The (Really Short) Skinny on Google Annihilation by Rob Benwell
I have received many email promotions about a new traffic and SEO membership product by Rob Benwell, called Google Annihilation. I haven’t had time to even look at the sales page until just now, and I did a little quick research about what some who bought this product have to say.
In short - I will definitely not be buying this product, and I don’t recommend that you buy it either.
According to this article at NeuroLinker (who are of course tooting their own horn instead) and the blog signature Neil over at Affiliate Marketing for Dummies, Google Annihilation is nothing else than another 3-way linking scheme. There are many such offerings out there, many of which are more advanced and/or more affordable than Mr. Benwell’s offering.
I am not saying that this kind of thing is totally ineffective, but you should also be aware that some renowned SEO experts consider this kind of linking scheme to be outdated by now. For example, in the third issue of The Net Effect (an Internet Marketing magazine by the guys over at Stompernet) Jerry West list three-way linking on a top list of link building myths - claiming that Google now are better at detecting such linking networks. Don’t take that as the ultimate truth though, even if Jerry seems to be a guy who usually tests things before passing judgment.
At any rate, there certainly isn’t any basis for the “Google loophole”, “Big secret to all the traffic you want” claims made on the sales letter of Google Annihilation. But I am sure that the “It’s not your fault now have a look at all my expensive cars and luxorious real estate” approach Benwell has been using for all of his recent products will make many sales this time around as well. 
Affiliate Marketing Product Selection - A Forgotten Aspect?
A while ago I watched a video from an online marketer. In his hands he held a set of DVDs, an affiliate marketing product he had chosen to promote, and he sincerely recommended that the viewer - his own subscribers and customers - invest in the material that was on those DVDs. Certainly nothing wrong with that strategy so far.
Only he forgot one very tiny little thing - the spread of DVD cases he held up in front of the camera where all still inside their shiny plastic wrapping…
You may think this is a big “so what” - and maybe to many viewers it was - but to me he was basically saying:
“I have not bothered to actually check out the content on these discs (even though it is literally right in front of me!), but I am sure it is great so I highly recommend that you spend quite a lot of your hard earned cash on this product”.
A very viable and convincing attitude, right?
In all fairness, I realize that there may be all sorts of good explanations for the product still being in its wrapping. And perhaps the marketer in question really DID know this affiliate marketing product first hand. But none of that really matters - those who did the same observation I did may still have drawn the conclusion he hadn’t even bothered to take the content out of the package.
Do Your Research and Promote Good Stuff
Be that as it may, my point with the above story is that I think you as an affiliate marketer need to know a little bit about the product you are promoting. Because that will help you both in pre-selling the offer much better and - as you are promoting genuinely good stuff - in building trust with the people you are regularly marketing to, such as an opt-in list.
You don’t want to be known as “the guy who tries to sell me crap at least once a week”, do you? In fact, I myself remain on the email list of a couple of marketers for the sole reason of knowing that “if he promotes a particular product, it is with 95% certainty not even worth a first look”.
I am not implying that you are somehow morally obliged to have great experience with each and every product you try to sell as an affiliate, if you want to make big bucks that is probably impossible. But especially to new affiliate marketers, I think it is important to learn the importance of paying attention to the quality of the products and services you are trying to promote. At the very least try your best to find out whatever you can before promoting something.
Let me take another example.
Even without doing extensive keyword research, you can draw the conclusion that there are many people out there who really wish they could quit smoking. And sure enough, there are lots of smoking cessation products, aides and guides out there - many of which have affiliate programs.
You will quickly run into sites promising to help their customers kick their smoking habit in only a short period of time and almost effortlessly. The methods range from anything involving hypnosis to methods revolving around herbs and/or homeopathy, and many of them do a really good sales job of convincing you that what they offer is indeed the real deal. It is amazing but true, they claim. It seems like a real win-win for both the affiliate and the would be customer.
However, if you do some basic research on smoking cessation you will quickly find out that there is no research that support the effectiveness of such methods other than through the so called placebo effect. Affiliating with such products you would quite literally be selling snake oil.
You then learn that a good smoking cessation program can include various aids such as nicotine patches, gums etc. These you could indeed very ethically promote as an affiliate! However, there are also prescription medicines like Chantix that sell for way more. And there are certainly many cool looking sites offering these products that seem to have lucrative affiliate programs. So it might seem as a good deal to promote…
Only, it probably isn’t.
If you go to NABP you will quickly see that, in the US, there are only 15 approved online pharmacies. The list of sites that are specifically NOT recommended as safe to do business with is much, much longer. Turns out the site you where about to affiliate with is on that black list as well. Whoops…
One would perhaps think that the above example is redundant, certainly common facts as these should be obvious and known by everyone? But as many affiliates are more or less blindsided with stuff like effective sales pages, high commission payouts etc. I think this kind of basic research is often overlooked.
There are even people out there promoting herbal/homeopathy drugs there that claim to cure cancer for Pete’s sake!
On a handful of occasions I have come across people who blatantly say that “they are affiliate marketers - so they are prepared to do all kinds of shady stuff as long as it brings in the checks”.
I hope you aren’t one of them. And if you do a little checking before you select your next affiliate marketing product, you won’t be peddling junk by mistake either.
Merry Christmas With Internet Marketing Presents
As I am soon off to spend Christmas with the family, I just wanted to give any readers of this relatively new blog a couple of Internet marketing related Christmas presents. The gifts are two “old skool” books that you can start reading right now, free (I am actually using the word as it is described in the dictionary) and without any strings attached.
The first one is the book Unleashing the Ideavirus by Seth Goodin. That link goes directly to the PDF-file hosted on his blog.
Jay Levinson, author of Guerilla Marketing has said this about the author:
“Take Leo Burnett, David Ogilvy, Bill Bernbach and Mark Twain. Combine their brains and shave their heads. What’s left? Seth Godin. “
Among other things you probably know him as the man behind the immensely popular Squidoo. If viral marketing is something you are interested in, Unleashing the Ideavirus is definitely a book you don’t want to miss - if you really want to learn what the concept is all about, that is. Viral marketing isn’t some golden bullet, gizmo or secret sauce that you can just attach to anything and expect it to have profound effects. Or as Seth himself puts it:
“Being viral isn’t the hard part. The hard part is making that viral element actually produce something of value, not just entertainment for the client or your boss.”
The second book I wanted to recommend to you is one I haven’t read myself yet, but so far I think it seems to be an interesting read indeed. It is the 1998 book New Rules for The New Economy, by Kevin Kelly. In the middle of the dot com boom of the 1990s, Kelly seems to have written a book that in fact predicted much of the Internet of today, with all its very viable business strategies revolving around new types of communication (today known as social media) and the selling of ideas rather than all the physical stuff the Industrial era generated.
I have personally subscribed to this book in the form of an RSS feed, simultaneously taking it as an exercise to check what’s new in my Google feed reader more frequently (sort of an early new years resolution). But if you prefer you can also download the whole thing in PDF format.
With that I am off for my Christmas holidays, and would like to wish everyone a Merry Christmas and (in case I do not get around to writing another post before then) a Happy New Year!
Photo credit: Jonas N