Keyword Elite 2.0 allows you to run 8 different projects, and here is my actually hands-on review of each Keyword Elite 2.0 project.

Keyword Surge – I probably found Keyword Elite’s keyword surge to be the most disappointing part of the entire product. Using its proprietary database, I results that it returned seemed to be lacking quite a bit. For example, a search for the term “keyword elite” returned a total 16 keywords. Using the free Google Adwords keyword tool I got 87 keywords. Other searches I tried with KE2 also showed significantly less results. The search volumes return by Keyword Surge also looked to be pretty inaccurate as well. For example, the search term ppc coach search shows 3600 monthly searches in the Google tool, but just 180 monthly searches in KE2. Since I personally haves sites ranking for the term ppc coach, I am pretty certain that 180 monthly searches value is way off. I tried several other searches as well and the search volumes consistently differed from the Google Adwords keyword tool by a factor of 10. I also have issues with the other keyword sources that you can use as well. Using the Google results, you don’t even get any search volume numbers and it was quite laughable to see some of the irrelevant Ask.com results it returned.

Market Research Sleuth – This project lets you enter a keyword (or multiple keywords) and see the ads that are running for it on the big 3 networks and it’s supposed to show you how competitive your keywords are. I don’t have too many complaints about how this works, but honestly you can do the same thing with the free version of Traffic Travis.

Adwords Time Machine – This Keyword Elite 2.0 project allows you to quickly get the ad history for any website that has advertised for your chosen keyword in at least 1 of the past 6 months. Of all the KE2 projects, this is probably the one I like the best. The top section gives you an overview of which advertisers are consistently advertising for the chosen keyword. In theory these are the sites you want to emulate for your own PPC campaigns. What I like the best about the Adwords Time Machine though, is that if you click on the magnifying glass icon for a particular site, it will give you all the keywords that a particular advertiser is bidding on in Adwords. This actually seems to produce accurate results and I can think of several ways to use that info effectively.

Search Engine Dominator – This project is for SEOs and it analyzes how difficult it will be to rank for certain keywords in the 3 search engines. This feature may come in handy for some, but the user interface for this is way too cluttered. The bottom table is just filled with way too much information which makes it really hard to look at it and quickly figure out what you are looking at. I like the fact that it search through all 3 search engines, but I think I still prefer Market Samurai’s SEO competition tool better.

Adwords Competition Sniper – This project allows you to monitor keywords in Adwords over time. You can schedule KE2 to automatically run this project at specific time intervals to gather this data. However, I don’t find this particular compelling as again, the free version of Traffic Travis has this exact same feature.

Advanced Google Site Targeter – This project allows you to search for other sites related to your keyword that are displaying Adsense ads on them. Theoretically, this will help you target these sites in your Adwords campaigns. For example, if you are running CPA polls, you may find this feature useful. However, I know that the free tool Adwords Digger can do the same thing.

JV Diamond Miner – The purpose behind this project is to help you find joint venture partners in your niche. The tool will go out and find other websites that have an opt-in email list. What you are supposed to do is approach these site owners and see if they would be willing to promote your own product as your affiliate on their opt-in thank you page. This may or may not work, although I am skeptical at how practical this project is. If anyone has success using this, please let me know.

CPA Magnet – This last project allows you to search for CPA offers across different networks. While definitely useful, there are plenty of other free places you can do the same thing online, like OfferVault.com (which I just noticed actually powers CPA magnet) and Offernut.com which is actually powered by the free Offer202 api.

Can Keyword Elite 2.0 help you make money? If you have your own product to sell, then absolutely. Brad Callen is a master marketer as evidenced by the hype his products receive. Get on his email list and follow his strategies for promoting Keyword Elite 2. It will definitely help you market your own product better. However, while Keyword Elite 2.0 is not a completely terrible product, it certainly does not live up to the hype. $197 is a high price point for most people and I think majority of its functionality can be found in other free tools.

If you have purchased Keyword Elite 2.0 yourself, do you agree or disagree with my review? Be sure to leave a comment and share your experiences with Keyword Elite 2.0.

I didn’t know much about Peter Drew before, but somehow I ended up on his mailing list. It turns out it was because I had created an account on one of his sites, called BadRSS, a pretty useful service for submitting your RSS feeds. Anyway, I got an email in my inbox from him promoting his new product, Brute Force Twitter. Normally this sort of email would go straight to my trash, but for some reason I read the email and sales page. What caught my eye was the fact that he was offering a $1 trial to try the product for 5 days. After 5 days you would be billed $37.50 a month if you wanted to continue to use it. I figured it would be pretty easy to see whether the software could do what it claims to do in 5 days, so I forked over my $1 and signed up.

My Review

The Brute Force Twitter software is actually a very simplistic desktop application that works only on Windows. This is quite unfortunate and annoying as my primary machine is a Mac, so I had to take out a Windows laptop I have and install it on there. The software is linked to your paypal information, so if you cancel your subscription, it will stop functioning.

BruteForce Twitter has two primary modes of operation. The first mode allows you to specify a certain user and the software will go out and follow a random number of followers of this person. The second mode allows you use to specify a search term, and the software will follow people who have used this search term in their tweets. The way Twitter works, when you start following people, a certain percentage of people will start following you back. Therefore, by selecting people or keywords that are related to your niche (ie. internet marketing), you will soon build up a huge set of targeted followers that you will be able to market to. It is possible to do this by hand, but with the help of this application, this can all be done for you in an automated way.

Besides adding followers, the software has one other important function, which is the ability to remove the people you are following. A new Twitter account is limited to following 1000 people and you will need to get 1000 followers before you can start following more people. By pressing the Remove Twitter Friends button, the software will look at all the people you have followed, and remove all the ones that are not following you back. By getting rid of the “dead-weight” every couple of days, this keeps you under the account limits and allows you to follow other people instead who might actually follow you back.

Does It Work?

I’ve only been playing with the software for a couple of days now, but I am definitely seeing results. Check out my twitter account. At the time I write this, I have about 540 followers and growing. I’m sure that after a month or two, my account will have many more followers (Please check back and see). The initial version (1.1) of Brute Force Twitter that I used was actually kind of buggy. One major bug that I experienced was that the Remove Twitter Friends function wasn’t quite working properly and it was removing more people then it was supposed to. However, the new version (1.2) which was just released over the weekend seems to fix most of the issues I was having with it.

Will You Remain A Subscriber?

Well, the software seems to work as advertised, but actually I don’t think I will be staying on and paying the recurring $37.50 a month subscription. I have a few concerns, not just about Brute Force Twitter itself, but regarding these automatic twitter friend bots in general.

1) Your account could get banned at any time.
These types of Twitter bots are explicity against Twitter’s terms of service. Now, Brute Force Twitter itself has some built-in checks to avoid appearing like an automated bot. For example it adds friends at random time intervals. But you will notice that it also has a very nice affiliate program and many affiliates will be promoting it on places such as… Twitter. Just do a search for Brute Force Twitter (or the name of any other twitter bot) on search.twitter.com and you have an easy list of of people to ban. Oops.

2) Are these really “quality” followers?
I could be wrong about this, but my gut feeling is that the majority of the followers that I get through this method will not be following my tweets. In fact, I bet many of the people that are following me are actually using bots themselves. Reading through some the tweets of the people I am now following, the majority of them are busy spamming their own products or other affiliate programs. The way I use my own personal Twitter account, I only follow people that I am really interested in. I have never followed anyone just because they followed me. Perhaps I am just in the minority, but it remains to be seen what the quality of my followers are.

My Own Twitter Bot

Wasting Money Or Making Money With Twitter Bots

All that said, I have actually come to the conclusion that you can make quite a bit of money with Twitter bots. Not necessarily from marketing products to your Twitter followers but by promoting their affiliate programs. This is where I think Brute Force Twitter has an especially effective model. The product works decently (at least superficially) and it is easy to demonstrate this to your readers with a test account or two. Most people won’t mind paying $1 to try out the software, and when they start getting followers, they will stay on at least a month or two, if not longer. That’s 33% recurring commissions for every month they stay on which is quite good. The affiliate site claims that the $1 trial converts at a rate of 10%, 63% of these turned into full members, and 93% continue to stay on multiple months. That’s pretty impressive if true. You can promote this on Twitter, an email list, or create a money site and do some article marketing. Twitter is in the news everywhere these days so if you want to take advantage of the amazing growth that Twitter is experiencing right now I would take a look at Brute Force Twitter and see if you can make some money with it.

If you are truly serious about creating a PPC business then this is hands down a product you need in your arsenal! I am only promoting this because it really is a gem to have for those that want a quick and easy way to create LPs. You really need to jump over to their website and read about all of the features this product provides! They even have several examples set up for you to view. If anything, look at the examples so you can get a better idea of what truly great review site should look like!
- CashTactics.net

Last month, when Affiliate Theme was released by Unique Blog Designs, the quotes above were a sampling of some of the hype from the Super Affiliate’s pumping up this new theme. And why not? With commissions ranging from $48.50 to $98.50, affiliates can make a healthy chunk of change promoting Affiliate Theme. I’ll admit that I got caught up in the hype myself. I bought myself the Super Affiliate Package for $197 and registered the domain. My plan was to setup a review site using the theme itself, do some case studies of making money online using sites created with the theme, and rake in some affiliate commissions. But after playing around with the theme a bit, I became kind of underwhelmed with what it could do. Not to say that the theme is completely awful, but for the price they are charging for it, I expected much more.

The premise of Affiliate Theme is that affiliates with limited or no coding can create affiliate marketing websites for their PPC and SEO campaigns. All customization of your site is controlled from within the Affiliate Theme Options control panel. Creating a quality landing page is a time consuming process and imagine being able to pump out several of these affiliate sites in less than an hour or so. That’s a pretty effective selling point.

First, take a look at the Affiliate Theme test drive page and you check out some of the pre-made landing pages that were created by the designers. Do any of them really look like they are highly converting landing pages to you? Just my opinion, but to me they look pretty plain at best, and amateurish at worst. See the Call to Action buttons on the Ringtones page? They are just colored squares with text. I was looking around on the support forum and I found a couple of other examples of people using Affiliate Theme for some of their sites (Site1 | Site2). Not terrible, but are these really something that couldn’t be done with a free WordPress theme?

Another selling point of the theme is the 30 unique banners that are included and as a SuperAffiliate I also get 10 free banners a month. I must say I am really disappointed with these. All of them are completely generic and uninspiring. Supposedly a new feature is on the way where we can overlay our own text on them, but even if that is the case, I am still not sure that I would ever use them.

Affiliate Theme does give you 6 different layout options and you can dynamically change between them. There are quite a bit of options you can tweak from the control panel like fonts, background settings, layout options and much more. This makes the page quite long which makes it slightly annoying to find the options you need. Plus the Save Settings button is all the way at the bottom so you every time you change an option, you need to scroll all the way to the bottom to save your changes.

What irks me the most about this theme is that its billed as a super fast and customizable way to build landing-type pages. However, if you are customizing everything from the control panel, it actually ends up fairly inflexible and your sites end up looking like the ones on the test drive page with maybe a different color or background. Where’s the support for building a sales letter type page? How about a review style page like the ones you see everywhere? Sure I could customize the CSS and muck around the php code to do what I want, but I could do that with a free WP theme too. Doesn’t doing that defeat the whole purpose of purchasing this theme?

I do give the Unique Blog Design guys credit for providing decent support. The forums are fairly active and they have responded to the few of the questions I’ve had it a timely manner. Plus, I can see they are working hard on improvements to the theme. The latest version added the ability to have a separate blog from the site, and I see some more signs they are trying to improve the flexibility of this theme. However, for $197 and all the hype it received, I had high expectations. Unfortunately, Affiliate Theme doesn’t live up to them for me.

I am ashamed to admit that I got started with internet marketing on the DigitalPoint forums.  The reason why I hung out there was that the first product I bought there actually did work.  It was a method having to do with watermarking you videos on Youtube to drive traffic to your site.  I made quite a bit from this method, and I still get traffic to one of my sites to this day.  Unfortunately, one bad thing about succeeding at the beginning is that it took me quite awhile to realize what a cesspool of crap most of the DP Buy Sale Trade forum was. People will sell anything on there.  Most of the methods and ebooks are repackaged from other people.  And half of them don’t work in the first place.  You honestly can’t trust any of the reviews on the place. Most people are too lazy or don’t care to do a proper review.

It’s not just DP that’s the problem.  The whole internet is filled with reviews for every IM product.  Sites like JohnChow and other Super Affiliates are paid to review products.  But can you really trust them?  Although I am sure they take a cursory look at whatever product they’re peddling, evaluate if something really works you have to spend some time with it.  We never see someone actually use a product and show that it actually worked for them.

This is where Wasting Money Online comes in.  I plan to spend my own hard earned cash on the internet marketing products I review here and see if they actually work for me.  For the products that I can apply to this blog, I will do so.  If some product claims that they can get your site to the top of Google in the search results, then you can see for yourself it works for this blog.  I am hoping to be as transparant as possible with my reviews and even give *gasp* updates to see if I am still using them, or they are still working.

Full disclosure, I will be including my affiliate link (if applicable) for the products I am reviewing.  If a product is good and can make both you and me money, then I hope you will reward me with a commission for my honest review.  But if the product sucks or is overpriced, I won’t be holding that back in my review and hopefully I can save you some money. Let me waste the money, not you.