Not Sold in Stores

Clickbank should seriously consider setting up a quality control department. Those folks would be tasked with reviewing every single product that is being sold throughout the Clickbank network.

I know it would be a huge undertaking - but something has got to be done to preserve some integrity in the products that are being offered. I understand that these are not THEIR products - but since they do the order processing their name is most definitely associated with the sale. And it is even more strongly associated with them when a buyers credit card statement shows up with the Clickbank name on it!

I make a full time living as an affiliate marketer and I use Clickbank a LOT - mostly because it is so easy to implement and, since the “merchandise” is not of a physical nature, the sale is instantaneous with no need to ship merchandise. I usually purchase the product (ebook, software or membership) to see if it’s something I want to promote and that I would feel comfortable selling to my closest friends. Unfortunately, the majority of the offerings do NOT pass this litmus test.

The vast majority of the items being sold through Clickbank are, pure and simply, crap. Many of the items have no creative thought or are written so poorly that you can not comprehend what the heck the author is trying to say.

Everybody wants to make a lot of money without putting in work - that’s human nature (and also an extremely strong emotion to market to!). There are plenty of books out there that describe how to contract with ghost writers through websites like elance.com to produce books to sell on Clickbank so that you can easily make your fortune. Unfortunately, many of these writers have no clue as to what to write and they seem to either write extremely poorly or they fill out their book with so much fluff that you get nothing out of it.

So, I reiterate, Clickbank needs to set up a quality control department because they sell intellectual property and not physical property like Commission Junction (CJ works mainly with corporations who have an investment in inventory instead of the self-publishers that Clickbank works with).

If they don’t set up a quality control group, there is a HUGE opportunity for someone who wants to compete head on with them!

STAY CLEAR!!

I purchased “The Angry Guy” ebook this afternoon for $47 - and I guess now I’m the Angry Guy.

This is a completely useless, poorly written piece of internet marketing material. I can honestly say that I learned nothing from this ebook. There is not even a single thought in this ebook that is new to internet marketing.

After removing all the front matter and bonus links, there are 42 double-spaced pages, written on 2/3 of each page (the banner consumes the top 1/3 of the page!) and triple-spaced between paragraphs.

I ran the ebook through a word counter and found that the total “information” material contains 5,755 words. That translates to about 5 single-spaced, typewritten pages.

As an example of his brilliant insight into marketing, let me paraphrase his thought about choosing the right market:

“Don’t choose a market with a lot of competition.”

Or I’ll paraphrase how to choose a domain name:

“Don’t use a domain name that lets people know what the site is about because the search engines may find out.”

Apparently, the guy who wrote this material is ashamed of it. There is no mention of his name on the website or in his ebook.

This is an attempt to be a direct ripoff of The Rich Jerk.

DON’T WASTE YOUR MONEY!

At least The Rich Jerk provided some good information for newbies and I found a couple of concepts to try out.

The Angry Guy website is very slick looking and the book continues that theme. But, like an old boss of mine used to say:

“You can’t make chicken salad out of chicken s**t!”

I always thought that Cinco de Mayo was a Mexican celebration of their independence from a foreign governing body. I discovered that I was wrong.

On May 5th 1862, the locals from the Mexican mountain town of Puebla fought off a highly trained advancing French army that is often described as “elite.” The peasants were significantly outnumbered, yet they prevailed.

Many local Mexican farmers went on the offensive that day and struck down the attack. This was cause for huge celebration and now there is the tradition of observing the 5th of May on that day in 1862 - Cinco de Mayo.

Search engines just can’t seem to get it right. The search engine gurus make ongoing changes to their search algorithms in an attempt to provide quality results for the information that is being requested.The problem is there is a huge number of people and companies that practice SEO (Search Engine Optimization). Rather than spending their time producing truly valuable information offerings, they waste it trying to figure out how the search engines rank their web page and then try to manipulate the page so that it ranks well.

Why do they want it to rank well? Answer - greed.

You see, people use Google, Yahoo, MSN and other search engines to get answers to questions they type into them - these are called keywords, or keyword phrases. If the largest group of people use the same keywords to search for something, be it a HDTV or a meditation eBook or anything in between, then you need to have your website show up on the first page of the search results in order to get any traffic to your site and possibly sell something. Optimizing web pages to get traffic like this is BIG business! Search engines can’t read and understand the billions of web pages on the Internet so they have to compute various elements of a web page to determine what the page is about and to deem whether or not it has any real “value”. But there are just too many things that are considered and therefore their results are not very good.Here are a couple of things that seem way out of wack to me:

Back Links - Search engines figure that if there are a lot of links to your site, then your site must be popular and therefore have a lot of value. Unfortunately, there are plenty of ways to get totally irrelevant sites to link back to you. There are many automatic link sites and software that also direct links to you. These include: