In the April issue of my Digital Upstart printed newsletter I wrote a blueprint on cost per action marketing. This is where you market an offer, such as people giving their post code on someone else’s web site, and you get paid each time someone carries out that action.
The response I received from the blueprint was probably the biggest I’ve ever had. People went nuts from it and wanted to know more.
A couple of weeks ago I said that cost per action marketing, or CPA, was going to be the next big thing online. I said that if you wanted to become a guru go into this market, make some cash and then release a product on it. People will promote it like crazy because it is the next big topic online.
Well Chris Cobb of www.cpa-arbitrage.net has done just that. He has released a course on cost per action advertising.
Cost Per Action / CPA Arbitrage – my verdict
Unfortunately he doesn’t read this newsletter (or if he does he didn’t pay attention) because I said to become a well-known and respected guru you need to release quality information.
As soon as I saw the sales letter for this one I winced a little. I knew, from reading tons of these sales letters, that this was going to be a badun’.
The first thing that stands out is the headline.
“Clickbank insider returns sheepishly to show you why he quit using Clickbank”
Then you scroll down to notice that he is selling the eBook through ClickBank.
That’s just me being pedantic there. It doesn’t matter if he “returned” to use a platform he quit two years ago to use it again IF the product he has returned to is worth selling.
It isn’t.
At fifty quid this isn’t cheap. You’re then hit with the usual one time offer for an extra fifty seven dollars promising you the advanced strategies. Nothing wrong with that. What did pee me off somewhat is it states I’ll never see the offer again and on the download page it says repeatedly “Get the advanced strategies here”. Marketing de ja vu.
Onto the book itself. The book is seventy seven pages worth of, well, very basic information. You’re walked, at a slow pace, through the basics of cost per action and how it works.
As it progresses you start to realise there’s a fair bit of filler there. And that familiar sinking feeling comes into play.
What really bugged me about this though are his “strategies” for getting traffic to cpa offers. The truth is that you can find all of the information at the beginning of the book online without spending a penny. So I was looking forward to reading some new strategies from Chris on how he generates so much cash from these offers.
If he is making that cash, he certainly isn’t telling us how he’s doing it.
There are four pages worth of keyword strategies. And a few pages of pretty rubbish traffic strategies that lack so much detail I wasn’t quite sure whether there was any point including them in the first place.
He talks about things like using Yahoo answers to generate traffic. That, quite frankly, is a ridiculous concept. Ok you might, and I do mean might, get a few clicks from there but this guy is talking about making thousands a day. Not going to happen. His traffic strategies are stuff that will never in a million years generate the kind of cash he promises.
So the book itself is pants. What about the “extras”?
Well the rest is basically a few titbits from a course released by a different marketer called Affiliate Payload. I own both, which makes this part useless to me, and I didn’t rate it that highly in the first place. You’re handed over to Affiliate Payload where you can watch some so so videos on media buying. Not really any good.
So all in all this is just another below par ClickBank product that no doubt the entire brady bunch will promote claiming to be the next best thing ever. Avoid it.
If you want to learn about cost per action then there are some amazing resources out there that blow away CPA Arbitrage and they won’t cost you a penny. One of them is from Gauher Chaudry www.cpahotspot.com. His eBook there won’t cost you a penny and is ten times more comprehensive than Chris Cobbs.
A BT nightmare. Again. And some covert persuasion
You might be wondering why there was no eletter last week. In the past three years I’ve only missed three or four eletters. So what went wrong?
When I moved into my first flat in Southampton I had a nightmare as British Telecom, bless them (gits), managed to balls up and took 2 weeks putting broadband into my new flat. That was three years ago now.
Well it’s good to know that BT are consistent if nothing else, because now they’ve caused endless trouble in my new flat.
I moved into the penthouse in Ocean Village two weeks ago. What felt like a positive step forward became a pain in the rectum when I phoned BT to find out why they hadn’t put the internet in my new place yet. I was told the “order was cancelled”.
Five minutes later I was told the order wasn’t cancelled and broadband would be activated in two days.
It wasn’t.
I then proceeded to yo-yo between technical support and the sales advisors who were both unaware of what the other was telling me. This resulted in me ranting about the fact “It’s good to talk so why the bleedin hell aren’t any of you lot talking to each other? I’ve had this conversation eight times with different people”.
Anyway it’s still not fixed, but I do now have Orange Mobile Broadband. It’s about as quick as Paris Hilton on Mastermind but it’s doing the job.
One thing that I have learned from this experience came out of the blue. I phoned up directory enquiries and asked for the phone number for Orange Mobile Broadband.
“You asked to be put straight through”
“Yep that’s right”
As the phone rang through to Orange I realised I hadn’t actually asked to be put straight through. The operator, obviously trained for this (you pay them more if they put you straight through), told me I asked to be put straight through and without even realising it I agreed.
Over the past few weeks I have been reading up on influence, covert persuasion techniques, conversational hypnosis and more. And it is genuinely scary just how every single day we are getting marketed to without even realising it. These “under the radar” techniques are getting us to do things in our every day lives on autopilot and only now am I starting to notice it.
I’m fascinated by this subject because I know that this kind of thing can be used, ethically, in marketing online. I’ll test some of the ideas and concepts to see how well they work with my websites and come back with my findings. I have a strong feeling this will help all aspects of online business.
Back with a vengeance
The week and a half without the internet has allowed me to recharge my batteries and I’m back raring to go and enjoying more than ever saving you from spending your hard earned cash on hype.
If you have emailed me in the last week and I’ve yet to answer rest assured I am working my way through my emails and you’ll hear from me later today or tomorrow morning the latest. You will hear from me though so I apologise for the delay and thank you for your understanding.