I received a phone call from them yesterday. Apparently they’ve been advised by their “lawyers” that they should take legal action against me if I leave my negative review of their company on my blog. I was told “just because you have a blog doesn’t mean you can say whatever you want.” I told him I was just reporting my experience. He said something along the lines of “it’s costing us money and you can’t prove everything I said was true” as the reason I have to take the review down.

So as they insisted the review has been removed from this website. You can now find the smart-traffic.co.uk review on a much more popular and high ranking website . You can rest assured that if Smart Traffic still have issues with this, I will seek more media coverage of the subject. Giving a bad service is one thing, threatening legal action against anyone openly reporting their experience is another. I’m not going to let a corporation get away with bullying tactics.

By the way Smart-Traffic, don’t bother calling me again. If you want to get in touch, you can email me, so that everything we both say is recorded. That seems fair doesn’t it?

I first joined Network Blazer with a free trial which came with an ebook which has now been replaced by Info Product Killer. Network Blazer is run by a man with a split personality. His evil side is an lazy, arrogant, 17 year old, international sex machine and affiliate millionaire with a fondness of the word “numpty”. In some of his videos he talks about Affi as if he is a different person and at one point even received a text message from him. Thankfully his alter ego seems to have disappeared although I’m not entirely sure that his technical support isn’t another side to his complex personality.

Network Blazer itself is a content management system designed to make building an affiliate website easy. It does this well, this most complex code you’ll need to understand is [LINK=http://www.example.com/]Buy Toys heres![/LINK]
Network Blazer provides an easy interface for uploading pictures, text and most importantly price comparison charts which are updated automatically.

One of the best features is that you don’t need to pay for a host or deal with FTPing everything for the site since all sites are hosted on Network Blazers servers. There is no limit on the number of sites you can host on their which is a great deal in itself. It has a members’ only forum with lots of nice people and no egos.

The downside is that you have no control over the code. If you want to do anything which isn’t built into the system, there’s no way to do it. For example, Google analytics is built into the system, but Webmaster tools isn’t. You can’t edit CSS (well you can change the background and text colours) which makes all Network Blazer sites look very similar. This can make them an easy target for a manual penalty and you might need to deal with a Google reconsideration request. Many updates to the backend are talked about but rarely delivered with a few acceptations such as servers based in the US to help with localisation.

Network Blazer Conclusion

If you have could fully edit your sites, I would recommend Network Blazer to just about anyone who wants to get into affiliate marketing. But you can’t so I’m going to say it’s a great all in one affiliate website package for people who don’t have much experience building websites.

Network Blazer

I started SEO just a little too late to take advantage of comment spam. A year or so earlier I could have got loads of easy links to my sites just by replying to posts on websites and mentioning my URL. Fortunately this type of spam is of little use these days since 96% (figure based on a tiny bit of research using Fast Blog Finder) of blogs’ comments are automatically nofollowed.

What about the 4% of remaining blogs? Can you still get an easy link from them? The answer is yes. The problem is finding the blogs which still allow followed comment links. That’s what G-Lock Fast Blog Finder is for.

Once you open the software you can type in a keyword, search for it and a list of hundreds of blogs will appear within a few minutes. Next to them you will see the PageRank of the post and whether it allows links to be followed or not. You also get a lot of pages returned which for some reason the program can’t determine if the links are followed or not.

In a typical search you can expect to find (very roughly) 60% “unknown” results, 30% “nofollowed”, 6% “HTTP Errors” and 4% “Followed”.

G-Lock Fast Blog Finder Conclusion

The Fast Blog Finder software is a very good way to find places to get easy links, although there aren’t many of those places left. $49 will gain you several links for each of your target keywords. The only question is, are blog comment links any use?

If you’ve read my other reviews you’ll probably have noticed how much I hate long sales pitches on homepages. I’m pleased to say Article Submit Auto has a small sales pitch with a very dramatic video which actually shows what the product does without you having to hunt for it. On the downside, there may be an honesty issue as it offers “article marketing manual worth $67” for free if you order “Before Midnight November 12, 2009”. I have a sneaking suspicion that offer will be renewed until midnight on November 13, 2009 tomorrow.

I spent a long time looking for an article distribution tool that would submit to the sites that actually count like Ezinearticles and Article Alley. There are plenty of services which will send your article to lots of websites, but these are usually websites which are full of duplicate content because the only time people submit articles to them is when using one of these services.

With the worthwhile articles websites it is much harder to distribute your articles to them. This means the quality of the articles is higher and more of them are unique. As far as I know Auto Submit Article is the only way of quickly submitting to most of these sites at once.

Once you join you do have to spend ages providing all your log in details to various sites so you can be automatically logged in to distribute your articles. Once you have done this once however, you can distribute every article minutes after you’ve written it instead of spending an hour logging into each website and copying and pasting all the info many times over.

Finally I want to say my experience with customer service has been great. I emailed asking for more site profiles to be allowed, and it was sorted out within days.

Article Submit Auto Conclusion

If you’re into writing articles to get easy links (or getting someone to write them for you with need-an-article) and do it often enough to make the $39.95 per month seem worthwhile, this is a good place to join.

Article Submit Auto

Writing quality content can be a chore. Hiring a quality content writer can be expensive. The solution; support developing countries and get cheap low quality articles written at need-an-article.com*.

If the quality of the content on your website isn’t an issue for you, and you just like to have lots of words on your site, need-an-article could be the perfect solution. You pay $14.97 per month… but wait, today (or any other day I assume) you can get a special offer of $9.95. Then pay $5.52 for an article up to 550 words long (there are other options but they all provide roughly the same value). This is very cheap, and can give you a lot of content for a low price, $30 spent at need-an-article.com could fill a website.

You get to say what you want the article to be about and include any details of the task, then within a couple of days a writer will accept your article request and usually have it finished for you within a few more days. The speed this is done at is quite impressive. You also have the option of requesting any particular writer you wish who has done an article for you in the past.

The downside is that none of the writers I encountered seemed to use English as a first language. While I’m sure they speak English very well, it’s not as easy to overlook minor improper sentence structure when it’s written. If it is representing your company it can look unprofessional. I found myself proof-reading and making corrections with all the articles I received (which you might not believe given the number of typos and spelling mistakes in this blog).

Need-an-Article Conclusion

If you need cheap content and aren’t too fussy about quality, or you’re willing to spend the time correcting mistakes in the articles, Need-an-article could be the service for you. If looking professional and building a good reputation is important, then it might not be so useful.

need-an-article.com*

Oh dear, another huge sales pitch on this product’s homepage (I had to roll my mouse’s scroll wheel 57 times to get to the bottom of the page). I have to say I have my doubts about the testimonials on the homepage. Why do none of the people who have left these testimonials (or anyone with similar results) seem to have visited the associated Network Blazer forum? Maybe it’s just a coincidence. That’s not to say the people in the forum who use the guide aren’t making money from it, just that the guide hasn’t turned their lives around quite as much as the claims made in testimonials on the homepage.

I’ll overlook it though because it’s actually a pretty good ebook. It provides you with a step by step guide on how its author Craig Kaye builds affiliate websites and makes an income selling things through Amazon.

It skips the theory or any talk about any debatable issues and just tells you how Craig puts his sites together. It doesn’t give you indecisive advice like “you should have several links to your homepage throughout your website but not too many because Google might not like it”. Advice like this can leave you asking more questions like “what anchor text should I use?” or “is linking from 50% of pages to my homepage enough or too much?”. Info Product Killer uses more of an approach along the lines of “have two links on every page to your homepage using this anchor text…”

The downside of this is that the advice could be wrong. You might be wasting time creating too many links. On the other hand, personally I would waste more time trying to work out how many links I should have, rather than just getting the job done.

What I’m not very eloquently trying to say is Info Product Killer might not be right 100% of the time but it doesn’t matter too much because of the time you save by using a step by step guide.

The emphasis is put on quickly creating lots of low quality websites which make money. This could cause issues with Google determining your site as a thin affiliate.

The guide provides great on page SEO techniques but I feel the importance of link building is left out. The author disagrees with the general consensus on the importance of off-page SEO and believes interlinking your own sites and having a good on-page SEO is enough to get you all the traffic you need.

Info Product Killer Conclusion

Easiest to follow step-by-step affiliate guide I’ve seen. Will get you an income quickly but I think to make serious money you’ll need some good quality inbound links too which isn’t covered in the guide. There is also a 60 day money back satisfaction gaurentee.

Info Product Killer

I get angry just looking at the Mindvalley Labs website. If I am interested in a product I want to get the gist of what it is within a few seconds. What I don’t need is (I’m not exaggerating) a 28 page sales pitch. The 6,500 word page about their course starts with your typical Internet Marketing ebook headline “We Built A Client A Website That Made $2 Million Dollars In Just Two Weeks”. What that headline neglects to state is that the website was for someone who is bit of a celebrity and who has a film where he claims to bring you the secret of happiness and wealth. Never the less, it is a very impressive achievement, just don’t get the idea that their course will do the same for you.

I feel physically sick when I read complete bullshit like “Each Secret Is Valued at $247. 12 Secrets = $247 x 12 = $2.964.” Well I have a secret which is worth even more. It’s valued at $10,000,000. Email me the money then you may click here to learn the secret.
In total Mindvalley claim their course is worth… $10,056! But lucky you, today you can get the whole course for only $197! You’re paying under 2% of the course’s “real” value. In fact, what they actually say is “It’s yours right now for $9,997
$4,997
$1,997
$497
ONLY $197… you get $10,056 worth of training for FREE!”
How is it free if it costs $197?

Despite that bad first impression, the members’ area actually provides a decent course. The Mindvalley Labs Chain Reaction Marketing course was the first thing I actually paid to learn from. It wasn’t the 28 page sales pitch (which apparently they’re paying someone $10,000 to rewrite!) that convinced me to invest the money. I was convinced when I signed up to their mailing list and got lots of interesting tips on increasing conversion rates and such.

The impression it succeeded in giving was that Mindvalley Labs had already spent years and $100,000s on researching sales methods that work. Getting their course would save you a massive amount of time and money. Even more important was a 100% money back satisfaction guarantee. If I didn’t think I would make my money back from what I’d learned, I’d ask for the money back.
I never needed to ask for the money back. Although a lot of what they teach is aimed selling ebooks, much of it can be applied to general affiliate marketing. The course is divided into 7 parts, which are each divided into 6 modules which are each around 10 pages long.

Intro – Getting The Basics Right
Part 1 – Getting Traffic
Part 2 – Capturing Leads Right
Part 3 – Building Relationships
Part 4 – Closing Sales Right
Part 5 – Maximizing Customer Life-Time Value
Part 6 – Business Automation
Part 7 (Bonus) – Social Media Marketing

Subjects such as SEO aren’t covered in massive detail by the Mindvalley Labs course since it is just one of 36 chapters but there are still over 10 pages worth of well thought out concise information, telling you the fundamental parts of each subject, along with some useful tips.

Mindvalley Labs Conclusion

Unlike the 28 page sales copy, the content of the members’ areas gives a lot of useful information in a relatively small amount of space. Everyone is bound to learn something from the course. If you’re an affiliate marketer and can’t control things such as prices and special offers, not every chapter will be of use to you but you will probably learn several really good tips which can increase sales in some of the other chapters. My advice is to try it and if you don’t feel it’s paid for itself within a few months, get a refund. At worst it’ll have been a waste of time, but I doubt many people will feel that way.

I was very lucky that they had a *Real* special offer on at the time. Not a bullshit never ending special offer like those that accompany nearly every other item I’m reviewing. No this was a real 2 for 1 offer which isn’t available now. Sorry, that’s not going to help you but it does demonstrate that Sitepoint have integrity. Anyway, I needed to pick a second Kit to have and went for the Search Engine Marketing Kit 2.0.

This stands out from the crowd by being physical book. In fact it’s 345 pages of A4 paper in a folder. If nothing else, it certainly makes you look very professional. For your $197 you also get a CD containing stuff which I don’t think is that useful for anything apart from showing clients how professional you can look (which if you’re in that type of business can double your income).

The book itself is divided 9 sections:

• Search Engines – Basically a history of search engines. Not very useful but some interesting information.
• SEO Basics – This section is very good for beginners in SEO but it didn’t teach me anything I didn’t already know. It covers things like picking keywords and putting them in headers and anchor text.
• Advanced SEO – This is a bit more like it. SEO tactics here include working with flash, javascript, cookies, dynamic sites, robots.txt. It didn’t really teach me much I didn’t know but it’s good for brushing up and for intermediate level SEO people.
• Pay-per-click – Just about everything you need to know about PPC.
• Link Building – Some good strategies but also some less useful ones (such as directory submission).
• Your SEO Business – Good advice if you’re into selling your SEO services, although for a fuller picture of making a business out of SEO, you should get the Web Design Business Kit too.
• Case Studies – Some examples which can be followed as a guide to getting your website off the ground.
• Interviews – Some experts share their tips, one of the best parts of the book.
• Tools – Quick overview of SEO tools on the market.

Search Engine Marketing Kit Conclusion

This is probably the ultimate beginners’ guide to SEO. By the time you’ve finished with it you’ll have all of the concepts nailed. You’ll still need to work out what really works though. If you’re already fairly experienced with SEO, you would probably be better spending your money elsewhere.

Who Should Get It?

People with an Interest in SEO with little experience and to a lesser degree, people who want to sell their SEO services.

NOTE: Version 3.0 is out very soon so hopefully it’ll be a little more up to date.

The price seems reasonable considering what you get. It is a service designed to get you good quality one way links. The way it’s done is by you writing a short blog post between 100-200 words long and including a link to your website. It gives you 100% control over the header, anchor text and keyword usage. Your post will be published on one randomly picked blog from Linkvana’s network. You can write as many posts as you like and set what speed they get published at (upto 5 per day).

The Linkvana Interface - It looks ethical enough by telling you only to link to white hat sites.

Linkvana keeps their blogs from becoming an obvious spam-fest by having several strict rules on what your posts can contain. You are not allowed to use words which could indicate your site is related to gambling or porn and you can only place one link per post. Using duplicate content can get you thrown out of the network. Most importantly, you are only allowed to link to genuine non-spam sites.

Other than these rules, the quality of the posts can be very low. Just type out the first thing that comes to mind and there’s no need to proof read. Personally I could setup up to 30 posts per hour (as long as I wasn’t being distracted by TV or anything).

That means with two hours’ work I would be able to get 60 links to any of my sites, surrounded by unique, keyword rich content which would come in at a rate that seems natural to search engines. What’s more, each blog they own has a pagerank of 2-5.

Sounds too Good to be True

Yep. Of course it is. Google seems to have deindexed most of the blogs run by Linkvana. It has made around 90% of the links worthless. I’d give you an affiliate link to their website but it might do me more harm than good.

Linkvana Conclusion

Linkvana makes a valiant effort at trying to cheat the system but in the end there is no escaping Google’s will.

Who should use it?

No one. It’s expensive, naughty and your links will be deindexed.