In this case, however, it’s actually a pretty decent trade off.

The Authority Codes is a visually appealing, super-slick, 21-page PDF document that shows you how to use the SEO Quake FireFox plugin along with 12 customized search queries (these are the “authority codes” Ryan is talking about) that will help you find credible blogs where you can post a comment and obtain an in-pointing link.

What’s so “authoritative” about these potential links?

Well, in addition to searching opportunities within your typical “.com” extension, you’ll also be looking for “.gov”, “.edu”, and “.org” opportunities as well. The thinking goes like this…

A link from a “.gov”, “.edu”, and “.org” extension carries more weight from Google, as it is more likely to be credible. Ryan goes a little over the top (in my opinion anyway) on the whole “value” thing. He puts it this way…

“In fact, most experts agree that Google multiplies their value by as much as 5X over a regular page with the same PR.”

Unfortunately, this statement is completely unsupported or substantiated by anything remotely resembling evidence. I know of no expert who claims this – since Google and Google only knows the value of any in-pointing link, it would be foolish to do so – as there is simply no way to conclusively prove this assertion.

Not to diminish the value of any decent in-pointing link, but I recently argued that it makes absolutely ZERO sense for Google to arbitrarily assign a ton of value to a link just because it happens to sit on a certain extension (in the aforementioned article I provide an example of a post full of link spam residing on a .edu domain. Google has no doubt programmed its spider to search for spam flags, which I highly doubt are deactivated on these respected extensions).

I also take issue with Ryan’s Multiplier Chart, which is used to demonstrate the “fact” that a single link from a PR 5 web page is “worth” 555 links from PR 1 pages. Again I have to ask; where is this data coming from? Because once again, unless it comes from Google’s Webmaster Guidelines pages (and I assure you it does not),  it’s mere speculation.

There is nothing present in this document to substantiate any of the more “enthusiastic” assertions.

For the most part though, it’s a pretty solid document; common sense strategies on making value-added posts in addition to using the codes to unearth decent (and genuine) link-building opportunities.

Bottom line – download and use the Authority Codes.

It’s worthwhile.

One caveat…

Ryan is what I would call an “aggressive marketer.” Now, I realize he has GIVEN me something valuable with the Authority Codes and in return, I am willing to check out his marketing messages.

Occasionally.

Not every freakin’ day.

I unsubscribed from his list within a week. The good news is that he completely honors unsubscribe requests and I have never received another e-mail from him. My recommendation therefore is this – check out the Authority Codes and see what else Ryan has to offer. If you get tired of being marketed to, unsubscribe.

After all, that’s what I did.

Right now, I’m enjoying tinkering a bit.

Stay tuned!

Case in point; if you want to talk authoritatively about a product or system, it helps to have some first hand experience with it. If you do not – and to my knowledge Lis Sowerbutts is not, nor has even been a Site Build It! owner, it’s a bit difficult to allot a ton of credibility to anything the author says.

It’s also a little annoying for marketers like myself who go out of their way to be informed before opening a discussion with an audience about a certain product or service (I recently reviewed Adam Short’s Niche Profit Classroom; I paid the $67/month subscription fee, learned the system and wrote about its Pros and Cons. It took many hours of work to do so).

It’s too bad Lis couldn’t be bothered to conduct a real review of SBI!. She’d have a lot more credibility if she did. Because as things stand, she appears to be little more than an ill-informed, lazy, malicious twit with a “bone to pick.”

Nonetheless, targeting the word “scam” along with “SBI!” and “Site Build It!” is a smart keyword targeting strategy, no doubt about it. If you are researching a product or service and are tired of reading glowing testimonials, nothing brings the comments of the disgruntled to the surface faster than a trip to your local search engine and a search for the “name of relevant product/service” plus the word “scam”.

But marketers aren’t shy about targeting these keywords either. In this case, a search for SBI! scam isn’t bringing up the genuine comments of unhappy customers,  but a seriously unflattering discussion of SBI!, written by an individual who knows next to nothing about it.

Before I continue with this discussion, let me digress for a moment…

First, unlike Lis, I consider myself well-qualified to discuss SBI! in detail. I worked full time for SiteSell.com in numerous capacities for 6 years, finishing up as Site Build It! Product Manager in December 2006 (a cancer diagnosis ended my term at SiteSell, and I work for them only in a very limited capacity now). I’m also a well-established, successful Internet Marketer who makes his living online and has done so for many years (see more about me).

I know what you’re thinking…

… here comes a PRO-SBI! rant from someone who’s as biased as Lis.

Not so.

Obviously I feel strongly about SBI!, but I’ve always been honest about who is best suited for this tool.

In my opinion, not everybody needs it.

Advanced marketers may not, especially if their requirements are minimal. You’ll notice that this site, for example, is not an SBI! site. It’s based on the Word Press Platform. As a marketer, I have an innate curiousity about everything web-based. Thus, I thought I’d give Word Press a try. No biggie.

Don’t make the mistake of assuming that because this site isn’t based on the SBI! platform, its value is diminished in some way.  I simply do not need the advanced functionality afforded by this tool here. For those who do however (my girlfriend Marilyn uses SBI! for her flower arrangement and information site, as does my friend and bandmate from The Big Bang, Ian Kurz, with his Everything About Camping site), it is invaluable.

Anyhow, let’s get back to the “SBI! Scam.”

Before I begin debunking some of Lis’ comments, let’s define the word “scam.”

Scam: A fraudulent business scheme; a swindle.

If you are familiar with SBI!, you’ll know a couple of things…

• It is taught at over 30 colleges and universities, including Penn State and the University of Arizona.
• Potential customers are clearly informed that SBI! is not a “get rich quick” (GRQ) scheme. In other words, don’t buy Site Build It! expecting to get rich quick. It ain’t gonna happen.
• Potential customers are informed – on the order page no less – that they need to bring BAM (brain, attitude, and motivation) to the table to succeed. Or, to put it another way… don’t expect a push-button solution to generating revenue. The system works, but YOU have to work it, and you will need to do plenty of  THINKING along the way.

I don’t know about you, but to me, this message isn’t consistent with a “scam” of any sort.  To me, it sounds a lot like a warning: if you think you can sleepwalk through this process, pressing a few buttons here and there and then expect to be living on a beachfront somewhere within a few weeks, sipping daiquiris while your chauffeur polishes the Bentley, you’re very much mistaken.

And it’s inconceivable to think that the SiteSell brass managed to hoodwink the administrators of 30 respected education institutions into using SBI! as a teaching tool.

Obviously then, SBI! is no scam.

So let’s address some of Lis’ arguments against SBI!…

1) You don’t own your domain: Initially, Lis insisted that you don’t own your own SBI! domain, based on the fact that Anguilla-Beaches.com was registered in Ken Evoy’s name (I’ll explain why it is in a moment). Then she updated her comments with the truth (that you do), but then insisted that this is still “disingenuous marketing.”

Interesting. You see, there’s nothing “disingenuous” about owning a domain name. You either own it, or you do not. Since you do own your SBI! domain name, as advertised, Lis’ inability to offer a full retraction on this statement is evidence of a strong anti-SBI! bias.

Posting this in the first place is also evidence of something I said earlier; Lis is too lazy to do any real investigating into SBI!. If she would have spent 5 minutes on Anguilla-Beaches.com, she would have realized the site belongs to Nori Evoy (Ken’s daughter). Since Nori started the site when she was 13, it makes sense to be registered in Ken’s name.

Then she could have performed a Better-Whois on any of the zillion sites featured on the SiteSell results pages to discover that yes, you do own your own domain name.

But she didn’t.

What does that tell you?

2) You can’t move your site to cheaper hosting.

Again, Lis has to retract this statement, indicating is that is IS possible, but apparently “quite difficult.”

Once again, a little research done beforehand would have prevented Lis from putting her “foot in it” once again.

Worse, there’s absolutely no context provided here either, which means you’re getting an artificially “negative” view of the transferring process.

For instance…

As I indicated earlier, this site is based on the Word Press platform. And while I could easily transfer it to another hosting service that supported the Word Press platform, it would be a serious P-I-T-A to move it to a hosting platform that supported a different format, like Movable Type, Blogger or straight HTML.

And that’s why this argument is flawed; you’re not switching hosting – you’re looking to move material provided in a specialized format to another different specialized format – either HTML, a blogging platform, CMS platform, or whatever. And that’s a P-I-T-A no matter what you are using. In other words…

… this is an issue not exclusive to SBI!.

In other words, while its unfair to call SBI! a website building platform (because it’s so much more than that) you must do your due diligence before picking a specific platform for your web business because you do not want to have to change it later.

3) Using Alexa to validate SBI!’s traffic-driving ability is deceitful because…

“Alexa ranks just proves that you have a bunch of internet marketers visiting your site - probably because of the link from the sales page - as they are the only people who use the Alexa tool bar. Internet marketers are unlikely to buy your homemade chocolates or rent your condo in Puerto Rico.”

This is another perfect example of how lazy Lis is; once again she has made a series of unsubstantiated statements which, like the ones she’s already had to retract, are easily demonstrated to be inaccurate.

In her rather rambling statement above she has indicated…

• The SiteSell “results” page (a page that illustrates the effectiveness of the SBI! process by featuring select sites and its corresponding Alexa ranking) is worthless, since the only reason why the site in question HAS an Alexa ranking is because it is visited by internet marketers who have the Alexa toolbar installed.
• Only Internet Marketers use the toolbar, which infers that all Alexa data is incredibly skewed and offers no value at all.

To demolish these arguments, let’s first see what Alexa says about how it obtains its data…

“Alexa’s traffic rankings are based on the usage patterns of Alexa Toolbar users and data collected from other, diverse sources over a rolling 3 month period.”

So by its own admission, Alexa compiles its data from numerous sources. This makes sense, since only a tiny percentage of surfers browse with the toolbar. If it only used this data to compile rankings, most web sites would receive no Alexa at all. Yet relatively few do, which is indicative of much more diverse sources of data.

Secondly, if Alexa compiles data over a 3 month period, there will be a 3-month lag before any site’s information is updated. In other words, the sites appearing on SiteSell’s “results” page – especially the non-internet marketing sites that according to Lis only have an Alexa ranking because they are on the “results” page – would have to be included with no Alexa ranking at all. This would mean that for a period up to 90 days, prospective SBI! customers would see tons of poorly performing sites as a “testament” to the effectiveness of SBI!.

Hardly good for business.

Obviously then, any site included on the “results” page must obtain a decent Alexa ranking on its own, or it makes ZERO sense to feature it on an SBI! PREselling page.

Two last things to think about…

If it were SO easy to manipulate Alexa rankings for your own financial benefit, why is SiteSell the only one to be doing so? Why wouldn’t any of the zillion other website building services use it to demonstrate proof of their own traffic-building systems?

And if SiteSell is manipulating the data, why aren’t they being sued by Alexa?

4. The SBI! Search Engine (SE) Tool submits your site to the SEs, including Google. According to Lis, you should never submit your site to Google.

Really?

According to Google’s own Webmaster guidelines, you should.

I don’t know about you, but I know who I will choose to believe.

5. SBI! advocates the use of PPC (pay-per-click search engines) which…

“…is as about as risky as say foreign exchange dealing as it is not something any new on-line marketer should be doing.”

Uh-huh. Now it’s just getting silly.

A couple things here (and I hate to beat a dead horse, but Lis would have known this had she any real experience with SBI!)…

• Pay-per-click (PPC) advertising is NOT risky. As the owner of an offline business, I can tell you I would love to have more advertising opportunities like PPC, where I can easily select my audience, determine the maximum I will pay per visitor, and measure my conversion rate. In the offline world, I pay a ton of money for advertising and have almost no idea how well it fares for me. Online, you determine what you will pay per visitor, and who those visitors will be. PPC is only risky if you don’t do any research or elementary math, and throw a pile of money at poorly performing keywords and pages.
• The Site Build It! documentation does address PPC advertising in detail, but it does not “advocate” it. PPC is an essential element of online marketing, and depending on the nature of your business, may or may not make sense for you. This is completely addressed in the SBI! Action Guide. Obviously, advertising only makes sense if you can obtain a decent ROI, which usually means you need to be selling your own product or service. But if you can make $50 for every $10 spent on PPC, why on earth wouldn’t you do it? At the very least, you need to be educated about the opportunity.
• For brand new sites that do sell products/services, PPC brings traffic, customers and newsletter subscribers immediately, so your business can start being profitable.

6) “You don’t need a newsletter or autoresponder unless you are selling crap.”

In over 10 years of doing business online, this is the first time I have heard ANYONE say this (having made it this far through her “review” it really shouldn’t surprise me to hear something this dumb).

It doesn’t matter which marketing gurus you worship at the feet of, they all say the same thing; a newsletter or autoresponder is paramount to ANY online business.

Yes, regardless if you are selling anything or not. It is the only way to stay in touch with your visitors, build trust and rapport with them, and to encourage return visits. If you are actually building a business online – regardless of how you monetize it – you need visitors. More importantly, you need repeat visitors who trust you. The easiest way to accomplish this is with a newsletter and/or autoresponder series.

7) At $300/year, Site Build It! is expensive. All you need to spend is $10 on a domain name, $5/month for hosting, and supplement that with some free tools used in conjunction with WordPress.

Sigh. Let’s go through the reasons why this is yet another ridiculous statement…

1. SBI! is not expensive. The minimum investment for ANY successful online business will be…
   $10/month hosting (I would not recommend paying any less for hosting, regardless of what Lis says. As with everything, you get what you pay for. Cheap hosting is often inferior hosting).
   $10/year for your domain name
   $19.95/month for your autoresponder which you MUST have if you are serious about succeeding online.
   That’s a grand total of $370/year, $70 more than SBI!, which offers all the above, plus tons of other features as well.
2. Compared to other online business building services, SBI! is cheap. For instance, Adam Short’s Niche Proft Classroom (which I recently reviewed) costs $67/month.  What about tools that offer similar functionality to those already present in SBI!? I recently played with a keyword research tool, Cash Keywords Pro and it also costs $67/month. SBI! contains a ton of cutting edge keyword research tools already… no need to pay anything extra.
3. SBI! is a LOT more than a series of tools and simple web hosting. It’s the process outlined in the Action Guide that is so invaluable. One thing Lis says is that her suggested bundle of tools is not an “all the tools in one place” solution, and “you’ll have to learn some stuff along the way.” Once again, Lis has FAILED. This time, to account for your time being worth anything. Learning how to build a successful web business from scratch can literally take you years of trial and error. Who do you ”listen” to? Whose ideas are credible? Every guru seems to have a different idea… and product to sell you. What are the best options for your business? Is your business even viable? From keyword targeting to SEO, from web copy to autoresponders and newsletters, from monetization to link building, from social media marketing and Twitter, there’s a ton to know and learn.In short, what every budding newbie marketer needs isn’t a bunch of free stuff  and an invitation to “go build your business as you see fit.” What they need is a proven, concise, step-by-step process how to build an online business. And THAT is what SBI offers. And THAT is its biggest value.

8. SBI! is a scary cult.

Which sounds more reasonable to you…

1) The SEO of SiteSell.com, Dr. Ken Evoy, is a diabolical mind control expert. From his bunker in the Caribbean, he controls numerous satellites and operates sophisticated “world-hypnosis” machines which turn innocent surfers into slathering, raving pro-SBI! fanatics.

2) SBI! works (if you work it). This leads to an ecstatic group of individuals who cannot believe their good fortune; the “stay-at-home-mom” doesn’t have to go back to work, but can enjoy raising her daughter. The retired couple are happily supplementing their income and can now follow up on the plans they had before the credit crunch.

Is it any wonder folks like these are both excited by SBI! and eager to share the good news?

I can relate myself; I remember back when the Internet first started earning me a living. I scarcely dared breathe for fear of killing the “goose that laid the golden egg.” It’s an exhilarating feeling - while you sleep, affiliate commissions pile up. As does Adsense and Chitika revenue. Feel like taking a day off? Go for it… the money keeps on coming in.

When it happens, it’s amazing. Unbelievable, in fact. And the way your life opens up? The freedom you now have is incredible.

So I understand the enthusiasm.

But it makes me wonder if Lis actually makes any money online. If she did, she would not mistake genuine enthusiasm for the “evidence of a cult.”

Oh yeah… and I have been in Dr. Evoy’s office several times, and never once did I see any mind control devices.

So there you have it. A complete breakdown of Lis’ BOGUS SBI! review.

What’s the moral of the story?

Always do your own due diligence.

Question those who talk with authority, but have no practical experience with what they deem to be an expert on. Be wary of those who have to retract statements that have been proven inaccurate, especially when rudimentary research would have established the facts beforehand. And watch for statements that are completely at odds with readily established facts (i.e. “you don’t need a newsletter unless you are selling something”).

Of course, always, always, always look for evidence of an ulterior motive. Lis’ article is packed with them.

As for me, well… SBI! may be for you, or it may not be for you. Regardless, it is an amazing tool and you deserve to know the truth.

Oh yes, and one more thing; SiteSell has prepared a response to Lis’ article. You may wish to read the official response to the whole “SBI! scam.”

The thinking goes like this…

… The “.edu” domains are usually maintained by academic institutions that have a lot of credibility, and therefore garner instant respect with Google. The “.org” domains, maintained by respected organizations and associations, receive the same.

Therefore, obtaining an in-pointing link from such a domain offers much more impact than from a simple “.com” or “.net” domain (”.gov” links, or links from government sites, are also seen as credible and highly valuable). That’s the argument being made by various marketers anyhow – certainly the ones trying to sell you the software that locates the “.gov”, “.edu”, or “.org” links.

But are these links really all they are cracked up to be?

I spent a morning doing some searches for “.edu” blogs targeted to my UltimateFatBurner.com site in an attempt to find some genuine link building opportunities. What I found wasn’t too confidence-inspiring. Here’s a perfect example of what I’m talking about, from the Stanford Graduate School of Business, no less (this is not an isolated example, by the way).

This page, which has a Google Page Rank of 2, contains a short post about Oprah Winfrey’s endorsement of Wasa crackers. Since it’s a blog, people are offered the ability to post their comments. And post their comments they did; I gave up counting after 50 – there’s at least 100 comments here. And almost NONE of them are relevant to the topic at hand - all blatant promotional material with links to various weight loss gadgets, diets and supplements.

Now believe it or not, this is a moderated blog. Yep, someone had to approve each one of these spammy posts (incidentally, the same moderator obviously didn’t see my on-topic comment as being particularly flattering towards Oprah, and rejected it).

Now frankly, I don’t care what the gurus say…

Google is not going to arbitrarily assign a lot of weight to a link from an “.edu.” page simply because it resides on an “.edu” page.

It simply doesn’t make any sense.

First…

I’m not a programmer or a techie, but I can think of a dozen ways to program a spider to flag link spam, regardless of the domain of origin. It would be programming child’s play to identify the responses to the above posts as self serving link spam, and down-grade their importance accordingly.

Do you really think Google has programmed its spider to ignore blatant spam “flags” as soon as it visits a “.edu”, “.gov”, or “.org” domain?

Regardless of whether or not domains hosted on these extensions tend to deliver greater value on a whole than their “.com” and “.net” counterparts,  it doesn’t make sense to believe so.

Secondly…

In the face of the example above (again, not an isolated example) you simply cannot argue that all domains with the .edu, .org, and .gov extension always post high quality material. Obviously, they do not (there’s nothing wrong with the post itself, of course, but 99% of the comments should not have seen the light of day). And if that’s the case, it’s tough to argue that Google arbitrarily assigns a ton of link credibility to any and all links from these domain extensions.

Bottom line?

You can bet your bottom dollar Google is well aware that marketers are trying to capitalize on the authority of these “respected domains” and has tweaked their algorithyms to adjust for it.

To argue this is both counter-intuitive, and reflective of an ulterior motive (i.e., the selling or promotion of a product that locates such links).

At the end of the day, I have a tough time seeing how a post on this particular blog would provide any link value to any web site.  And if it does, you can bet it won’t do so for long.

Of course, genuine, quality links will still count. As they always have. From any domain extension.

But as far as obtaining a handful of .edu, .gov. or .org links as the solution to your link-building woes, forget about it. Worthwhile ones are going to be really tough to get, since you will need to contribute something of exceptional quality for the moderator to approve your comment.

And the easy ones?

Google will effortlessly identify them as link spam, and penalize them accordingly.

In the end, I have this advice…

If a link is incredibly easy to obtain, it’s usually worth very little. Webmasters and moderators of quality resources (regardless of the domain extension) know what they have, and are not going to jeopardize their site’s integrity and credibility by posting off-topic comments with spammy links.

Link building is hard, tedious work. There’s no way around it. There’s just no easy way to obtain worthwhile, high-authority in-pointing links.

I rest my case.

I bought the JVC Everio, which appeared to offer all the “bells and whistles” I needed, including a “one touch upload to YouTube” option which I assumed meant that the camera exported video in a format supported by YouTube.

Oooops!

It doesn’t.

JVC (and to my understanding, several other brands of camcorders as well) exports finished videos in a proprietary “MOD” format. The problem with this is that this format is not supported by any of the video editing software I own (Camtasia and Windows Movie Maker).

That means in order to do ANYTHING with your video, you must first convert it into a more common file format supported by popular video editing software  (yes, with the Everio you can upload your video directly to YouTube, but you can’t edit it first – and you’ll need to at least add a title screen or two before making your video live).

In order to do this, you’ll need to purchase video converter software. Yeah I know – more stuff to buy.  However, most of the more popular options offer a free trial option so you can try before you buy. I experimented with several, but in the end settled with NCH’s Prism Video Convertor which was the only one I could get to work consistently. You can download a free trial and read customer reviews at Download.com.

So learn from my mistakes; when you’re shopping for a camcorder to make your online marketing videos, ask your sales rep what format exported video is in; my recommendation is for MPEG formats. You’ll save yourself a TON of headaches!

I plunked down my credit card, and signed up for the “basic” version of the program, which costs $67/month.

So what is Niche Profit Classroom, exactly?

Well, it’s the brainchild of Adam Short, and basically it’s a complete system he developed to enable you to build small, profitable niche businesses from scratch. In this case, your small niche business will consist of…

• A squeeze page, designed to obtain the e-mail address of your visitor in exchange for a free report.
• A sales page designed to sell the e-book you will have created in this niche.
• 10 or so keyword focused content pages (KFCPs) that will drive traffic from the Search Engines and PREsell your offering.
• Up to another 10 keyword-focused articles which will be submitted to article directories for in-pointing links and additional traffic.
• A download page for your customers to obtain their purchase.

And that`s it.

However, if you visit the Niche Profit Classroom at the time of this writing, you’ll be able to watch a short video of Adam, who early on asks the viewer, “what if almost all the conceptions you have right now about building a profitable web site were totally false?”

Nothing against Adam, but this is complete nonsense. It`s marketing, plain and simple.  There is absolutely nothing new about what Adam is doing – it`s been done for years by savvy net-marketers. The only way his system will challenge your conception of the way things are done online is if you have ZERO experience in the Net marketing field.

The difference is, he has developed a system so YOU can do it.

With that said, let`s get down to the nitty gritty. How good is the system, and just what exactly is included in your purchase? Let’s login and have a look…

As you can see, the back end of Niche Profit Classroom is pretty impressive looking, but we can distill everything here into…

1) Help & Instruction: One thing you cannot complain about at NPC, and that’s a lack of instruction. There’s a TON of it, all provided in video format. Each major section of the niche site building process is identified and then broken down into a series of videos.

As you can see here there are 8 sections: An Overview, Market Selection, Domains & Hosting, Website Content, List Building, Website Launch, Traffic Generation and Looking Forward. Obviously, each of these topics covers a pretty wide range of material; so these are general headings at best. For example, the section I have highlighted here, “Market Selection” consists of 28 videos, broken down into…

• Introductory material (market psychology, market factors, install SEO Quake into FireFox)
• Introduction to keyword research
• MoneyWord Matrix keyword research
• Expanding your keyword set Prt I
• Expanding your keyword set Prt II
• Accelerated Market Research
• Introduction to the Market Profiler
• Market Profiler Research (Amazon, ClickBank, forums, Adwords, etc)

Given that the help has to assume you have absolutely ZERO experience with the fundamentals of building an Internet business, you can just imagine how much material is presented here. Literally, it starts pretty much at the `this is a keyword` stage. And while tons of instructional material is certainly a good thing, it was the help, the sheer volume of it, and the format in which it was presented that frustrated me SO much in the end. Let me explain…

First, I do agree that using `video lessons` to educate your customer is a good idea… when they are presented as an adjunct to PDF files. With Niche Profit Classroom, there is only video instruction – there are no printable PDF files to be found (at the time of this writing, anyway). Since you can`t quickly skim a help file to see what you`re up to speed on and what you are not, you are forced  to watch all videos to ensure you don`t miss some piece of vital `specific to this tool` information. For experienced marketers like myself, it is hair-pullingly frustrating.

Next, the sheer volume of material means you need LARGE blocks of time to make it through any section of the Classroom uninterrupted. If you happen to have a family and a job, this can be a problem. For instance, I asked my girlfriend to proceed through the process to see if she would like to give it a try. She works long hours and only has a couple of days off in a two week period. Despite allotting generous amounts of time to the videos on days off and the few evenings a week when she did not return from work exhausted, it took her weeks to get through the Classroom.

I didn`t fare much better; with two growing, successful online business, an offline business and occasional consulting, huge blocks of time are an issue for me too; with conflicting priorities in the way, it took me over 3 weeks to get through all the videos. Not surprisingly, by the time I completed the final section of the classroom, I had forgotten vital elements of earlier lessons. And good luck finding the stuff you want to review; with umpteen zillion videos spread over 8 sections, it`s almost impossible to find a specific detail or strategy easily.

Of course, if there were accompanying PDF help files, none of this would be a problem – it would be easy to locate forgotten critical information, and quickly review vital elements of the program. The only way around this is to keep very detailed notes as you watch the videos… and by the time I realized this would be a necessity, I was already too far into the program to bother.

Extremely, EXTREMELY frustrating.

2) Software tools:

This is where you will access the various tools essential to the NPC classroom. The first one you will be using is the Market Profiler, which runs on the NPC server. Into it, you will plug the information acquired while researching the topic or niche of your choice.

On the other hand, the MoneyWords Keyword Tool is downloaded to your desktop and will run directly from your own computer. You will use this tool to analyze the keyword data generated by the free keyword tool provided by Google.

3) Downloads:

Most of the material in the Download section requires either an upgraded membership, or an additional fee. The Niche Packs are an exception; each month you are granted access to two new and completely ready-made niche businesses (includes ebook, sales letter, graphics, mini-course, traffic blueprint, optimized articles, keyword research and a market profile).

Don’t even bother with this; I downloaded one on growing tomatoes, opened one of the articles and copied and pasted a sentence directly into Google.

The result?

Tons of sites using the same articles, templates and sales pages to sell the same e-book. How many sales do you think this will convert for you? I’ll tell you… not to darn many. The value of Niche Profit Classroom will come from developing your own products and articles and selling a distinctly unique product, not banging up the same web site as dozens (hundreds?) of other NPC members.

4) Hosting:

Yes, you can even host your mini-sites at NPC – up to 15 of them if you like. It’s a simple matter of plugging in your domain name and pressing the “Host Domain” button. This sets up your mini-site on the Word Press platform, formatted in the single-page mini-site template style used by NPC.

If you create enough mini sites, this hosting option will certainly justify the cost of membership. If you only plan to create a site or two, think twice about using this service; it may tie you into paying the $67/month fee for perhaps much longer than you’d care to (yes, I am sure you can transfer the hosting, but who knows how easy this process is?).

5) Value Addons: forum, webinars, etc.

There’s no end of things going on at Niche Profit Classroom; there’s a vibrant forum, regular education webinars, and so on. Lots going on here, if you’re looking for a community.

OK, now that we’ve had a look behind the scenes…

Let’s discuss the NPC process.

After you complete the Classroom instruction, you’re ready to start creating your own niche profit web sites. Here’s the basic process…

1) First, you must identify possible niches and determine whether or not they offer any potential for profit. To do so, you must proceed through the Market Profiler’s 7-step proces. Some of the factors involved include…

• Number of related books on Amazon
• Number of Amazon reviews
• Number of direct competitors at Clickbank.
• Number of AdWords advertisers for your topic.
• Top 10 keywords for your root keyword
• Number of forums in the Top 10 SE listings for your root keyword

… and so on. Once completed, the Profiler spits out a “Market Value”  which is a numerical representation of how profitable (or unprofitable) your chosen niche is. At this point you either move forward (with a profitable niche) or begin researching another one.

This, quite frankly, is the most tedious part of the Niche Profit Classroom. And it’s probably the point at which newbies will get “hung up on” the most, especially if the Market Value generated by the Profiler doesn’t indicate an absolute “winner.”

“Do I move on with this niche, or not? Is it profitable enough?”

And so on.

More on this a bit later.

2) Once you’ve determined to move forward with a particular niche, it’s time to move on to the 2nd step in the process. At this point, you’ll have your niche, and a series of “profitable” keywords (i.e., keywords that show decent demand at the Search Engines, but are not overly competitive; being targeted by too many marketers).

Now it’s time to fashion your research into a “saleable” item.

How do you do that?

By developing an outline for your e-book (that’s right, you’ll be selling an e-book) and then outsourcing the production of it, and the keyword focused content pages that correspond to the profitable keywords you discovered, to a researcher and writer. Oh, and I almost forgot; you’ll need to have a mini-course created too (you’ll be using it in your autoresponder sequence) which can be loosely based on your e-book outline.

Yes, you can write the e-book, mini-course and articles yourself if you like. This isn’t the ideal scenario, however:

• Most people aren’t professional writers and simply don’t have the skills to create an e-book of the quality needed.
• Should you be lucky enough to possess the necessary writing skills,  creating your own e-books and articles is incredibly time-consuming, especially if you are not an expert on the topic in question.
• The whole idea of NPC is to leverage your time by outsourcing the creation of major time-consuming projects to overseas experts who will work for extremely competitive prices. That way, you can spend your time researching more niches and building more businesses. Your “team” does the rest.

Of course, the entire process is thoroughly documented in the video help.

3) Once your outsourced material has been completed, you’re ready to go live with a web site. And if you’re using the Niche Profit Classroom  hosting, getting your web site set up really is as easy as pressing a couple of buttons. Your WordPress-based sales template site will be created immediately – all you have to do is to plug your material into it.

If you are using your own hosting, you’ll need to ensure your host offers WordPress (most do) and upload the NPC WP plugin to the appropriate file (don’t worry, there’s full documentation on how to do all of this!)

4) Once your site is up, complete with mini-course, articles and full-fledged ebook, it’s time to put the 21-day traffic blueprint into action.

And that’s it. Now you’re ready to move on to your next Niche Profit business.

Very simply, that is the gist of the Niche Profit Classroom process.

Briefly now, let’s discuss the pros and cons of the system:

The PROS:

1) Extensive video documentation covers every task in complete detail so no one, no matter what their level of Net Marketing experience, can easily follow the process from start to finish.

2) The NPC series of proprietary tools combined with the applicable free resources do a decent job of identifying niches and profitable keywords.

3) Building a web site based on the NPC single-pages sales site template is dead easy.

4) This is a proven, money-making Internet-Marketing strategy.

5) Plenty of support and a vibrant community.

The CONS:

1) No written documentation. I detailed this issue earlier – there’s so much material here it’s almost impossible to get through it all in a timely fashion. And then, when you want to go back to review something, it’s almost impossible to find the relevant video file.

2) There’s no streamlined process for experienced marketers, something that would be addressed by PDF help files.

3) It’s not cheap; outsourcing a 75-100 page e-book and supporting articles and mini-course can cost anywhere from $400-$700. And this is a perfect example of where skimping is not a good idea; you need to sell a quality product or your refund requests will kill your business.

4) Finding the right professionals to outsource your product(s) to is not easy. In NPC, Adam outlines the system he developed to streamline the outsourcing process, as well as ensure you hire the right people the first time.

Well, I’m here to tell you that in over 10 years of doing business online, the vast majority of my outsourcing experiences have not been anything to “write home about.”  And that’s despite paying serious dollars to learn how to do so effectively!

At the end of the day, every time you hire someone you are taking a chance. Sometimes you lose your time. Sometimes you lose your money. Sometimes you lose both. Of course, if you DO find the right team, there’s no end to what you can accomplish. I’m not trying to rain on your parade here; just be prepared for some hair-pulling – this part of the process is a lot more of a problem than you might believe.

5) There’s a real danger of “paralysis by analysis” here, especially for newbies. In order to move forward with the NPC process, you have to trust your research, and the results generated by the various tools. If you don’t have a lot of experience marketing online, this might be difficult to do, especially when you are looking at a minimum $500 cash outlay to outsource the creation of your materials. If you are a marketing newbie, hesitant to drop large chunks of cash on an unproven niche, you can start by promoting related affiliated products. Although not the recommended means of leveraging NPC effectively, this way, you can “test the waters” before you make an investment.

6) The monthly fee is high: Yes, I agree: $67/month doesn’t buy you much anymore. And on the surface, NPC’s fee doesn’t seem unreasonable. However, when you compare Niche Profit Classroom against other online business building systems, it IS. SiteSell.com’s Site Build It!, for example, will set you back $30/month, and its suite of tools make NPC look like a child’s toy. Plus, you can build and monetize any sort of web site you like – meaning you don’t need to fork out big dollars for outsourcing.

So what’s the bottom line here?

The Niche Profit Classroom system is viable, but in my opinion, it is one that will be best realized as you get some experience with the research process and outsourcing of product development. In other words, the more niche profit sites you build, the better you will get – at trusting your judgment, identifying profitable topics, and outsourcing projects to credible professionals.

And, the more niche sites you have, the more likely you will be profitable. If you build a single web site and it’s a flop, you need to offset the loss of that web site by developing other profitable ones. Frankly, it’s the way of the Internet; some of your sites will generate loads of SE traffic and convert visitors into customers well. Others, not so much.

NPC is really about leveraging your time to create LOTS and LOTS of sites, each based on a solid foundation (which is the single-page squeeze page / sales letter template). That’s the power of this system.

So who is best suited to Niche Profit Classroom?

You really need two things; a willingness to work hard and some disposable income. Yes, you can use the system to promote affiliate products (which eliminates the expense of creating your own) or you can write the e-book, articles and mini-course yourself. But neither of these options is the ideal, recommended means of creating niche profit sites.

That means you’ll need to be willing and able to drop some fairly significant cash on each and every venture you approach. This is definitely NOT the business for you if you’re on a restricted budget due to a job loss or something similar.

So… is Niche Profit Classroom for you? Well, if I’ve done my job properly, you should have a pretty good idea one way or another after reading this review. If it appeals to you, maybe. If not, probably not. If you’re an Internet Marketing newbie, I’d be inclined to steer you in another direction. You’d be better off learning the ropes with a tool that does not require large injections of cash to get started.

Regardless, Adam does offer a $1 free trial. Yes, if you like the sound of this system, you can trial NPC for 14 days for a dollar.

A word to the wise though; Do not sign up for the free trial until you are sure you have a few days you can dedicate to get through it all. Otherwise, you simply will not be able to accurately evaluate the system within the 14 day period. That means you’ll have to cancel your membership prior to reviewing the system completely, or end up being charged the recurring $67 fee before you know it’s right for you.

Good luck!

Riiiiight.

On the face of it, it seems feasible. After all, Facebook is – depending on who you consult - one of the top 3 most visited web sites in the world. Visitors spend more time there than at the sites of any of the other big players-almost 7 hours a month, according to recent statistics.

And, when you factor in the power of social networking, where vast numbers of people are linked together in “islands of trust”, you can’t help but drool at the opportunities.

But it’s not that simple, despite the assurances of the Net Marketers who have apparently unlocked the code. Especially considering FaceBook itself hasn’t mastered the art of making their business profitable; up to as recently as a year ago, their ability to survive long-term was being questioned.

The problem-for marketers and the owners of Facebook-is the way people use the service. My girlfriend and I were sitting around the supper table the other night talking about this, and I asked her, “what’s the main difference between the ways you use Google and FaceBook?”

“Well”, she said, “when I go on FaceBook, I go there to see what Jenn or Tina or Suzanne are doing, to check out new pictures, do a little chatting, and so on.”

“Uh-huh,” I said. “And have you ever noticed or clicked on an ad in FaceBook?”

“No”, she replied.

“And so when you go to Google, what are you doing?”

“I’m searching for something.”

“Uh-huh. And have you ever clicked on an ad at Google?”

“Yep. Lots of times.”

“And why is that?”

“Because I’m often investigating a possible purchase, and the advertisements are highly targeted – sometimes moreso than the listings themselves.”

EXACTLY.

And that’s the big problem for FaceBook; it is a place where people go to interact with others, stay in touch with the comings and goings of their contacts, and view videos and pictures, play games, etc, etc.

In short, it is a social media tool.

People don’t go to Facebook to buy stuff, or even to research the stuff they want to buy. For that, they go to Google. This, in a nutshell, is why Facebook has been a monetization nightmare for its owners. And that’s why you need to be extremely skeptical of offers from those who have mastered the “Facebook code.”

With its legions of visitors, Facebook does offer HUGE opportunities to the right businesses; the ones who leverage their presence by creating cool, “viral” apps which can be shared between users.

But it’s no alternative to Google, nor will it likely ever be.

However, if advertising on FaceBook sounds like something you’d like to experiment with, you can do it quite easily on your own – it’s not rocket science.

I don’t really remember how I stumbled on this software, but since it deals with video creation and the leveraging of existing content – something I’m very interested in at the moment (as witnessed by the series of video marketing and creation articles on the site) I thought I’d plunk down my credit card and give it the old “test-run.”

Especially since Instant Video Articles claims to be able to “convert your articles into tracking-sucking videos in under 30 seconds.”

In my experience marketing online with video, one of the keys to capitalizing on this medium is being able to create videos quickly and effectively. The net is awash with millions of very entertaining videos. So your creation is going to  go head to head against a ton of competition,  as well as folks with extremely short attention spans and “itchy” mouse fingers.

So there’s really not a lot of point in spending days creating a masterpiece that no one will watch. In my opinion, it’s better to quickly create as many short, pithy videos and target as many different keywords and topics (related to your niche) as you can.

Before I begin… what should be pointed out here is that you’re not creating videos as much as you are creating a slideshow; a series of still images strung along on a timeline. No worries; I’ve created plenty of videos like this and they can be effective (here’s an example of mine that has received 3,500 views on YouTube). It’s just that this software does not offer the ability to import or display actual video footage shot on a camcorder.

How does the software work?

If there’s one thing this product has going for it, it’s ease of use. I’m used to using Camtasia for video creation, and in comparison, this product keeps things simple by offering relatively few options. The entire video-creation process is constrained to 3 simple tabs…

• Slides: For every image in your video, you create a slide. You add your text to slide, customize the font size and color to your needs, and even add a customized table if you like. Once you have enough text on one slide, you create a new one and so on until you’ve completed your article (when you finish your project, the software will string these slides together as images, giving the impression of a video).
• Backgrounds: Here’s where you can customize the look of each slide by selecting a background. This can be a solid color, a gradient, or a custom image (when I inserted an image, it ended up tiling the entire background with it).
• General Options: Here’s where you select the duration of the playback of each slide in your video as well as choosing a soundtrack  (optional).

Creating the video: Putting my series of slides together was easy enough, although I was a little annoyed that the text formatting changes I made on the initial slide weren’t being carried through to new slides, even though the changes were highlighted in the tool. For example, I changed to an Arial font and 4-point size and for every new slide I’d have to re-select these options, even though they appeared to be the current options chosen. There is a way to get around this…

Format your initial slide the way you want, and create duplicate (there’s a single-button option  for this) for all new slides. Cut and paste your new text over the previous material and the font changes are retained! Presto!

As a background, I used a solid color (black) to keep things consistent with my current Camtasia-created slideshow type videos (here’s an example from YouTube).

Selecting the duration of each slide: Using the “General Options” tab, determine how long the software will display each slide before moving on to the next. Here’s where this product’s limitations start to show.

For instance, how do you know how long to display each slide before moving on? In software like Camtasia, you simply play the video within the software, read along with the production and chose the most appropriate setting for each individual slide.

With Instant Video Articles not only can you not playback the video within the software, your choice of article duration time applies to every single slide in the video.

Not so good.

For example, suppose one slide has a lot of text and takes 5-7 seconds to read. And suppose the following slide contains a single sentence that takes 2 seconds to read. You need to select the slide duration that will ensure your viewer has enough time to read the most text-heavy slide you have in your video. That means that for the second short slide, they’ll have to wait 5 seconds until the next transition.

This may not sound like much, but in reality, it’s an eternity. And it will pretty much guarantee your viewer will be on his/her way somewhere else.

Plus, you have to guess on what is the ideal duration for your slides. For me, it also meant I had to go back and alter a number of slides, to ensure all contained the appropriate amount of information to fit my duration selection. Plus, I had to render the video an extra time or two when I discovered my selected slide duration was too long/short.

Adding a soundtrack: Using the “General Options” tab, it’s a simple process to select an appropriate MP3 or .wav file to play as a background for your video (make sure you have the rights to the music, or obtain some royalty free music).

There’s a couple of problems with this part of the process…

• Since there’s no time line, you have to manually determine the length of your video by counting the number of slides you use by the time selected for slide duration. For example, if you’re using 15 slides with a 5-second duration, your video is 75 seconds long.
• There’s very little help in the software, so it’s not evident whether the software will cut off, fade out or eliminate any additional material on your music soundtrack. When I added a 2 minute MP3 to my 55 second video, I ended up with 60 seconds of blank screen showing after the video ended, while the soundtrack continued playing in the background.

This meant I needed to modify the track in my editing software, before re-adding it to the video, hoping it wouldn’t be a hair short or long compared to the video time line. Not a big deal, but it certainly meant that my “traffic-sucking” video was taking a LOT longer than 30 seconds to create.

How did the final product turn out? You decide…

Did you notice the other issues?

That’s correct…

First, the Instant Video Articles software does not insert transitions between slides. When I create slide show videos in software like Camtasia, I use a short transition between each slide, which causes them to flow together much more smoothly. Take a look at the same video done in Camtasia (here with a new soundtrack), and see how the slides fade slowly into one another?…

In contrast, the slides in the Instant Video Articles software simply “appear” which makes the video seem – to me at least – choppy and unprofessional. In my opinion, this software’s end result could be significantly improved by building a simple “fade” transition between slides.

Second, now that I can finally view the video in the Vzaar player, I can see that the text is TOO DARN SMALL, even though it appeared to be “just right” on the slides as I created them. That means I have to go back into the software, increase the font size, adjust the text formatting on the slide accordingly, and re-render the video. Argh!

Alright, here’s the video with the changes made…

A little better, huh?

OK, now that you know what Instant Video Articles does and how it delivers, let’s quickly review the pros and cons…

The “Pros”…

• Extremely easy to use, almost no technical knowledge is required.
• Short learning curve.
• Product is very affordable – only $17!
• Creates a decent quality video relatively quickly.

The “Cons”…

• No video import
• No time line
• No playback within software-you have to complete and render your video to see how it will “view”.
• No control over individual slides
• Limited functionality and flexibility

As you can see, the list of “cons” is pretty extensive. However, one thing you need to keep in mind is Instant Video Articles costs about 1/16 the price of professional video software solutions like Camtasia, so it’s not really a fair comparison. In my opinion, the Instant Video Articles is good value for the money, and, if you can live with its shortcomings, probably worth investigating – especially if you’re on a tight budget (you can learn more about Instant Video Articles here!).

A word to the wise though…

The simple conversion of articles into video format is not going to lead to huge swarms of traffic to your web site. What you’ll end up with is long, boring, unappealing videos that no one will watch to the end. Instead, create short, compelling “teaser” videos that lead naturally to click-through to your site – read how to do it here!

One thing I have not discussed is how to place a video in a custom player on your own web site. The easiest way to post video on your own web site is to publish your video to a service like YouTube, and then place the “embed” code on your own web pages and blog posts where you want the video to appear. Most of the time, this works well-enough for the needs of most net-marketers.

But what if you do not want your video to appear on YouTube?

If your message is directed specifically to site visitors and not relevant to an outside audience, this is a possibility. Or perhaps you do not want to use the YouTube branded player, which will offer additional video options after your video plays (which you can’t control).

I recently found myself in this position; I did not want my video to appear on YouTube as I was speaking directly to a very specific audience. Additionally, I wanted complete control over the player, so visitors wouldn’t be tempted to click off in some other direction.  What to do?

There are ways to stream Flash files directly onto your web pages, of course. I tried this at first. However, after several hair-tearing hours messing with both Camtasia and DreamWeaver, I gave up in frustration and went looking for a hosted 3rd-party solution.

The first one I found was Brightcove. It’s probably the most well-known video hosting service, but it’s not cheap. The “entry-level” service starts off at a mere $500/month. While I have no problem forking over cash if it’s going to leverage my business, I don’t have the videos, require the bandwidth, or get the sheer number of video views to justify spending that amount of money.

Surely there must be something cheaper?

The next service I investigated was Ooyala. It looked promising, but it too starts with a $500/month “basic” package. Ooops… not the right tool for the small business person.

Amazon’s CloudFront service appeared promising, but after 20 minutes of reading through supporting documentation, I remembered why I was investigating a third party service in the first place; to eliminate unnecessary complexity and complication. Sorry, Amazon. Bye-bye.

I finally found what I needed with a service called Vzaar.

In addition to a 30-day free trial period (no credit card required, thank you), they have monthly packages starting at $15 and going all the way up to $750!

Now that’s more like it.

I signed up for the free trial, and upgraded to the “bronze” package ($15/month) after I was able to experiment with the service and determine it suited my needs (I’m not sure how much bandwidth I’ll require, so I’ll upgrade accordingly as necessary).

Update: I’ve since upgraded to the Silver membership.

The service is slick, easy to use, and offers all the custom options I need. For instance, I was able to customize the size and color of my media player to reflect the look and feel of UltimateFatBurner.com. And I was also able to brand the player with my URL – here’s an example…

The Vzaar dashboard is simple and clutter-free, reporting on video plays, bandwidth usage and trend, as well as video activity (I’ve only got one video up with this service right now, so I haven’t included that in the screenshot)…

Although I’ve only been using the service a week or so, I’m extremely pleased so far. It offers me the customization options I need, it’s extremely affordable, and it’s drop-dead easy to use. Now here’s a time-leveraging tool to add to your video-creating library. Sign up for the free trial and see if Vzaar is right for you!

Not sure why you should care?

Then you have probably missed my introductory Test Tube article on Twittollower, the service that builds your list of Twitter followers automatically (in my test tube articles, I put various tools/software/strategies to the test on my main web sites, and report the results to you!).

This service promises to add a minimum of 2,000 niche-targeted followers to your list each and every month. This, at an introductory cost of $67 per month, rising to $99/month after the first 200 participants.

I subscribed to the service to determine several things…

1. Does the Twittollower service deliver the volume of followers that it claims?
2. Do these followers appear to be niche-targeted as advertised?
3. Do those followers respond to my “tweets”? Build my business? Deliver traffic in a cost effective means?

Once I got to playing around with the Twittollower service, Twitter, and “tweeting”, I quickly realized that it would be very difficult to assess the true value of the Twittollower service and make general, wide sweeping statements about its effectiveness/ineffectiveness based on my experiences.

In the lingo of my science-based supplement review site UltimateFatBurner.com, this is a “n=1″ experiment. These results may not be applicable to you – no more than the guru who is preselling the Twittollower service based on his/her own positive experiences. In other words, this is my UNIQUE experience and yours may be different – depending on your audience, its demographics, your offers, the effectiveness of your “call to actions”, your tweets, your niche, etc, etc.

Keep this in mind as you follow along with my experiences…

1) Does the Twittollower service deliver the volume of followers that it claims?

Absolutely. In the month I remained subscribed to the service, my brand new Twitter account obtained 2953 subscribers, and as you can see here, it has generated another 600 followers or so, in the few days since my cancellation…

2) Do these followers appear to be niche-targeted as advertised?

It’s almost impossible to tell.

Sometimes, the “twitter” handle is indicative that your new follower is targeted to your niche, but most of the time, it is not. For example some of my recent followers are “bitchogram”, “metroscreen” “hotelsreviewed”, “onlinesalsa”, “redhottips4u”, “janetjackson5″ and “beabillionaire”. Certainly nothing here to indicate these new followers are the slightest bit targeted to my niche.

At the same time, just because their Twitter handles are not indicative of that, doesn’t mean they do not have such an interest.

I can, however, attest that the Twittollower algorithym does have a glitch or two. I was none too pleased to find for instance, that I was “following” “yourdailyporn.”

Not only do I highly doubt that this “tweeter” is interested in what I have to offer, but who you follow is readily available for perusal by your audience on Twitter. Having porn related material in the list of people you follow is hardly what I would describe as a positive “brand building” exercise.  It undermines your credibility and calls your integrity into question. I was lucky to catch this one, but since Twittollower generates so many leads, if you’re not actually checking each and every one of newly generated followers, some will slip by.

Not good.

3) Do those followers respond to my “tweets”? Build my business? Deliver traffic in a cost effective means?

This is probably a better measure of whether Twittollower delivers the targeted followers it promises. And since it was recommended to start a brand new Twitter account for use with the service, I was able to compare its performance against the already-established but rather pathetic account (28 followers as of today’s date) set up for UltimateFatBurner.com.

And the results? These two charts from Hootsuite tell the tale. First, the chart for the original UltimateFat account (click here to view full size image in a new window)…

And next, the chart for the brand new “dietpillguru” account (click here to view full size image in a new window)…

As you can see, over the same 30-day period, Tweets to the existing account received 65 clicks, while those sent to the new one generated a mere 84 clicks. Considering that the new account had 20 times the number of subscribers of the established one within a week of its inception (now a whopping 150 times as many!), this is hardly a rousing endorsement. It’s pretty pathetic, but it confirms what I suspected – real targeted followers are the ones who are “wowed” by your great content, products, services and so on, and sign up to receive your updates from your web site.

As you can see, this is neither an efficient nor a cost-effective way (about $0.80 per visitor to date) of driving traffic or building a business – at least, it certainly isn’t for me.

So why did the service fail so dismally for me?

From what I can tell, it could be any number of reasons…

My “tweets” weren’t compelling enough: At the beginning of this experiment, I read a lot of tweets to get a feel of what sort of material was flying around the “tweetosphere.”

In the end I settled on a blend of material that inspired curiosity (i.e. “It’s a bit hard to believe that Microsoft hates fat people…” “Are millions really wasting their time jogging?”, “Cheat your way thin? Really?”) or a deliberate “call to action” (i.e., “You HAVE to check out “The Ab System” if you’re looking to get lean, mean, and save big too!”, Download our newest publication “Dirty, Rotten Tricks; Supplement Company Lies That Cost You $$$” FREE:”).

Neither worked particularly well in generating interest with my followers.In most cases, I made a deliberate attempt to avoid making tweets that appeared as crass marketing messages, since many Twitter users find such things offensive.

I didn’t send enough tweets: Since I’m not an active Twitter user, I’m not really sure of the accepted protocol of tweeting. In other words, how many times will my followers tolerate a message for me in a day?

I experimented with 1-3 tweets per day; once in the morning, once at lunchtime, and once in the evening. As far as I could tell, the frequency of my tweets or the time of day they were sent made no difference at all.

I didn’t spend long enough establishing my credibility: At first I thought this might be an issue but then it dawned on me…”… how can I establish my credibility if people don’t take the time to follow up on the links included in my tweets?” I have yet to be convinced that one can build huge amounts of credibility 140 characters at a time. People need to go the extra step if they are to assess the value of your offerings. And if they don’t do that… you’re done.

The demographic of my followers is not ideal: Are the people using Twitter who are interested in my niche the same demographic as the visitors to my web site? I know that for the section on fat burners, the largest majority of visitors is middle-aged women.

Are my followers comprised mostly of middle-aged women? Somehow, I doubt it. Still, it hardly accounts for the fact that virtually none of my tweets received much of a response – even ones that elicit a natural curiousity (i.e., “It’s a bit hard to believe that Microsoft hates fat people…”)

My followers just weren’t all that interested in what I had to say: Ultimately, it occasionally comes down to this – sometimes, the people you are trying to reach really could care less. Perhaps I haven’t been doing anything wrong, and it’s a simple matter of the fact that my followers are not targeted, and therefore not interested.

By now, you’re beginning to see the problem; there are a LOT of variables which can be factored into the equation to account for the failure (or even its success for that matter) of both Twittollower and the use of Twitter as a marketing medium. While Twittollower certainly delivered on the number of followers it promised, how targeted they really are is difficult to assess with any real degree of accuracy. In my case, I have a hard time believing they were extremely targeted – my results give no indication of that at all. But I need to be fair.

Do I have other concerns about marketing with Twitter, and services like Twittollower in general?

You bet.

As services like Twittollower grow in popularity and marketing with Twitter becomes more prominent, the tweet “signal to noise ratio” is going to increase substantially. Even in this experiment, about a quarter to a third of the people I received Tweets from (usually as a result of being added to their follower list) sent some sort of marketing message. In other words, they were using Twitter to promote their own interests – just like I was – and were unlikely to be responsive to mine.

As this percentage grows, expect Twitter users to become less and less responsive to any marketing message of any sort. In other words, “tweets” originating from people outside an established network of friends, family and colleagues are likely to be viewed with great suspicion. My gut feeling therefore, is that there’s a very limited time line for effective Twitter marketing, even if your business seems perfectly positioned to benefit from it.

Secondly, isn’t Twitter largely something enjoyed with cell phones? How many people are able to browse a large text-based web site easily and effectively on a cell phone or PDA? Seems to me that if that’s the case, my business is definitely not ideally suited for a Twitter marketing strategy.

I had several goals as I embarked upon this quest. First, I wanted to continue to build the UltimateFatBurner.com brand, by driving new visitors to its high quality, researched content. Second, I wanted to increase revenue by sending visitors to reviews of affiliate products I recommend.

I was unsuccessful in both counts. However…

I suspect using Twitter as a marketing medium could be very effective, but I also suspect it depends on your offers, and more importantly, your demographic. If your business appeals to a young, hip, “permanently-attached-to-their-cellphones” audience, then using Twitter and (even Twittollower), might make sense to you.

At least for the time being.