What is your budget?

Since the last post I received a flood of emails about the latest super hyped product Traffic Fusion from Mike Filsaime. I deleted all the messages because I don’t think anything he produces is going to interest me. The simple reason is that he is a top marketer and the level he is working at is way above “normal mortals”. So what is this level where the top marketers are and what sort of money are they spending to supposedly generate millions of dollars?

As I pondered this question a message appeared in my inbox promoting a course for Adwords/Adsense. The cost was $2000 for a collection of DVD’s.

The once popular Adwords and Adsense opportunities seem to have been dropped since the Google Slap and the miniscule earnings, $1 per day, admitted by a lot of Adsense users. So how can somebody be asking for $2000 to go back on the Adwords/Adsense bandwagon?

There was a video link in the email so I watched it and everything became clear. The guy promoting the course showed evidence of his earnings and unusually his costs as well. He admitted to spending $100,000 PER MONTH on Adwords which as you can see is $1.2 MILLION PER YEAR

In his screenshots you could also see what he had to do to generate the income. It involved creating hundreds if not thousands of websites related to specific keywords.

The image the gurus like to convey is that they are a small business working from home and if they can do it so can you. Do you really think that somebody making millions of dollars a year is working from home with a couple of computers and an assistant? These are multi million dollar corporations.

The guy in the video I watched admitted that he had employed specialist companies to do his marketing in the early days and now had his own corporation. This corporation could have a 100 highly trained specialists just doing Adwords campaigns, which is why they can spend the sort of money shown above and create thousands of specialized websites.

I don’t think Mike Filsaime, John Reese, Frank Kern or any of the other hyper gurus are banging away at their computers everyday doing the “manual work”. Do You?

Just out of interest I did some research on Traffic Fusion to see what it involved

The idea of the software is that it allows you to put product offers on other peoples download pages. You can then control them and keep track of these offers. You can tweak them and split test them to make the maximum conversions. BUT to make it work you need a little black book full of partners with multiple sales per day. In other words it is a Joint Venture type setup.

That is fine if you know a lot of gurus with huge mailing lists but what about the ordinary guy who knows a handful of marketers who only sell a few products a week and have small mailing lists?

That’s why I said at the beginning I don’t think Mike Filsaimes products are of any use to the rest of us, although I’m sure he’ll make wads of cash from the guys who have an advertising budget of
$1.2 Million per year.

What sort of year is ahead?

It’s the first day of September 2008 and the start of the main season for “Internet Activity”. For years the best period for new products has been September to November. Summertime is usually very quiet due to people going on holiday but this year has been completely different.

There has been a stream of new product launches over the summer to the point where I am sick of cleaning out the junk from my inbox. There may have been some good products in there but the majority of it is just rehashed crap. It is also clear that most of the promoters of these products, who in a lot of cases use the same emails as everybody else, have never even looked at the products they are promoting.

I thought it was just me who was getting hyper critical with the so called “life changing products” that were being thrust at us until I received an email from Jim Edwards. Jim is a well respected Internet Marketer so it’s worth listening to what he has to say. In his latest newsletter he had a couple of rants about the way Internet Marketing was going and in particular about the “Floggers”.

These are the people that will sell anything that crosses their desks. They just send the promotions to their mailing list telling them that it is the latest wonder product that will guarantee their success. Of course it doesn’t because in reality they don’t want you to succeed. Why? Well if you succeed they won’t be able to sell you the next batch of “secret” garbage products.

The latest “slight of hand” is the review site. These are sites that will look at a particular product and then write a review about it for potential buyers. To do a review properly you need to buy the product test it throroughly yourself and then write a report covering what it does and its advantages and disadvantages. In other words an independent assessment.

What the floggers do is use a review that has already been written by someone else. They certainly don’t bother to buy and test it themselves.

The second point Jim made was the way some guru marketers are getting to the point where their only interest is relieving you of the maximum amount of cash for literally garbage products.

In the summer there were a lot of critical comments about a product launched by one very famous marketer, which was just a rehash of his first product which made him famous.

Personally I think Internet Marketing will see some major changes for the better over the next year or so because people are just getting sick of the all the hype and poor products.