Mindvalley Labs Review – Chain Reaction Marketing 2.0
Update: Mindvalley have been ignoring my emails about cancelling a subscription. I now think this company is best avoided. I’ll publish full details when I’m less busy.
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.
Sitepoint’s Search Engine Marketing Kit 2.0 Review
For a time after the Littlewoods incident where I lost £19,000 in three months (that’s a story for another time), I decided to give up affiliate marketing. It seemed too risky. I wanted to become a freelance web designer. I didn’t know where to start until I came across Sitepoint’s Web Design Business Kit. It’s a great guide for how to begin and grow a web design business.
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.
Linkvana Review – It Doesn’t Work!
It’s really hard to find an honest review of Linkvana. Search for Linkvana and you’ll find pages of rave reviews. That might be because they pay affiliates $50 per month per person they sign up. They can afford to pay affiliates that amount because they charge a massive $147 per month for membership (that’s $1764 per year!). This unique service is designed for people with a serious interest in what getting high search engine rankings. This review will give you the good and bad sides of the Linkvana.
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.
How I Got Reindexed with a Google Reconsideration Request
Before you look into a Google Reconsideration Request (previously known as Reinclusion Request) , you need to check if you really have a Google Penalty. If you’re sure you have, you’ll need to make some changes to your site and let Google know about them.
Start by looking for reasons why you could have been given a penalty. If your site has any of the following, you need to get rid of them:
- With the exception of meta tags and alt tags, does your site include text which is there for search engines to see and not for people to read?
- Is your site made up of mostly content taken from other websites?
- Does your site contain anything which may cause harm to a visitor’s computer such as viruses?
- Have you been buying, selling or exchanging links to improve your rank?
If not, the most likely reason you were penalised is that you you’ve been classed as a thin affiliate (as I was).
Are you a Thin Affiliate?
A thin affiliate site is one which appears to offer little value to its visitors. The only people that will benefit from them are their owners. That means it has adverts but not useful information. The text on the site is mainly there to convince people to buy a product or to appear in search results. If your sites simply points a user to a shop elsewhere on the Internet, Google thinks they might as well miss out the middleman and go straight to the shop. Sites like this are also likely to use black/grey hat tricks to gain higher search engine rankings.
How to Stop being a Thin Affiliate
To get Google’s respect back you’re going to have to put real work into showing your site is useful. Ask yourself if a user would have a reason to come to your site rather than go directly to any site you are affiliated with? If not you need to change your site so there are reasons. Here are some examples;
- Review products in an unbiased manner. Don’t overhype the one you are trying to sell. Why not give genuine reviews of products stating the benefits and flaws of each. You can provide an affiliate link to each of the products. Google doesn’t mind affiliate links, just as long as they aren’t the sole purpose of the site. How long would it take to write a few good reviews? Is it worth taking that time to get your site ranking well again?
- A price comparison chart requires little time to research but can provide a good reason for someone to come to your site; it saves them having to hunt around for the best price.
- Collect news and give your own opinion on it. The easiest way to get news on a particular subject is to use Google News. If you’re promoting the latest LG TV, type “lg” into Google News and see what stories involving LG are happening. Read it, write up about it in your own words and provide your opinion.
- Go to forums related to your website and see what everyone is talking about, then write an article on the subject. You’re not writing a sales pitch here, you’re trying to be informative.
It just takes a bit of creativity and time to come up with something useful to your visitors. Once you’ve given some purpose to your site and removed elements which exist only to influence search engines, it’s time to get on your knees and beg Google to let you back on their index.
Making a Google Reconsideration Request
Create an account for or sign into Google Webmaster Tools. If you haven’t already, you’ll need to register your penalised site with them. Now double check you’ve understood everything by reading through this and the webmaster guidelines.
Finally, go to the reconsideration page and tell Google all about what you’ve been through. It’s a good idea to be detailed and show you’ve put a lot of work into turning the site around. Below you can see the reconsideration request I sent to them which worked for me and you’re welcome to use it as a template:
Hi,
Over a month ago I noticed my site had been deindexed. I guess the reason was that it was classed as a thin affiliate. Since then I’ve been completely reworking the website to offer visitors something useful and unique. It is almost an entirely new website. Here are the changes I’ve made:Removed all image affiliate links. [Actually I had added one back in before they reviewed it, so I was worried that might cause mistrust but they didn’t seem to mind]
Removed almost all text affiliate links.
There are now only a few remaining affiliate links. These are in context and the links would be there even if they were not affiliate ones.
Much of the old content which seemed less useful to visitors has been removed.
Main navigation is now more meaningful to users (the heading of each page is now also the anchor text).
Lots of new unique content has been written and images included, you can get an overview of the sort of information by reading the titles of the recent posts. I will point out a few examples of particularly useful information for visitors below:
You can see here [url of a forum not run by me] that lots of people are requesting information on reliability of retailers. My site aims to give people that information by pulling data from various web resources (and linking to them so users can validate what I’m saying). This is demonstrated best here [url]
Here [url] you can see a short review of some the best software for [product] along with images and links to download them (which aren’t as easy to find through Google as you’d expect so it’s useful).
The site will not return to being a thin affiliate. I am much happier with the new classier looking, more useful website. If traffic returns to the site I intend to carry out more consumer research at my own expense in order to aid my visitors in finding quality products.
7 Days after sending Google the reconsideration request I got a message sent to my webmaster tools account. It gave no details other than to say the site had been reviewed. The message doesn’t even tell you if you were successful or not. I did a search in Google and for the first time in over a month my site was back up there! It was a great feeling.
I hope you can do the same with your site. If you have any questions, I’m happy to help. Good luck.
Affiliate Tools – Reviews Coming Soon
Over the next few months I’ll be reviewing most of the products I’ve paid for in an effort to improve my affiliate marketing career. I’ll tell you which ones have been a waste of time and which have helped. It can be hard to find honest reviews of these things. Most reviews are from people trying to sell them.
Instead I’ll just tell you what I honestly think of each of them and let you make up your mind if any of them are worth the money. I also hope people coming to the site will add their opinions.
Here’s the reviews I’ve got planned for now:
- Mindvalley Labs Chain Reaction Marketing 2.0
- Need-an-article.com
- Linkvana
- SEOmoz
- SEO Book
- Info Product Killer
- Network Blazer
- Sitepoint’s Search Engine Marketing Kit
- Article Submit Auto
- Fast Blog Finder
- And some free tools
One review will be published every Thursday. You can remember it as T3, “The Thursday Tool” so you know when to check back here… or you could just subscribe.
Find out if you have a Google Penalty
Update: I forgot to mention, one really good way to check if you’ve been given a BIG penalty. Do a search for your homepage URL (“affiliatethoughts.com” if it was this site). If you’re not listed first, Google really isn’t friends with you.
Understandably people can become very anxious when they’re rank drops in Google. They often feel they have been hit by a penalty. I was one of those people a few months ago. I got my website back on track in the end. If you’re in that situation try to relax. I’m going to tell you how I fixed the problem, and if you want it badly enough you can fix the problem too.
First of all you need to determine if you really have a Google penalty. Ask yourself the following questions:
Have you been deindexed? Was your site in the index but is now entirely missing?
If you search for the URL of your homepage, does your website show up? If not, it could just be a bug. Try again tomorrow and/or from another computer so that you are connecting to a different Google data centre. If you’re still not showing up (but you were in the past), the bad news is you’ve been deindexed. The good news is I had the same problem and fixed it. This is what my rankings looked like from just before my deindexing, to just after being reincluded:
| 30-Apr | 04-May | 05-May | 06-May | 11-May | 14-May | 18-May | 19-May | 20-May |
| 3 | 3 | 3 | - | - | - | - | - | - |
| 21-May | 23-May | 29-May | 01-Jun | 07-Jun | 11-Jun | 18-Jun | 19-Jun | 20-Jun |
| - | - | - | - | - | - | - | - | 22 |
| 24-Jun | 28-Jun | 01-Jul | 03-Jul | 06-Jul | 08-Jul | 09-Jul | ||
| 7 | 5 | 17 | 15 | 5 | 5 | 5 |
If you have been deindexed, you can skip the rest of this page and read about how to get reindexed. If not, you may have a smaller penalty, keep reading.
Are your bad rankings just temporary?
First of all, don’t panic (I know it’s easier said than done). Rankings often have a temporary drop, especially if you’ve made changes to your site such as updating your title tag. Here’s an example of a random temporary rank drop I experienced for a particular keyword:
| 30-Nov | 01-Dec | 02-Dec | 03-Dec | 04-Dec | 05-Dec | 06-Dec | 07-Dec | 08-Dec |
| 7 | 6 | 8 | 134 | 134 | 125 | 125 | 130 | 124 |
| 09-Dec | 10-Dec | 11-Dec | 12-Dec | 13-Dec | 14-Dec | 15-Dec | 16-Dec | |
| 120 | 112 | 107 | 111 | 115 | 6 | 8 | 7 |
Here’s how to test if it is just a temporary drop. Search for your keyword, find your listing and click the “Cached” version of your site. At the top of the page you should see “This is Google’s cache of www.yoursite.com. It is a snapshot of the page as it appeared on…” note the date down so you will know when the cache has updated. Until then your rank is unlikely to change much. Once the cache has updated you will hopefully return close to your original position, if not, keep reading.
Was your former higher rank just temporary?
As rankings can randomly drop, they can also randomly improve for a short time. If your rank was only high for a week and is now lower, you likely haven’t been penalized; you’ve just been put back in your place.
Was your site in a stable position for over a month and has suddenly dropped by more than two pages?
A new site will often bounce around the search results. Here are the daily search rankings for a specific keyword for one of my latest website;
| 17-Sep | 22-Sep | 27-Sep | 05-Oct | 06-Oct | 07-Oct | 08-Oct | 10-Oct |
| 12 | 13 | 26 | 17 | 19 | 25 | 9 | 23 |
You can see these rankings are up and down like a yo-yo. This doesn’t mean a penalty has been applied. So if your results are looking like this, don’t worry. Just carry on with what you’re doing, and your rank will settle down after a few weeks.
Have you made any dramatic changes to your website recently?
It might be the case that you have simply made your website less search engine friendly. If you have made changes to your site’s structure, navigation, title tags or any other large alteration to the page which is not ranking where it once was, this could have caused your rank to drop because you inadvertently effected your search engine optimisation.
Have you lost any important backlinks?
If you’re aware of where your most important backlinks came from, check they’re are still up. If they have been removed or nofollowed for whatever reason, contact the website owner and try to get them back. If the links are still there, it could be a penalty.
Have you checked robots.txt?
I have a friend who thought he had a Google penalty for 6 months before realising he’d forgotten to let the Google bot crawl his site. Make sure you’re not making the same mistake. Robot.txt lets you tell search engines if you don’t want them to index your site. Check www.yoursite.com/robots.txt. If get a page that mentions “file not found” and/or “404” you don’t have a robots.txt file and so it isn’t preventing Google from coming to your website. If you get a page with anything else on it, check http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Robots_exclusion_standard#Examples to see if your robot.txt file is set up correctly.
If you’ve answered all the questions and still feel you have a penalty, it’s time to make some changes and let Google know what changes you’ve made. Find out how by reading about how to get reindexed with Google.
Commission Caps – How Much I Earned for a £1,015 Sale
Commission Caps can be annoying. They aren’t really very common in affiliate marketing but with Amazon they can fairly often cut into your profits.
Here you can see a few of the items I’ve sold on Amazon. The most expensive sale I referred brought in £1015 for Amazon. Even at Amazon’s lowest commission rate, without the cap, this would have earned me over £50. Instead I got just £7. I earned barely over 0.5% of the sale price for my part in bringing a high paying customer to their site.
A few of my sales which had their commissions capped. The cap just for these items cost me over £100. I bet Amazon don't cap the commission they charge on third party sales.
It’s pretty annoying but then Amazon can be fairly generous in some ways. For example Play.com pay just 2% commission on DVDs while Amazon gives a minimum of 5% up to 9% (but realistically very few affiliates will get above 6.5%). So Amazon is paying far more than double what other companies will pay for certain items. On the downside Amazon‘s one day cookie is another annoyance.
What do you think about Amazon’s affiliate rates, one day cookies and commission caps? What caps have stopped you earning what you should have?
The Point of this Blog
As an affiliate marketer, starting a website without spending hours researching keywords doesn’t feel very natural. For once I’m building a site (this one) without the goal being to make money. A search for “affiliate marketing blog” shows me the market is too competitive for that anyway. So this blog is really just for communicating my affiliate thoughts… hmm that could be a good domain name.
Occasionally I discover something or have an “interesting” thought related to affiliate marketing that I want to tell people, but I doubt my friends are interested in things like how turning a website’s logo upside down can increase conversion rates by an extra 0.5%. So this blog should help me get things like that off my chest.
This is going to be a no BS blog. There won’t be any tales of how I make $100,000 a day and will sell you the secret for $79.95. I won’t exaggerate my earnings or charge anyone for advice.
I hate bullshit like this so you won't find it here. Thanks to Mindvalley Labs for the providing this example.
I don’t make $100,000 a day but I do live off affiliate marketing. My proudest affiliate achievement is a period which peaked with me earning over £1000 commission in a day. I’m not making anything like that at the minute (affiliate marketing has its ups and downs) but I am able to work whatever hours I choose from anywhere I can plug my laptop in.
I’m far from an affiliate marketing millionaire but I could help you learn how to make a living from the Internet without the risks of starting a traditional business. With affiliate marketing you’re risking your free time more than your money.
There will be affiliate links on Affiliate Thinking… hold on what’s site called again? Affiliate Thoughts will have affiliate links but I’ll make them obvious by marking them with a *. If you’d prefer not to help me out (because you don’t trust me or something) then you’re free to just go directly to the website without clicking my link. If you do click on the link, you can feel good that a little bit of the money that would usually go to the share holders of large corporations will instead go to me and encourage me to write more crap in my blog. If you do click on my affiliate links and buy from them, thank you very much.
Affiliate links aren’t the main point of this site, as I said, it’s mainly to get things off my chest and to help people out. Maybe karma will bring people to help me out too.
I hate Twitter
Warning: This post has nothing to do with affiliate marketing. It’s just something I wanted to say.
Update: It’s good to see Ricky Gervais is with me on the Twitter backlash saying “I’m sure it’s fun as a networking device for teenagers but there’s something a bit undignified about adults using it, particularly celebrities who seem to be showing off by talking to each other in public.”
Actually I don’t hate Twitter, I hate the media which constantly go on about it despite the fact that it’s nothing special. If I had invented it I would be quite proud but wouldn’t actually expect anyone to use it. In fact I wouldn’t invent it because the concept seems pointless.
What is twitters innovation? What sets it apart from the giants of social networking in the past, namely MySpace and Facebook? The answer, it restricts you to 140 characters per message. That’s it. And that’s a positive thing!? Have I missed something?
Twitter's other unique feature: Today's Internet user is too busy to read both sides of a conversation, so just show them one or the other.
I also hated MySpace. While the idea of giving everyone an easy webpage is good, it’s not a new idea. It’s been done tones of times before, take Geocities for example (set up 9 years before MySpace, which doesn’t sound like a lot but really is in Internet terms). The reason why MySpace became so popular (in my humble opinion) is that it kept annoying you with emails giving you the impression that your real life friends would be upset if you turned down their “friend request”. If you get 20 messages from people who you know asking to be your “friend”, you can’t really just ignore them all, it would be rude. Once you do that, you’re encouraged to supply all your other friends’ email addresses so they can be spammed too. This caused a snowball effect in several ways, which I won’t go into because this is supposed to be a Twitter rant. Anyway, at the end of the day, MySpace essentially nagged people into joining.
Facebook did the same. I kind of hate it for that but it really did bring a lot more with it. Cleaver features such as tagging people in photos and being able to see your friends’ updates in one place were just a couple of the reasons why Facebook deserves credit (although it also got where it is today mainly by nagging people).
Twitter basically took the status update feature from Facebook and restricted you to 140 characters per message. Surely you can’t just steal a feature, make it worse and hope to become that fastest growing website on the Internet. Apparently you can. On the plus side Twitter doesn’t nag you with emails. Instead the media go on and on about it. Why? Not because it’s a brilliant new way to communicate although that’s what they’ll tell you. It’s because they’ve seen the success of what went before and don’t want to be last on the bandwagon this time.
Talking of people who jump on bandwagons, I felt sure that soon-to-be Prime Minister David Cameron would be a member of Twitter. He’s not however and he had to apologise for saying “The trouble with Twitter, the instantness of it – too many twits might make a twat.” It’s the best thing he’s come out with and is almost enough to make me want to vote Tory.