Make Money Online - Scam or Legit?

User Reviews of Internet Marketing Gone Wild Continued

Just the promised daily update (see yesterday's post on User Reviews of Internet Marketing Gone Wild  for background info).

Not a lot of additional info.  Mike did not have time today to use the product at all.  I did though.  As I mentionned before I had baited some hooks (can't spell out specifics) and was waiting to see how they turned out.  Today I decided that I would bait some more.  I know me and if I put 20 offers out there and 1 of them is a winner and overall I come out with a reasonable payoff for my time, then I'll keep going.  But if I simply put out 10 offers and don't get any winners.... I'm not so likely to put out 10 more. 

So I decided to look for other opportunities to try this technique and found one.  I'm very hopeful and should know whether I have a winner with a day or two.  Again, I couldn't help but think, that with everything I've seen about internet marketing, I didn't expect to be seeing any truly new ideas, but I definitely have with Internet Marketing Gone Wild.

Anyone else who is giving it a try, please add a comment here.

User Reviews of Internet Marketing Gone Wild

As I promised in yesterday's post, Internet Marketing Gone Wild Goes Live, I am going to give you daily updates from two users of this product.  Myself, who has a number of years of internet marketing, most of it in affiliate marketing.  And my friend Mike, who was recently laid off (officially he retired) and is looking for a way to make some money, that will still give him a lot of flexibility with his schedule.

Me:  I was very excited by the contents of the Quick Start Guide contained in Internet Marketing Gone Wild.  This was NEW material, a new approach to making money online, that frankly I would never have thought of on my own, but I could easily believe would work.  I jumped into the supplemental report that gave specifics to follow and sprang into action.  I can't spell the details of the idea, for obvious reasons, but what I tried is a bit of a bait-the-hook-and-see-what-bites action.  So now I'm seeing what bites.  I will say that this is completely above board and legitimate business approach.

---------  my friend Mike's email says --------------
Mike: (the one with no internet marketing experience): i just started reading over the material in Quick Start Cash Video Section which precedes the modules and there is like a TON of information there.

It all makes sense and there is step by step instructions for internet illiterates like me. But, I don't think it's quite as easy as he says it is that you'll start making money in no time. He does concede it isn't a get-rich quick scheme and that you have to do work to make money, so that meshes well with me as it just doesn't sound "too good to be true".
 
My basic conclusion is that it is going to take a few days to actually get started, but not weeks certainly.

He seems to mention several times making $100/hour. Hell, if I could work 5 hours a week and make $500/week, with my pension, I would be doing quite well.
-------  end of Mike's email report -------------

So that's it at the end of Day 1 of our using: Internet Marketing Gone Wild.  Stop back soon

Woo Hoo.... Money for Doing No Work!

In my last post, I told you a bit about RAPBank.  Soon after that, I listed an ebook or "special report" for sale on RAPBank.  It was a product that I had spent a fair amount of time developing because I thought it would be popular.  But I'd never had much success driving traffic to the website where it was sold from.  So I thought, I'll put it on RAPBank and maybe one of the other affiliates will have a mailing list or a website that matches the product. 

So today I went to my email and I saw a "You have received a payment" email from Paypal. 

That's odd, I thought -- I didn't see any corresponding email that my sales process usually generates.  I figured I'd better see what the person bought, in case perhaps my download mechanism had failed.  And then I discovered, it was/is my first sale that a RAPBank affiliate made.  Hell, that may be the first sale an affiliate of mine ever made.  I checked and according to their tracking there have been 84 clicks and 1 sale.  Not a particularly impressive conversion rate, but too soon to declare it an average.

So other people selling stuff that I created.  I definitely like THIS!!  Hopefully there is more to come.

RapBank Review -- RapBank Compared to Clickbank -- No Comparison

Although I've sold and bought products on Clickbank, I've never been a fan of it.  I find a lot of the items to be overpriced.  It's clear people choose prices to attract affiliates -- people who will try to sell anything with almost any tactic -- fake reviews, promoting an item they've never even seen or used -- if they can get a $27 commission.  And I know that Clickbank's fees for people listing products are also fairly high, which further leads to inflated prices.

Enter RAPBank!  RAP stands for Rapid Action Profits -- because initially RAPBank was designed to handle any product that was sold using the Rapid Action Profits system.  So the original RAPBank required a purchase of Rapid Action Profits system before you could list any product on their for others to promote. 

Well that just changed.  Now anyone can sign up for RAPBank and sell products as an affiliate or list products that they own for others to resell.  The ability to list products for others to sell (and split the profits with them) is called List-N-Earn.  There is a $10 per product listing fee, but that seems like a pretty modest charge to me.

So what's so great about RAPBank?  I haven't explained why I like it.  Let me take an example.  Let's say I've got an ebook about making money using Craigslist and I charge $10 for it and make only a dozen sales a year.  If I list the product on RAPBank, then someone with a popular Make-Money-Online blog, can promote the product.  When the first sale is made the money goes into my Paypal account.  When the second sale is made, the money goes into the seller's/affiliate's Paypal account -- instantly, at the time of sale.  No waiting for that Clickbank check to arrive in the mail or bank. 

Prior to RAPBank the only way I had to get affiliates to sell my product, was to sign them up as MY affiliates.  But now they can just sign up as being RAPBank affiliates -- and they can choose between over 700 products (and growing VERY rapidly) to promote. 

I heard of RAPBank from Bill Ortell, creator of Quick Web Creations.  I was one of the very early users of Quick Web Creations and after an email exchange for help, Bill got on the phone and walked me through a task that was giving me trouble.  Even more impressive was that when he got done helping me, he was genuinely interested in finding out if I found the product useful.  If there was something that I hoped it would do that it didn't. 

So I'm rambling... let me be more succinct -- here is what is great about RAPBank.

- If you are an affiliate and make a sale, you get your commission immediately (at time of sale) into your Paypal account

- If you are a product owner and only have one or two products, you can get affiliates to promote them by listing them in RAPBank.  You don't have to try and talk someone into becoming an affiliate of yours.

- Low fees to list a product means more reasonably priced products to promote

- Fantastic customer service

If that's enough for you, then check out RAPBank now!!

Poo and Double-Poo on Google and Squidoo

I don't really know which is frustrating me more right now.  Google or Squidoo.  One of the approaches that I'd had pretty good luck with was Squidoo lenses.  My success was modest (maybe averaging $5 a month per lens).  Some of the pages I created were total duds with no one looking at them and some took off.

Here is one that I did on digestive enzyme supplements.  I tried to provide some useful information, to select some books on Amazon that had good ratings and tell people where they could learn more.  And then I'd have some products or websites with additional information -- most, but not all of these, included an affiliate link.  The lens on digestive enzyme supplements followed a typical pattern.  I linked to it in a couple blog comments, bookmarked it a place or two, watched in frustration while Google seemed to not notice it and then gradually some traffic came.  And then I noticed more traffic.  One thing I will say for  Squidoo is that they give you nice traffic statistics -- how many people are coming, what search term they used to come to the web page, or where they followed a link from.  No need to hassle with setting up Google analytics or learning your way around traffic reports on Cpanel. 

When I noticed digestive enzyme supplements was getting more traffic, I looked and was delighted to discover that I was on the first page of Google when you searched on 'digestive enzyme supplements'.  Now I had chosen this topic (and most of my topics) because they were something I had once researched on Google and discovered there was only a modest amount of information on.  So life was good.  I was getting traffic (which earns you more money directly from Squidoo) and occasionally was making a referral sale.  I wasn't going to be able to pay the monthly car loan, but if I could get 10 - 20 of these to do so well, then maybe...  So I started to add more Squidoo lenses.  Some did well, others did not.

And then it happened...

About 2-3 weeks ago, I logged in to Squidoo and discovered the traffic to digestive enzyme supplements had dried up completely.   I googled the term 'digestive enzyme supplements' and sure enough I was no longer on page 1.  So where was I?

I changed to advanced Google search and went for the first 100 entries.  I wasn't in there!  The next 100?  What the hell?  (Pardon the strong language).  I mean, are you kidding me? 

So here is my rant today.  What's up with Google where suddenly for no reason, they drop you like a hot potato?  I had not done any huge link building campaign that might have set off a SPAM filter.  On the other hand, I had used a link in a signature or two on a forum where it was appropriate, so it wasn't as though there was absolutely no new links to it. 

Plus I had used a couple of the widgets in Squidoo that cause the webpage to automatically get a modest amount of new content, so it should not have been deemed stale.  But there you have it, Google has stiffed me and I'm left with nothing to do but cry about it.

My next post (I didn't intend to go on and on so) will be about my frustration with Squidoo and What's Better than Squidoo.

Stay tuned!