the same kind of build-up, the same kind of hype generation? Because it works…

And I guess that type of video also works. But does that really mean that every marketer has to go and make a carbon copy of the Video Boss videos? Same style, same background music, same fonts, same colors and even the same text-animations? Seriously, you can’t select a different animation effect?

Apart from anything else, I bet that almost no one has actually tested the Video Boss type video against a different type of video. Video is a b***h to split-test, after all. Let me just say that I’ve been running a few tests with different video types and I’ve found some pretty surprising results.

I think that Internet marketers who market to the Internet marketing crowd have to start thinking on their feet a bit more and start innovating more quickly. You see, outside of the IM market, you can go ahead and use all of those tactics and techniques you know inside out. Use free ebooks as sign-up incentives, do the product launch formula, use Video Boss videos, use fake time-constraints, have one-time-offers that aren’t really one-time-offers and claim that the price is about to go up “any minute now”. Outside of the IM market, people haven’t all seen this stuff a million times before.

But if you’re marketing to online marketers, start thinking outside the box and be the guy who comes up with the next formula rather than always relying on methods that everyone got fed up with last week.

And seriously, consider using a different text-animation, if nothing else.

By the way: While Product Launch Formula is certainly going to be big and spectacular and cool and everything, one of my readers recently pointed me towards a product about launching products that looks way more interesting. Check out the Interactive Offer and see for yourself. It’s a really cool way to market (one that I like to use myself) and I learnt some very cool stuff just from the pre-launch videos. Coincidentally, I had already been doing almost exactly what the videos talk about, before I saw them.

Too bad that the Interactive Offer also suffers from Video Boss-itis…

Let me know what you think. Is this rant justified? Are you also fed up with the same old formulas? Do you use them yourself?

Cheers,

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What is Web2Mayhem? That’s actually not an easy question to answer, because Web2Mayhem includes so many different things. One possible answer is to say that W2M is an all-in-one website promotion system. It includes automatic submission tools, a link-network and a syndication network, keyword research tools a link cloaking and tracking service and a complete step-by-step system for promoting websites.

Does this product deliver or is it spreading itself too thin? Read on to get the full details.

Overview

W2M is a system that has many aspects. Actually, saying that is still an understatement. Below, you find a complete feature list with a brief comment for each item. If you’d like to see some further explanations and more details, check out my Web2Mayhem videos.

Web2Mayhem Software

• Account Creator
  The Account Creator does what it’s name implies: You enter all of your account info (desired username, password, e-mail, profile-picture etc.) and this tool goes out to 97 different websites and creates accounts for you there.
  A great feature of the Account Creator is that it also uploads a profile-picture and a short bio to all the accounts where this is possible, giving them a human touch.
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• RSS Announcer
  The RSS Announcer will take any feed you specify and distribute it to 37 different RSS aggregators online.
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• Social Bookmarker
  This program can automatically bookmark any webpages you load into it on a total of 37 different social bookmarking sites like Diigo, Blinklist, Mixx and others.
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• Video Sharer
  This tool will upload your video files to a maximum of 17 different video sharing sites like YouTube, Dailymotion, Flyxia and others. Note that for many videos, it won’t make sense to submit to all 17 sites, since some of them are niche-specific and don’t accept videos on every subject.
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• Article Distributor
  This program submits your articles to 29 article directories online. Among the directories listed are Ezine Articles, GoArticles, Articlesbase, articledashboard and many more.
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• Blog Poster
  The Blog Poster is quite an interesting feature. The Account Creator will create profiles for you on 10 free blogging platforms like Blog.com, Blogger, tumblr and so on. The Blog Poster is the tool you use to submit content to all of those free blogs.
  You can use this to just submit the same articles you’re already distributing to article directories, but you can also make use of the free blogs in additional ways. After all, most of these free blogs allow you to insert links in the body texts, add pictures and videos and generally let you do a lot more with your content than what you can do on an article directory.
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• PAD Submitter
  This tool submits PAD files to shareware and freeware directories. Even if you don’t have any actual programs of your own, you can take an ebook and convert that into a PAD file for submission. In this case, you probably won’t get much attention in the form of people actually downloading the files, but you’ll still get backlinks from the websites where your files are listed.
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• Podcast Broadcaster
  This program submits your podcast audio files to 14 different podcasting sites. Again, this is something that can get you a lot of exposure and some nice backlinks as well.
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• Content Spinner
  The Content Spinner is a relatively simple text-spinning application. It lets you simply mark text you want to create variations for and then manually enter those variations into predefined fields. The program will then insert the correct spinning syntax for you (and you can even choose among four different types of spin code).
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• Keyword Corral
  This tool lets you import data from the Google keyword tool and filter and sort it according to what you are looking for. It’s a pretty solid tool and a good addition to the Web2Mayhem system, but it does require quite a bit of manual labour, compared to high-end solutions like Keyword Elite 2 or Market Samurai.
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• Web Page Analyzer
  The Web Page Analyzer will check some on-page stats on your site and compare them to the top listed pages for a keyword you specify. You’ll get a rundown of keyword densities, occurrence of the keyword in title, header and META tags etc. The tool can also be used to analyze competitor’s pages before you even enter into the race for ranking for particular keyword.
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• Note that for all the submissions that have captcha protection, you can integrate Decaptcher into W2M, if you have an account there (Decaptcher is a paid service).

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Web2Mayhem Online Applications

• Syndicate Kahuna
  The Syndicate Kahuna is a network of blogs that you can submit content to. Similar to article directories and the free blogs, this is one more source of backlinks and traffic for your website.
  The only drawback is that you have to spin your text in order to get a good number of submissions (a non-spun article will not be submitted and the more you spin, the more submissions you are eligible for). After I plugged one of my blogs into the Kahuna and started receiving submissions from other members, I came to the conclusion that this is a big flaw in the system: Most of the articles I received were the kind of unreadable rubbish that auto-spinning software produces.
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• PAD Software Submitter
  In the W2M members area, you’ll find another PAD submitter which is separate from the desktop software one. It does the same basic thing, but submits to different directories.
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• Link Exchange System
  Also part of W2M is a very neat link exchange network. All you need to do is plug a script (or WordPress plugin) into a page on your website (this will be your links-page) and specify your niche. The script will then automatically create a list of links out to other sites relevant to your niche and in return, you get links back from other websites. The system makes sure that all the links are one-way and you get to pick the anchor-texts of the links pointing to your site.
  While links from link-pages may not be terribly valuable, the W2M link-exchange is the easiest and fastest way to get a couple of custom anchor-text backlinks that I’ve ever seen.
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• Collaborative Blogs
  As a Web2Mayhem member, you get the option to create mini-blogs on two collaborative blog sites. You can get your own category or subdomain on these blogs and have the advantage of your articles and links appearing on a frequently updated, aged, high-PR and frequently crawled web-property.
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• Web 2.0 Co-op
  This is a system that organizes the mutual promotion of social media content among the members. Here’s how it works: You can post “jobs” and see other members’ “jobs”. A “job” could be giving someone’s site a digg or a thumbs-up, rating and commenting on someone’s Squidoo lens or bookmarking a webpage for someone. For each completed job, you get credits which allow you to post your own jobs and thus get your own Web 2.0 content promoted.
  While you will never get thousands of diggs or stumbles just from the Web 2.0 Co-op, the system can give your content a great, initial boost that can make a big difference.
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• Redirect Kahuna
  This application is a link cloaking/redirection service that includes detailed tracking.
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• Keyword Research Tools
  Additionally to the offline tool (Keyword Corral), there are several online tools you can use for keyword research.

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The System

If you look at that feature list and think that it all might be a little too much, you’re not alone. When I first saw how extensive W2M is, I expected the whole thing to be pretty chaotic and thought it would take me days just to learn my way around all the tools.

However, Web2Mayhem also comes with a step-by-step system and instructions on how to use it. The system simply runs you through several phases for promoting your website going from finding a niche and keyword to the initial promotion phase and all the way to the “maintenance” phase, which is when your site is ranking #1 in the search results and all you have to do is make sure it stays there.

If you just follow this system, you will be introduced to every one of the features of W2M one by one and there is a document and a video tutorial for each one.

Even though there is a ton of training material to go through, it is very well structured. The only thing I can complain about is that the video presentations could be better, but that’s really nit-picking.

As for the system itself: I found it to be very solid and fairly easy to implement. There’s no doubt that following this system will get your pages ranked. The system is nothing revolutionary in itself, it’s just that the W2M software lets you do a lot more promotion and link-building than you would ever be able to do manually.

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So, What’s Bad About It?

I’ve been saying an awful lot of good things about Web2Mayhem so far and I’m starting to feel uncomfortable. I hate it when something I write starts looking like a pre-sale.

So, let me put my critic-hat on and tell you some things that could be improved in W2M:

• Flexible Account Management
  W2M has only one set of user-data per account profile. This means that if you already have an account on GoArticles that you would like to submit to and you have another account on articledashboard, but with a different username, W2M can’t submit to both those accounts from the same profile. You’ll have to create separate profiles or create new accounts with identical username/PW combinations.
  It would be nice if there was an “I already have an account here” option.
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• All Browser Submissions
  All of the submissions are done in an automated browser window. The only problem with this is that it’s a bit slow, at times. The system works quite well, though, so there’s me nit-picking again.
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• Automatic E-Mail Confirmation
  Currently, you have to manually go through all of your mails and confirm the account creations. No fun.
  There are tools that can automatically go through your mails and confirm them. From what I read in the W2M forums, they might already be working on such a solution.

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Ratings

Fluff-o-Meter

Again, I’m always careful about being too enthusiastic about the products I test, but I really have to say that Web2Mayhem is one hell of a fluff-free zone. The training material gets straight to the point and the entire system is focused on getting results. There’s none of the “I made $X in only X days and you can too!” bullshit that you so often find with make-money-online stuff. It’s all abaut learning how to do things and then doing them. No filler.

Web2Mayhem: Fluff-Free Zone.

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Spam-Factor

My inbox has not suffered much from signing up to W2M. I do get occasional mails and most of them are at least somewhat promotional in nature but, and this is a big BUT, they usually contain some really good value like webinar and interview invites (and those webinars and interviews are well worth listening to).

Promotion + value = list I don’t mind being on.

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Scam-Scale

We can go straight to the synopsis-box with this one.

Nothing scammy detected.

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Overall Rating

The core of Web2Mayhem consists of a very good collection of auto-submission tools and a solid, well laid-out system to follow for promoting your website(s). Just to be clear: You will still have to do work. To make full use of Web2Mayhem, you should ideally have at least one (better several) monetizable sites in place and be willing to write articles and make videos and maybe audio content on a regular basis.

What Web2Mayhem does, is take that content that you create and make the absolute most of it by spreading it far and wide across the interwebs. And if you’ve ever wondered how to best coordinate all of the different properties to which you submit content, you’ll find a very good answer to that in the W2M training manual and videos.

This is for you, if:

• You have money-making websites already and want to get more out of them.
• You know how to build and monetize a website, but lack the tools and/or knowledge to get them ranked in search results.
• You already create content like articles, videos or podcasts and want to ramp up the results you see from them.

This is not for you, if:

• You are completely new to online marketing.
• You have never created a website before.

To sum it all up, Web2Mayhem is a powerful system with powerful tools. Work with it and you will be rewarded.

To learn even more about Web2Mayhem, check out my videos and to see the product itself, click the banner below.

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Anyway, here we go with today’s collection:

• Find Good WordPress Themes on ThemeGrade
  If you’ve ever been looking for WordPress themes, I’m sure you quickly noticed that there are more of them available than you could look at in a lifetime. Many of them look very fancy, but how can you know which themes are also good “under the hood”? Ideally, a theme should have good SEO presets (proper tagging and such), be compatible with all browsers (with the possible exception of IE6) and load quickly. ThemeGrade is a great little resource since they rate (free and paid) themes in many different aspects. Makes picking a good one that much easier.
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• Link Acceleration Explained – SEOmoz
  Very nice, short-and-to-the-point video explaining the concept of link acceleration (sometimes also called link velocity). A must see for everyone who does link-building for their sites.
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• Link Building Basics – Terry Godier
  In this article, titled “7 Habits of Highly Effective Link Builders”, Terry Godier explains the basics of proper link-building. Together with the link above, this should give your link-building and ranking a kick-start.
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• Huge Collection of Video Marketing Resources – reelSEO
  As the title suggests, this post on reelSEO contains perhaps everything you will ever need to know about video marketing. It’s a collection of links to lots and lots of resources. If you’re into video-marketing, you can’t miss this.

Right, that’s it for this week’s Link Love Friday.
I hope you enjoy the linked content and benefit from these online marketing gems.

Cheers,