Well, you can see that I have road tested the product and gone into it in some detail.

My conclusion is simple:

Unless you are already making good money with affiliate marketing through landing pages, you should:

Buy Affiliate Funnel System

But remember to check out the bonus page FIRST and I have a great bonus no one else is offering!

Also, apologies - for some reason, if you click on a Post title on the left, you get a 404 error - just scroll down, it’s all on here!

The content network has had some interesting traffic stats. Using the methods recommended, I’ve had some better figures. Normally, my Content network stuff stinks but this is better.

Interestingly, my review pages have a clear winner (Product A) and Product B some way behind, Product E is doing nothing.

That’s the way it works. Sometimes.

Also, with the mystory review, I’ve found more  click throughs, but less purchasers. It looks to me like the review  page converts better. I’ve  found this out by looking at my Hoplink analysis on Clickbank and my TIC codes.

I’ve also ruthlessly pruned my keywords - anything that has a less than 2% click through rate is pruned which should bump up my profits.

Now, I shall channel everything to one mystory campaign and one review page - I shall delete the rest.

At the moment, I’m just about in profit. (About $25). However, my projections from the data, pruning the un performing landing pages and keywords is that I should make about $100 - $150 a day.

Obviously I will need to optimise  it more and I haven’t tried the other methods  yet.

Ok, we’ve had about 150 clicks for the two popular names (it’s been going about 36 hours).  

Now, just trying to sought out the bonuses!

Great. My stuff is emailed back from the Outsourcer and so I crank up the campaign and its off to the races!

In the meantime, I set up a separate Content network campaign as he recommends, with similar ads and methods but setup as new Adword groups (using the Adwords editor).

I also look for ads to put placement ads on.

I begin to set up my Adbrite stuff as recommended and am waiting for that to be dealt with.

Time to move onto Stage 2 of the process.

Now, I’m going to do something slightly different here.

First, I register a domain name with my Domain account and setup a new hosting account with my reseller package. This takes a few minutes.

If I told you the domain name, it’ll get trashed. It will be de indexed by Google and people will find the PPC ads I use and click on them - just to be a tyre kicker.

Next, I have to make a decision . Do I set up a Wordpress blog or do I use XSIte Pro 2? These are my two main options

Because of what I’m going to do, I have decided to use XSite Pro 2 and not Wordpress, although I love using Wordpress, particularly with Semiologic theme. But I digress.

I have decided that I want to split up my efforts as follows:

A review site comparing three of the products

A personal history my story page.

Now, how I do things is I create a few sub domains (6 in fact). Three I give a personal sounding name like ‘my story’ (although I didn’t for this site, so don’t go looking for it!)

The other sub-domains I build around the product name.

I then write for my three personal review pages the same ’story’ but offer at the end of each offer the top two products by gravity and the third the up and comer. If I wanted, I could create five sub-domains likewise.

I do a similar process for the reviews.   

For one review site, I review all five products and offer product A. The next Product B and the next Product E.

Then, I divide up by PPC keywords into different Adword groups per keyword.

For product name keywords for product A, B and E I set up two ads - one sends them to Review A and the next to My Story A. For Product B, one click to Mystory B and one to Review B.

For C and D, I send them to EITHER review A or review E to persuade them to buy the other product, basically.

I bid quite high for these keywords.

The other keywords I split up into action keywords and generic keywords.  I bid quite low for these and I send them to Review A or Review B, usually at the start.

In each page, each product has it’s own TIC code.

By the way, for the main domain, I write some general content and include ads I take from Ezine articles to flesh it out and give it content. I usually put Clickbank Ads on there to monetise.  I will outsource some unique content for this later.

I use XSite Pro to automatically generate my Privacy Policy and the other stuff Google likes.

This is again quite a time consuming process but it is worth it.

By the way, use different Clickbank accounts for each promotion if you want to prevent people finding out your whole strategy. I do (now).

Next, I run the ads at maximum speed with even ad rotation for about 200 clicks per main product keyword.

Yes, this is quite expensive (or it can be).

I will then prune my keywords and look at my tracking codes to see which review page and story page converts the best.

(I then send these ideas in considerable detail to my Out-sourcer with instructions what to do.)

I’m now  going to tell you about my trial run

I have gone into a niche that I have not spent much time in before, which is the weight loss niche.

Product Selection

The first step of all internet marketing endeavours is to find the right product.

So, I performed a ‘CB Autopsy ‘ as recommended in the first module and shortlisted 5 interesting looking weight loss products. I picked two really good sellers already and I picked a newcomer to see how that would do as well as two ‘plodders’ (as I call them).

I never take long on this as essentially you let the market choose the product for you.

Next up, I used the demographics method in the ‘MIG’ phase, essentially by looking at demographics from the website he recommends. I also tend to use Google trends studies as well.

Here, I decided upon a website aimed towards women dieters and those who wanted to loose weight based on my demographical studies. It’s quite interesting the figured on how many young women, particularly from the States, are looking for weight loss and dieting information.

Yet a surprising amount of the information out there is aimed towards men.

OK, so that is that stage done. I like to pick 5 products first and split test, but I’ll talk about that later.

Next up is competition analysis.

This step is vital and I always feel is under covered in most guides. It is either over sold or under sold but what people are rarely told is the RIGHT way to use it.

Anyway, I use two tools at this stage, Market Samurai and Google Cash Detective 2. However, if you have Affiliate Elite and Keyword Elite you can do a similar job. In fact, there are many ways to skin a cat.  I also use Keyword Spy and have used SpyFu before. Both are good.

First, I enter into GCD the product names and see what ads are being run and for how long. I look for ads that have run for a whole for products that have been on the market   a long time. I look for ads that constantly are high in position too.

I then take all the keywords they use (easy in GCD2) and paste them into a text file for future reference. I also have a sneak preview as to what else the affiliate is selling.

If you find a successful looking affiliate, if you have access, you can look on Affiliate Elite or Keyword Spy to find other types of campaign that affiliate is promoting. Why not look at all his or her campaigns?

When this is done, I look at the successful appearing affiliate’s landing pages. 

Bear in mind that competition analysis software is very fallible and rather inaccurate. The fact is, very often affiliates aim to loose money or just about to break even with their PPC campaigns. They aim, in reality, to build a list and will make their money on the backend of their list.

So you can never assume a long running, constantly well ranked site will always be profitable on the front end. However, unless the campaign runner is a moron, you can safely assume it is profitable for him some way.

Anyway, with that caveat in mind, I look at their process. What kind of (to use the language of AFS) funnel is it? In other words, what kind of landing page?

I usually do a search for the domain name if it is impressive with ’site:’ before it in Google to see what other pages are indexed. This might reveal whether the affiliate is split testing a landing page.

If there is an opt-in, I usually will opt-in to see how much further into his process I can get.   

I keep track of all the good landing pages I see with the PPC in a file for use in Market Samurai. (See a bit further on).

So now I check for the good looking sales processes his other ads to see which variants seem to work better and I copy these into a swipe file.

Also, I look at the voice and the style of the landing page. What is the tone being sent? I compare these with the list given by Saj P in AFS as he has given strict definitions of different types. Although I used to do a similar process before, it’s easier applying the categories of landing page that Saj P has set down.

So now I now that one is an ‘expert’ blog whereas another is a ‘my story’ type of page, for instance.  

Now, I have a list of successful landing pages, PPC ads and keywords.

I then check the other four products in the same way.

Yes, my friends, this is rather time consuming. It takes about 40 minutes to an hour per product.

Next up, I fire up Market Samurai. I start a new product for the keyword product name for the products I have identified. I then enter the keywords that the good affiliates are using into the mix. I also enter the domain name into the Google external tool and choose the domain option and let Google recommend keywords.

I copy all of those into a text file.  

I then prune out the ones that are two short or two wide, enter ‘free’ into the negative list and let it do it’s thing. Of course, this information that you get back is often in accurate but you get a good idea.

Next, I do an SEO analysis of those keywords and also enter the sites I identified above with GCD2 to analyse those sites to see if they have been optimised for SEO or not.

This information is useful for more long term projects.

Having done this analysis, I now have a good idea of approximate costs and also what keywords are apparently working for other affiliates, what  ‘buttons’ and ‘triggers’ are being keywords are being optimised and I have some idea of what ‘triggers’ are being promoted in good landing pages.

So now I know what works for other people, approximately and I have a raft of good ideas.

Of course,  what works for me may not work for you, even if you do an identical thing.

I had a guy once rip off an entire campaign I did for a product launch last year. However, it appeared he dropped out before I had a chance to complain to him. Why? Well, for one thing, his rip off what slightly different and maybe that slight difference made a difference to my campaign converted and his didn’t.

Maybe, as I said above, that my campaign was optimised to sell a back end report of my own and build a list rather than necessarily make commissions. As it was a recurring sales product, I lost money in the first month but made it back and went into profit in the second month and the next few months were all profit. However, I also had a small list to promote tot and I sold a backend product too.

Whether he did any of that, I don’t know.

Also, there is sometimes an intangible about the whole process. If you ever split test, you can see a slight change to landing page can dramatically effect your conversions when in reality there is no logical reason why that should be so.

Anyway what this points to is the fact that competition analysis software can’t always be trusted.

The first stage is a long process (it took me about four hours to do the above.)

Once again, that I have described elsewhere, all gurus like to use the own terminology to describe similar things.  What the master funnel system essentially is is an integrated system of different landing pages that receive traffic from different sources that point to a money site in slightly different ways that then monetise that traffic.

 What I really liked about the course here and the videos is that it sets out in step-by-step methods how to set up a landing pages and related to different types of valves (traffic systems). 

 For instance, you could

•  send traffic direct from pay per click to an affiliate sales letter without an intervening site;
• or you could send money from a banner you had bought from a CPA network direct to an affiliate sales letter through an affiliate link; 
• you can send traffic from a pay per click advert to a review page and then to the affiliate sales letter;
•  or, you could send it from pay per click to a review page and then to a presell page and then to the affiliate sales letter;
• you could buy a banner from a CPA, and send traffic from that to your review page or presales page and monetise it that way;
• And so forth

What you get is a series of step-by-step broken down methods of sending traffic from one particular source to one particular valve to a particular landing page and then to your money site.

Module Four  - The Bonus Funnels

He also teaches how to exploit up-and-coming product launches.  Of course, there is nothing new particularly here but for those who have gone through the preceding course, applying this additional source of traffic to their money pages may be a very good idea.

And to those who don’t jump on the bandwagon of product launches, this information is useful of course.

The second so-called bonus funnel is using SEO methods to get on the first page of Google for product launches.  Again, nothing particularly revolutionary but nevertheless helpful.

Module Five, the “Swipe Files”.

Saj P describes these as the real monster of the Course and essentially they are full Internet marketing package systems for the Forex market, the weight loss market and the money making market. 

Within it, you get pay per click keywords, ads that are successful, pre-sell pages for two highest converting products, a banner to advertise a free e-book, a squeeze page giving away a free e-book, the ebook to give away, and a list of websites to advertise the banner on.

Certainly this is helpful for some people, I would think.  However, this is the kind of information that would date very quickly and in any event would simply mean that you would do exactly what everybody else is doing. 

Therefore, it might be more useful to look at it as example web sites are what you could yourself do rather than actually copying it.  Better, I would say, would be to use a website like Google Cash Detective 2 to get a list of keywords that are converting, a list of successful adverts, and use competition software analysis to find the best review and presell pages and either outsource to create similar landing pages or  do it yourself.

This way, your actual efforts will be up-to-date and relevant.  In terms of the other stuff he gives away, the free e-book and so forth, there are a variety of sites of course one can get this kind of material with great ease and I’m sure anyone who has been in Internet marketing for five minutes, can obtain a good-quality PLR from the Warrior Forum or other sites very quickly.

So speaking to myself, I don’t think that these so-called “Swipe Files” are the massive benefit of the system.

To me, the real benefit of the system is the step-by-step methods he offers you which you can yourself put forward and use in a step-by-step manner.

Like everything else, once you’ve set up sites for about five of these ‘funnel systems’ you will find your own ways of doing things.  You will discover your own problems and your own solutions and you will find better ways of doing things.

For instance, I always think a big failing of many of these courses is their failure to teach how to use proper competition analysis software.

In my opinion, using a site like Google Cache Detective 2 can be absolutely invaluable in giving you the inside track on many product launches and the inside track on many successful affiliates.  This, used in combination with Keyword Spy or similar sits can give real insight really quick.

But that is a minor grumble.  This is a course that looks like it’s clearly aimed towards beginners or those who have started out but not making money.

Those of you who know what you’re doing that need something to do step-by-step, I would heartily recommend the system.  In fact, what I intend to do is to now test the system by applying the method step-by-step, setting up a web site using the methods described setting up landing pages and valves as described and drive traffic to them. 

I will then be able to say whether the system compares favourably to other methods are used or is simply a gimmick.  I shall report back.

Of course, as we see with every new Internet marketing launch, we see different terms and languages used to describe essentially similar things.  Whether it’s a ‘Google-izer’, a Secret Affiliate Code, a ‘blueprint’, a ‘conduit site’, essentially all these terms are being used to describe similar things

After all, Internet marketing is about getting traffic,  sending that traffic to a page which encourages the visitor to make a decision that will make you money in the short or long-term or both.  That, is essentially it.  And there no great mystery to it.

The terms that Saj P uses in his stuff is about “valves”, which essentially is a different way of saying different traffic systems.

 The different systems he recommends using are:

•  Google Adwords,
• Google ads on the content network,
• using Yahoo PayPer  Click;
• using MSN pay per click;
• and also what he describes as the “covert traffic arbitrage media buying secret”.

Well, he does describe this in some detail in this part of the course, and I don’t want to steal his thunder too much but it essentially involves buying CPA ads rather than putting them on your site. 

However, he recommends a variety of sites on which to do this and how to find sites to advertise your banners on.

I have to say that I hadn’t done this method before, and therefore when I read this in the guide, I thought it very interesting and it’s something I wanted to try.  So, all in all, good ideas, particularly for those who are new and even those who are less than you, like me.

Also contained within it are sections on using social platforms like Facebook and also exploiting a list.

Well, that’s enough for this post!  I want to go into what I consider to be the real gold of this product in my next post tomorrow.

In this post, I’ll set out what the various modules are that are offered in the course so you can see what type of material is offered and what concepts are being put forward.

 Module 1 — elite research techniques

In this module, Saj P recommends several web sites and methods of analysing the click bank marketplace and also competitor’s efforts.  He recommends how to study demographics and how to aim different sales processes to different demographics.

This is always one of the most difficult parts of an Internet marketing course.  If you include the section, more experienced Internet marketers complain because, frankly, there’s not a lot new under the sun with this sort of subject material.  Frankly, anyone who’s bought any of Saj P’s previous courses will have access to this stuff. 

However, if you haven’t had access to his staff, then some of the ideas he gives here are new and aren’t described in detail in any recent courses.

Module 2 — landing page systems

Integral to the whole Affiliate Funnel System are the different sorts of landing pages that funnel traffic to your money site. 

In this module, Saj P suggests the various types of landing page that you can use. 

I don’t think it is a particular breach of his intellectual property to tell you that those include

• a straightforward review page,
• a review page pushing double or multiple offers,
• a personal blog,
• presell pages, (written from two distinct angles);
• squeeze page
• landing pages with opt-ins,

 and also how to use incentives like free reports or other giveaways, (and how to obtain them, too incentivise more people to click forward to the money page.

 The really new aspect of this course is not only does he recommend when to use those different types of landing page, (which is a subject not covered in great detail in any other courts), but also his banner ad system. 

This is a technique of using banners to advertise on other people’s web sites to get traffic to your chosen landing page.  It’s actually a very straightforward idea in practice, and when you read it you will be amazed that you haven’t done it before.

However, I’m not going to tell you what it is because this is a useful and potentially newly explained idea which I suspect a lot of people haven’t used before.

Also contained in here is information on using videos, proof and testimonials to give authenticity and credibility to your site.

So, all in all, I liked this module.  Although they taught me nothing particularly new, as any picked up some useful tips and I think the people who are just starting out, the step-by-step approach that Saj P recommends will be invaluable in terms are giving you a blueprint you can follow.

There’s absolutely no doubt that the method that Saj P promotes here is not new. 

 This is not a groundbreaking revolutionary new traffic system.  However, what it does is give you a series of systems you can follow and try in various niches.

 Essentially, the system is built around what he calls the landing page system and their “valves”.

 The landing page could be a review page, a pre-sell page, and opt-in page or a banner promoted on other sites.

 The “Valve” is the traffic system by which you send traffic to the landing page.  That might be done through standard pay per click traffic, through social networks, your own list, co-registration, and the usual traffic methods.

 The idea essentially is to set up a variety of different landing pages, which receive traffic in slightly different ways, but all point to you’re (for want of the better expression) money page, which monetises that traffic with affiliate links, PLR products, and your own auto-responder and cost per action ads.

So, nothing revolutionary or new, but what I really like about what I’ve read so far is that it is system.  In other words, you can follow it and if you do this then this then this, you stand a fairly good chance of succeeding as far as I can see.

 In the next post, I’ll go into in a little bit more detail the actual contents of what you get to the package and the modules.