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 Unfortunately, the methods described are hopelessly outdated, not to mention exceedingly well known.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 The SEO tips are rather outdated as well and include link buying and submitting to paid directories, neither of which are good SEO methods.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.