My friend introduced me to this killer tool – terapeak.

Basically, it’s like a backdoor to all of eBay’s stats. So it may not be cool to everyone.

But if you run any kind of business selling things on eBay you’ll want it.

If you create websites that utilize the eBay Partner Network, you’ll want it.

In my case it is the latter. I like it. I want it. I need it. I’m signing up today.

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I love cool tools! I wanted to start a new blog. So I registered domain, set up an account on my cPanel VPS, used Fantastico to create a WordPress blog, found a theme and modified some settings. Viola! – a new blog in less than an hour. Now I just have to wait for 1&1 to update the DNS servers. I think if I registered the domain at Godaddy I really could have the site live and ready to go in under an hour. (I use 1&1 simply because they are cheaper.)

Oh, and by the way. I made this post using ScribeFire, which is also one cool tool!

Technorati Tags: blog, wordpress, fantastico, cpanel, 1&1, godaddy, scribefire

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I’m very mediocre at online marketing. I know all the theory and things I should be doing to make money online, but I haven’t hit the big time by any means. I think a big part of the problem is that I’m not very motivated by making money. For for some weird reason, I’m very motivated to save money!

This is where the knowledge and skills I’ve developed in internet marketing begin to be entertaining and profitable. I have two example to share. One I’ll share now, the other I’ll share after May (you’ll understand why when I share it then)

Example the first:

I love Rocketman! It’s one of my all time favorite movies. It’s just plain clean stupid humor. I wanted a copy of it so bad on DVD. At first it was only available as a region 2. I couldn’t take a chance of it not working. LaterI found that it was released in region 1. I saw a few copies on Amazon, but they were selling for over $50 per copy. I did some searching and found that the only way to order them was by joining the Disney DVD club. I didn’t want to join the club for one movie. I did some calculation, and though I can’t remember the exact numbers (this was two years ago) I figured if I joined the club and bought filled my requirements by buying all Rocketman movies, I could get approx 9 copies for $118.00 ($13.10 each) and then quit. So, if I kept one and sold the rest to break even, I would just need to sell them for $14.75 each. Since they were selling on Amazon for $50 I figured it wouldn’t be a problem.

My wife was quite surprised when she saw 9 copies of Rocketman show up in the mail. Ok, by now she’s probably not surprised by the weird things I do, but rather curious. I kept one copy for my personal collection and sold the other 8 on Amazon for an average of $40 each after shipping. So, to do the math, I got my movie and made $202.00 in the process!

I told a friend about it and he was elated because his wife had joined the Disney DVD club and they still had 3 movies to buy before they could fulfill their commitment. He bought 3 copies of Rocketman and sold them promptly.

So why not wash, rinse, repeat? I told you, I’m lazy. I hated going to the post office and shipping movies. Besides, I’m sure they have some kind of rules about household quitting and rejoining. I did tell everyone what I did and said they could do the same to make a quit buck, but I think they were all too skeptical and no one took me up on it.

Don’t bother now, because you can buy them new on Amazon for under $10.

Look for the follow up to this post in a couple of months.

UPDATE:

I wrote the follow up post, but just before publishing it I changed my mind. As much as I would love to share what I did (I basically got a $1000+ value from $6 worth of advertising and 1-2 hours of time). I thought it would be a once in a lifetime opportunity, but from what I’ve learned, the opportunity may present itself next year! So, I guess I’d be better off keeping this one to myself for now.

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If you are into affiliate marketing at all, or have been in the past year, you probably remember the whole “The Death Of Adsense” report that came out last year. In was in the middle of these reports that I first heard about John Jonas. He did a marketing call with Scott Boulch, the author of The Death Of Adsense. I listened to it on my iPod while working out during lunch one day. I couldn’t believe how much information John was sharing on that call and how straight up honest he was. I agreed spot on with everything he said – especially his product reviews. After listening to that call, I found his website and email list “What’s crap and what’s not.” It was refreshing to say the least.

I was especially intrigued by an email John sent to his list back on December 2nd. He had initially send an email hyping Competition Dominator, but came back saying it was crap based on further use. I find some of the comments left to this email humorous. I think it was mostly people who wasted their money on the product just chirping to try to justify their purchase to themselves.

I found this comment especially humorous and ironic:

Worst Review Ever… Revealing Ignorance

Submitted by Anonymous on Tue, 2006-12-05 17:02.

Well, you sure know how to make enemies and to lose credibility. Any one that trashes an excellent product because they have their own agenda to sell their own product should be ignored or worse.

You’ve lost all credibility with me and I hope with many of your subscribers and readers who are using it and know it’s **not** crap.

Chris and Goran are some of the best software developers I know and honestly.. this product is powerful in so many ways.

If you can’t make it work for you or don’t see the value of it, it only means one of two things to me: A) You’re not very bright. B) You’re trashing it so people will buy your product instead.

More likely it’s both.

You don’t even use your last name on your PR Zero pages here. A lot of credibility you…

(BTW, that post is a PR2 and the site as a whole is a PR4)

Well, John finally released his product. Again, I was surprised at the detail he showed in his videos – especially how to do the stuff manually. From a web programmer and automation engineer it looked to me like he was giving away the farm before he even released the product. He actually showed you how he made the software work! I think this was to prove how legit the software really is – no false claims, no smoke & mirrors.

I waited for the released and when I saw that it was nearly $300 per month, I can’t say I was surprised. I figured it might be as much because if used properly, this software could easily pay for itself with minimal effort – unlike most software that makes that claim. I had the opportunity to order it, but I didn’t. But let me tell you a little bit more about myself to explain why…

I think I first got started with Internet marking back in 2003. I had a few websites and I was even selling Palm & Pocket PC software to a niche market (but I can’t say I even know what “niche market” meant at that time). I had a co-worker that started telling me about the money he was making on the side with various things he was doing. Ultimately, he started making HUGE money using Google Adwords. He referred me to the Google Cash book by Chris Carpenter. I bought it and read it. I spend a few months trying this stuff out. I racked up thousands of dollars on my credit card, but the affiliate commissions I got seemed to barely break even. I think out of all the campaigns I tried only one or two of them made fairly decent returns – or so I thought. As I was trying results I later learned that most of the sales for my best profiting campaign were fraudulent so I never got paid. I lost big time. I cut my losses and figured this system is just not for me and gave up on it – even though my friend was making 5 figures a month with it.

I never really lost interest with Adwords though. With the Death of Adsense report, I learned how I could better improve reporting. I tried again, but still I could never seem to find a profitable campaign I was always losing money. Most of all, I didn’t want to get out my credit card again. I was on cash only basis from here on out!

So in essence, this is the reason I did not buy John’s software. I simply didn’t have the cash on hand in my “business” account. Everything I do on the side I keep in a separate account. This is sort of my “playground” to earn extra money. We have a baby on the way due in September and my wife (who doesn’t understand much of this stuff anyway) was not very keen on the idea of me spending that much money on software I couldn’t very well explain to her.

On day 2 I was surprised that there were open spots still available for UnderCoverProfits (UCP). I sent John a message and asked out of curiosity how many seats were still available. There were only 6 left! I explained that I couldn’t afford it but I thought about writing my own version that essentially did the same. I was surprised at his response. He was positive and encouraging – even offering tips and suggestions!

Well it took only 3 days to write the features that I saw on John’s videos. Granted, I don’t have all the features, I don’t have keywords sorted by campaigns, and I don’t have the ability to find other ad campaigns existing for a certain clickbank user. But I have the core functionality that makes the software so valuable. In his videos, John used “panic attack” to demonstrate one profitable campaign he found. Here are my results after 12 days of monitoring (click to see full size):

I don’t have a full month of data for any keywords yet, but I got excited with results I have already started seeing so I tried out some ads. The first one I tried was profitable! It’s a ClickBank product and honestly, I have never had success with any ClickBank products – even though that is what all the gurus rave about.

As you can see from the screen shot below, I’m actually getting some “bars” in ClickBank now!

On that first campaign I’ve tried, I’ve netted $180 in 5 days. I understand all the tracking techniques and all the principles behind tracking, testing, landing pages, etc. My problems has always been to know what products will actually make more than I have to spend on them to get the traffic. Now, thanks to John, I have a tool that will help.

It’s funny, when I told my wife about the results. She said, “maybe you should buy his software now.” It’s certainly a good idea. Like I said, I don’t have all the features John has. My biggest concern is that I’m running this on my own hosting account. I have to query Google every day for each of my keywords. John has 30 servers and 1500 IP addresses set up. Obviously he has a safer and more reliable system. Well, now its obviously a bit too late even if I wanted to. The seats are full so I would have to get on the waiting list like everyone else.

So to sum up this post, thank you John for awesome software you have released to the public. Even though I have not purchased it, your help and suggestions have gotten me back in the game after two years on the disabled list!

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