So today I coughed up $37 and bought the newly released Auto Blog System X from Rob Benwell. He has released a detailed e-book for Internet Marketers on how to create 100′s of niche blogs and use the power of WordPress 3.0+ to streamline the administration of the blogs.

The 60-page booklet contained a lot of information that I already had a grasp on but contained a lot of info that will help me build niche blog run on auto-pilot while not looking like they are on auto-pilot.

Just so you know, this eBook is not for a novice. While packed with good solid content, if you are new to Internet Marketing, and buy this book I suggest that you upgrade to the personal coaching program that he offers after checkout. It is around $380.00.

He has made a guarantee that if I follow his system and do not make $1000.00 over the next 7 days that I will get $100 plus a full refund of my product.

Over the next few days I am going to put into practice his system and see if I can pull this off. Hell I will gladly take an extra $1000 per week. Who wouldn’t?

When you go to the purchase page to watch the video sales pitch you will notice that Rob is only selling 250 copies of his system. I do not know how much longer before he is sold out but I can tell you there are at maximum 249 copies left because I am a customer.

I do not want to reveal too much of his content because that would not be fair to those who purchased it, but I will say that I have already scoped my first niche and will be building 2 blogs around it. His book lists reams of plugins that I need, some are NOT free so I will set a budget of $200 (US Funds) for this project on top of the $37 that I paid.

So with a budget set at $200 let the experiment begin.

I purchased two new domains from GoDaddy.com – In truth I purchased these domains a few months ago (based on keyword research) and have not done anything with them. Figured they are good candidates to run with. So I paid $7.49 for each domain thus reducing my budget to $185.02.

Stay tuned for an update on this as I begin building my blog.

If you are anything like me and get overwhelmed, if not baffled, by SEO then this blog posting is for you. I am going to tell you about a piece of software that will help you dominate your competition, no matter your marketing niche.

For the past couple of days I have been playing around a new piece of software that allows me to strip apart my competitors marketing strategy and turn it into my own. TrafficTravis is a free SEO juggernaut that is quite amazing.

From their website:

Free SEO Software

Take your Market Research, SEO and PPC campaigns to a whole new level with this suite of professional tools.

Traffic Travis gives you a godlike perspective over all aspects of your SEO and PPC campaigns, so you can spot opportunities that others might miss.

Whether you’re an experienced internet marketer or a complete newbie, put Traffic Travis to work and your campaigns will thank you!

And do you want to know the best part? Traffic Travis is now FREE!

Some of the features of Traffic Travis:

• The higest rated SEO Software on Cnet – 4.5 stars!
• Astoundingly comprehensive collection of essential Market Research, PPC and SEO tools, all in one place!
• Make sense of search engine and PPC information and spot hidden opportunities!
• Learn from your competitors and save time and money by not making costly mistakes!
• See the results of your SEO actions by running graphs and reports and track your sites, ads and positions. You can also spy on your competitors!

Now you may be wondering why they give away software as powerful as this. Simple, they have a pro version that cost money but is packed with even more punch.

Again from their site:

Exclusive limited time offer: Try Traffic Travis Professional Edition for just $5

Do you want to gain top front page rankings in Google, Yahoo, and MSN search engines for your target keywords? Would you like to have a SEO expert looking over your shoulder critiquing your webpages? Perhaps you want to gain an unfair advantage in PPC?

Traffic Travis will give you the tools you need to achieve higher rankings in the natural search results, perform in depth market research, and gives you extensive tools to give you a much better return on investment in PPC.

With Traffic Travis Professional, you’ll gain some high-quality extra features including:

• Unlimited projects: If you’ve got a bunch of sites on the run you want to be able to keep tabs on them all. TT professional allows you unlimited projects for both SEO and PPC campaign
• More information: Including search counts for keywords, historical data analysis for your competitors’ sites, and a larger keyword limit.
• Print and save reports: If you’re an SEO or PPC professional, you can print off graphs and reports to provide to your clients.
• Free support and advice from professionals: Get advice on how to boost your rankings by SEO and PPC experts. This level of support is only available to Professional license holders.
• 7 Day Risk-Free Trial: Try our professional edition before you commit to buying it.

Traffic Travis will find sites that are advertising on your keywords, AND tell you who your biggest competition is, AND show you how their ads are performing over time, AND you can preview their ad right inside Traffic Travis. Talk about snooping!

Heavy competition means that there’s money to be made. Traffic Travis shows you the keywords that are heavily advertised on, as well as pointing out keywords which experience a high turnover in advertisers. (This screams “danger!”)

Page title, Pagerank, Alexa rank, meta tags, heading tags, keyword density… the works. All the nitty gritty on-page factors of a website laid bare with the click of a button. No more digging around in source code!

How well does your page stack up for a particular keyword? Traffic Travis gives you a rating based on factors that are known to boost your search rankings, including meta tags, headings, page length, page content and more.

JESS3 designed and animated this for the JESS3 lecture at AIGA Baltimore in Feb 2010. With his State of the Internet video JESS3 has provided statistics that are simply mind blowing. As an Internet Marketer, the sky is the limit!

http://www.vimeo.com/9641036

About JESS3: Jesse Thomas is the CEO and Founder of JESS3. A creative interactive agency specializing in social media data visualization, JESS3 has architected visual masterpieces and interactive solutions for IBM, Intel, Microsoft, MySpace, Pfizer, Time Warner, NASA, Nestle, Pepsi / Tropicana, the Wall Street Journal and many other blue chip companies.

One thing I have learned in my short time as an Internet Marketer (IM) is that in order to succeed you have to deliver quality products and services to your customers. Whether you provide quality or crap, your reputation will follow you. There is nothing more powerful than maintaining an excellent online reputation. Knowing that, the online world of commerce runs the gambit from quality products to pure crap. And price is not necessarily indicative of the quality of the product or service that you get. Some of the best stuff available comes at little or no cost.

I can personally vouch that two of the top online “gurus” are currently peddling crap products for a lot of money. They are nothing more than a modern-day Snake Oil Salesmen. This is not me crying sour grapes. This is harsh reality. In both cases I spent nearly $1000.00. With one of my products it did not work as advertised. Not even close.

Pay to learn to spam?

In fact following one of the plans would have had me turn into, what I like to call, a Spam Whore. That’s right; pay a guy $1000.00 to get some software and a system where I spam other websites to drive traffic to my website. My philosophy in life is to trust people until I am given reason not to. With that in mind I followed his plan. This software would take articles that he provided and spin them into what was supposed to be my ‘unique’ content.

Next his software would send the article to a whole host of sites. Well I tried sending it to the first one through his automated system and two things happened. The article was full of un-parsed code and after manually fixing the code,  the site did not accept the article. I tried to retrieve my user name and password from the site and my account had vanished into the Internet ether.

I am to Blame

Now here is where I need a kick in the ass. After the fact, I read the terms of service (TOS) of the article submission site and saw that my content must be unique to their site and be my own creation. On both accounts I had violated their Terms of Service. Like I said, I deserved to have my ass kicked.

Incomplete Products Delivery

The second product I purchased was delivered incomplete. I bought resale rights to a variety of long established products and a hosting account to deliver them. I was told that by providing my PayPal info and a simple click that all of my websites would be up and running in minutes.Well it did not work. In fact my hosting order was delivered to someone else and charged to me. My receipt was sent to my email address but in the name of another customer on their network. I had this other client’s complete contact information. I can only assume that someone else had mine.

Gurus Revealed?

So to summarize: I bought two products and neither worked properly. With one it wanted me to spam and violate TOS of at least one website. I had spent close to $2000.00 and had crap to show for it.  Are you wondering who these gurus are? Well I have no intention of outing them because they each did one thing right. They lived up to their unconditional money back guarantee. I got all of my money back in less than 24 hours. All that I lost was a few hours of time working with the products. I will suck that loss up and consider it a part of my learning experience.

Rush to Market!

Do I think that these gurus are dishonest? Perhaps one, only because he would have had me violate TOS of another site to deliver traffic to mine. But maybe he was like me and did not read the TOS. Which leads me to what I think the problem was.

Both were in a rush to get their products to market. So much so that they ended up delivering stuff that did not work because, for some reason, when the new year hits there always seems to be an abundance of new programs and systems hitting the market all at once. It appears to be the right time of year to do a product launch.

Reputation

Like I said, your online reputation is everything. You need to do everything in your power to make sure that the product you are selling, whether yours or not, works as advertised. It has to provide excellent value for the money, and offer an unconditional money back guarantee that will be honored. If the product you are promoting refuses to honor a money back guarantee not only will your online reputation be permanently damaged, you may lose your PayPal account and have a visit from the authorities.

Frank Kern is the best

Like Frank Kern says, and I am paraphrasing here,  “you want to attract cool customers that you like and who you want to form friendships and partnerships with.”  If you do not know Frank, I will be introducing you to him in my next blog posting. Without a doubt this guy is the guru’s guru. He is the mastermind behind almost all of the most successful QUALITY product launches in the market today. He is probably the most influential figure in IM over the past decade.

So what works best? Create your own product!

I have got into IM thinking that my computer skills would easily translate into money. In my short time I have discovered that computer skills are great, but that is just one small part of the puzzle. In fact people without computer skills are succeeding at IM. They can hire people like me on the cheap from such websites as elance.com or rent-a-coder.com, thus devoting their time to do what they do best…market online.

Well the more I study and research the more I am realizing that for me, what is going to work best…again for me, will be the developing of my own product. I know that there are a lot of people making a ton of money many selling other people’s products, and that may be what is working best for them. However I found this site, for which I included a shameless affiliate link, that is offering a free webinar on product development.

Of course they are going to try and funnel you to their sales page, but the free content is promised to be great and you should take advantage of it. I am. This free course starts on Sunday, March 7th, 2010. So register now.

The Holy Grail?

The so-called holy grail to succeed at IM is to  provide your own unique product. Simple as that. It has to offer excellent value for the money. In fact, again according to Frank Kern, your product or service should deliver more value than the money you were given. You want satisfied customers. You want customers that you can connect with. Ones who will be a testament to the value of your product. Their word of mouth will be your best advertisement. It is free and very powerful. Word of mouth can make your product go viral overnight.

Every successful online marketer, at one time or another, right from the Godfather himself, Frank Kern himself (you will hear more on him coming blogs), uses squeeze pages to turn visitors into list members and list members into customers.

That being said, you will notice that I have a very large ad pimping a product called Flexsqueeze for WordPress. I absolutely love this product. It gives me the flexibility to create my own squeeze pages and embed them into my blog. Take for example ‘In Silver We Trust’, a squeeze page I created with WordPress. You heard right…I created this page within WordPress.

You will see the link to this page in my menu at the top of the page and it is fully integrated into my blog.

And the best part is that you can break from your usual template theme and use one of the many built in squeeze page themes.  Here is a little video of how you can set up a squeeze page in minutes. You are going to love this:

What’s going on in Greece?

Telegraph – Feb 7, 2010

The Guardian – Feb 7, 2010

Spiegel Online – Feb 1, 2010

What’s this all mean to Gold and Silver?

Free Gold Money Report – James Turk – Feb. 4, 2010

Why is the price dropping?

MineWeb – John Embry – Feb. 3, 2010

Meanwhile there are further reports of a lack of physical supply on the London Bullion Exchange:

GoldenJackass – Jim Willie CB – Feb 3, 2010

Folks, be sure to get physical Gold and Silver!

To learn about the history of silver, money, the cyclical nature of ‘great depressions’, and a chance to win free silver, please go to “In Silver We Trust“

I dislike fear tactics but I see no other way then to let it all hang out. Financial Armageddon is about to strike the entire world. In 2008 we faced the first phase of the economic crisis and we have yet to fully recover from it. A lot of people lost more than 50% of their retire savings, millions lost their homes, leaving their hopes and dreams dashed and broken.

Now it looks like round two is about to start and, quite frankly, I am a bit scared of the ramifications from this second salvo. For, if true, it will make the crash of 2008 pale in comparison.

There is literally trillions of dollars, greater than the entire GDP of the planet, hidden on the balance sheets of governments, banks, and other financial institutions. As the unwinding of these financial instruments happen, the world economy is on the verge of total and wide-spread collapse.

For your own sake. For the sake of your family and friends, I implore you to transfer at least part of your wealth into precious metals. As I said previously, I prefer silver. You need to do this now. If you want to see my video clip that makes a strong case for this then please click here.

Now please watch the Keiser Report, with host Max Keiser. He is a financial expert and economist who tells it like it is. I warn you that this nothing like you have heard before so it may take a few minutes for your brain to compute and adjust.

Look at it this way. If I am wrong your investment is in a very liquid asset, easily converted back into paper currency. But if I am right, and according some leading world economists I am, then failure to act will result in complete and total loss of your paper-backed financial assets.

One of the things that I like to do when running an Adwords campaign on Google is to do a split test. By that I mean I run two landing pages for the same ads and keywords. Once I figure out which one works the best I will run with that and create another landing page and have that compete against the best of the first split test.

I will keep doing that until I find one that is bringing me a lot of traffic at minimal costs…in other words the landing page receives a high quality score from Google.

So with that in mind, I decided to create two landing pages for my FREE Silver Giveaway Contest:

Landing Page 1:

Landing Page 2:

In Adwords, I created two Ad Groups with identical keywords and text ads, in other words all settings are identical. I set my Keyword maximum that I am willing to pay at $0.10 per click. Now you have to keep in mind that this campaign was brand new and no advertising had commenced and what has happened has left me totally perplexed.

The following image was just taken from my Adwords page and you can see for yourself that the same keywords that are enabled in one Ad Group are not enabled in the other Ad Group because my ten cent per click bid is too low.

WTF? Now I know that ‘gurus’ will shun me for revealing my keywords, will say that I am shooting myself in the foot, that is fine…right now I do not care. I want someone to explain this faux pas.

Some of the differences are not chump change either. Look at the keywords “invest in silver” and “invest in silver bullion”. Is it me or is it Google?I am truly baffled. Just when I think I have a good handle on Google I get this turd grenade tossed at me.

Anyone out there care to explain this?

This is Day 2 of the FREE Silver Giveaway Contest. To enter sign up for my FREE newsletter and receive tips, tricks, and strategies on building your online presence from leading industry experts. Here is a promotional video that explains quite succinctly why silver is the single best investment opportunity available today.

Best Regards,

CONTEST RULES

1) you can only register once.

2)you must allow your name and general location to be published (Mike Smith from Kansas for example).

This is a notice that the site has officially launched. Yippie…Yahoo! So what is this site all about? To sum it up in one word: An Education Site…ok that is three words but that is my goal. I want to educate people on Internet Marketing Techniques, solid tried and proven wealth building techniques, and how to protect your wealth from being stolen by the current economic climate.

I will be discussing how to build a loyal following of readers and convert them into buyers of your information and/or products.

KISS the NEWBIE

This site is targeted at newbies, introducing them to the world of Internet Marketing. Am I a ‘guru’? HAH fat chance…but I’m working on it. By KISS the NEWBIE, I am offering up your first lesson today. Keep It Simple Stupid. I am not calling you stupid…well maybe I am…but what I am saying is it is not rocket science to building your online presence. There are pitfalls, there are mistakes that all newbies make…and I am here to try an make sure you do not get played for a sucker. If there is one thing that I am an expert on…it is making mistakes and being played of a sucker.

SWIMMING WITH SHARKS vs SWIMMING WITH DOLPHINS

The Internet is full of Sharks but it is also full of Dolphins. Who would you rather swim with? The Shark’s modus operandi is to get as much money out of your pocket while providing nothing but regurgitated BS, stolen ideas, poor value for your money, or stuff that is readily available for free. The old cliche is true: If it is too good to be true it probably isn’t.

The Dolphin, on the other hand, sure they want to make money but more importantly they provide a product or service that will help you build a better online presence.The Dolphin knows that their product or service is valuable, of high quality, and unique.

FREE SILVER BULLION GIVE AWAY

As a launch special anyone who joins my mailing list from now until March 25, will be entered into a draw to receive two 1-troy ounce shiny, brand spanking new, uncirculated silver bars. I will video tape the draw and publish the results here.

Here are the little beauties that you may win:

The rules are simple:

1) you can only register once

2)you must allow your name and general location to be published (Mike Smith from Kansas for example)

So what’s in the newsletter? People who register for my FREE newsletter will receive news, views, and industry trends from leading experts that I have affiliated myself with. You will have access to insider information that will not be shared publicly on this website.

All of the insiders will be leading experts in their related field and offer valuable insight, information, and products. So what are you waiting for?