I am planning to write a guide on how to install Ubuntu Server on an old PC to run the popular AdSpy Pro script without paying a dime on web hosting fees. I spent some time during the weekends to figure out how to get the geeky Linux operating system to work on my 10 year old Pentium 3 500 Mhz, 384 MB SDRAM PC. It’s a 100% pure Linux shell based operating system with no graphical user interface. Very hardcore linux stuff that I have been trying to avoid for a long time.

I hope that AdSpy Pro will be able to run on my Ubuntu Server smoothly. I estimate I would require at least a VPS web host to run this script properly. Running AdSpy Pro on my own Ubuntu Server would be like getting a free dedicated web host. Too bad my internet connection runs at 3Mbps if not it could be really fast.

How Google AdWords Spying Scripts Work

I have been waiting for a long time to have something like adspypro since I joined a secret membershp site about 1 year ago. I remember the service I used was not as advanced as the ones we have today. Previously, we had to compile a list of competitors with Keywords Analyzer and a list of keywords to input into these Google AdWords spying scripts.

What the service used to do was it compared each keyword in your keyword list with the each competitor in your competitors list. For example the keywords “green apples” could be listed in a Google AdWords advertiser that uses the domain “GreenApples.com”. When the script searches for “green apples” and finds “GreenApples.com”, you have a match and this indicates “GreenApples.com” is using the keywords “green apples”.

Nowadays, we only need to enter a list of keywords and the list of advertisers will be recorded for us with the exact keywords they are using in your keyword list. You have to understand that these spying scripts will not reveal their keywords to you unless you have uncovered them in your keyword research! The scripts only help us do manual search engine queries to Google.com to see who are advertising with your list of keywords.

As more of these PPC spying scripts become available at lower prices, it would be crazy not to use one because any serious affiliate program marketer will be using tools like this to find profitable affiliate programs and keywords to exploit. Even if you do not plan to get into PPC marketing, you could potentially uncover a lot of great affiliate programs in your target niche.

The Campaign Blast Method in a 5-ebook package

• AdWords Basics
• AdGroup Clustering
• Landing Pages 101
• Campaign Blasting Method
• The Universal Truth

The AdWords Basics section is for newbies to Google AdWords. It’s great for getting a general introduction to Google AdWords and what you need to click on to get your campaigns running.

The AdGroup Clustering section is pretty amazing stuff. I never thought of such an ingenious way to organize my campaigns. What Matt is teaching you to do is to get over Google AdWords limit of 25 campaigns and automating the tracking of your daily stats via Google AdWords’ reports system. The downside of this section is that the screenshots are outdated and I am not sure if I will get the same information with the new Google AdWords reports system like what Matt described in his ebook. You will have to use an excel spreadsheet to import the Google AdWords’ CSV file reports. Another boo boo is you have to purchase that excel spreadsheet. You will get Matt’s free campaign tracking spreadsheet if you join his “Campaign Blasts Source” membership site. Its reasonably priced and I believe you should join it you are serious about using Google AdWords to promote affiliate programs.
The Landing Pages 101 is a brief guide on the technical details about setting up a landing page. There are no real life examples in this guide. Just general tips on what to do with your web site and advice to test your landing page to get higher conversions. You will have to join his membership site to learn more.

The part on “Blasting” is where the real meat is. Matt recommends that you set up cheap market tests to find profitable niches. I have been doing that for quite some time but not to the level Matt is describing in his ebook. I have been finding it very difficult to do cheap tests with Google AdWords lately and that has hindered my growth. I used to be able to do it very cheaply. Nowadays, if I try to bid low, my keywords will be disabled, and my ads will get nowhere. Therefore I am skeptical about this “Blasting Method”.

Matt has very clear rules on what type of keywords you should use, how much you should bid, and when to stop the test. I created 2 “Blasts” for 2 Clickbank affiliate programs and I would like to see if his ideas really work. It really doesn’t take long to set up a “Blast” if you follow Matt’s advice. The challenge for me is to get my Google ads to be displayed and clicked on enough to gauge whether the people in these markets will be profitable for me in the long run. It’s really difficult if I am spending as little as possible. On the other hand if I spend too much in the beginning and it doesn’t sell, I would have wasted quite a bit of money. What a dilemma!

The Universal Truth covers some personal development “Q & A” sessions for yourself. Maybe you should read this first if you do not know what you want for your life and online business. Matt condenses quite a lot of personal development principles in a few pages. It will be useful if you honestly fill in the blanks provided and discover what you want to do with your life and how you want your online business to serve your unique purpose.

Matt Levenhagen’s Membership Sites

Be prepared to invest more money to discover the finer details of Matt’s method from his membership sites. Matt has 3 membership sites for you to further upgrade your PPC skills.

The Campaign Blasts Source – A Membership for Continuing Education to learn the blast method and to continue to grow as a PPC Professional.

Ezy Websites – When you are ready to get serious about landing pages, you will want to join Ezy Websites. I have created a very easy step by step system to create landing pages (web pages), I have provided you with profit pulling landing page templates, I give you help creating content… and also provide on going support and training with the membership.

The Web Profit School – A site that covers every area of internet marketing, but also provides a forum for you to interact with other Blasters and PPC professionals… I provide on going Adwords Training and Campaign Follow Alongs to help you master my methods.

I understand what Matt is saying when he described his “blasting” method because I have been doing something similar. Newbies might have a hard time figuring out what Matt is trying to teach you. I suggest you pick the right combination of his products and services for your own needs to save money.

Conclusion

Matt Levenhagen’s Campaign Blast Method provides you with a scientific, low risk, low cost, efficient, and effective method for sniffing out profitable affiliate programs you can promote.

I believe Matt goes deeper about testing for profitable niches than anyone I know. I have tested over 150 affiliate programs to find profitable affiliate programs and I have made a lot of painful mistakes. If you follow Matt’s advice, you will find profitable affiliate programs easier and spend less money provided you find a way to get past Google AdWords’ quality score system.

One of the hardest things about promoting affiliate programs with PPC search engines is finding affiliate programs that actually sell with PPC ads. You need to have a lot of determination and drive to make this work. It can be very frustrating at times to spend a lot of time and money and not make a sale. If you cannot take failure gracefully, this really isn’t for you because you will get more campaigns that fail than those that will make you money.

If you’re game for this, then Matt Levenhagen’s Campaign Blast Method would be a great starting point in your Google AdWords journey.

You see, there isn’t any software out there that can spy on your Google AdWords competitors to this level. You could program Keyword Elite to spy on your competitors daily or multiple times per day if you like. When I say spy, you can actually see which keywords they are bidding on and what ads they are using.

This is great news for anyone who uses Google AdWords to promote affiliate programs. We can now see which keywords our top competitors are consistently bidding on for a period of time so that we can literally “steal” his keywords and ad for our own benefit.

I am still reviewing the software so I can’t give you my full story on this software. From what I can see right now, it is way ahead of all the keyword research software I currently own. Mind you I own 3 keyword research software..

• Keywords Analyzer
• Keyword Locator
• AdWords Clever Wizard

None of them comes close to what Keyword Elite can do for you. Stay tuned for my full review!

Here’s the official introduction of Blogging To The Bank…

Rob Benwell claims to have gone from zero to $516.53 per day in affiliate commissions without spending a single penny on advertising.

The story started a couple of months ago when Rob set up his first blog. He set it up because there was a lot of talk about blogging been the future of the internet. He set it up. Got a few backlinks, 9 in fact and then left it.

A week later he checked his position in the search engines and he had a #1 ranking for the main keyword. He was receiving a ton of visitors. He also had a few other #2 and #3 positions for other keywords.

He looked into it and was shocked to see he had out-ranked sites with thousands of backlinks. He told me he was so excited that he couldn’t sleep and spent the night up trying to figure out why this was happening.

He looked at everything different he had done with his blog that others were missing. He set up others blogs which included ads for affiliate programs and followed this method with a few little tweaks here and there.

He now claims to have “cracked the secret code” to getting a ton of free traffic and keeps setting blogs up on a weekly basis. He told me he expects his affiliate checks to double or even triple in the next two months.

I am willing to learn any alternative method to using Google AdWords to bring in free and long term source of incoming traffic to my web site so this was something I was looking for. I am quite fed up of paying the almighty money sucking Google AdWords and playing the “quality score game”. Blogging To The Bank could potentially save me a lot of money in the near future and beyond.

Before I go into details about the Blogging To The Bank system, I would like to point out what I feel is the biggest disadvantage of the system presented in Rob’s ebook.

First of all, I would like to applaud Rob for trying to be as fluff-free and hype-free as possible with his ebook. The Blogging To The Bank ebook was an easy read. I completed it in less than 15 minutes. The problem is, the linking strategies he is trying to explain in the ebooks sound a bit confusing. I still don’t quite get it after reading the ebook 3 times. Maybe I should re-read those sections to see if I missed out something earlier on.

The best thing about the ebook is that Rob actually uses a real life example of some of his blogs. You can check out the blogspot.com blogs he mentions in his ebook and they really rank well in MSN.com.

The Blogging To The Bank system has more advanced techniques on “flooding your blog with targeted traffic”. Rob covers the easy stuff like setting up Blogspot.com blogs and what to post to these blogs in great detail. In fact I was very impressed with the “SEO” instructions on how to select a keyword with less competition and how to use that keyword phrase in your blog links and post content to highlight those keywords you want to rank high for.

But when it came to advanced stuff, I feel that they were not explained in great detail. I couldn’t figure out how to implement Methods 1-3. Methods 4-5 are “black hat” SEO techniques while Methods 1-3 are “white hat” SEO techniques. Methods 1-3 can be done at low cost if you are skilled writer. If not, you’ll have to know how to outsource your writing jobs effectively to make it work. Methods 4-5 require additional software that could set you back an additional $300 + to make it work.

I think I know what Rob is trying to achieve with his system but it will take me a few weeks to figure out how to use the tools in Methods 4-5 and interlink my blogs to generate enough traffic. You see I am still unsure about the linking techniques Rob described in his ebook. If he doesn’t reply to my questions, I’m going to have to “bump around” a bit to find out how to do it the hard way.

I give the Blogging To The Bank ebook a 3/5 overall rating. It could have been improved if the areas I mentioned were covered in greater detail. Those are critical parts of this system and to vaguely go through them will stear a lot of readers in the wrong direction. Get this book to profit with the “white hat” SEO techniques Rob described in his ebook if writing is your thing. Get this ebook if you hate to write and/or hate to hire someone to write and don’t mind spending some money on the tools Rob recommends to make this system work.
I will personally test the Blogging To The Bank system to see if I can make a profit with this way of generating traffic. I will report back on my progress in my blog in the near future. In the meantime, please check out my blog and ping blog to read some of the blog generator reviews. *Hint* Rob uses one of the blog generators mentioned in my reviews to generate his blogs.

Please check out my Wealthy Affiliate review for the full story.

Here’s what you’ll receive in the Wealthy Affiliate membership site:

1. “Personal Coaching” in the forums. I have seen members sending the 2 owners of Wealthy Affiliate their Google AdWords campaign details privately for them to critique. This could be useful to learn how they optimize their campaigns.
2. Keyword lists of a bunch of affiliate programs. I am not sure how they came up with their keywords lists. Its just a long list of keywords in a text file. There are no indications of the amount of searches made for these keywords, neither are they arranged in ad groups. There is still a lot of work for you to do in order to use these keyword lists. I personally wouldn’t simply take their keywords and assume it will make me loads of money. I ran them through my keyword software to see the exact search statistics.
3. A simple get started guide. I don’t like the guide at all. It is very vague and I have complained about it in the forums. You’ll be better off reading a guide like Google AdWords 123 and then join a forum like Wealthy Affiliate if you think you need a support group.
4. 2 review landing page templates. I like these templates. If you search on Google.com for “Wealthy Affiliate Review”, you’ll see a landing page comparing Wealthy Affiliate to other related affiliate marketing resources.

I have very high expectations of someone I pay to be my coach. Paying $29.99 per month isn’t going to get me a coach of the highest level. If you can afford it, you might want to pay someone like Perry Marshall or Mark Widawer to train you how to get your campaigns in order. I believe my expectations were a bit too high for the low monthly fees I am paying right now.

I had a list of questions to ask the guys in there…

• Why not create video tutorials to further explain the PPC stuff you talk about?
• How do you guys deal with the ridiculous min. CPC Google throws at you?
• I usually gauge my max CPC judging from the commissions I will earn from the affiliate program. How do you guys do it?
• I personally am not comfortable bidding more than $0.20 per click… Do you always want to have your ad at the position 2-5 no matter the cost?
• Sometimes when I see my min. bid is too low to get top 8 positions, I generally stop bidding on those keywords. Am I selling myself short here?
• How to create a landing page?
• Do I collect the name and email of my visitors at my landing page?
• How to optimize, split test to get the max. conversions at my landing page?
• When do I abandon my campaign?
• I am curious to learn how you guys came up with your keyword lists so that I can do it myself. Care to share?
• I also see a lot of people asking about how to create landing pages and the topic is always being side stepped. Why is that so?
• May I ask if I am supposed to create only the campaigns with the keyword lists provided here?
• What if I want to create other campaigns myself? How do I research for an affiliate program?
• How do I generate keywords for my campaign if you do not want to teach us how to do it?

I was surprised with the answers I got from the owners of Wealthy Affiliate. They told me I was being negative and critical of them when all I wanted was answers to my questions. The only areas I feel that might have offended them were the ones in bold above… I got upset when I saw a lot of questions about building landing pages were not answered with enough detail so I asked them why they were not answered. Yes, they have a review landing page template but they don’t have a landing page that was geared for 1 affiliate program only.

After a few email and private message exchanges, the owners decided it was better that I leave Wealthy Affiliate so that they could focus on helping the Google AdWords newbies and intermediates. Wealthy Affiliate isn’t for more advanced and expert level marketers and I didn’t know that till I joined and asked them some of my  advanced questions above.

They are going to release an ebook that might cover the topics above. That is why they can’t really cover those topics in the membership site right now. So if you’re willing to wait for the ebook release that is coming out in a few weeks time, then go for it. If you would like to find out for yourself what the Wealthy Affiliate membership site is like, please sign up and take a look. It might be good for you even though its not for me.

Wealthy Affiliate is for affiliate program marketers who want to promote affiliate programs with PPC search engines like Google AdWords. I personally didn’t see any information about promoting affiliate programs with Yahoo Search Marketing. I only see Google AdWords related information in there.

Here’s what you’ll get in the Wealthy Affiliate membership site:

1. "Personal Coaching" in the forums. I have seen members sending the 2 owners of Wealthy Affiliate their Google AdWords campaign details privately for them to critique. This could be useful to learn how they optimize their campaigns.
2. Keyword lists of a bunch of affiliate programs. I am not sure how they came up with their keywords lists. Its just a long list of keywords in a text file. There are no indications of the amount of searches made for these keywords, neither are they arranged in ad groups. There is still a lot of work for you to do in order to use these keyword lists. I personally wouldn’t simply take their keywords and assume it will make me loads of money. I ran them through my keyword software to see the exact search statistics.
3. A simple get started guide. I don’t like the guide at all. It is very vague and I have complained about it in the forums. You’ll be better off reading a guide like Google AdWords 123 and then join a forum like Wealthy Affiliate if you think you need a support group.

Yesterday I had a Jeet Kune Do class. Before I went for the class I was reading a bit of Bruce Lee’s "Jeet Kune Do" book. I have to tell you its almost impossible to learn Jeet Kune Do from those sketches Bruce Lee made. You can’t see the full picture from the book. You have to have someone show you how its done.

In the internet marketing industry, I am seeing a shift to creating info-products with screen recording software. Almost everything that is done on a computer can be recorded with a screen recorder. A lot of things cannot be explained effectively through words alone. I was expecting much more than what I am seeing in the Wealthy Affiliate membership site right now.

I have very high expectations of someone I pay to be my coach. Paying $29.99 per month isn’t going to get me a coach of the highest level. If you can afford it, you might want to pay someone like Perry Marshall to train you how to get your campaigns in order. I believe my expectations were a bit too high for the low monthly fees I am paying right now.

I have a list of questions to ask the guys in there… I am waiting for them to answer my list of questions. If they give me satisfactory answers, I will consider extending my membership if they don’t kick me out for my hard hitting questions that is!

Let’s do some basic math on how the lazy pig system can make you money:

• If your site makes less than an average of $2 per day, you will lose money!
• If your site makes an average of  $2 per day, you will receive breakeven on your traffic fees
• If your site makes an average of more than $2 per day, you will be profitable
• To get a monthly profit of $60, daily average needs to be at least $4
• To get a monthly profit of $80, daily average needs to be at least $4.67
• To get a monthly profit of $100, daily average needs to be at least $5.33
• To get a monthly profit of $150, daily average needs to be at least $7.00

The author doesn’t cover this in his ebook and seeing the numbers above really gets you to focus on how much money you need to make to be profitable. Who the hell wants to lose money of breakeven?

The author also doesn’t cover how to pick a profitable niche for your web site. So far the best way I know how to uncover a good estimate on how a particular niche will perform on Google AdSense is with the Online Gold Finder. I believe this lazy pig system will only work if you manage to pick a really profitable keyword to build your web site around. I have not been able to do it but maybe you might be able to find that niche and make loads of cash?

I looked around on the internet for other people’s opinions about the lazy pig system and check out this review at EveryPleasures.com. I posted a question there. So far I have only found 1 guy who says he’s making a profit, the rest say they aren’t making enough money to cover the traffic fees.

I will reuse my 17 .info web domains ($33.83) I purchased from RegisterFly and build sites according to Neil Shearing’s “Auto Income Secrets” in the future. I give the lazy pig system a no go. Its simply  too vague and “hypey” but I do give the author credit for being very responsive to all my questions. Despite his help, I just couldn’t get the lazy pig system to work in 4 weeks of testing and I just didn’t want to waste my time and money doing this for another month.

This is a 1 page opt-in capture page that redirects to the merchant page after I have their name and email address.

My results are pathetic at the moment but I have learnt some things about landing pages. I still need to do some testing on what works for me and what doesn’t. For example, I now know that my photograph and signature at the bottom of the page doesn’t improve the conversion at all! Strange!

I would like to know if I position the opt-in box at the top of the page and add a “drop in box” asking for their name and email would improve the opt-in conversion. I am paying about $0.05 per click so its not that bad. This would serve me well with my future sites.

I am in the process of calculating the conversion with a spreadsheet…. More to come in a while!

Alright, today we’re going to talk about building an opt-in list. If you’re an affiliate and you are NOT already building an opt-in list, you’re killing your business.

What you’re building is a SHORT-TERM business that goes bankrupt the day you stop advertising.

I have been thinking a lot about my PPC campaigns and I must admit there isn’t much "leverage" to my money making efforts. Once my PPC ads are down or if they are not ranked high enough, I will have no business. If Google decides to change the rules for affiliates to make it harder for us, that only means a harder life for me.

Building an opt-in list is something I MUST do in order to get ahead and stay ahead. I just installed a new newsletter script to handle all my current lists and future list at 1 domain. Previously I thought of installing the WebInsta mailing list script on each domain. But after doing that for 2 domains, I realised its not scalable at all. Its takes too much effort to install it because it isn’t for people with no PHP experience. I had to tweak the code a little to make it work the way I want. Furthermore it doesn’t have autoresponders.

Here are some of the skills I need to acquire to take my affiliate business to the next level:

1. Drive targeted traffic to my web sites without paying a dime.
2. Write articles or autoresponders that sell or hire someone to do it.
3. Build opt-in lists for each mini affiliate site I build and collect their email addresses BEFORE sending them to the merchant site.
4. Use autoresponders to follow up with my subscribers of my mini sites lists and pre-sell them on the affiliate products.

Maybe I should start doing this by converting my landing pages to collect my visitor’s email address and send them to my affiliate program merchant site AFTER they sign up. Now I am sending my visitors directly to the merchant site. I can’t contact them to sell them anything else.