Hey guys. Sam here again with another review. It’s just gonna be a really short one today. I’ve been reviewing a lot of products like software services, installable software, those kind of things. One thing I want to branch at into doing is some shorter reviews looking at sort of business development and training, Kindle books, and other Ebooks and maybe print books that I’ve been reading. I’m a firm believer in reading a bunch of, you know, books and … I mean, I use a Kindle myself. I haven’t read a print book really in a long time, but I do read the occasional one.
Yeah, basically what I want to do is start, I guess, yeah, reviewing books, training books and guide books and all those kind of things that I’ve been working with, or reading I should say. The first one I want to cover is something called, Essential AdWords: The Quick and Dirty Guide. The Kindle edition of this by a guy called, Kyle Sulerud. Sorry if I’ve pronounced your name incorrectly there. But, yeah, I’ve been following Kyle’s sort of AdWords Training for a while now. He’s got a, like a high-end AdWords Training course that I’m hoping to buy at some stage. I think he closed the access to it recently. It’s about a $1000 course. You know, it’s obviously a pretty nation, it’s really focused at creating effective AdWords campaigns for local services, businesses, you know, and then getting really good conversion rates and basically giving local-service clients a good ROIN and sort of trying to create a business, I guess, out of providing AdWords Management to local service businesses.
So I’ve been seeing, you know, he’s got a lot of promotions out on the Facebook news feed. He’s got an AdWords group, I believe. I’m a member of it. I’m trying to think if he’s the Ad Man or just a Moderator. Something like that. I’ll double check. But basically, I didn’t even know he had a cheap guide available. Someone had mentioned it in a comment on one of his posts on Facebook, that they’d purchased his Essential AdWords: The Quick and Dirty Guide on Kindle. I thought: Oh, I’ll give that a shot. Jumped over to Kindle and lo and behold, it was like 75% off, $2.00 or something like that was the price. I thought: I’ll buy it and just give it a quick read.
So look, all I’m gonna do is super briefly cover what it is, what I like about it, what I don’t, and is it worth reading. So, as the name suggests, Essential AdWords: The Quick and Dirty Guide is a basic guide to Google AdWords. Yeah, it’s a short Kindle Ebook, you know, you can probably read through the whole thing in about a half an hour. You know, it costs a few dollars, the price of a coffee or something like that. It just contains a whole list of, I guess, things you need to know to sort of, I suppose, have a good understanding of the basics of AdWords.
This is not a super-detailed complex guide. It’s not an in-depth strategy that, you know, you sort of boiler plate strategy you can apply to multiple clients or anything. It’s just giving you a grounding in the platform. Yeah, so what I’ll do I talk quickly about the things I like about it and the things I don’t and is it worth your time to actually go out and buy this and read it. So, the thing I like is that … it’s most of all is that it is really hard-hitting. It is short. I mean, two bucks I paid for it. Who cares how short it is?
Even if it was three or four pages long, as long as the information was good it’s worth a buy at that price. I pleased to say that the information that’s in there is really good. There’s a lot of very valuable insights that you can glean from this that if you did … I mean, I’ve been doing AdWords for a long time. But if you were new to AdWords and you didn’t know what Kyle was talking about, there’s a lot of settings he makes you aware of, and sort of things you need to know about the platform that if you get them wrong you can blow through a lot of money quickly. You can run campaigns that aren’t particularly effective.
Basically, I think his goal with this Quick and Dirty Guide to AdWords is to provide you with, I guess, enough information to be dangerous or perhaps I should say enough information to not make massive stuff-ups with your AdWords account that’ll cost you or your client loads of money. So, he covers all sorts of things like network settings and what are the different campaign types and what are they good for. How to get into the right mindset with keywords. That’s a really valuable section, actually, you know? How to think like potential customers are thinking so you pick good keywords.
He talks about negative keywords. And actually, a really interesting point that he raises here, and the more I think about it the more it’s true is he talks about the fact that really, you know, you can make or break a campaign on negative keywords. A lot of people don’t think enough about negative keywords that they, you know, that they don’t use enough of them. But if you’re smart with AdWords and really master the art of negative keywords and avoiding your ads showing for search terms that aren’t relevant or are going to lead to clicks that generate conversions. You know, you do this by using negative keywords that you’ve either researched or you think would be appropriate or whatever. A master of negative keywords saves you a lot of money and improves results of the campaigns. It can really be the difference between a campaign that works well and one that’s a total failure.
He talks about conversion optimization. He talks about how to write ads. He talks about basic campaign settings you should know. And look, none of it is in huge detail or huge depth, but what’s there is actually really good and really hard-hitting. Certainly it’s, you know, what I’m gonna do is just come out and just say, hey look, this is, you know, buy this book. It’s worth buying simply for the fact that you can read it at lunch break probably at work or on the bus on the way to work or while you’re waiting for your plane to depart at the departure lounge or anything like that. Read it before you go to bed. You’ll get a really good grounding and basic settings you need to know about AdWords.
And more importantly, a few areas that you really need to be aware of to get good results. Basically, you know, picking good campaign settings; picking keywords that strike at the heart of what your target audience is looking for. And how to use negative keywords to avoid wasting money because that’s what you’ve got to remember. Every click on your ads doesn’t lead to a conversion or doesn’t lead to a positive brand and direction that turn into a conversion down the track. You know, it is wasted money. I’ve worked on AdWords accounts where … I mean, one I worked on, for example, the client was spending about $1000 a month on AdWords. Not a huge amount, but he was a small business. He had set it up himself because like a lot of small business owners, he didn’t want to pay. “Oh, I can do it myself.” He came to me and said: “Look, I’ve done it myself. I can’t understand why my AdWords account isn’t performing.”
He basically, he’d done only broad match keywords. Everything in the same ad group and the same campaign. He had display ad-on under search network, which is a terrible option. Of the last month, he’d been running that campaign. He spent $1000 and I was able to work out about $970 of that was spent on totally irrelevant clicks that had nothing at all to do with what he was selling. You know, if he’d read Kyle’s book, AdWords: The Quick and Dirty Guide, he probably would have avoided a few of those mistakes.
So, yeah, Essential AdWords: The Quick and Dirty Guide by Kyle Sulerud. Look, it’s not perfect. It’s really short; it’s basic. But the information is hard-hitting. It’s cheap. You can read it on Kindle. You don’t even need a Kindle. You can just read it on the web reader. I recommend checking it out. It’s well worth the buy. I can’t wait to have a look at his full-course one day.
I thought I would take the opportunity to give you guys an update on my STM Forum Review as it has been a while since I originally wrote my review.
Long story short:
I had my original membership for a few months, but cancelled it earlier in the year.
Within the last week (end July 2019) I decided to renew for another month and check out the current state of the forum.
As of July 2019, the forum does not appear to be particularly active. It isn’t dead, but I remember there being a lot more “action” when I first joined – many threads now seem to be newbies asking repetitive questions, kind of like an expensive version of Black Hat World.
The sales website doesn’t seem to have been updated in the past year – it still talks about upcoming events in 2016 etc. When you’re charging big bucks each month for forum access, you should at least ensure that you keep your sales site updated!
As it stands right now, I don’t believe any more that Stackthatmoney.com is worth joining UNLESS you are solely interested in making money from paid traffic + CPA offers, and are committed to seeing success with this method.
If you are interested in getting into CPA + paid traffic (and I mean really interested and committed to making it work) then Stackthatmoney membership might still be worth it.
However, for anyone who is just interested in affiliate marketing in general, I can no longer recommend purchase.
You are paying quite a substantial amount of money each month for a forum that doesn’t seem to be sufficiently active or contain enough hard-hitting information to justify joining – unless you are into paid traffic and CPA.
If you do want to join, then I suggest doing so for one month and then archiving the best bits of all the threads you read – that will probably serve you enough.
Original Review (Update Above Supersedes This:)
Welcome back to another honest review at Reviews Boss. Today we’re taking a look at a very niche product – it’s a popular affiliate marketing forum called Stackthatmoney (or maybe Stack That Money if you like nice looking grammar).
How Much Does It Cost?
Access to Stackthatmoney forum costs $99 USD per month. There is no free trial or reduced price trial available … the price is the price.
You can pay with Paypal and credit cards.
Who Is It For?
Right off the bat, I want to say that Stackthatmoney access is not for everyone.
Firstly, if you’re a total noob to affiliate marketing, then I really don’t recommend STM. Although there are resources aimed at beginners, you’re probably going to get overwhelmed quickly and that will lead to burn out. If you’re totally new to the game, then just start with something really simple like what you learn on Affilorama.
Secondly, if you’re interested in profiting from SEO, then I don’t recommend STM. The SEO section of the forum is small, and there is nothing in here that you won’t find elsewhere anyway. I’d save that $99 a month and put it into paying for link building services, or hiring someone to write 10 x 1000 word articles to target long tail keywords on your site.
From where I’m standing, Stack That Money is purely for people who want to learn how to make money from affiliate marketing using paid traffic sources. Furthermore, you need to be the kind of person who is going to be willing to actually invest in making campaigns profitable. If the idea of blowing $100 a day for a month before you reach a winning campaign scares you, then this style of affiliate marketing is probably not the game for you!
Why Use A Paid Forum?
Let’s face it – none of us like spending money unless we absolutely have to. It’s also no great secret that there are LOADS of affiliate and internet marketing forums out there, such as Warrior Forum and Blackhatworld.
With this in mind, why on earth would you choose to join a paid affiliate marketing forum? Surely you could get just as good information browsing the free forums and blogs, right?
Well, you’d be wrong. Or at least 90% wrong.
While there are occasionally some gold nuggets on free Internet marketing forums (usually Blackhatworld to be honest … it’s been so long since I’ve seen anything good on the Warrior Forum that I’ve basically stopped checking, perhaps with the exception being solarwarrior’s Bing Ads + Clickbank/CPA guide) most of what is written on there is garbage. This is because the majority of users are just there to try and make money from other users, or because they aren’t paying to be part of the club they have literally zero skin in the game, and don’t take anything seriously.
Furthermore, because you have to “pay to play” with this particular forum, the average quality of user is soooo much higher. Although you still get the occasional annoying post where the user hasn’t read the OP, this is generally due to a bit of ignorance – or sometimes even language issues – as opposed to the biggest issue that plagues forums like Warrior Forum; endless screeds of accounts looking to reply to every single open thread, all of them hoping to entice other forum users to click on whatever crappy link is in their post signature.
Don’t believe me? Just go check ANY thread on the WaFo and you’ll see that 90% of the posts are useless filler, posted by people looking to puff up their post count and maybe earn a few measlies off of signature clicks. You might get the occasional insightful post, but I guarantee that most are just crap.
What the Stack That Money team have been able to do so successfully is pull together a disparate group of real super affiliates (and I mean proper super affiliates … not the “I’ve managed to convince a few JV partners that I’m a super affiliate and now I’m making 99% of my income selling Make Money Online info products”) and get them to share actionable, insightful, and hard-hitting advice. This is as opposed to most affiliate marketing forums, which are just people bragging about their results in order to shift a few crappy WSO-type ebooks, as well as all the clingers-on who beg and plead for step-by-step coaching with no actual desire to test things for themselves.
What I Like
Incredible wealth of information available. There is so much to learn on here. It’s insane … the amount of information available is truly incredible. Most popular threads contain more useful information than 99% of affiliate marketing ebooks or courses I’ve seen.
Friendly forum. Even the “super affiliate” members of the forum seem very friendly and willing to help with getting you started or overcoming hurdles. Despite the fact that there are plenty of serious earners (who are no doubt very busy and don’t want to deal with lots of questions) everyone still chips in and helps each other out. There isn’t too much pretentiousness, or people flaming others over their own choice of strategy.
Reasonable price. $99 is quite expensive, but I think when compared to the value you should derive from the training and resources available, it is a reasonable price. This is especially so when you can consider that you can cancel at any time … so even if you just join for one month and then cancel you are still likely to derive great benefit.
Learn from others’ mistakes. There’s something to be said for being able to get a detailed run down of campaigns that have worked, as well as campaigns that have flopped for people. From this information you can avoid making the same mistakes on your campaigns. This will save you money and hopefully get you to a position of profitability ASAP. In this way, I guess you could say that spending $99 could actually wind up saving you a great deal more in the long run.
Conclusion
I’ve only been a member of Stackthatmoney for a couple of days. Since joining I’ve been spending loads of my free time reading through the threads and absorbing the knowledge.
So what’s my ultimate conclusion to this Stack That Money review? Is it worth forking out $99 per month to be part of this exclusive community?
Here’s what you need to know:
If you’re interested in getting into the affiliate marketing trenches and slogging it out with paid traffic campaigns, then I think it is 100% worth the money. There is so much good information in here – I can think of a few threads off the top of the head I have read that simply blow away anything I’ve ever seen on places like Warrior Forum or Blackhatworld (I’m including WSOs in that list by the way). In fact, STM has better affiliate marketing content than just about any course or training product I’ve ever seen … and I’ve only just started scratching the surface of what is available.
Now if you’re more interested in general entrepreneurship, or other forms of Internet marketing like dropshipping, selling your own info products etc, then there are other places to look. STM really is focused almost 100% on the nitty gritty of paid affiliate marketing, usually promoting CPA offers, rebills, Pay Per Call etc. If that sounds like you, then get your credit card out right now and join. You won’t regret it.
The one caveat to this review is that I haven’t yet tested the longevity of Stackthatmoney. What I mean by this is I can’t confidently state whether membership is worth it long term. I don’t know whether I’ll blast through reading all the threads I can find, and then turn around in a couple of months time and decide that I’m not getting enough value out of whatever new content is being posted. What I can say is that I will come back and update this review in a month’s time to state whether or not I continued with my membership (NB – review has been updated, see below)
Am I Still A Stackthatmoney Member? (Update: October 2019)
No. I canceled my membership just before the end of my first month.
Why did I cancel?
It’s not that Stackthatmoney isn’t good (in fact, it’s probably the best forum I have ever joined, at least in terms of providing quality, actionable content). It’s more that 90% of the conversations on STM relate to making money with affiliate marketing from paid traffic + CPA. And this is an area of affiliate marketing that isn’t super interesting to me right now. I’d love to get into CPA one day, but I’m focusing on some other areas first.
There were some fantastic threads about creating “viral media” sites and driving traffic to them from Facebook, Instagram etc. This was really interesting to me, and I read the pants off each of those threads. However, the problem I found was that there simply weren’t enough new threads on these topics that I like to keep me interested. I read everything on this topic in an afternoon, saved the best bits, and then found there wasn’t much more for me to go on with.
Similarly with Clickbank (the affiliate network where I first got started). There are some good threads, but they aren’t particularly fresh. All the new stuff is generally about CPA + mobile/PPV traffic.
I want to stress once again that I’m not saying Stackthatmoney is bad. I think it is great. But you need to be interested in the type of affiliate marketing that the majority of STM’s userbase is discussing. If you’re interested in other strategies, then spending $97 per month is a big ask for information you may never use.
For now, all I’m gonna say is that if you are genuinely interested in having a crack at paid traffic affiliate marketing with a focus on CPA (and the thought of spending $X,XXX+ just in order to generate a positive ROI doesn’t scare you too much) then you NEED to be on Stackthatmoney. It’s just such good value even if you join for a single month, read the case studies and guides – maybe download them to your computer – and then cancel your membership.
Go here to learn more about STM and to join for yourself. If you’re serious about affiliate marketing, then you won’t regret joining.
Welcome back to another top-notch review here at Reviews Boss. Today we’re taking a look at a product I have been using for years, called Traffic Travis.
Above the SEO functionalities, there are also tools you can use to research available domain names and improve your PPC performance (as well as boost Adsense earnings)
It has been a mainstay of the SEO software game for a number of years now, and literally hundreds of thousands of people have used it.
In fact, if you Google “SEO software”, TT shows up as one of the top results:
So I think it is fair to say that Reviews Boss has a duty to do an honest and detailed review of this product.
Disclosure
At one point (many moons ago) I was actively involved in the development and promotion of Traffic Travis. However, that does not affect my dedication to providing an honest and detailed review, and it has not changed my opinion as I’m no longer employed by the company which developed the product.
What Can It Do?
According to the vendor pitch, here’s what Traffic Travis can do:
Run automated SEO health checks on your site
See your site backlinks and analyze them in detail
Deep dive into SEO competition for keywords and competitor sites
Improve your on-page SEO
Track your rankings for multiple keywords Google, Yahoo, and Bing
Research new keywords to find terms to try and rank for
Analyze the competition of these keywords to see breakdowns of top 10/20 competition (as well as get at-a-glance keyword competitiveness metrics)
Get insights into your PPC/Adwords competition in order to improve campaign performance
Find domain names based on the keywords you uncover
How To Get It
There are two versions of TT; free and Pro.
The easiest way to get it is to go here and download the free edition. You’ll need to register with your email address in order to do so (I will come back to this in the “cons” section of the review).
I recommend that you only ever download Traffic Travis through the official website; don’t go through one of those download sites like Cnet or Softpedia as you will still need to register anyway, and also you might wind up downloading an outdated version.
You should get the free version before you look at upgrading to Pro.
Market Samurai Vs Traffic Travis
I will maybe do a full comparison of Market Samurai and TT at some stage in the future. I’m not certain on this as it seems like Market Samurai (I think it is now called Noble Samurai) has all but been abandoned. The site looks like something out of the dark ages now. That being said, the social media presence of Market Samurai is still being updated on a semi-regular basis. Certainly I do not hear people talking about it anywhere near as much as they used to.
There is only one functionality that these two tools share; keyword research. Both work by tapping in to Google’s Keyword Planner and then returning results based off that. Long Tail Pro focuses specifically on keyword research, whereas Traffic Travis offers a broader sweep of tools.
So, which one does keyword research better?
Overall, I would say that Long Tail Pro is better at finding long tail keywords. That is, after all, the purpose of the software. However, Traffic Travis actually has quite decent SERP competition analysis; and unlike LTP it doesn’t cost you anything in terms of paying a monthly fee for some kind of premium access. You can even analyze quite a few keywords on the free version; although if you plan on analyzing more than 20 keywords in any one sitting, then you’ll want Pro.
The main alternative to TT is probably Market Samurai. However, there are a bunch of different products out there (some free, some premium, some with different tiers) that can manage the functionality of Traffic Travis or at least provide an alternative to some of it:
The list goes on … I don’t really like meaningless comparisons like that.
If you’re interested in learning more about all the available SEO software options that might be able to replicate some of TT’s functionality, then I suggest you read this post.
How To Download Traffic Travis Professional
The easiest way to get Professional is to upgrade from within the software itself. However, if you are determine to buy Pro from the outset, then you can do so here.
At this stage of the review, I reckon it’s probably time to take a look under the hood of Traffic Travis and see what the software can do.
This will be very image heavy, and each image will feature a caption underneath explaining what you are seeing and how it relates to the functionality of the software:
When you power up Traffic Travis, this is what you will see for the first time – you might actually notice that the software is not up to date ven if you just happened to have downloaded it.
Welcome to the home screen of TT. It’s from here where you will set up your projects, manage your sites and get at-a-glance statistics. You can see down the bottom the Upgrade To Pro option – this is where you need to click if you do want to upgrade.
Adding a project into TT is really easy (you do it from the top menu bar). Once you’ve chosen to add a new project you will see a screen like the one above. It’s pretty simple what you need to here. You can always come back and add more keywords and search engines at a later date. The only confusing option is the Sitemap URL. If you don’t have a sitemap setup yet, then TT will try to scrape your web pages from robots.txt – although you really should try to get a Sitemap.
Once you’ve added in the basic details of your project, you will probably also want to use the “Update Settings” option and set everything to its shortest possible time period that you get more regular updates. What you see above is the default option. I don’t really do anything in Miscellaneous, Video Rankings, or Email Scheduler (although you are more than welcome to try these features out!)
If you run a YouTube channel and are trying to rank your videos, then the Video Rankings module will be music to your ears. It can help you track where your videos are ranking on YouTube for any given keyword. It also checks ranks for Google Videos as well.
Miscellaneous settings.
The video rankings pane for checking your YouTube rankings.
The email scheduler is where you can set up automated report emails. This could be handy if you are using TT to track client rankings.
Once you’ve added in your report you should see something like this. Note that there isn’t too much data available for Reviews Boss because it is a very new site. If your site was established, then you would hopefully see a whole lot more under top 5 ranked keywords, backlinks, and so on. I’ve also only got 4 keywords added at the moment, so hardly much to work with!
If you want to upgrade to Premium and download it, then you need to use that UPGRADE TO PRO button that will be at the bottom of your screen. Remember to get a feel for TT and whether or not you actually like using it before making the call to upgrade.
This is the basic view of the keyword research tab. It really is quite self explanatory. You put in the keywords you want to search to expand from – your “seed” keywords – and then go from there by hitting fetch. BTW if you’re having trouble with keyword research, then you should check out my speed keywords gig on Source Market here, which will really help you hit the ground running.
When working with the keyword research tool you can change your location and language setting, as well as SERP values match type.
As with just about every keyword tool ever, you can filter your results. This is standard stuff.
Now let’s move on to the SEO competition analysis tool which is probably my favourite bit of Traffic Travis. The purpose of this particular module is to give you an at-a-glance difficulty metric for ranking for any particular keyword, as well as detailed analysis of the top 10/20 ranking sites for any particular term.
From within the Research/SEO Competition module you just enter your keyword(s) and then press okay. The module will then go away and get to work to analyse the results.
NB: If you want to analyse a lot of keywords – in my experience anything over 20 at once – then you really need the Pro version PLUS working proxies. Otherwise you will get blocked from the Google API used to power this tool.
This is what you will see after the SERP competition check has run. Now unfortunately that image is kind of hard to see due to it being compressed for web – I will try to upload a better version in due course.
But you should be able to make out the “extremely difficult” rating, which tells me without digging any further that I would probably struggle BIG TIME to rank for the keyword “SEO Software”.
Then you get the other data that is better for those who want to make a manual analysis of the keyword and their probability of ranking for it:
Pagerank average and median
Page backlinks (ie the links pointing to that page that is ranking)
Site-wide backlinks count
Number of SERP results
Intitle and Inanchor competition
KEI score
CPC
The piece de resistance is the fact that you can get a detailed report like the one above that breaks down each keyword and its top 10 (or 20, if you choose it) ranked entries in order to see how they are performing in terms of backlinks, on-page SEO, authority etc.
Traffic Travis Pro Crack
People are always on the lookout for cracked versions of Traffic Travis Pro in order to save money. My advice is don’t waste your time with this. Either use the free version, or stump up the money for the paid version. Cracked software puts your machine at risk, and usually goes wrong anyway (especially when it’s something like TT that has frequent updates).
Don’t be stingy – either pay for premium access or make do with the free option.
I know at one stage a number of years ago, there was a working cracked version that was doing the rounds on places like Blackhatworld. That is long dead, so don’t even bother. Just pay for it 🙂
Traffic Travis Pro Download
Want to download Traffic Travis Pro? You can do so here. Please note you will need to pay the $97 USD purchase price before you can complete your download.
Traffic Travis For Mac
One of the most common questions about TT is how to run it on Mac OSX. Unfortunately, there is no native support for OSX. This means that you either need to look for alternative software (ideally something that is cloud based) or use a workaround that will allow you to run TT on your Mac.
On the Traffic Travis website there are some solutions available for using Mac. Basically they involve either installing Windows on a partition of your hard drive or secondary hard drive, or using a software like Parallels in order to run a Windows environment on your machine.
The problem with these options is that they cost money, because you either have to buy an expensive software or purchase a valid Windows licence key, unless you already happen to have one lying around.
Honestly, the easiest way to use Traffic Travis for Mac is to skip all the fiddle-farting and go out and buy a dirt cheap Windows laptop. I used to have an old laptop I kept lying around for this exact purpose. I could run TT whenever I needed it, as well as some other Windows only software that I used. Now I’ve gone back to Windows only it’s not an issue for me, but I still recommend this as an easy solution.
Pros
Here’s what I like about the product:
Reasonable Price. $97 per year is not a bad price at all or an SEO software that has so many different features, and which has a proven track record of being reliable. Furthermore, the free edition is actually very good if you are just managing a couple of sites.
Regular Updates. Traffic Travis has been going steady for years now, and is always regularly updated. You can feel safe and assured that your purchase isn’t going to be abandoned any time soon. I’m a big fan of regular updates.
Lots Of Features. You really can do a heck of a lot of stuff with Traffic Travis. I know a lot of more advanced SEOs don’t really like it because it is a jack-of-all-trades and master of none, and it also prioritizes simplicity over power (compared to something like Scrapebox, for example).
Good Support. If you have any issues you need help with, then support is not hard to come by and is generally very good. There is a huge FAQ database available here, which covers most questions you could ever want to ask. If that doesn’t get you to where you need to be, then there is also a ticket-based support system available with quick replies.
Very Usable Free Tier. Some SEO software massively restricts the amount of value a free subscriber can get (I’m looking at you, Ahrefs). Traffic Travis can do just about everything you’d want it to do on the free tier, which is great when you are first starting out and can’t justify stumping up the cash for the Pro version.
Make sure you’ve checked out my guide above to what is different between the free and pro editions. I think you will find that the pro edition stacks up rather favourably.
Easy Refund If You Aren’t Happy. Because Traffic Travis is sold through Clickbank you are entitled to a no-questions-asked refund within 60 days of purchase. If you’re sitting on the fence, then this should give you some great peace of mind. Clickbank’s refund policy is absolutely watertight, so you have nothing to worry about.
Cons
Here’s what I dislike about TT:
No Cloud Access. People spend less time these days in front of their computers, and more time on phones, tablets etc while out and about. Because there is no cloud access you have to use Traffic Travis on a desktop or laptop machine. It would be great to have cloud access and the ability to check from a mobile device.
No Mac Native Support. This has been an ongoing issue for a number of years now. The lack of native Mac support is frustrating, and should be fixed. The only way you can run this software on a Mac is to go through the expense and hassle of running a virtual machine or secondary Windows install. It surely has to be time that an all-new Mac compatible version is created.
Annual Pricing. Access to the software costs $97 per year. So while this is a meagre $8 per month, it still sucks when you forget you’re paying an annual fee and your credit card or Paypal gets rebilled. I would like to see a lifetime access option for a big discount like $197.
Your Inbox Will Be Under Attack. Remember that Traffic Travis is produced by the same company as Affilorama (and Salehoo, which is another product I will review in the near future). Once you download the free version or buy the Pro edition, your email address is added to FINISH
Affilorama Premium Upsell. You need to consciously untick this, unless you want to get access to Affilorama Premium via a slightly surreptitious upsell. You get the first month for free or for a dollar or something low ball like that. But if you forget to cancel, then you are automatically rebilled the next month for $47. Not ideal – either remember to cancel or just uncheck the box anyway. I will be reviewing this product in the near future in greater detail so you can see if Affilorama Premium is actually worth buying; if the conclusion is good, then you can always go back and get it.
Not Superb At Any One Thing. TT is a bit like a Swiss Army Knife. It has a lot of useful tools, but none of them are outstanding at doing their respective job. For example, its keyword research module is useful, but nowhere near as powerful as something more specialised like Long TailPro. This is why a lot of more experienced SEOs aren’t huge fans of TT, because it probably just isn’t powerful enough for their specific needs.
Conclusion
Should you buy Traffic Travis?
As far as free SEO software goes, the standard version is a handy tool to have in your arsenal. It tracks ranks quite accurately, gives you a useful overall picture of the health of your website, and can help with performing competitive SEO and PPC analysis.
Considering it is free, what’s not to love?
But what about the paid, professional version of the product? Is it worth a buy?
You know what, I actually think it is. However, it is only worth buying once you’ve built up some experience with SEO, and if you genuinely have a need for the extra functionalities (like the ability to add more projects, research more keywords and so on).
Start out by downloading the free version of TT here, and get to know how the software works and its functionality first.
Once you’ve spent some time with the free version and have got used to it, you can make a call as to whether upgrading to the Pro version is worth it for you or not.
I have TT Pro and enjoy using it on a regular basis to track rankings, get handy SEO competition analysis, and other research metrics. It’s not perfect, and I’m sure that anyone with a bit of skill and the inclination to do so could replicate most of the functions for free using other tools.
But as a unified dashboard from which I can look at basic SEO and PPC metrics, do research, and optimise my sites, it has use that justifies the purchase price. As a sort of jack-of-all-trades toolkit that can work alongside other more premium products, it really is quite handy.
Overall, I recommend it. Start with the free version – you can download it here – and then take your time to get used to the software and what it can do for you. From there you can make the call on whether it is worth upgrading to the professional version.
Hey, how’s it going? It’s Sam Frost here from reviewsboss.com. In this video, I want to cover a common question I get asked quite a bit and I see people asking all over the show, in fact, and that is ClickBank legit? And I think I’m pretty qualified to talk on the subject. Not because I’m the world’s greatest super affiliate or anything like that, but because I’ve been a ClickBank affiliate for over 10 years. I’ve been a vendor, I’ve been a customer so I’m pretty acquainted with the platform and basically what I want to do is discuss whether or not ClickBank is legit and a few different arguments people have made as to why it isn’t. And then I’ll share my opinion as well.
So as far as ClickBank being legit or not goes, one of the most common complaints you see is that ClickBank sort of sells a lot of products that aren’t too great. And I totally get where people are coming from, especially if you go back sort of a few years in the past, ClickBank’s quality control was famously fairly poor.
Basically, it was a case of if you were willing to sell a product and pay the entry fee, you could get on their platform and sell it. I think really the way around it was the refund policy, which I’ll talk about more in a minute. The problem with the sort of anything-goes approach of ClickBank was that there were some pretty average products put on the platform and yet buyers have been burned. And affiliates were burned as well because affiliates would promote these average products. Often on the basis of the fact that they had very fancy promotional materials and they looked good and actually it turned out they were junk and the buyer would be unhappy and they’d request a refund and the vendors would sometimes try and be noncompliant with the refund terms and all sorts of stuff like that.
So there is definitely an issue there. I think it’s become less of an issue over time. And I think ClickBank have really put a lot of efforts into improving the quality of the products that are on there. Certainly compared to the early days. I mean, there’s still some stuff that gets through the cracks but generally, I think the quality is better. Probably where they do themselves the biggest disservices is allowing some of these, I guess we’d say sort of quack medical products to be sold. There’s a lot of medical info products on there that probably shouldn’t be sold simply because of what they’re trying to claim. But that’s probably going to be quite a contentious statement, and I expect I’ll get some flak for that. But the thing you’ve got to bear in mind with ClickBank, of course, and whether or not they’re legit, is that they are simply providing a marketplace service.
It’s kind of like eBay or Trade Me for me here in New Zealand. All eBay and Trade Me are doing is providing a platform. And some of the people who sell on those platforms and some of the people who buy on those platforms will be bad people. Most people will be good and most good people are selling good products, and most good customers are buying not just to consume something and then demand a refund. So it’s quite an interesting one really.
I think ClickBank perhaps cops a little bit too much flak here. I think there have actually tried to improve the quality of their platform over time. And I do honestly believe that with something like ClickBank, there’s an element of sort of let the buyer beware. This is especially the case in make money online niche people will come along and they’ll say, “Oh, I bought this thing that promised I’d make a million dollars overnight and now I didn’t.”
Now, maybe you can argue that ClickBank shouldn’t allow the sale of those kinds of products at all, but people should be wary of what they’re buying. So I think there’s an element of ClickBank’s responsibility there. There’s an element of buyer and seller responsibility there as well. But as far as providing a functional working platform goes, they do an excellent job at that. So I don’t really think they can cop too much flak there, to be honest.
The next point that ClickBank tends to get some heat from is with regards to affiliates and vendors and the refund policy. So ClickBank basically makes a vendor offer, I should say, a 60-day money back guarantee on any products sold. So I can buy something today, I can consume all the information out of that product today. I can wait pretty much 59 days and then request a refund. And yeah, sure, the vendor is allowed to challenge that in the sense that they’re allowed to try and convince me to stay and not refund the product if they so wish. But ultimately, ClickBank will overrule there and you’ll get, the customer will get their refund.
And if for some bizarre reason they don’t well then they’ll just issue a chargeback anyway and ClickBank’s probably going to side with the customer every time. And this has caused some issues for vendors and affiliates alike. The vendors and affiliates, the problem is you can make a sale, sort of think the money’s in the bank, and then weeks later, nearly a couple of months later, get a refund. And if you’re not doing a huge volume of sales as an affiliate or a vendor or this can be quite harmful, especially if you sell high-value products.
I’ve made some good affiliate commission selling a couple of really high ticket items on ClickBank. But I’ve had sales where I thought, “Wow, I’ve done really well out of this.” And then, yeah, 58 days later a refund request comes through and it just wipes out your results for that weekend. It is quite frustrating. And I think arguments for ClickBank not being legit, some of it’s come from there.
It’s an interesting one because without the refund policy, I suspect ClickBank may have struggled a bit simply because otherwise there’d be a lot of chargebacks going on due to the nature of some of the product categories they are sort of famous for, especially make money online and dating and health and those kinds of things. So it’s kind of like a damned if you do damned if you don’t from ClickBank’s perspective.
But from the vendor and affiliates perspective, I know that that long refund window can cause some real challenges. And the part of the problem as well, especially in the make money online niche, is that there are people who are serial refunders. They’ll buy everything. Anything that comes out, they’ll buy it, especially if it’s an info product because they know they can save it all to their hard drive. Or if it’s an online course, they can rip all the videos and copy and paste all the content and then they just ask for a refund and they can just come back and buy more and more products. And there are some pretty unscrupulous people who out there who will do that. I mean, if you have a genuine problem with a product if you’re not satisfied that ensure you should try and get a refund.
And from a vendor’s perspective, you’ve got to remember that your net marginal cost of serving each customer is not great. You build the product and then you can sell it multiple times. But the problem is from a customer’s perspective if you do have a legitimate complaint with a product that is one thing, but sort of coming along and just being a serial refunders not good either.
And really then the only other thing to cover as to whether or not ClickBank is legit, is probably from the affiliate’s perspective and issues around is ClickBank’s tracking accurate? Are they shaving commissions or anything like that? And commission shaving is something I’m not too clued up on, to be brutally honest. I know it does go on. And for example, a lot of CPA affiliate networks, especially some of the more fringe ones, they’ll peel off traffic that should be yours and make money from it.
My experience is ClickBank has been great payers. I don’t think they have a dodgy tracking system. I have no reason to believe they do. I know that some vendors will do things that are a bit unethical, they’ll put a newsletter pop up on the homepage so you drive traffic through your affiliate link and then use later optin pops up or a special discount and a lead puts their email address in and then the next communication they get the cookies overridden. And next thing you know, you don’t get a commission, you’ve just been basically putting in effort for free to build their list.
There’s nothing wrong with that approach if you know that’s what’s happening and if you’re getting rewarded for it. So there are products out there where really what the affiliates are doing is basically earning a commission to get people signed up to a list where then the vendor’s going to go and up-sell multiple times.
Nothing wrong with that as long as it’s an honestly disclosed process or at least very, very clear what’s going on. It’s when it’s not being disclosed that it’s a problem. But look, in conclusion, is ClickBank legit? I think it is. They provide a platform that works. They provide a platform that has been consistent in terms of service for quite some time now. And I don’t think it’s going away anytime soon.
It’s not the most sophisticated platform, to be honest. If you don’t need affiliates as a vendor, you’re probably better off looking elsewhere. But certainly, they do work hard at sort of developing their platform. And I don’t think from a platform perspective, anyone can convince me that ClickBank isn’t legit. Where the issues tend to come is the fact that they have, especially in the past, allowed products onto the platform that just aren’t what they claim to be.
Make money online is a classic example, is a lot of hyped up just crap products basically that get pushed by people because the commissions are huge and the guy selling the stuff aren’t dumb, they know that they might get a 20, 30% refund rate, maybe even higher, but as long as some people aren’t refunding, they’re making bank because the selling the course for two, three, 400 bucks.
I don’t think though that’s ClickBank’s fault. Maybe they could do a better job of screening products. I think they have actually tried to put effort into that anyway, but certainly, that’s more of an issue of unscrupulous vendors and the buyer does need to be aware. And it’s part of the reason I started my Reviews Boss Website was to review these kinds of products and say, “Hey, look, this is good or this is just junk. And people are just pushing it because they think they’re going to get a good affiliate commission.” But as far as platform goes, ClickBank is legit. Really, issues come from product’s being sold that aren’t really what they claim or aren’t as good as they’re made out to be, usually that’s affiliates hyping things up because they want to try and jack some commissions and the other issue really is that refund period.
Hey guys, what’s up? It’s Sam here from Reviews Boss back with another review and it’s going to be another short one today. The product I’m talking about doesn’t need too much of an in-depth review but it is worth mentioning so that’s why I’m bringing it up. So the product I’m looking at is called Toggl. So that is toggl.com and you can click the link here to go straight to Toggl.
So what is Toggl? Toggl is a time tracker software. A time tracker for anyone who needs to sort of have a list of tasks or projects and then track the time they’ve spent working against those projects. So if you’re a consultant or a freelancer and you work by the hour, you might be a developer or something like that, or a graphic designer or a SEO business or anything where you track by the hour, well Toggl’s pretty much made for you. It’s designed to help make tracking hours, tracking time spent on projects and tasks easier.
And of course you know you can use it in internal teams as well. You might run a business that’s got ten staff and you want to see what they’re up to in the day, well you can tell them to track their time on Toggl so you can look for efficiencies and things like that. Of course that opens up another whole kettle of fish as to whether getting staff, internal staff to track their time if they’re not doing billable hours for clients is a good thing, I don’t think it is. I’ve found jobs where you have to do that are pretty miserable and often the staff are pretty unmotivated.
Generally, my take is that basically you should only be tracking time if there are actual billable hours involved. Obviously you can’t say to the client I spent ten hours on this project when you only spent five, that’s why you need good time tracking but you know if your team are just doing things that are in-house projects well focus on the output not the time.
But anyway let’s continue on with the review of Toggl. So like I said, it’s going to be a short one. I’ll focus on the things that I like about Toggl and the things I don’t. To start off with the things I like about Toggl, well the first one is the free version, the free sort of pricing level I guess you’d call it, is very very good. It really is different, decent sorry. It’s all I use … basically, yeah I mean I use the free version of Toggl every single day to track work I do for clients, for consulting I do.
It’s important to know the way I work I don’t actually charge by the hour anymore, I charge fixed price for projects or retainers or things like that rather than giving an hourly price, but what I want to do is have insights into how long on average a project is taking me and whether any clients or projects that are taking up more time than they really should be. So you know you might have to, if you’ve done any freelancing or consulting or anything like that, worked in an agency, you’ll know that some clients often the ones who are doing smaller jobs, the lower value jobs, they take up loads of your time and then it’s the higher value clients who are actually much more efficient to work with. So yeah, for just basic use for yourself, the free version of Toggl is very good.
However, if you have a team or you do a lot of hourly based billing and you’re not just tracking time to get a sense of how you’re using that time internally to sort of work out an average hourly rate you do make on paper, pay by the project work, or anything like that, well then look at the more premium plans because there are a lot of additional features. I won’t go into them all but there’s some really cool stuff as you move up through the feature list and obviously through the free to starter, to premium to enterprise plan. I mean the enterprise plan literally could do it all, probably if you’re doing lots of hourly billing for clients. Starter is where you want to be, free would be a little bit too limited. I’m going to upgrade to starter soon. Premium looks really good as well.
So anyway, first thing yeah that I like is just how many different options there are in terms of packages depending on your requirements from the very usable free one right up to enterprise, so that’s great to see. The second thing I like about Toggl is that it’s very easy to use, it’s just so straightforward to work out what you need to do and it’s straightforward but also not restrictive in terms of the way you’re able to work with it. So I basically have my account set up with different clients and then under those different clients, different projects. So you know one client it might be that the project is developing a digital strategy. So I would sit that as one project, I would track time against that. As I clock on and clock off on that project against that client, I can add commentary about what I’ve been doing so I can say okay, yesterday I spent an hour and a half researching competitors of their brand or something like that. Yeah, really easy to work with.
There’s great training provided as well, which is another big plus with Toggl. You have no worries at all about finding it difficult to use. It’s so efficient, if I think back on some time tracking software I’ve used in the past, things like Clocking It for example, were a lot less elegant and efficient to use. They just felt a bit clunky although this going back quite a few years. I remember using one in a company I worked for. I think it was called Copper or something like that or it might have been a slightly modified version of Copper or whatever the base software was called, we just called it Copper. But oh my goodness, that was horrible to work with. It was just absolutely terrible, you could only add time in increments of quarter of an hour, you had no easy sort of hour counter you just had to click start and then when you click stop you could see how long you’d worked. You couldn’t see the time adding up like you can with Toggl.
So look, it’s such an easy platform to work with. Really I don’t need to go into too much more detail about the benefits of it I think. Basically it’s very affordable, you know free is obviously extremely affordable and then the actual paid plans are very reasonably priced with what you get as well. You know the starter package is only nine dollars per user per month. Well if you’re an independent contractor, it’s nine a dollar a month for a really powerful platform, only 18 dollars a month per user for premium. It does jump up to 49 dollars per month for enterprise but to be honest, unless you’re running a large team, especially a team that’s doing billable hours, and you need to be able to do things like lock their time entries so you know they’re being honest about the time they’ve spent on their billable hour tasks or you’re probably going to stick to free, starter or premium and you would do very nicely with those indeed for a good price. So look from the positive side of things, Toggl is great value for money, it’s very easy to use. It’s just so nice to use as well, it just feels right. It doesn’t feel like a sort of program that’s trying to interrogate you and shake you down every second of the day, it’s just trying to help you get your work done in a more efficient manner and that’s great.
So moving on to the negatives, things I don’t like about Toggl. Well to be honest, there aren’t that many really. When I first started using it I must admit, I didn’t really read the instructions properly and I used it incorrectly and this sort of resulted in time reports that were fairly meaningless. But if you do take the time to actually look at the training you’ll see how easy it is to use. I mean nothing’s perfect but with this particular software I am finding it really hard to put my finger specific things I don’t like. I think the interface is very clean. I have noticed some times that it will be a bit laggy with like picking different client projects, or clients and picking different projects. I wish that there was a faster way, or maybe there is and I haven’t discovered it yet, of copying projects from one client to another. So if you provide a SEO service to ten different clients and you just create the different client names and you copy the same projects that would sit under it like link building or Google Analytics research or outreach, and you can copy them all under the same client.
On the free plan there are a few things missing that you’ll probably notice fairly quickly if you do really need to be doing time tracking in your business. Just things like downloadable reports make it a bit harder to work with on the free platform.
As I said I just use it for internal reference purposes basically saying okay how many hours did I spend on this project versus what I billed. What was my average internal hourly rate? I’ve got a rate I try to work to even though I don’t quote on that directly. But look, overall I think Toggl is absolutely fantastic. I mean you might find some gripes with it but in terms of what I do and how I like to work I really do find it very good. I mean I’ve never been a huge fan of time tracking. I think it’s only really useful to do it very, I guess, fastidiously if you’re doing genuine billable hours in which case yeah you really do need to be on the ball because firstly, you don’t want to wind up ripping your client off. That’s you know not the right thing to do to say oh yeah I did ten hours work when you only did eight.
Secondly, you also need to be aware and if you’ve got a team working for you they also need to be aware that, it eats into your profitability if you’re not tracking your time effectively when you’re supposed to be doing billable hours and you think that client A is paying you for 20 hours a month but actually there’s 25, 30, 40 hours worth of work going into that client. Well you’ve just taken a 50% pay cut overnight or whatever the percentage may be. [inaudible 00:10:58] worked in quite a few agencies and doing my own work as a consultant now, and I’m all too aware of the fact that it’s very easy for time to blow out when working on clients. You’ve either then got to go to them and have that awkward conversation of oh I’ve just blown out on a task and I’m going to have to send you a bigger invoice than you expected, or you’ve got to wear those costs and that’s not good for your business either.
So yeah look Toggl is a very good platform for time tracking. It’s fast, it’s efficient, it’s easy to use, it’s well priced, the features are there, the support seems very good. I’ve even received, they’re obviously automated emails but they’re pretty nicely personalized, promoting training for the product and can we help you get more out of it. But when I compare it to some of the other time trackers I’ve used, it really is very good. I just can’t see any reason not to recommend it to be honest. It’s one of those apps that comes along every so often that you think okay this really works, it’s very effective. Speaking of apps, you can get it for Android, iPhone, you can get it for your desktop, you can get it for Chrome browser or you can just access through a web interface.
So yeah Toggl, if you need to track time it’s well worth checking out. I really like it. I think it’s well priced, I think it’s easy to use, I think it’s effective and I can’t really say too much bad about it. Really anything bad is probably going to be more around the interface or if you have very specific requirements about how you need to track time. But overall yeah go give toggl.com a look, see what you think, give it a try and let me know your thoughts in the comments below.
So you’ve read my absolutely killer AffiloJetpack review, and decided you want to buy the product? Great. But there’s only one problem – you really want a discount!
Even though the product comes with a watertight 60 day money-back guarantee (so your money is never really at risk) the “sticker price” of $997 is high and it’s always nice to secure yourself a little discount from time to time.
Wait for the product to go “on sale”.Affilorama-branded products tend to have sales that align with major US public holidays, e.g. 4th July, Thanksgiving, Christmas etc.
Sign up for one of the free AffiloJetpack giveaway products. I’ll let you in on a little secret – this product (like most others in the “make money online” space) relies heavily on a funnel sequence that occurs before most people buy the product. Of every 100 who visit the sales page of the product for the first time, probably only a tiny percent buy. However, many more people sign up for the free introductory eBook (check out the AffiloJetpack sales page and then go to exit – you’ll see what I mean). There are also other ways to enter the funnel, like webinars etc. However you enter, you’ll wind up receiving the occasional discount offer on AffiloJetpack, as well as other related products … you also get to enjoy the free content as well!
Grab a ready-to-go discount here. If you click this link you’ll automatically lock in a discounted price of $747 for the full product. That’s a decent saving, and it’s accessible any time.
So there are a few decent ways to get a discount on AffiloJetpack. Remember, you can feel free to ask me any questions you have about the product before buying as well. I’m happy to help.
Here’s a transcript of the video if you’d rather read:
Hey guys, what’s up today? I want to talk about a Kindle book I’m reading at the moment. I give you a quick review of it. It’s called Million Dollar Consulting Proposals and by a guy called Alan Weiss. I’m reading it on Kindle. See here that’s Kindle Paperwhite which is probably one of my favorite devices ever made. Super, super good to be able to go everywhere you want with a whole lot of books. But anyway, Million Dollar Consulting Proposals had a write a proposal that’s accepted every time. And Alan Weiss was famous, most rose to prominence I think for doing a book quite some time ago. I think in the early ’90s it was originally released called Million Dollar Consulting.
And basically Million Dollar Consulting was … it’s hugely well reviewed. I’m just checking it out here on Amazon. It sold a lot of copies. Four and a half star reviews. Something that that I actually want to rate this one as well. But I started with Million Dollar Consulting Proposals just because I saw it recommended on my Kindle list and it was cheap and it came up for sale. So I started reading it while I went away on holiday the other day. Basically for a book I think it was released in 2011 or the addition I’ve got according to Amazon. It’s really, really good. I mean if you’re interested in doing high end consulting or high end freelancing and getting away from that I guess sort of low quality kind of stuff that plagues the industry and that can make it really hard to make money well this book will help you.
And how it’ll help you is by getting you in the mindset to understand what you need to do with proposals. So basically Alan Weiss, his opinion and sorry if I’ve pronounced your name wrong, his opinion is that most proposals are done wrong. I think he’s probably right. But what tends to happen with proposals they’re long winded. They’re drawn out. They’re boring. It tells the client things they already know or that they don’t need to know. Whereas his whole sort of ethos is you should be creating pretty straightforward and simple proposals quickly that basically establish the value and sort of really I guess ground the relationship that you’ve already built so that the proposal becomes less of this massive hurdle. It’s not, oh now I’ve talked to this prospective client for an hour on the phone today and now I’ve got to go and do 50-page proposal. No, instead you basically agree on the deal first and the proposal’s just formalizing that agreement.
And really throughout the book what Alan’s done is lay out examples from his own work and client’s he’s worked with. There’s lots of anecdotes but there’s also lots of practical steps as well like workbook style examples of things too. And overall I’m a big fan of this book. I haven’t quite finished it yet. I’ll do a final review and publish that to my Reviews Boss channel when I’m completely finished. But look he knows his stuff. If you could jump on amazon.com for example and look at … I’m just looking at it now, looking at the range of books he’s done. He’s got very good reviews. He was a … Alan Weiss was not necessarily a pioneer, I don’t know enough about the history of who came up with the stuff. But there’s a famous book called Value Based Fees: How to Charge and Get What You’re Worth. That’s probably one of his most famous ones along with the Million Dollar Consulting Guide as well.
So basically if you look at the blurb on the Amazon Kindle page or book page, Million Dollar Consulting Proposals forever ends the time consuming and often frustrating process of writing a consulting proposal. And it’s true. It’s such a frustrating process. And I know this from my own consulting and freelancing and I know it from having worked at agencies as well. It absolutely sucks. It’s such a pain doing proposals often because as Alan states, they’re done the wrong way. Basically what you should be doing, you should be agreeing pretty much in principle first what you’re going to do and then you create the proposal based on that rather than sort of leaving the prospective client hanging and saying … and then presenting them with this proposal that is probably a step too far or puts them off or oh we didn’t agree with that.
So, whether you’re starting out whether you’ve been doing consulting or freelancing for a while, I would really recommend this. The current price as I speak right now is $17.83 for Kindle, $18.57 for the paperback. It’s cheap. It won’t take you too long to read. I’ve read almost all of it on a flight across to Australia the other day and a bit on the way home. But there’s really, really hard hitting good information in there about improving your proposals. And basically … yeah, it gets you into the mindset about thinking about things in the right way.
So thinking about value for your pricing instead of pricing time or tasks or whatever which is a hard thing to get your head around. But it does create especially for genuine consultants, if you can do the work in an hour and deliver just as much value as the guy who does the work in 100 hours, as long as the value is equal well why shouldn’t you be paid the same amount or potentially more. In fact you should really be paid more because you’ve been so efficient and you’ve tied up less of your client’s time as well.
It goes into all these kinds of things but the main focus is on how to structure and present your proposals and such a way that really, really enhances your value proposition and makes you stand out from the competition and hopefully allows you to charge those higher fees. All of his other books I haven’t read any of them yet but they seem to be really about upping your game and not being one of those consultants or freelancers who scraped by and rarely make a living. This is all about … you’re charging what you’re worth. And if you’re genuinely delivering value you should be charging a decent amount, but it shouldn’t matter to the client because at the end of the day even if you charge … If you charge $1 million and you deliver $2 million value to the client, well they’ve got a better deal than if you charged them $10,000 and they only got $5000 value.
Million Dollar Consulting Proposals is a very, very good book. I haven’t quite finished it. When I finish it properly I’ll post a link to my reviewsboss.com review which is where I do really detailed breakdowns. But my initial impressions are it’s a really good book and I do recommend you check it out if you’re interested in consulting.
There are some in the Internet marketing community who say you will never find a more wretched hive of scum and villany than the Warrior Forum. And, unlikely Mos Eisley, there are no cool space creatures to make up for it.
Although I think that the “WaFo” does have its valuable discussions and content (from time to time) because it is a free forum you can’t be too harsh on it … apart from the dreaded WSO section where the vast majority of products are just terrible.
But what about the Warrior Forum’s premium access area, called the “War Room”?
What Is The War Room?
Basically, it is an upgrade to your regular Warrior Forum membership. You pay a fee, and you get access to a bunch of extra content, features and tools that the hoi polloi can only dream of. Or something like that!
It is trying to be an exclusive forum, a bit like Wealthy Affiliate, Stack That Money, or The Dojo. These are all premium forums that I hope to review in the future as well.
How Much Does It Cost?
Warrior Forum War Room Membership costs $8.08 per month … but it’s billed annually. That’s right folks, the old tactic of luring you in with a cheap sounding monthly rate and then making you pay it as an annual rebill is in full force here. Either give the annual price, or make it monthly.
For all intents and purposes, the price is $97 USD.
Btw, when I joined a few years back it was a one off purchase for lifetime access. And I’m pretty sure it was under $50 for that lifetime access. The perks of getting in early, I guess.
I haven’t seen any Warrior Forum War Room discount codes going anywhere either. Maybe they run specials from time-to-time, but I’m not sure.
Pros
SOMETIMES something useful shows up in the user submitted section. You occasionally see a gold nugget hidden in a free product thread, or in the product itself. However, this is about as rare as hen’s teeth.
Some of the AMAs aren’t bad (albeit many are dated). If you’ve got some time to kill, then you might find some useful tidbits of information in some of the AMA replays. There’s nothing groundbreaking in any of them, but worth a watch I guess.
Bigger private message storage. This is useful if you want to pitch/cold message to people on the main forum. For example, if you see someone posting about “what is a good article writing service” and you offer article writing, then you could pitch to them to hire you. I’ve landed some business this way in the past actually.
Cons
Free products are just user submissions. The War Room sales page makes it sound a bit like you are going to be receiving loads of premium products for your admission price. However, what you are getting for free are just products (think eBooks, video courses, WordPress themes etc) that other War Room members have decided to give away. Often these are old WSOs that have run their course, and now the owner is looking for a way to squeeze that last bit of value out of it. Other products are clearly just PLR that has had a new cover slapped on, or the regular lead hook the user would give away on their blog or website anyway. You would probably expect more high end products, but 99% of what is available are short little eBooks that usually sell for $10 or crummy WordPress themes that haven’t been updated in years.
Paying to have people try and bait you onto their lists and upsells. Although the rules state no forced opt ins on user submitted products, you will still find that just about every free guide, theme, plugin, or product you download will either a) try and jack your email address or b) try to upsell you to something. There’s nothing wrong with that at all really, but it just becomes tedious after a while. Combine this with the fact that everybody just comments on each others’ threads with one sentence comments like “yes, list building is important for profiting online” in order to drop their signature links, and it’s enough to drive you crazy. You’re literally paying to have people try and make you pay more!
It feels like every guide is about making money from solo ads in the Internet marketing niche. As I mentioned above, the Warrior Forum has a terrible reputation as being a place people go trying to make money teaching others how to make money online (even if they don’t make any for themselves). This is a particular problem due to the Warrior Special Offer/WSO section of the regular forum. Unfortunately, the War Room doesn’t escape this fate. And just like the main WaFo the big culprit is endless guides to making money from solo ads. These are like the Internet marketing version of circle jerking. I’m sure there’s money out there in solo ads … but I wish people would stop spamming their “make $100 a day by buying lots of solo ads and building a list, and then selling your own solo ads” guides.
If you don’t know what a solo ad is, it’s basically where you pay to have an email sent on someone else’s list. This is really common in the Internet marketing niche, but not quite so popular in other niches.
There is only one special offer. Stickied at the top of the main War Room forum is a thread about member special offers. You click in to this, all eager to see special deals galore that will more than justify the cost of membership. But alas, there is only one deal. It’s 60 days’ free access to Moz Analytics. And that was posted all the way back in 2014!!! The special offers are DEAD, it seems.
No new AMAs for ages. At the time of writing, the last AMA I can see in the official stickied thread was Tim Paige from Leadpages on How To Hack Your Way To Better Conversions. This was published back in September 2015. So basically half a year ago. Stale, old, not fresh. What’s even worse is that some of the AMAs happened but recordings haven’t been uploaded. An example of this is an AMA with the man behind the popular 9gag viral site. Now I’d love to watch this because I’m interesting in monetizing viral niche sites. But nothing has happened in the 3 or so months since the AMA was done live – no replay is available and there doesn’t appear to be any response from the mods as to when it is going up.
Warrior Forum War Room: Worth It?
Absolutely not*. Total waste of coin and I would definitely not recommend it to anybody. The Warrior Forum has gone downhill massively
* If you are looking to sell products or services on the Warrior Forum (either through the WSO section, God help your soul, or the Warriors For Hire section which actually has some decent stuff going in it) then you could probably justify it. This is because War Room members tend to be viewed with more respect by forum users, and this might help boost your perceived trust level, which in turn could lead to more sales.
Furthermore, you get the benefit of having the Premium Warrior Forum access. This just gives you extra forum privileges, the most useful of which is the ability to have more private messages. This could be good if you’re messaging people to pitch services or JV ideas.
But to be honest, 99% of people reading this review are going to be better off avoiding the War Room.
When you consider you can have a tool as awesome as FPTraffic for about the same price – and it’s something that you can actually use to make yourself good income and drive traffic, you’d be a mug to spend your money on this.
Just a quick update about this site – I’ve enabled live chat (you’ll see it in the bottom right-hand corner of the screen). If you want to get in touch and ask me any questions about a product or service I’ve reviewed – such as whether it is suitable for a particular situation you’ve got – then live chat will help you get answers faster.
If I’m not available/online for live chat, you can still leave a message on the system and I’ll get back to you as quickly as possible.
I’m happy to answer any and all questions related to products and services for digital marketing professionals. Don’t be afraid to speak up – all questions are important, and this is part of my dedication to helping ensure that you get the products and services you need to be awesome at what you do.
LinkedIn is probably my favorite social network on the Internet. Although I spend more time on Facebook (largely owing to the number of pages and groups that I run) I still think that for anyone with a professional/business focus, LinkedIn is the place to be.
Here’s why I love LinkedIn:
It’s the network where professionals and business owners go. Facebook can be great for business opportunities (thanks to the number of groups out there for business owners, entrepreneurs, local industries etc) but ultimately Facebook is a place that people go to get a bit of an escape from work. On the other hand, the whole purpose of LinkedIn is to connect and network with other professionals.
An effective LinkedIn strategy can open doors. I’ve had two great jobs and won a number of lucrative consulting contracts through LinkedIn, and to this day continue to get good leads.
The overall quality of content on the platform is higher than Facebook or Twitter – I feel like LinkedIn tends to expand my mind.
Why would you even want 500+ connections?
A wider network (provided it is targeted and quality) means you are more likely to show up in searches that other people make.
You’ll also get more content on your feed that you can interact with and start building sales opportunities. The biggest mistake I see people making with LinkedIn is being passive – i.e. not interacting with content that others post. Instead,
Here’s how to get 500 LinkedIn connections, fast
Add email account connections.
Look up everyone who you would consider to be a “real world” contact.
Reach out to people who view your profile. To get the best results with this approach, you’ll ultimately need to invest in LinkedIn Premium (I’m going to be doing a separate review/piece on whether or not LinkedIn Premium is worth the money).
Conclusion
If you want to get to 500+ LinkedIn connections in a short space of time, then the recommendations above will definitely help you to do so.
Just remember that sheer numbers of connections are not valuable in itself. I’ve seen some people on LinkedIn who boast of 10,000+ connections (protip – if anyone puts the number of connections they have in their LinkedIn by-line, it’s safe to say they have no idea what they are doing) but whose content receives almost no interaction.
Why?
Because they’ve probably bought fake connections or connected with people who could never bring them any value.
On the other hand, there are people with several hundred connections who get great interaction and probably get far more value (in terms of business/career opportunities) out of the platform.
Ultimately, as with everything in life, quality always trumps quantity. However, if you can increase quantity while keeping the quality good, then that can only be beneficial!
