Your Best and Worst Marketing Solutions Experiences

Written by Zac Johnson
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Every day my email box is inundated a flood of new email pitches and sales letters for new marketing programs that will promise cash and riches. Depending who it’s offered by and what it is, these marketing solutions can vary heavily in pricing, anywhere from $29.97 all the way up to $4997. Just because a big name player backs a program, should it sell for X times more than another… and how many of these “exclusive” programs are really limited to the 100 members they promise?

When it comes to the success of a program/service, price isn’t everything. I’ve tried out a ton of programs and memberships, just to see what’s new and what they are selling. It’s not often that a $299 a month package is providing something much different than a cheaper or free service/blog is. It’s all about how the sales page leaves you feeling and if it can get you to bite. Once you become a member of these services, you will see many offer the same mix tools. (ie: ShoeMoney Tools, KeywordSpy, PPC Coach). All these of these solutions have cross overs on what they offer, and vary in pricing… but still, all three have been very successful. Which of them is the best is still up in the air, and to be decided by the customer.

With so many programs available, how are you to weed out the good from bad?

Two great examples of purchases I’ve been very happy with, are Hummingbird and 4HourAffiliate. Several months ago I purchased a tool for twitter, called Hummingbird, the program helps build up your following with relevant users. This has been an excellent resource for building up traffic to my smaller sites and has paid for itself several times over. There are no monthly membership fees, and it was only a $97 product. Another excellent program I’m using is called 4HourAffiliate, which can create hundreds of Facebook Ads in minutes, instead of hours and eliminates the headaches of manually creating new campaigns. Both programs were a one time purchase and worth a ton more to me than any other monthly subscription service.

On the flip side, I’ve tried a few programs that just haven’t lived up to their hype. I’ve also been a member of other sites that charge $99-$199 a month to access forums and services. The program with monthly membership sites, is that I usually find myself fading away from the site and just waste money and forget to cancel or just not use the site.

Which brings us to the big question. If you had the chance to grab any affiliate / internet marketing course, what would it be? Also, for those of you that have spent good money on a program and found it to be lacking, feel free to post on that as well.

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17 Replies to “Your Best and Worst Marketing Solutions Experiences”

  1. I'm curious to know ..what was those programs that have not live up to their hype… at least i will know where to not go…

  2. my favorite stuff has come from frank kern free or paid. i have learned more from his free videos than all the other junk i have bought combined.

  3. I am newbie blogger and still exploring the power of internet and I think learning and reading is my priority now. However, your experiences are very useful to me as we can not spend our bucks for nothing. Thanks

  5. Most of these "programs" are junk and only a handful actually have truly valuable information. The problem is, new bloggers can't differentiate between the two.

    My advice to green bloggers is to learn as much as possible with the free information that is available from MMO experts, apply that information, and learn along the way.

  6. Well, actually, I have something like 1gb of pdf materials, ebooks, training courses, video training courses, whole bunch of stuff and crap.

    Most of those I got somewhere for free, I am subscribed to dozens of lists of other internet marketers, and I rarely actually buy anything (lol), as I was burned many times by over-hyped products and manuals, but often I get mails that point me to that and that site where I can download that and that internet marketing, traffic sucking, lead generating, blogging – whatever – ebook, products bla bla.

    What matters is that you choose one or just a few of those. For example, I am actively involved in learning and applying blogging techniques and strategies from 2-3 ebooks from established bloggers like Darren Rowse, Yaro Starak and so, I follow advices from those ebooks, and run my own, small, newbie, but rising blog. It's free, domain is also free, but I don't care, I don't have big expectations, I see it as a learning platform, not something that will rake me 1000$/month in the matter of few weeks.

    If I buy (now) I wouldn't even buy if someone I know very well recommends me something, just because I realize that, however good some pdf ebooks, training course can be, it actually distracts you from DOING, instead you just read, OBSERVE what someone is telling you through his/her ebook.

    So, my advice, although I am a noobie myself, is take 1, even junk product, and follow it, and if you fail, you will know of ONE way that for sure can't make you money. Then you choose something else, stick with that too for 4-5 months, and see if that delivers any, even tiny results.

    This will sound like a self promotion, and it is, but I actually run a blog where you can download quite useful ebooks about for example, blogging, SEO (Search Engine Optimization) and stuff like that. I even have some niche ebooks, shortly described, and I give you my ideas and thoughts how you can profit from it.

    I am no liar, I don't make any significant money online, few cents here, few cents there, but when I look half a year back from this moment, I was losing averagely 5-10$ a day… Now I have a days when I make those 5-10$.

    I've read many ebooks about keyword research, SEO, social marketing etc. but until I started doing all those things, I didn't really know what are they and how hard they can be. I've managed to get Google page 1, I've finally started seeing traffic coming to my blog even when I don't promote it all for a week, I track my analytics account and see people coming from search engines, sites that post about my blog etc.

    In the end, I probably won't be making more than 20-30$ a month passive income from this blog, but the value of real-situation knowledge I gained over the past 4-5 months can't be found in any ebook or any pdf manual.

    Uh, what a long comment

  8. As you said, Zac, everything depends on the customer. The quality and effectiveness of a program all depends on the customer's rating.

  9. I am a new learner in internet, I found your site has a lot of information, but if I have to choose maybe affiliate tools is my choice (4Houraffiliate). Regards.

  11. Thanks for your article, it is always welcomed to see what others discovered in that endless search after new knowledge in that so "unique" business as OL Marketing, certainly is. No matter how much one saw and learned down the road.

    I have similar experiences, came across good and bad, affordable and/or forbidding price-wise, but main reason why I am making this small "contribution" here is, that I had "unforgettable" experience with Mike Filsaime and would like to warn others. I do not wish to put down his system, he certainly does something right, being that successful, but I have discovered one point in his marketing, which turned out to be outright dishonest.

    Besides total lack of support, (I hope he improved that) no way to reach anyone, was stealthy way to drag out from you more e-mails, so when you cancelled something, all continued on that secondary e-mail and you passed your free trial period not knowing.

    Result for me was, that he owes me exactly $95.97. After dozen calls, left messages, e-mails and snail mails, no result.

    I think this despicable. Making money is great, but these tactics I do not consider at all amusing. Would you?

    Regards…

  12. I have been on shooemoney tools for a while and ppc biz they just keep carging my card every month and I forget to drop them …. thanks for the reminder and if you don't want to buy ebooks Rent Textbooks

  14. What you guys think of 4HourAffiliate? Anyone joined yet? What is that and how does it work?

  15. Darren Rowse was one of my early and continued sources of information for those wanting to start in the blogging world specifically (not just hawking an affiliate product through adsense arbitrage). His Problogger forums have been a good resource for interacting with other bloggers as well and getting community reaction to your (or other ideas). IMO, finding and interacting with other like-minded (and ideally successful) bloggers is a good way to learn and hold yourself accountable within a group. After all, learning is only a good thing if you put the things you learn into practice.

  16. Another great post Zac, I've been perusing your content on this site and just wanted to say thanks for everything. I'm definitely going to check out Hummingbird.

  17. Yeah, I am rarely impressed with programs I spend money for. Usually they are just touting stuff I already know or that I can find for free elsewhere. But I always get suckered into buying them JUST IN CASE there's some new tidbit I might have missed that could make the difference in promoting my business. One that I was happy to fork over the cash for was the "authority codes" info. But if you search that term, once again, you'll find the actual codes available online for free. Oh well.
    My recent post VoIP company Skype buys Qik

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