Can’t Get Rich

Paul, of Uberaffiliate.com, announced a new service yesterday: UberCamp. What is UberCamp? It’s an invite-only forum where you can interact with affiliate marketing experts…for a price. Nickycakes was quick to point out everything wrong with the idea, and I’m going to have to side with Nick on this one: UberCamp just sounds like a bad idea.

Buy why Geoff, why?

Put simply, Paul’s fledgling forum is Wickedfire with a monthly fee. For $99, $199, or $5,000 a month, you get all of the following:

1. Interact with experts

Paul listed three experts that will be present on the forum (himself and two others). While it’s nice to be able to get answers from people who know what they’re doing, you have to wonder how much time they’re going to be devoting to the project. If the forum has 100 members, and each one asks only one question every day (which is unlikely, considering this forum will mainly appeal to newbies), can you really expect three people to spit out 100 well-written, informative responses?

On the other hand, Wickedfire has plenty of experts, most of whom will answer your questions and even help you out on AIM or over email, provided you ask good questions.

2. Case studies

Paul promises regular case studies, where the experts walk you through different techniques and teach you how to work in the industry.

That’s great and all, but I got into Wickedfire’s last case study just by asking nicely. I learned a ton of useful information, met plenty of intelligent people with great ideas, and I didn’t have to pay a dime.

3. 1-on-1 time with Paul

For $5,000 a month, you can work with the master. You get a direct line to Paul, and he’ll teach you all he knows, critique your ideas, etc.

$5,000 a month. $60,000 a year. That’s one hefty consultant’s fee. Paul had better be sitting on some amazing secrets to ask that much. It really makes me wonder though: How much time can he devote to private mentoring? I mean, he’s got all of the other forum members to feed information to, and then he’s got his own campaigns to run. There’s only so many hours in the day, so I’m wondering how he’ll manage to fit it all in.

I guess I should also mention that there are four experts on my AIM contact list that I can hit up with questions any time I want. They’re just as knowledgeable as Paul, and I’m not paying them anything. I guess if you don’t want to take the time to establish a good network of contacts, and just want to go straight to the info, then maybe Paul’s $5k/month deal is right for you.

4. Paul shares his campaigns

He must have a lot of good campaigns if he’s promising to share his keyword lists, landing pages, etc. I expect something like this will happen:

1. Paul fully discloses a campaign.
2. 2% of his readers learn the underlying principles and techniques.
3. 98% of his readers copy it outright.
4. Market floods, driving up advertising costs.
5. Readers blow their budgets for little return on investment.
6. Everybody marvels at how Paul managed to get such a good CPC beforehand.
7. Paul’s reputation among his fans increases.

Works out pretty well for Paul.

I’m being harsh

I know, I know. Some of the ideas behind UberCamp do have some merit: For starters, by charging a monthly fee, he’s limiting the number of people who can see his secret info, resulting in less market saturation. That’s a good idea in theory, but I have a feeling that a lot of those secrets are either (A) available someplace else or (B) going to end up on a member’s blog (it’s not like I don’t pull ideas from Wickefire all the time). I guess being invite-only is a decent idea, as it keeps out the morons, but I can’t see him getting many members that way:

“Hey dude, come join this forum. I’ll vouch for you, and it’s only $200 a month!”

“How about YOU join and pay, and then you teach me the secrets you learned.”

“Good idea, I hadn’t though about it that way.”

All in all, UberCamp just sounds like Wickedfire with fewer idiots and a monthly fee. I know you have to spend money to make money, but in this day and age, most information can be found for free. Personally, I wouldn’t go anywhere near UberCamp.

As always, I will always be the first to admit when I’m wrong.  If any of you guys choose to use Paul’s new service, and it works out well for you, let me know (not holding my breath).

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So, I got my economic stimulus check yesterday. While my fellow countrymen will no doubt spend their checks on safe investments, such as lottery tickets and Louis Vuitton handbags, it’s up to us crazy Internet people to take bold risks and waste our money on frivolous things. Here’s a quick list of what your $300 will get you online (if you’re one of those people who got $600, just multiply by two. You can do that, right?):

30 domain names from Google

Buy some decent domain names, setup some autoblogs/real blogs/ebay niche stores/whatever. Avoid-excessive-amounts-of-dashes and try to come up with something that’ll be popular in 3-6 months.

3,000 clicks from SocialMedia

Expected return on investment: $1-$2.

450ish clicks on Facebook

Expected return on investment: $10-$20

15 guaranteed reviews from me

Buy them for your friends and family.

3 copies of BANS or 6 copies of PHPBay Pro

I don’t know why you’d want multiple copies, but you can use them to start building an ebay niche store empire.

A few ebooks

I guarantee that with this method, you’ll be making over $300 A MINUTE. Absolutely ZERO experience required and it only takes minutes 37 seconds to learn! Just send $97.95 to my paypal account to get started!

A few sites submitted to hundreds of PR3+ directories

Sometimes, it can be worth it to pay someone to do manual directory submissions for you. I use this guy from Wickedfire to do mine for me. At $35 for 400 directories, you can have him do 8 sites and still have money left over for a lot of Jones soda.

5 custom landing pages

This guy makes them. They’re gorgeous.

Ok, enough plugs. Take a look on Wickedfire’s buy/sell/trade board, and you’ll see tons of services ranging from stumbleupon submissions to article writing services. Use your $300 wisely and invest in your online future.

A note for confused non-US residents: I’m talking about this.

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I love zombie culture.

Books, movies, video games, everything. I’ve read the Zombie Survival Guide cover to cover, I’ve watched countless zombie flicks, and I’ve played through Resident Evil 4 somewhere around a dozen times. I have an emergency escape route planned in case of zombpocalypse. We have a very strict ‘no fake zombie’ rule in my apartment, the punishment for which is severe bludgeoning, usually to the skull. In short, zombies are cool.

Why do I bring this up? Well, I found an interesting thread on Wickedfire yesterday. It looks like one of the forum’s members made a low-budget zombie film, and is looking for ways to promote it. He’s even looking into starting an affiliate program. The thread itself is a fountain of useful ideas, but there’s one thing in particular you should look at.

Specifically, the movie’s trailer. For future reference, if you have one of your movie’s characters shove a chainsaw through a zombie’s face, you get an instant plug on my blog.

Anyway, I thought the whole thread was pretty interesting, mainly because it puts modern advertising into perspective: You don’t really need a multi-million dollar advertising campaign to spread awareness. Forget expensive TV/radio advertising, all you need is a few flyers handed to the right people and a handful of blogs. If you happen to get lucky, you can rely on viral advertising to get the word out.

For example: I read Wickedfire. I like zombies. My roommate, who reads this blog, also likes zombies. He may write about the movie on his blog. A lot of his friends like zombies. They write about it. The dominoes continue to fall until the producers are buried in order requests.

Back to the thread. As usual, HarveyJ is a veritable goldmine of useful information. He suggested something that I never would have thought of, but can definitely see catching on: Leak your own movie. Take a low quality version, leak it onto the P2P networks, and let it spread itself. Pretty soon, you’ll have people searching for information about the movie, writing about it, and even buying it (low quality versions suck).

The most important piece of advice in the thread, however, is one that I hope most of you have figured out by now: Don’t be afraid to simply ask for help. It was suggested that the producer simply ask zombie bloggers to give him a plug. It’s a good idea, and it can work for any number of situations (including podcasts). Aside from getting a little free advertising, you also get the added bonus of establishing contacts within whatever niche you’re looking to break into. I just can’t stress this enough: Always go out of your way to network with people in your niche.

Also, always keep a sword or spear in your house (in case of zombies). Blades don’t need reloading.

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A few weeks ago, Matt introduced me to SocialMedia. At the time, it seemed like a good idea: I place my ad on hundreds (thousands?) of applications on various social networking sites, and I get a billion cheap clicks. Well, it’s true. You do get a billion cheap clicks. The thing is, none of them convert (at least for me). It’s a great system in theory, but I just can’t get it to work in practice.

What is SocialMedia?

SocialMedia is a neat little tool that partners with the owners of applications on social networking sites. It’s kind of like Adwords: The publishers place the ad blocks on their applications, and the advertisers pay (per click) to display ads on them. Simple, right? Like anything, the system has it’s pros and cons.

One of the things that I really like about SocialMedia is that they don’t overcharge you. If you specify $0.10 per click and budget $50, you’ll pay $0.10 per click all the way up to that $50 (or 500 clicks). The thing is, the system won’t immediately yank your ad, and if you’re getting clicks very quickly, you’ll end up getting a ton for free (or, if you want to look at it a different way, your $0.10 CPC becomes $0.05, etc). Whether you get 500 clicks or 1,500 clicks, you only end up paying what you specified. I’ve gotten $0.02 clicks this way before.

On the other hand, they system is incredibly clunky and tedious. For starters, it can take anywhere from half an hour to two days to get your ads approved. The ad creation system is fairly limited, and there’s no way to automatically duplicate ads with different URLs if you’re doing split testing. On top of all that, they only accept Paypal payments.

My problem’s really not with the system though. My problem is with the audience.

Target Audience

Who compulsively uses Facebook/Myspace/Bebo? Why, people between the ages of 13 and 22, that’s who. People who (in theory) don’t have a whole lot of disposable income. That’s not a problem though, right? You just do lead-gen campaigns, right? Well, I’ve always assumed that Myspace = moron, and so far my testing with SocialMedia has backed up that assumption. For starters, I’m led to believe that nobody on social networking sites actually reads the ad text, and just clicks around their screen randomly, hoping to get to where they’re going. Case in point: I ran a ZIP submit offer, and the ad text clearly stated “Enter your ZIP code to blah blah blah.” Hundreds of clicks. Tens of leads.

Of course, maybe I’m just picking on Myspace. After all, you don’t need little old me to tell you that its users are all a bunch of idiots. That’s common knowledge. What about Facebook? Well, Facebook users tend to convert better than Myspace users… by about 1% or less. My theory is that the Myspace users are migrating to Facebook, resulting in an average loss of intelligence as a whole.

Overall

I’m just not having any luck with this service. To me, advertising with SocialMedia is like filling a bucket with pennies and dumping them off the Empire State Building. Sure, one or two pennies might hit someone right in the forehead, but the rest will all miss and be wasted. You get little to no results from a large investment. If I were you, I’d experiment with it a little, but don’t sink too much money into it.

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I just haven’t had much luck with digital goods lately. While other affiliate marketers have made their fortunes from ebooks, dating services, and ringtones, it’s just not working out for me. That’s why I’ve decided to try a different approach, one mainly focusing on eBay.

As I mentioned the other day, I’m going to try to get into the affiliate niche store business. I’m testing one right now, and if I can find a good method of driving traffic, I’ll probably build 10-25 stores a month (and many more if I really start making money).

While affiliate stores are all well and good, I’m thinking of taking it a step further and actually starting an eBay store. I’ve been thinking if over for awhile, and I’ve decided to do a few trial auctions for imported items from Japan. If things work out well, I’ll start doing lots and lots of them. I have a friend over in Japan who is going to sea-mail me a big box of stuff, stuff that our research shows we can get a 300% ROI. Isn’t legitimate business fun?

Ebay has always been fascinating to me. You can sell the most mundane crap on there. Just as an example, I have an uncle who lives by a pier in New York. He used to go out to that pier at low tide, pick up snails, and sell them on eBay. Now he makes a pretty decent living selling aquarium stuff. I find it amazing that you can just pick up crap you’ve found lying around and sell it on eBay.

How can you apply this to your situation? What if you don’t live near an ocean? Well, for starters, pay attention to what’s on sale in your area. If you find a store that’s overstocked and having a 90% off sale, buy up whatever it is they’re selling and resell it. A long time ago, a store in my hometown was overstocked on Gameboy Advance games and was selling them for $5 a piece. I bought 20 of them and resold them for an average for $30 each. Huge profit.

Of course, managing an eBay store takes a lot of work when you factor in order tracking and shipping, so it’s not for everyone. Still, if you think you can find a niche and crack it, you stand to make a lot of money.

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