Making Millionaires Online

Oh God, please, please don't waste your money on this worthless e-book. The Making Millionaires Online site promotes an e-book containing a system that has made people up to $94,000 a month! Some copy from the site that sums up the generalized nature of the product pitch well:

"I have found a proven money making system anyone can use. You don't need any special computer knowledge. You don't have to know how to build a website, and you don't have to be a marketing guru. So what do you need? All you need to do is follow a few simple steps and you are on your way to making a small fortune online. This system is a set it and forget it system, which will virtually run on 100% autopilot."

Later:

"With my system you will be able to create multiple streams of income in a matter of a few hours. I provide you with everything you need to start making money online."

This product's only redeeming feature is the relatively low price for an e-book containing make money online or work from home programs, $29.99. The content on the site doesn't give very many clues to what the book contains, but you can tell it might have something to do with e-bay.

The actual e-book contains a series of sales pitches and promotion methods -- of course they are all to promote the Making Millionaires Online system as an affiliate. Unfortunately, the methods described are hopelessly outdated, not to mention exceedingly well known. Author suggests using e-bay classifieds and Google AdWords to promote the product, which you will sell through ClickBank. A section on search engine optimization is included in case you decide to put up your own site to sell this product. The SEO tips are rather outdated as well and include link buying and submitting to paid directories, neither of which are good SEO methods.

Bottom line -- there is absolutely no information contained in this e-book that you cannot obtain for free by searching, including the sales pitch he offers to promote the Making Millionaires Online program, which you can read here. That said, I did enjoy reading that Mr. Sebaa considers himself a "freaking genius" for mastering the art of link buying. Don't spend money on this program. If you want to become an affiliate, google it and steal the sales copy from the other affiliates already using it, or better yet, come up with your own.

Six Figure Yearly

Blah, another e-book explaining how to use ClickBank. Nothing interesting here, just more of the same. The product costs $69.97, marked down from $114.95, so you are really getting a bargain! It's endorsed by two affiliate sites, http://www.homebusinessfiles.com/article-sixfigureyearly.html and http://www.workathometop10.com/index.html. Interestingly, http://www.workathometop10.com/index.html gave Six Figure Yearly a "difficultly" rating of easy. I guess "difficultly" is similar to "difficulty" if you don't know the difference between an adverb and a noun.

The Better Business Bureau says the company is owned by Grant Stevens who also owns Data Entry, Inc. at http://www.data-entry-inc.com/. Data Entry, Inc. is also a ClickBank and Google AdWords product. Six Figure Yearly was developed by a single mom named Michelle Campbell. She had to work really hard to support her family! I couldn't find out what her relationship to Grant Stevens is, but my intuition tells me the sob story I read on Six Figure Yearly is a hoax to move products; Michelle Campbell is probably Grant's stage name at his drag shows. Grant has a number of complaints filed against him with the Better Business Bureau, none of them resolved due to inability to contact anyone at the company using the contact information given.

The most annoying thing about Six Figure Yearly is the marketing tactics on Google. There are dozens of pages with unique URLs returned on a query, but they all redirect through some affiliate program that just redirects me back to Six Figure Yearly's main site with affiliate cookies added. How are these affiliate sites, which are garbage, getting indexed?

You can get information on how to advertise ClickBank products using Google AdWords for free, so I wouldn't bother paying for this e-book. Try reading through the information here. If you still think you need an e-book to use this system successfully, go ahead and waste $69.97 on Six Figure Yearly.

The Science of Getting Rich

Well, I was definitely hoping to find some good dirt on The Science of Getting Rich program, but so far no luck. Everyone who has taken the time to put comments or reviews of this system online seems very happy with what they received for the extremely hefty $1,995 purchase price. Of course, these are all affiliate marketers so why would they say anything negative?

It started with a book by a man named Wallace D. Wattles entitled The Science of Getting Rich. This book was published in 1923 and is now in the public domain. That means, among other things, that you can read it for free on Wikipedia. The book takes a philosophical approach to obtaining wealth -- mind over matter; change your thought patterns, change your life. Then in 2006, Rhonda Byrne produced a film based on the principles in the book called The Secret. This film can be purchased on Amazon starting at $19.99. The film features presentations by Michael Beckwith, Bob Proctor, and most notably Jack Canfield, author of Chicken Soup for the Soul. After the film's success, Rhonda partnered with Bob Proctor who had already expanded The Science of Getting Rich into a series of seminars and audio lessons.

You can obtain the information in this program for $19.99 by purchasing The Secret DVD on Amazon and reading the book on which all of this is based for free on Wikipedia. Or, you can pay $1,995 for a leather briefcase, an mp3 player preloaded with Bob's audio lessons, and a packet of instructional material based on the information in the original The Science of Getting Rich book. Also, you get tickets to Bob's seminars.

If you join the affiliate program to market this product, your level 1 payout will be $500. Your level 2 payout will be $250. If you are a good enough affiliate to sell a product worth $19.99 for $1,995, I highly recommend this product. If you don't think you will be able to sell a product at a cost that is $1,975.01 more than it is worth, then I recommend avoiding this program.

p.s. If you had a bad experience with this program, I'd love to hear about it.

Suckered.org

Suckered.org isn't a work at home opportunity, just an affiliate site with a unique gimmick. I stumbled across this site researching my last post and I thought it was a great idea. Suckered.org hosts a vast array of affiliate products and offers to refund your purchase if you are not satisfied with the product after 8 weeks. It's totally free, no registration is required. What a great idea!

Then I read the fine print. The refund only applies if you purchase the product through ClickBank. Which means, they are not offering any additional service that ClickBank does not already offer. From ClickBank's return policy:

Our official return policy for all ClickBank products is as follows:

ClickBank will, at its discretion, allow for the return or replacement of any defective product within 8 weeks from the date of purchase. For recurring billing products, returns for more than one payment may be provided if requested within the standard 8 week return period. After 8 weeks all sales are final.

So, suckered.org is not adding any value that is not already present in ClickBank. But, it would be a great idea for an affiliate site to really offer a full refund if buyers were unsatisfied, out of pocket. That would definitely be something to give customers some incentive to buy products through your affiliate site over another.

The other service offered by Suckered.org is "real reviews." The site indicates they use independent order verification technology to ensure only a customer who has purchased the product being reviewed can post their opinion. This is a good idea, but after clicking through twenty or so products, I'd only seen three reviews total. Two of them literally said, "Good product. Very good."

My opinion on this is that while Suckered.org has certainly come up with a clever gimmick, you might as well make your purchase through ClickBank directly.

Market Health formerly Joe Bucks and HerbalBiz

Market Health at www.markethealth.com used to be known as Joe Bucks, still accessible at www.joebucks.com. They offer an affiliate program selling natural health products for a wide spectrum of concerns ranging from diet pills to erectile dysfunction cures. The affiliate payout is 50% which applies to online orders, phone, and mail orders. It also applies to re-orders which is rare in the world of affiliate marketing. The second tier payout is 5%. Affiliates who make 20 or more sales a month can negotiate their rate. The affiliate program is free to join; you can also sign up for a newbie affiliate program if you do not have a web site already or know how to create one. This option is provided by HerbalBiz at www.herbalbiz.com and costs either $1.95 or $49.95. The $1.95 option buys you a turnkey web site pre-loaded with Market Health products, marketing templates for flyers, business cards, and banners, and an e-book on internet marketing. The $49.95 option buys the same as well as a year of hosting and an 800# with customer support that can be used to take phone orders. This sounds like a great affiliate opportunity with easy start-up and awesome returns.

However, several complaints have emerged about affiliate ID hijacking. Many affiliates complained their affiliate ID was replaced with a common ID -- #680256. Market Health's FAQ section addresses this issue, indicating an affiliate cookie is placed on your computer upon visiting a Market Health or Joe Bucks web site. #680256 is the default affiliate ID (or Market Health's own ID). This is certainly a simple enough solution if your problem is as simple as seeing the wrong ID on your own browser. Many affiliates complained their ID was not persisting for customer sessions as well, though, and the default ID was replacing it. Complaints indicated this occurred most frequently on the most popular products.

  The director of Market Health is Gary McNelly. Gary regularly contributes on forums related to Market Health or Joe Bucks, answering questions and attempting to resolve issues, which I think is a mark in his favor, though his tone sometimes rings a little snide. Gary says the affiliate ID hijacking issue is a cookie problem. Affiliates say this is ridiculous as the problem persists across multiple browsers and computers. Personally, I think the blame should fall at the feet of Herbalbiz.com, responsible for providing the turnkey web sites the majority of these affiliates were using to sell Market Health products. This is probably a bug in the Herbalbiz.com sites where the default affiliate ID is not being updated properly for all products when the affiliate customizes the site. If anyone out there has a turnkey Herbalbiz.com site where this issue is suspected, send me the link! It would be my pleasure to track this issue further.

Market Health is a good affiliate program, but plagued with affiliate complaints due to the weak link in the chain - HerbalBiz. My recommendation is to set up your own site if you want to market Market Health products and avoid the turnkey sites provided by HerbalBiz.

UPDATE - I found an HerbalBiz turnkey affiliate site to check out. Basically, the issue is the implementation of the hidden affiliate ID, ironically meant to prevent affiliate ID hijacking. When you load the main store page, code on the site tries to set an aid cookie on the root domain for each advertised product on that main page. This happens when you click through to products not offered on the main page as well -- the store code attempts to write an aid cookie containing your affiliate ID on the product domain. Depending on the privacy settings on the browser, this may not be allowed. For instance, Safari browser's default settings do not allow sites to write cookies on third party domains. So none of these aid cookies will be written. In this case, the default aid (680256) is written upon direct navigation to the product site. This is a poor implementation that should be corrected to ensure affiliates receive credit for all their sales.

SiteBuildIt!

SiteBuildIt! is a suite of web site building and promotion tools that includes a hosting package, page builder, search engine submission, keyword generator, and marketing strategies to promote your site. SiteBuildIt! is a tool designed to help you create your online business from scratch, targeted specifically at affiliate marketers.

When I started looking for the most successful affiliate products, SiteBuildIt! kept coming up again and again. I think this may be because affiliates love to *sell* it more than it is because they love to use the product. The majority of the neutral reviews I read indicated SiteBuildIt! is a decent product for newbies who don't have any experience in web programming, but its applications are limited due to lack of compatibility for dynamic scripting like cgi or php. It is a simple tool that allows you to make simple, good looking HTML pages, and helps you promote them to search engines and monetize them. For more advanced purposes, it is somewhat lacking. That said, the product costs $300 a year, of which affiliates earn $75 for each sale, plus a portion for each year the customer renews their subscription. This is a big payout for affiliate products and one that is recurring. To me, this explains SiteBuildIt!'s generally high ranking more than the product offering.

Creating web page has been made simple by a variety of free products (see http://pages.google.com/); search engine submission is typically free; and web site hosting is in the range of $30 a year -- 1/10th of the cost of SiteBuildIt! As an affiliate product for you to market, I think it is a great one to select based on the payout and the recurring payment model. As a tool to build sites to market your other affiliate products... it might be worth experimenting on your own, taking a few free HTML tutorials online, and seeing what results you can produce without shelling out $300 a year for what is basically a glorified hosting package.

Get Adobe Dreamweaver CS3 from Amazon for about the same price as a one year subscription to SiteBuildIt! and make as many web sites as you want with it.

Ewen Chia

Ewen Chia is the originator of a couple of Internet marketing systems -- "Auto Pilot Internet Income" and "Internet Business For Newbies." These systems are also sold by affiliates and their content focuses on affiliate marketing. The e-book sells for about $27.

You can purchase these e-books from Ewen Chia and apply them to any affiliate program, but be aware these systems are being marketed by affiliates with the usual "Make millions online!" taglines. The affiliate sites typically won't tell you what you are buying, but of course it is simply an Internet marketing e-book giving successful strategies to market any affiliate program.

Look out for "review" sites that claim to review a few online money-making products (except this one of course -- I am not an affiliate for any of the products I review. The links in my posts are direct links to the corporate product, not affiliate links). The review site that led me to the Ewen Chia package had three online money systems "reviewed." Clicking through the links it quickly became obvious the review page was nothing but an affiliate main page linking to his affiliate page for each online product he sells via affiliate marketing. A quick whois query indeed revealed all three sites were owned by the same person. If you are ever looking at a review site, thinking it is legitimate information, do a whois query to see who owns the sites being reviewed as well. It is free and you can do it online here. The registrant in the whois database did not match the person the affiliate claimed to be on the product pages, nor did the address.

My recommendation is to go directly to Ewen Chia's information site at http://autopilotinternetincome.com/ and read through the content of his site, which is very meaty by comparison. Then use the information on his site to determine if you think the system is worth $27. If so, I recommend purchasing from Ewen Chia directly instead of an affiliate. Additionally, I highly recommend becoming an affiliate for a real product instead of the circular path of marketing the marketing system as a work-from-home-be-a-millionaire package.

The Apple Patch Diet

This is an affiliate program in which you sell a diet patch for about $50. Each sale nets you $25. This is NOT a multi-level marketing scheme. However, you must sell $100 worth of Apple Patch Diet product before you will be paid. The enrollment cost to you is $29.95, but the Apple Patch Diet company will currently deposit $25 into your affiliate account for signing up, for a total net cost or $4.95. Note that this rate reduction would only apply in the event that you sell $100 worth of product. The company also offers a "No-hassle" guarantee that promises you will make $250 in the first month. If you don't, you can contact the company within 60 days of sign-up for a refund of your $29.95 enrollment fee (you will not be paid the $25 that was deposited into your affiliate account in this case -- only your enrollment fee).

The Apple Patch Diet company provides an affiliate web site and a software product that submits your affiliate site to search engines to aid in marketing. The basic pitch is that you will not have to do anything, just sit back and watch the cash flow in after you enroll.

Better Business Bureau indicates this company does not meet the criteria for earning either a satisfactory or an unsatisfactory rating. A total of 27 complaints have been processed for the company since June of 2006, the majority of which were advertising issues which the company was able to resolve amicably. The company is owned by Jeff Burkey. For more information visit the Better Business Bureau Apple Patch Diet Information Page. If the link does not work, go directly to the Better Business Bureau web site and click "Check out a Business or Charity," then enter "Apple Patch Diet" in the search box and click "Search."

After reading multiple reviews of this affiliate program, I think it is a legitimate offering. You will be selling a real product. However, you will have to do some outside marketing in addition to using the search engine submission software provided by the Apple Patch Diet company. To make the program work, you will have to put in the effort (e.g. posting fliers and handing out business cards to sell the product). As with all diet products, many people claim the Apple Patch Diet is effective and many claim it does nothing. Reviewing the product offering is outside the scope of this post; only the affiliate "work from home" program is being reviewed. Many comments indicate the diet patch is FDA approved, however, this is misleading. Very few diet products are approved by the FDA. The delivery mechanism -- the patch -- is FDA approved. The ingredients are not FDA approved, as with the vast majority of diet products. There are extensive additional comments about this affiliate program as well as the Apple Patch Diet product on the Friends in Business community site.

Many affiliates sell this product on e-bay for a price between $25 and $50. This is probably a legitimate way to work the system to your benefit. Order the product from the Apple Patch Diet company directly through the affiliate site they provide for you for the price of $50. Keep the commission you earn of $25 for each product you have purchased yourself. Then sell the product on e-bay to recoup the other $25 invested and a profit. For example, you purchase the product for $50 from your own affiliate site, receive your $25 affiliate commission, making your investment $25. Once the product arrives you sell it on e-bay for $40 - a discount from the retail price - and recoup your $25 investment as well as turning a $15 profit (minus e-bay listing fees).

Access the Apple Patch Diet homepage at http://www.applepatchdiet.net.