Have you come across any interesting and/or useful iPhone apps lately?

A friend was showing me something called FourSquare the other day and I may well download it myself. It combines a social networking platform with a means of getting consumer reviews about all kinds of places that may be near to where you are.

I’m not convinced by the social part personally, but the rest sounds interesting.

Let me know if you are using it and what you think.

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Is Stealth Profit Machines, and the wave of similar big launches that have pushed the boundaries of what constitutes ‘legal, decent and honest’ in advertising the beginning of the end of Internet marketing as we know it?

You, like me, may be sick and tired of hearing about Chris Freville’s Stealth Profit Machines by now. I’m getting dozens of cloned emails a day from all the big-time affiliates – multiple copies from many of them.

The result is that Stealth Profit Machines has gone from nowhere to being very close to the the biggest selling product on ClickBank. It may even be at #1 by the time you read this.

Now, I have my differences with Chris about some aspects of the sales letter. I’ve expressed them here in Kickstart, and privately by email to Chris. I don’t approve of the ultra-hype and downright falsehoods that are so commonly used these days. It seems to me that copywriters are taking the easy way out, which is sad.

I’m also uncomfortable with the exit price offers, the endless upsells, downsells and cross sells, and the general feeling that all you want to do is buy a decent product but the owner has set a small dog to biting your ankles.

Tip: Don’t buy ANYTHING connected to Internet marketing without first trying to exit the sales page. More often than not you’ll be offered a cheaper price – sometimes for the same product, sometimes for a lesser offering, and if not, you can always go straight back.

Chris’ launch hasn’t been unusual in any of the marketing tactics it has used. Lot’s of big name affiliates motivated by the desire to out-sell each other, scarcity tactics, outright deceits justified in the name of ‘selling’, lots of controversy, crashed servers – you name it.

But what sets this one apart in one specific way is that behind it all there is a very good product being sold at a very decent price (whether you get the $10 discount or not).

That’s why I’m being a hypocrite and still promoting it. You can read my full review at http://imkickstart.com/course/reviews/stealth-profit-machines-warts-and-all-review/
If you want to create self-populating blogs with an absolute minimum of effort, for an incredibly low price, then SPM is just what you’ve been looking for. But take the sales letter with a big pinch of salt and don’t forget to try to leave before buying.

As to all the upsells, downsells and cross sells, none of them are necessary to make SPM work. They are icing on the cake that you can pick up if you want to.

One thing that has been pointed out to me and which I must pass on is that the content SPM pulls into your blog comes from EzineArticles. According the the very strict wording of their ToS, what SPM does with the articles breaks EA’s rules. I’ll have to leave it to you whether you are comfortable with that or not.

Maybe I’m naive, but I’m sure that a more ethical sales letter and upsell/downsell process would not have damaged its success. In fact, going by the number of people I’ve heard say wouldn’t buy because of the sales letter or the cloned emails, maybe it would have been MORE successful.

I’m sure that Chris and his top affiliates are a lot better off after this week. And good for them. I have no problem with people making money. And I have no problem with the launch marketing process, provided it is ethical.

But I suspect that Internet marketing itself is becoming poorer as a result of people getting tired of the ‘art of persuasion’ being overshadowed by the trend towards ‘market stall tactics’.

At what point did hypnotic marketing become hypenotic? And can we begin to remove the e before the FTC in the US and the ASA in the UK take notice and regulate all of us out of existence?

Not long, I suspect. And when they do, as always happens with government bodies trying to clean things up, they will probably be draconian in their approach and unreasonable in their regulations.

When that happens, a lot of people will be up in arms about the loss of their earning potential, but really, we all will have only ourselves to blame.

18 Comments »

It is sadly often the case that the bigger the launch and the more
big name marketers who are shouting its praises from the
rooftops, the poorer the product turns out to be. Hype, greed and
a whole lot of mutual back scratching all too often come first, and
the quality of the product comes last.

So it is that it comes as a great surprise and pleasure to find a
big launch product that is very low cost and does exactly what it
promises.

I shouldn’t be all that surprised because the big launch product
I’m talking about comes from Chris Freville, who, although he
runs with the gurus, has never forgotten that your reputation is
foremost, and quality products and first class customer service
are what that reputation is based on.

When I got my review copy of Chris’ new product, Stealth Profit
Machines, I expected the best – and got it.

The sales page has been written by the same copywriter who seems
to have cornered the market in big launches – and so it is full
of hype and tries to tease you into buying without actually
telling anything concrete about the product itself. I dislike
that style a lot, but I’m told it works.

I also dislike pile ‘em high, sell ‘em cheap supermarkets, but
they work brilliantly too – the biggest in the UK has just posted
profits up over 12% on last year!

So hype selling is probably here to stay whether we like it or
not. All the more reason then for people who write reviews to
fill in the blanks and balance the hyperbole.

The claim on the sales page is that in just 7 clicks of your
mouse you can have money-making websites set up and running
completely on autopilot.

Now I can tell you that that is true.

To make it completely clear though , yes, you click the mouse
button 7 times, but between those clicks there are a few bits and
bobs to fill in on the on-page forms. Its not hard stuff and only
takes a moment.

Here is what Stealth Profit Machines does…

It sets up WordPress Blogs for you – as many as you like on any
domain (although I would personally have one per domain),
installs a theme of your choice and all the plugins you need.

Apart from the bits you have to fill in on the form, I think that
lot takes up three of your clicks. It’s that simple.

Having done that, the software prompts you for a keyword and then
goes off and finds articles to be posted on the blog.
Automatically.

You are always in control and can pre-select which of the
articles are posted, or all of them if you so wish.

You can build a list of as many articles as you like.

Then SPM randomly posts them to your blog according to a pattern
you set once and then forget.

So far, so good. It all works perfectly, but it isn’t all that
different to several other auto blog products out there.

But then things get better.

Within SPM you can set up affiliate links (it doesn’t matter if
they are ClickBank, Amazon , Commission Junction or any other
affiliate program) and ‘attach’ those links to specific keywords
of phrases. So every time one of those keywords appears in an
article it is turned into a text link to the affiliate product.

But, cleverly, when you hover over the link, it is cloaked so
that it looks as if it is simply a link to another page on the
blog.

What you end up with is a blog that grows on its own, filled with
affiliate links that don’t look like affiliate links.

And all in seven clicks (and some form filling).

I love it and have already started putting up blogs on several
old domains I’ve had stored away and never found a use for. Now I
can very quickly dust them off and get them out there working for
me.

I can’t make comment yet on the earning potential that the sales
page talks about as my SPM blogs are still too new to be making
anything, but I can see how the claims could be perfectly
reasonable.

But think about it another way – how about you use links to your
other sites instead of affiliate links – you’d have a very quick
and easy way of developing a ton of backlinks.

Or use links to your own products.

The possibilities of this are enormous.

And yet, the price is laughably low.

One thing about the sales page I must comment on is the 300
copies limit. You know what I think about those false scarcity
claims, and, frankly, expected better from Chris. So I asked him
about it.

The copywriter du jour insists on putting it in his copy,
apparently, but here was an initial limit while the product was
in beta test, to make sure that their support team weren’t
overwhelmed if there happened to be an unforeseen bug or two. It
turned out that the launch went smoothly and no serious problems
were found, so the limit has been lifted and Chris is planning to
take it off the sales page.

To be completely transparent, you can replicate what Stealth
Profit Machines does with a collection of other software and
plugins. But the genius is in having put it all into one program
that is dead easy to use.

And to sell it at a price that you don’t have to think about.

http://urlnex.us/stealth-profit-machines

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