I was at the LFMpires seminar in Bristol (UK) over the weekend and got some serious food for thought.

Seminars are almost always great places to go – if only for the netwoking opportunities. The people you meet are always the high spot, but this time the speakers were top-notch as well. There were loads of them (including your’s truly) but for me, an American chap called Sterling Valentine really stood out. He had some great things to share and I recommend you look him up.

Thinking back to some of the personal stories that the successful speakers shared from the stage, there is one theme that keeps coming up. The people are different and the words describing their situations are different, but when you boil it all down, the people who are now enjoying success almost all went through a similar journey:

1. They were struggling in their lives. Some were flat broke and desperate, some were stressed to the max and at their wits’ end, some were on the verge of complete meltdown. Even allowing for a certain amount of poetic license in the stories told, the recurring theme is that their lives were way less than great and they were trapped.

2. They all tried everything. Or thought they did. They worked several jobs (if they had jobs) and flitted from one scheme to another.

3. Even when they discovered Internet marketing and saw the potential, they found it impossible to focus. Time and again we heard stories of people trying this, and failing, trying that, and failing, and then trying anything else that caught their attention. And failing.

4. Despite their phenomenal lack of success making money online, each and every one of them (and I’m including myself in the group too) absolutely knew – and I mean *knew* at a molecular level – that Internet marketing was real, making money online was possible and success was just a matter of putting the jigsaw pieces in their right places.

5. Success came *only* when, for whatever reason (everyone has their own reason) these people stopped chasing every rainbow and started focusing on creating a business. It came when they realized, at a deep level, that you fly higher and faster on a rocket that is blasting towards a target than on a balloon that is drifting in the breeze.

Everyone had their own solutions, strategies and skills, and each speaker was naturally ‘selling’ his or her own methods. But underneath it all, they were all saying the same thing: stop drifting, stop working hard at achieving nothing, stop being distracted. And learn to focus. You have no idea how much you can achieve if you only make a plan and follow it to the end.

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Let’s be honest, the launch of CBPredators has been a bit of a mess.

The basic site building part works fine, but other things promised on the sales page are mysteriously missing.

So what has been going on?

That question has been asked, quite vehemently, on the Warrior Forum over the last couple of days. There have been people shouting ‘scam’ and others talking about how they have already asked for a refund.

As I promoted this – and still stand by my recommendation, I felt it appropriate and honest to write an update of where we all stand. This is what I wrote…

I promoted CBPredators to my subscribers.

As with every product I promote, I asked the creators to give me access in advance of the launch so that I could test it out to make sure I was happy to put my name to it.

As a result, prior to the official launch I had created two sites and had shown them both to my subscribers.

One used the basic FlexSqueeze default theme (and a few articles added that I got from EzineArticles): http://www.factsaboutabs.com

The other had no extra articles, but I had made some changes to the look of the theme to make the site look a little prettier: http://pregnancy-miraclereview.com

I don’t know anyone else who promoted who took the trouble to do that. For me, making sure my readers know what they are getting is more important than positions on launch leaderboards.

The first site took me about half an hour to create – including adding the articles – because I was learning my way. The second one took about 15-20 minutes.

Both sites were indexed by Google quite fast (I added a link to one of them from my blog and put a link to site 2 in site 1) and although neither seem to be ranked high enough for me to find them, my stats show that traffic is starting to come from search engines. (Mainly from Bing). Only a trickle, admittedly, but it is early days.

When I was testing the program, and at the time I was telling my readers about the sites I’d built, I had not seen the sales page, so was unaware of the various promises made. As far as I was concerned CBPredators was simply a quick way to build optimized review blogs.

Could I make the sites without CBPredators?

Yes, of course. But not as quickly. I very much liked that the reviews were pre-written – yes, I knew I had to rewrite them, but it is way faster for me to rewrite something that exists than to think up something new to say on my own. That alone saved me a lot of time.

So I was happy to recommend CBPredators simply on that basis.

I didn’t really notice that there was a lack of training materials because there didn’t seem to me to be much that needed explanation.

That was all prior to the launch.

After the launch, and after I saw what was being promised on the sales page, I was a bit surprised to see how much hype was written.

The claim that you can make money after just 15 minutes is nonsense, in my opinion. I am sure my sites – if they continue to get traffic as they already are – will make sales. In fact, checking my ClickBank stats shows that there have already been ten order form impressions. No sales yet, but at this rate I’d be surprised if there wasn’t one soon.

There are also promises made for parts of the system that don’t seem to be finished yet. I’m not entirely happy about that either – if you are going to launch a major product, I think it should be at least 99% ready, not about 60% as seems to be the case here.

Mind you – they are not the first to rush a product to market and worry about getting it right later, and nor will they be the last.

What will be important is how fast they address the clear issues.

I note that there are more training videos there now – they are not great, but they are a start.

I don’t understand how the system can make other sites for you, ones not based on the prewritten reviews. This seems to be an important option, but I’d like someone to explain to me how to do it.

I also don’t understand how the system adds content, as promised in the sales letter. There doesn’t seem to be anything in my sites that could allow that. Perhaps that is something that is ‘coming soon.’

All in all, I was very happy to promote CBPredators and still stand by my initial recommendation. It is a great idea and as far as the basic sitebuilding is concerned, it works.

I would have much preferred them to have all their ducks in a row before launch, or to have been up front about the delays and either put it back a week or warn new subscribers that there is a hold up. A timetable of when stuff will be added or fixed would have been nice too.

I have skyped with Jerome Chapman and Mike Merz and know that they are committed, and working furiously behind the scenes, so have confidence that this will come good very quickly.

But to all those people who are crying ‘scam’ and rushing to ask for refunds, I have to ask ‘why?’

This is a ClickBank product. You have time to wait. Give it a few weeks and if they haven’t made good by then – that’s the time to ask for a refund. ClickBank isn’t going anywhere.

I’ve created and launched products of my own and understand teething problems. Maybe the problems that CBPredators face are of their own making, but let’s give them a chance to put things right before we send out the lynch mob.

Update: After I wrote the above, Chris Fox posted to answer some of the questions.

He has now promised that the plugin that will add content to your blogs automatically will be ready early next week.

He says that the facility to make blogs that are not based on the pre-written reviews is currently switched off, but will be put on line very shortly.

He tells us that there is already more training material available, with more on the way.

He advised customers that there was a webinar last night and will be another one tonight.

He assured us that they are getting on top of things, are currently training more support staff and sought to put our minds at rest that they are not going anywhere.

Frankly, they have a lot of money riding on this so it is not in their interest to screw it up any more than it already has been.

Now to answer one specific question that has been put to me – what should you put it the input fields for the FTP part of the setup?

Here are two different alternatives (note that the field names may be slightly different, but their order should be the same)-

In this one I have set up the blog on the root directory

Here I have set up the blog in a subdirectory called review1

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Over the weekend I was given exclusive behind-the-scenes access
to the new CBPredators software that is due to launch tomorrow.

It’s the one that was giving away free stuff last week (still is
if you hurry – http://urlnex.us/cbpredators ).

While I was very happy to point you at a bunch of useful
freebies, I was a bit concerned that CBPredators wouldn’t live up
to its promise and I’d have to recommend against buying it. After
all, freebies or not, I don’t want to start promoting stuff just
for the sake of it.

So it came as a relief to get inside and find that a lot of
thought has gone into it and – from my admittedly early
impressions – it seems to be a winner.

So what IS CBPredator?

It is a membership site (with a very low monthly fee – I’m not
allowed to say how much it is yet, but you will be very
pleasantly surprised) that lets you create fully-featured review
sites for some of the top selling ClickBank products.

The makers say that you can create a money-making website with
CBPredator in just 18 clicks of the mouse. I didn’t count, but
I’d say that is an accurate statement as the whole process is
dead easy and you are guided through the entire thing.

At the moment they have about 30 product reviews to choose from,
with more being added by professional writers all the time.

In case you are concerned that they will get so many members all
making sites based on the same reviews, let me put your mind at
rest. There are two safeguards to ensure that YOUR review will be
unique:

1. Each review will only be available to a limited number of
members. Once it has reached its quota it will be withdrawn.

2. In order to publish your site you have to make changes to the
review – spin the text to make it read differently. The process
to do this is very easy, and because it is written by you it will
always be human readable, and not auto-spun gobbledygook.

They don’t leave you high and dry on traffic either.

Building a website for you is one thing, but getting traffic to
it quite another. The guys behind CBPredator are aware that
traffic is a problem for many people and so a lot of effort will
be devoted to teaching you all about what works.

And naturally, the sites are built with the latest cutting-edge
ideas on SEO, so they should start getting natural search traffic
pretty quickly on their own.

The whole system has been built by Mike Merz, Chris Fox and
Jerome Chapman to automate their already established methods of
building successful, income-generating review sites. They know
their system works really well and have devoted their energies to
capturing that successful formula without compromising its
effectiveness.

In fact, their beta testing period has apparently netted the team
over $100,000 in profits!

I’ve already made my first CBPredators site, and can attest to
the fact that there was nothing complicated about the process
whatsoever. You don’t need to know anything about building
websites at all – the software does it all for you.

In fact, I’m very happy for you to take a look at my first
CBPredators site – a review of a ClickBank ebook called Truth
About Abs: The Facts About Abs – it took about half an hour
from start to finish – and that includes me going to GoDaddy to
buy the domain!

It is just a basic WordPress blog, but note that although I’ve
left it as it comes ‘out of the box’, the blog is totally
customizable – you can change all kinds of look & feel things if
you want to.

The basic setup gives you the blog and all the plugins you’ll
need, automatically created for you at the click of the ‘Publish
button’ and the main review page. It also includes those boring,
but important nuts and bolts pages that are linked to at the
bottom of the page: a privacy policy, terms of use, disclaimer,
contact us and about.

Once your blog is set up for you, it is dead easy to add pages
too. In fact, I’ve added 20 articles to be drip-fed into the blog
over the next week. I got them all from an article directory and
it cost me nothing – apart from about half an hour to post them
all.

This really is a very simple system to use.

The CBPredators sales page goes live at 3pm Eastern, tomorrow –
Tuesday April 20th – but I’m thinking that with the limits on the
number of people who can use each review, they may fill up all
their available places rather quickly.

For that reason, if you haven’t get yourself on their
announcement list already (by registering for the freebies they
are currently giving away) then do so now because it’ll be a case
of first come, first served.

And when launch time comes around tomorrow, get in quick at 3pm
EST (8pm UK time) in case there is a server meltdown!

I’m lucky to have review access right now, but I can tell you
straight that if that is revoked after the launch, I’ll be one of
the first in line to pay to join.

http://urlnex.us/cbpredators

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