Today I started the process of disassociating myself from GVO/Kiosk web-hosting. This was not an easy decision to make, as I have been a platinum member therefor some time and have multiple domains listed with them. And it was only in November that I renewed my annual platinum membership.
The truth is that I have been uncomfortable about their direction since they decided to become GVO. And since that time I have had a series of downtime related incidents that have caused me to look elsewhere.
I have never actively marketed GVO or Kiosk as a business opportunity, because frankly, I knew that the average punter could get cheaper hosting elsewhere. Occasionally I recommended Kiosk’s services to people who were serious about having multiple domains.
Briefly I toyed with the idea of becoming a webhosting reseller at a local level, but while I was toying with that idea, I began to have some serious service issues with GVO.
Some people (particularly MLM heavy hitters) love GVO, I have no argument with them. I have my MLM residual income streams that I find easier to promote naturally as part of my business and quite frankly, I could never really see how I could fit GVO neatly into my business.
I would have probably stayed with GVO, it it weren’t for some serious downtime issues I’ve had over the past week. It is a hassle to change hosting providers, particularly for somebody like me with seven active websites and a dozen or so more sitting on the server.
But matters came to a head and quite a few business associates pointed me in the direction of Host Gator which sells incredibly affordable web-hosting packages from as little as $4.95.
Unless you’ve been under a rock, this program has been everywhere and anywhere over the past month or so and I was intrigued by it, so I took a closer look.
Free and Powerful is essentially a sales funnel for GDI, a MLM program that has been around for eons in Internet Marketing terms and is a $10 monthly payment program that has earned SOME people a lot of money, but the point is that to earn good money with GDI, you need an army of trained affiliates recruiting for your downline.
Will you receive $50 in your Paypal account after signing up?
No
You have to earn another $50 before being paid.
Now let’s consider this carefully.
To earn that $50
You either have to spend $97 to “flip your your power switch” and earn $40 commissions on every referral that chooses to flip theirs or remain a free member and earn $17 on every member who flips theirs.
To be frank a $40 commission on a sale item of $97 isn’t great. In fact, it is at the lower end of the industry.
Let’s do some maths and see what’s going on here
Let’s say you join Free & Powerful and elect to “Flip You Power Switch”
You have spent$97
You have $50 owing to you from Free and Powerful
You sell a Power Switch option. You earn 40% commission on the sale that is $38.80.
You now have 88.80 owing to you from F & P and you have earned F&P $58.80. (Don’t forget they’ve already earned at least this much from you already when you elected to flip your power switch).
You still don’t have enough money to cash out, so you have to sell another Power Switch Option.
When you do you earn $38.80, bringing the amount owed to you to to $127.40. At the same time you are earning a tidy little sum of $58.80 for F&P who have now earned at least $176.40 from you.
How hard is this?
Well let’s think about it.
The vast majority of people who get involved with this are going to try and promote it using the generic pages generated by the system.
So they advertise it and network it as best they can.
Here is a fact.
It will take at least seven times for a person to view a site before they take the slightest interest in it.
Now if everybody is advertising the same page, who benefits from all the work?
Free and Powerful that’s who.
Everybody else id branding their business.
And in effect F& P is nothing more than a very clever sales funnel for GDI.
I don’t have a problem with that, particularly if you’re already promoting GDI, but a free $50? Nah, it’s not happening mate.
If you get in to this you’re going to have to work hard.
What about the Power Switch?
The Power Switch is effectively selling advertising space for business opportunities. On the face of itit sound like a good idea, and I spend a lot of money on advertising and I can tell you that there are many people like me ready to spend $97 on what they consider to be an effective advertising resource.
I wont be spending $97 here simply because all the focus and everything points to GDI. I can spend $97 elsewhere and get more targeted effective advertising
Is GDI a scam?
NO
Is Free and Powerful a scam
NO
Are they worth spending time on for a new Internet Marketer?
Err No.
I think I’ve covered the free and powerful angle sufficiently as for GDI, it may be suitable as part of an overall marketing plan and strategy but not as the only plan.
Time and time again I see people get sucked into a business opportunity without doing the preparation first. They are doomed to fail.
To start in this business you need four things.
A high level domain name. this mean.com or .net
Webhosting. Host Gator offer plans starting at $4.95 per month. (Beats GDI by a fair way)
A quality Autoresponder service. Their are three worth looking at. Traffic Wave, AWeber and Get Response. Traffic Wave is my choice.
I received an email from Mark Dulisse alerting me to the upcoming release of Gunshot Money.
I came across Mark when I purchased a high ticket item from him twelve months ago and his back up, support and training have been nothing short of phenomenal.
Mark knows what it’s like to struggle, and by his own admission was an angry person only a few years back hen nothing seemed to work and he was running around chasing his tail. Word has it that Alex Goad actually banned him from a forum because Mark was so negative about everything.
Alex actually challenged Mark to take one simple principle and work it and Mark took the challenge and his Internet Marketing star began to rise.
I am currently reviewing Mark’s new product Gunshot Money and while I haven’t formed a full conclusion at this stage, my initial thoughts that this is a very impressive instructional prduct well worth the investment to people looking to make serious money on line.
Over the past several weeks heavy hitting affiliate marketers have been bombarding your email in box with recommendations to buy the seven figure code-and the price hasn’t been cheap. The thing was going for $1297. I sure hope it delivers what it promises.
The only product of Mike Filsaime’s that I recommend is the free traffic toolbar Instant Buzz and I sure wasn’t attracted to this program even as an affiliate.
Filsaime delivers good content and good product, but I find most of what he delivers to be hype driven and in many cases people can get better value from products for far lesser cost. I am much more comfortable recommending Marketing On the Fringe or Mike Deluisse’s SEO Annihalator – both quality products without he hype fuelled hysteria of the seven figure code.
Now I wasn’t particulrly surprised when I got an email from Instant Buzz admin telling me that Filsaime was giving up Internet Marketing to take up software development and he was giving away the entire 7 figure code course for just postage and handling.
I’m pretty sure I got he same pitch for theButterfly Marketing Manuscript or whatever it was called, and as far as I can tell Filsaime is still doing Internet Marketing.
Now there are a couple of things here that require close analysis.
The first is How would you feel if you’d paid the $1297 three weeks ago only now to find that this “priceless” product was being given away?
Secondly you get the whole kit and caboodle but you have to take a fee trial of his marketing newsleter membership and then you’re locked into $19.95 per month and there’s an upsell (of course, there’s always an upsell)
I have no doubt that the product is good I just don’t like the marketing tactics – they leave a sour taste in my mouth.
If you want itj ust type7 figurecode in teh search engine box – good luck I’m sure you’ll do OK, but I refuse to be associated with it.
I’ve had the misfortune to have one of my sites hacked in to by some unscrupulous low life and I am here to tell you that it cost me a lot of money, damaged my reputation, may have cost me at least one friendship (they were sending obscene material through my domain name) and took me too many hours to repair the damage.
I was very pleased to receive the following warning from Joel Therien, CEO of Kiosk/GVO
Hi Mark
There has been a recent attack on many wordpress blogs that have been injecting Iframe attacks on accounts.
Here is what you need to know.
1. If you have no idea what wordpress is then do not worry, this is not affecting you.
2. If you do have a wordpress blog, make sure that you have upgraded your blog to the latest version.
In your wordpress admin you can automatically upgrade in there.
It seems many of the Iframe attacks are caused by an old version of Wordpress.
What hackers are doing is logging in via a insecure blog and then changing the index pages of all the pages on that specific server.
To prevent this from happening in the future just please make sure you are running the latest version of wordpress.
- Joel Therien President GoGVO.com
Joel has backed this warning up with several instructional videos one of which can be viewed here
There are a number of things that really impress me about Joel’s reaction to this. The first is how seriously he has taken the threat and the massive response he has personally made to what he perceives to be a very real and very serious threat to his customer’s business. You have to give him top marks for service
Secondly this response from Joel has come after he had to manage a massive campaign launch of GVO, complete with some very damaging abuse of his products from one stupid individual.
No wonder the guy looks pooped in the video, but he still took the time to helop his customers. Great stuff and just another reason to use GVO web-hosting.
Maybe I’m just in a bad mood today but I’m kind of getting annoyed by the constant stream of product launches with new “earth shattering, ground breaking methods” guaranteed to have you on clover in 90 days.
Let’s cut to the chase.
Most product launches go over old territory. Clickbank, adwords, adsense, cpa offers.
They all include screen shots, and “video proof “of their successes.
None of them tell you that these guys have probably worked their butts off for years to get the level of success that they claim to have. None of them say how much money they spend on Google Adwords. None of them say how many staff they have working for them.
How many people work for Mike Filsaime for example?
Do you think he sits at home by himself and has these wonderful ideas that he diligently writes the program for, then produces the product, writes the sales copy, prepares the launch material and buys the traffic.
If you do, then it’s time to wake up and smell the coffee.
I have nothing against Mike, he’s a great marketer with some good products, but his business is so upscale that you can’t hope to emulate him unless you’re prepared to upscale like him and to take the risks that he undoubtedly took.
Nothing is easy. It takes work, time, patience and research and frankly none of it is overly sexy (apart from when the cheques come in)
Yes there are good product launches that come along, I have reviewed several over the past 12 months.
Yes there are innovative ideas and techniques that people employ, but simply copying and pasting the published methods of an alleged guru along with the thousand or so others doing exactly the same thing won’t cut the mustard.
And here’s something else that these guru’s do time and again.
They get you in for $47, $77 or $97 and then they say look you’ll earn a little bit doing this but if you want to supercharge your efforts you need access to my inner circle and it costs (normally on a monthly basis)
And here’s what really gets up my nose with these “Adwords champions” at some point they’re going to spill the beans and say they learned everything they know from Perry Marshall.
The same book that I read once every couple of months. The same book that has taught me more about marketing than any other. The same Perry Marshall who’s emails I look forward to every week.
These guys know no more than I do about Adwords.
If you want to know about Adwords you go to the best source Perry Marshall. At the very least you should take his 5 day free course
I could go on, but the point I making is that without exception these people have been around for years. They know what they’re doing. they practice what they preach and they stand by their products.
They don’t regurgitate somebody else’s drivel wrap it in electric fluff and then spruik it through JV partners. They don’t have to.
MPAM (Massive Passive Advertising Machine =) was perhaps the first truly helpful resource that I found on the Internet and it has to be said that several years ago MPAM was being advertised seemingly by every legitimate and well intentioned marketer on the net.
MPAM was an educational program designed to show people how to legitimately design and profit from their own websites, particularly profiting from the easy money streams like Google adsense.
I learned a lot from it and when I thought that it had taught me it could, I moved on, aware that while it was a wonderful program, with a sound affiliate structure that my weakness was recruitment to programs.
Occassionally, I would sneak back to take a look at what the owner Michael Russell was doing, but generally I had moved on to other horizons.
I was somewhat taken aback recently to find that Michael has taken this highly educational and honest site offline, citing health reasons as the main cause.
The Internet Marketing world is poorer for the loss. Sincere honest program owners like Michael Rusell who develop hype free quality programs like MPAM are as scarce as hen’s teeth. I hope that he overcomes his health issues and returns with a revamped MPAM sometime in the future.
Internet Marketing can be confusing and intimidating to novice marketers who are assaulted with a variety of techniques methods and money making schemes that invariably they either become prey to one of the many “money for old rope” programs or they throw their hands in the air in frustration and walk away.
I realised this problem several years ago and put together a basic downline building program that combined a free money program with a traffic builder and then tried to instruct people to leverage their money into a series of profitable programs.
It was an ambitious venture that had one major failing – there were too many steps.
So I’ve dusted the program off and re-jigged it for simplicity and ease of use.
The Profitsentinel downline builder remains free to join and still combines a traffic builder with a free money program.
It however, no longer has a series of programs to join, just several key recommendations of quality programs and services.
Additionally, the Profit Sentinel Downline builder gives back door access to over 350 Paid Survey Sites.
The benefits of joining the program are
It’s free to join
Pro membership option pays 100% commissions
It virally builds traffic
It virally builds free income
It gives a means to motivate downline members in any program, by providing proven pathways to generate income
It provides downline building options for key residual income generators Traffic Wave and Kiosk(Now being marketed as GVO)
Not only is Traffic Wave a great autoresponder service with a great referral/commission plan, it offers a really simple and effective ad tracking service that I find particularly suited to traffic exchanges and most free advertising resources. The fact is that you really need to know what sort of reaction your advertising is getting and how slight tweaks to headlines, lead capture pages, splash pages and sales pages can all make significant differences to click through rates, lead capture and ultimately sales. Realistically you should be tracking and split testing every element of the sales process and keeping and refining what works best, while discarding what doesn’t work. Success with advertising does not happen overnight – there are several elements that you need to refine and craft so that you can maximize profits. These include
the initial advertisement (you should always have two variants)
The place of advertisement -if you’re going to spend some money you need to know that there is a live responsive audience viewing the ad
Your squeeze page (again at least two variants)
Your sales page
Your email follow up – open rates and click through rates
This takes a little time to master,but frankly if you’re not tracking your results, you simply cannot know what is working.
You simply must start tracking your advertising You simply must have an auto response service. Traffic Wave offers both. Check out how easy the ad tracker is to use in this video.
Affiliate doubler is a great piece of software that has been around for sometime but I still find to be particularly effective – especially so on Traffic Exchanges and other free advertising resources.
If you’ve ever used traffic exchanges, you will have undoubtedly encountered the Affiliate Doubler software and wondered how it’s done.
You will be using a Traffic Exchange and then find a pop up advertising a course or affiliate program seems to appear in your screen, or sometimes at the foot of your page.
More often than not, it’s affiliate doubler software in action.
This is perfectly legal software that offers several quality advantages.
perhaps the most important of all is it’s link cloaking capacity.
If you’ve been around for any length of time at all online, you will undoubtedly be aware that Affiliate commissions are stolen by unscrupulous buyers when they realize that the product being recommended to them comes from a place like Clickbank.
The easiest way for people to recognize a Clickbank link is when the hop link displays in the address screen, even when you use a URL redirect, the Clickbank link will show up.
Affiliate doubler cloaks the link entirely, so that the affiliate address never appears anywhere – link cloakers cost a pretty penny by themselves, but this is simply a by product of an excellent product.
So what does Affiliate doubler do exactly?
Well I’ve put together a video that shows one way I use it, but the possibilities for this product are only limited by your imagination.
Here are some suggestions for your use of affiliate doubler.
Every mailing you send to your mailing list could contain two links – the one to your sales page and a pop up detailing some handy bonuses that you may offer with the purchase of the product
You could use affiliate doubler links to drive traffic to CPA offers where you get paid for leads
You could have affiliate doubler links embedded in your website so that when somebody clicks on a link they will see two sites (either an opt in button, or a discount./bonus offer)
You could simply buy traffic from a source that allows pop ups and have two different opt in pages .
Affiliate doubler is one of the few pieces of software that I’ve used pretty much consistently for three years. I highly recommend it.
AFFILIATE DOUBLER BONUS
As I’ve said this is one piece of software that I absolutely recommend provided by somebody I completely trust. I want you to share in the benefits, so I have put together a pretty good bonus package for you.
You can access affiliate doubler membership for as low as $19.95 per month and I’m so convinced that you will benefit from this I’ve put together a bonus package worth TEN TIMES that amount.
Here’s what you get in bonus’ from me when you elect to take Affiliate Doubler membership for one month.
AFFILIATE DOUBLER BONUS PACKAGE
Facebook is fast becoming the preferred social networking site. Discover how you can profit from this social media phenomenon (Value $19.95)
Web Graphics can be the difference between appearing professional and looking like a rank amateur. get Louis Allports easy to follow instructions when you use Affiliate Doubler through me Value $29
The Money is not in the list – it’s in list management. This insightful valuable eBook will show you how to grow a responsive list of subscribers (Value $19)
Here’s what you need to do to double your affiliate traffic, cloak your links and claim these valuable bonus’ at the same time.
1.Purchase membership at affiliate doubler right now by clicking here
2.Email me at admin@profitsentinel.net with copies of your receipt details with the subject line AFFILIATE DOUBLER BONUS and I will email you directly the zip files containing these outstanding products.
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