This web site is not for everyone. The language used is crude and direct. If you don’t like that, then this web site will offend you. The good thing is, the reviews will give you a different perspective of some of the internet marketing products peddled today.

My Rant on Internet Marketing Products and Sales Tactics

$2000 price tags seem to be the norm today. It used to $1000 or $995 or $997. Now it is more like $1999 or $1995, which is $2000 rounded off. Personally, I think this is madness because some of the information they are selling is not worth that much money.

I rarely promote anything on this blog because most of the products that I go through are crap. I sometimes even write negative reviews of certain internet marketing products to warn others of the nonsense that is being sold to us.

This so-called idea of “pre-selling” to try to influence a potential buyer to buy a product that you have not even used just seems wrong to me. Unfortunately, that is how most reviews are written today. Very few reviewers actually use the products they are promoting. Even if they don’t like it, they might not even tell you that.

Just Google “product name + review” and you will see loads of scammy reviews that are just summaries of the the products’ sales pages. I think it is an insult to my intelligence because I can read it myself. I don’t need anyone to summarise the sales page for me into a few bullet points and say, “Hey! Buy this product, it is great!”

Why We Need More Web Sites Like The Salty Droid?

I like real people and I am sure most people do too. I also believe most people can sense it when someone is being genuinely helpful or when someone is trying to get you to open your wallet and hand them your money for their own benefit.

It is important to know which internet marketing “gurus” are trustworthy and which ones are slimy. They all work closely together and you don’t want to be the next sucker who buys one their their grossly overpriced products. There are only a handful of people I trust and buy from.

When The Salty Droid promotes a product, you can be pretty sure it will be a good one. However, you still need to do your due diligence to see if it will benefit you and your business or not. $2000 isn’t a small amount for most people, especially in hard times like these.

You will be grateful to The Salty Droid because they may help you save a few hundred to a few thousand dollars that could have been used on more important stuff.

Check out the comments on The Salty Droid and you will find a lot of people posting their opinions on these gurus and their products. You could probably learn a thing or two from these people and make some real friends. Some of them have web site that are really informative and interesting.

I recently found a fantastic stock photo and design resource at GraphicRiver.net. I purchase the Smart 3D Package Box for only USD $3.00! I deposited USD $20.00 into my account and bought some other marketing graphics from GraphicRiver.net too.

Here’s a small preview of the wonderful eCover templates you can find on GraphicRiver.net…

• Product Mock-Ups: Book covers, business cards, software box covers, DVD cases and more.
• 3D Boxes: 3D box covers you can use for your software or info-products.
• eBook Covers: eBook covers Photoshop actions/templates and eBook cover designs.
• CD Cases: Cool CD cases for your CD products.
• DVD Cases: Cool DVD cases for your DVD products.

If I knew about GraphicRiver.net earlier, I would have saved a lot of time and money by creating my own eCovers in Photoshops with these templates. You could simply purchase the covers you need for a couple of dollars instead of buying a Photoshop action package for $47, $67 or $97 and up.

What’s the Catch?

The only catch is you need to have Adobe Photoshop and some basic knowledge of using the software. You need to get Adobe Photoshop CS3 and above for some of these templates to work. Some of these templates use Photoshop actions and you should be able to use them with Adobe Photoshop CS2 and below. However, some of these templates use “Smart Objects” that are only supported with Adobe Photoshop CS3/CS4 and above.

My favourite box generator, Smart 3D Package Box, runs on Adobe Photoshop CS4 and above. I had problems getting it to work on my Adobe Photoshop CS2! I downloaded a trial version of Adobe Photoshop CS5 and it worked perfectly.

My Product Boxes

I created my product boxes with the Smart 3D Package Box. I still can’t believe I paid only USD $3.00 for it. Once I created a template for my product boxes, it was easy generating boxes with a consistent look and feel for all my product images.

My eBook Covers

I created my eBook covers with the Design E Book Cover in Seconds Photoshop template. I also paid a measely USD $3.00 for this template. I’m very satisfied with the covers I made for my products and I hope you find a template on GraphicRiver.net that suits your needs.

I have been testing Popup Picker on my web sites. I tested peel away ads for one of my sites and it did not turn out very well for newsletter opt-ins. I think peel away ads are more suitable for special discount ads. I switched to pop over ad and my newsletter subscriptions doubled!

Subscribe to my newsletter to get the same script I used to double more newsletter subscriptions for free. Test it on your web site to see if it helps to increase the number of opt-ins.

It is a good investment for the money I put in to get this book. Although I prefer to read Problogger’s blog directly, this book serves as a very good introduction to blogging for profit today. This book was published in 2008 and it is very up to date. If you follow Darren Rowse’s blog regularly, he has even more up to date blogging tips for you to implement on your blog.

It took me less than an hour to complete this book because I skipped some parts of the book that I felt weren’t applicable for me. What I learnt from the book is that I need to find a niche, post quality content, post more frequently, link to more blogs, make more friends online with others in my niche and also to use social networking tools like Twitter.

One of the most amazing things I learnt from Darren was how to use digg.com to promote some posts on my blogs. Darren recommends using “posts that lists stuff” on digg. For example, I could have a post with the title, “The Top 10 WordPress Plugins in the World” and post it on digg. I believe you would get yourself a lot of negative votes if you post other nonsensical links on digg. It seems so simple but somehow I missed that out.

There are a total of 10 chapters in the book:

• Blogging for money
• Niche blogging
• Setting up your blog
• Blog writing
• Blog income and earning strategies
• Buying and selling blogs
• Blog networks
• Blog promotion and marketing
• Secrets of Successful blogs
• Creating something worthwhile

If you are already a regular reader of Problogger, I feel this book isn’t absolutely necessary for you. I find his blog posts better and more up to date. However, if you like reading real books (not eBooks) and you have very little idea about this blogging thing, this is a very good book to start with.

I should have read this book earlier. If you haven’t, please check out my review of The Long Tail to see what you have been missing.

The long tail approach to search engine optimization refers to the targeting of lower traffic and lower demand keyword phrases in larger numbers instead of trying to target higher traffic and high demand keyword phrases. High traffic and high demand keyword phrases are scarce while the lower traffic and lower demand keyword phrases are abundant.

Outside of the SEO context, the long tail refers to this:

Our culture and economy are increasingly shifting away from a focus on a relatively small number of hits (mainstream products and markets) at the head of the demand curve, and moving toward a huge number of niches in the tail. In an era without the constraints of physical shelf space and other bottlenecks of distribution, narrowly targeted goods and services can be as economically attractive as mainstream fare.

Chris Anderson, the author of The Long Tail, goes on to describe how online businesses like Apple’s iTunes MP3 music store and Amazon.com go about stocking up hundreds of thousands of titles, which helps to sell a lot of the less popular products in addition to the hit titles.

Forget about the 80/20 rule when it comes to product variety and profitability. Chris advocates that you carry a wide variety of products for the sake of allowing different types of customers to buy them instead of dumping 80% of your product line for 20% of your products that sells really well. It does not matter if they sell slowly as long as it sells.

I personally find this book rather long-winded because there are way too many examples and they seem to be repetitious. It seems like applying this information for businesses with physical products would be a huge challenge because of the limited shelf space they have. Not everyone will be able to have big warehouses and lots of space to stock up on a wide variety of products.

Chris recommends using “virtual inventory” by making a deal with your supplier to supply you with a product only when it sells. I am sceptical about this idea but I know it works for Amazon. But what about the small companies?

Overall, I like this idea of not forsaking the long tail end of products that you could potentially sell to your target market. This long tail idea seems to work perfectly for digital products. However, I do have some concerns about the feasibility of some of the author’s ideas on how to implement them in businesses that sell real physical products.

The first seller to piss me off was bigrockmedia. You would expect an eBay seller with 98000 feedback points to behave smarter but they don’t because their checkout system does not work for people from Singapore.

I won a “Buy it now” auction for a music DVD and I wanted to pay immediately after the auction. However, the ChannelAdvisor.com checkout system does not have Singapore in its country list. I guess this is either the seller’s fault or ChannelAdvisor.com’s fault. I have tried to contact bigrockmedia 3 times but they have not replied to me at all.

The second seller to piss me off was trade4office. This seller is a Power Seller and they should know how to read their emails to check for their orders. In one of their listings for velcros, they said:

So I sent them an email saying:

Their reply was:

First of all, I have emailed them the number of yards of velcro I want. Secondly, they seem to have misread my email to them or something to give me an absurd reply like this with a typo. This proves that they just don’t give a damn about reading and replying to customer emails.

Lessons We Should All Learn From The 2 eBay Sellers Above

1. Don’t make it hard for your customers to pay you money.
2. Don’t turn away customers who want to pay you money by being rude.
3. Read the emails your customers send to you and reply to them promptly and properly.
4. When you make a mistake, admit it, fix it and apologise for it but do not try to ignore the mistake and hope the customer forgets about it.

Common sense stuff if you ask me but lots of people just don’t care enough to apply this stuff.

Product creators may submit their products to be sold on DealDotCom. The best thing about DealDotCom is their 2-tier affiliate program. According to their official documentation, you get paid 35% of DealDotCom’s profit for every item that they buy. If someone you referred to DealDotCom refers someone else, you get paid 15% of DealDotCom’s profit every time they buy something for the rest of your life.

I tested the BB Flashback discount coupon 3 days ago and as you can see it is still valid. The original price is $199. I consider this the best value for money screen recorder. If you can’t afford to buy Camtasia, BB Flashback is the next best thing available.

If you are on a tighter budget, you may want to consider getting BB Flashback Express. There are no editing features in this version and it lacks some other features of the normal version. At only $19.50 after the 50% discount coupon, this is a real bargain!

I won’t do a review of BB Flashback because Donation Coder has already reviewed most of the screen recorders available in the market today.

The shipping was very expensive. I saved a bit of money by sending it to my USA forwarding address in California before redirecting it to Singapore. My local customs charged me GST for a product of this retail value. Therefore this is the most expensive thing I have ever paid for online!

Check out the box and the stuff that came with it! They are really heavy! Here’s a summary of the stuff I got in there:

• A DVD of Jeff Walker talking about the overview of the whole product launch formula system
• 10 CDs of Jeff Walker interviewing experts like John Reese, Jason Potash, Jim Edwards, Mike Long, David Frey
• 9 CDs of Jeff Walker’s video tutorials explaining step by step of the whole product launch formula system
• 1 booklet of all the interview transcripts and bonus reports
• 1 booklet of the product launch formula system

So far I have watched the DVD video of Jeff Walker talking at some internet marketing seminar. Then I proceeded with the 3 interview John Reese Interview CDs. I listened to them today while I was at the gym in the morning and during my meal times. I ripped them into MP3s and transferred them into my iPod Shuffle. Didn’t want to waste my time doing the mundance things I do everyday without listening to this stuff!

I haven’t reviewed the meat of the whole system yet. The meat is in the 9 video tutorial CDs… I just spent another hour reading the 1st booklet about the product launch formula system and taking notes in my journal for my own product launch.

Yes I am launching a product of my own! I bought the product launch formula to help me market my product with a lot of buzz. I can’t say much about my product at the moment, I have left clues on what it is in my blog. Just dig my past blog posts about it… I’ll announce something within the next 7 days to kick start my own product launch formula sequence.