PPC Training Courses – The Year In Review

A regular and thoughtful commenter posted a question to me regarding my experience with the various PPC training courses I’ve purchased over the past year. All of these are big name courses and most were surrounded with a great deal of both hype and anticipation:

• PPC Clasroom v1
• PPC Classroom v2
• Black ink Project
• Commission Blueprint

Now, I don’t have to refer back to the original sales letters or wrack my brain too hard, but the only one that actually iived up to the full promise of its promotion was “The Black Ink Project I“.

More on that in a moment.

But I think a more beneficial question is what was my actual perceived value of the training several months to a year hence and what measurable impact did each have on my own bottom line?

Without further ado, here’s the year in review:

“PPC Classroom V1” – just to recap, this was a very highly anticipated joint effort by Anik Singal and Jeremy Palmer. I know for me and probably a lot of others the headline for the sales letter said it all:

“Million Dollar PPC Affiliate Reveals All”

OK, not the exact wording of the original headline, but that’s the gist of it. The million dollar PPC affiliate was of course Jeremy Palmer whom I and thousands of other IMers have a tremendous amount of respect for. I wrote a pretty comprehensive post reviewing PPC Classroom V1, so I won’t repeat too much of it here.

The basic highlights were that the launch was a complete disaster. The staff claimed that there servers were attacked. Whether this was true or not (I like to give people the benefit of the doubt), it’s becoming such as repeatable pattern for all big launches that no one buys the server meltdown story any more even if it could very well be true.

PPCC v1 was a physical product that came with a $500 price tag. There was also a monthly membership, which I and a lot of others were surprised also came with a $50 per month fee. Anik and Jeremy extended the free trial for 3 additional months before our credit cards started getting charged in January 2008.

I felt the physical course was very well written and produced, though I also found it be somewhat on the basic side with a lot of the content very similar to Jeremy Palmer’s “High-Powered Affiliate Marketing” eBook.

However, for new IMers it should be considered a very solid introduction to all aspects of affiliate marketing and a good foundation for learning PPC marketing.

The forum was a complete waste however.

Beyond the course materials, the biggest value I received from PPCC v1 was the Webinars and Tele-seminars.

That’s where I was first introduced to Amit Mehta. The calls he was on were some of the best and I really sensed some very positive energy and enthusiasm from him. This greatly influenced my decision to sign on to PPCC v2 even after I wound up cancelling my membership to v1 after 4 months.

Before concluding this review, I should point out that sometimes it can be only a single nugget of information that makes a huge difference in your results. Just such a nugget was dropped on me after Jeremy Palmer pulled out of PPCC after what was clearly a very difficult time for him.

He was replaced by a group of “faculty members” with the lead member being Heather Paulson of the Paulson Management Group.

Heather’s approach to PPC was quite a bit different than Jeremy’s. Where Jeremy is a master of landing page design, Heather took a much more analytical and academic approach to PPC with an emphasis on direct-linking whenever possible. In fact, she showed a clear disdain for building landing pages at the time.

Though I think, she may have softened her position on that given Google’s relentless enforcement of their Quality Score guidelines.

Heather’s research and testing into a particular ad writing technique was nothing short of brilliant. In fact, it’s no exaggeration that this technique alone has directly accounted for an increase in my overall CTR and thousands of dollars of additional revenue to my earnings this year.

So, despite all the screwups, lame forum, and beginner-level content, I recouped my investment in this product many times over.

“PPC Classroom 2” – like its predecessor, the launch was a disaster. This time the reason given was just shear server load. The really annoying part about all this and actually sad part, was a lot of people extended their lunch hours or stayed up really late to get in early. The net result however is, that the level of “gotta have it” frenzy was palpable. Regardless if this delay was planned or completely unexpected, it worked like gang busters.

The teaser videos with Anik and Amit enthusiastically chatting away Anik’s den were very well done. Both production-wise and in the content revealed. Truth be told, if you spent the time to read all the posts on Amit’s blog and watched the pre-launch videos, you pretty much got the best content from the course.

As I mentioned in the previous review for PPCC v1, I really gained a lot of respect for Amit from the Webinars he did for PPCC v1. I also then started following his blog and learned a lot more. So, that should explain why I jumped on PPCC v2 when it launched.

The other reason I bit, was I really wanted to see what Anik and his team had come up with for the online training platform. The result is very impressive.

To be honest, the eBook PDF format has really become stale.

This probably explains why the price points on IM eBooks have come down as much as they have. The real money, as any IMer worth his salt knows, is in “forced continuities”, i.e. paid memberships.

The content that Amit has put together is really quite good, though it is best aimed at beginning to intermediate PPC marketers. However, the online training using modules, videos, and downloads is very slick. I think the real future for Anik and his Affiliate Classroom company is in delivering online education within the IM curriculum. I posted a while back about the future of Interment Marketing Curriculums.

PPCC v2 can perhaps also stand as a case study for the endless upsell sequence.

Running the gauntlet to final checkout on launch day when the server response time was glacial was a testament to extreme desire and persistence. I lost track of the number of upsells, but there had to be no less than 6 as I recall. I did bite on the “Niche Detective” monthly membership at $19.95 per month and the “Live Bootcamp” with Amit for $297.

I’m ready to cancel the “Niche Detective” membership after only 2 months as it’s the usual high-gravity suspects from Clickbank. The number of PPC affiliates tripping over each other to promote the same garbage from CB boggles the mind.

The Live Boot Camp was a bit disappointing as well. However, it was enlightening to see one of Amit’s mini-sites as one of his testing methods when launching campaigns. So, still too early to tell, but these could yet turn out to be nuggets that yield a far greater return than the initial price of the product.

I suppose what has disappointed me the most is that in order to interact with Amit on the forum, you must have purchased the “VIP” membership level for another $197 per month. I certainly don’t think any less of Amit, but for better or worse, he has ascended to IM guru status. Hopefully, he’s enjoying the rewards.

The forum surprisingly isn’t as useless as the first one, but there are still a lot of disappointed members posting about how to get a refund. I don’t need the negativity. So I’ll be cancelling my membership since there’s little left to gain from this course.

As Alan Watts said in both defense and condemnation of using mind-altering drugs: “After you get the message, hang up the phone“.

Which reminds me — I need to also cancel my gym membership.

“The Black Ink Project” – this was actually Part I of the BIP and it was completely free. Jeremy said he wanted to help people realize their first profits online. There was some speculation that Jeremy felt bad about the PPCC v1 fiasco and wanted to make ammends. To my mind, Jeremy had already given so much of himself to the online community that there was nothing to make up for despite what happened with PPCC.

The training in the BIP was nothing short of phenomonal.

Jeremy Palmer is a naturally gifted teacher and his Webinars are some of the best I’ve experienced. He also does a great job during the Q&A sessions, which are always worth hanging around for. Jeremy covered the entire gamut of affiliate marketing from niche research to campaign setup to landing page creation. He also had a module on setting up your business and brought in his business adviser John Shaw to help out.

Even though the training was free, the value was very high. Jeremy subsequently came out with BIP2, which was based around a case study for the WebEX affiliate program in Commission Junction. I didn’t participate in this course since I felt I had the feel for Jeremy’s style and methods, though I’m sure it was also some high quality training.

Jeremy has also announced BIP3 coming out in January 2009 I believe. Jeremy and the guys from “Commission Blueprint” are cross-promoting each other’s products and if you purchase through their respective affiliate links the cost of BIP3 is $97. In addition, Jeremy is offering PPCC v1 as a bonus.

Just goes to show, if you can wait a while, today’s hot product becomes tomorrow’s giveaway.

“Commission Blueprint” – the hype on the sales page for this product is truly over the top, which is a shame since Commission Blueprint is one of the best IM info-products I’ve purchased in quite some time. Created by Steve Clayton and Tim Godfrey, CB is a series of step-by-step videos outlining Steve’s methods for promoting Clickbank products using Adwords PPC.

As I’ve posted before, I am severely “Clickbank challenged” and have fallen for just about every eBook that shows all those juicy gray and blue earnings bars on the sales page.

So have I been able to dominate Clickbank after having gone through the CommBlue training?

Nope. Not yet at least. But that’s not the point really. What I have learned is the “secret” at the core of the most successful CB affiliate PPC marketers. Now knowing this secret isn’t going to make me kill it on CB. What it has done is relieve me of chasing this market any further.

Yep, after running a few campaigns using the CommBlue method I’ve decided that my PPC efforts and funds are better invested promoting other types of offers. I’m not one to shy away from competition, but the CB market for PPC affiliates is insanely fierce.  I’m also uncomfortable promoting most of the products available on CB.

This lesson has been invaluable, but what’s really valuable with the CommBlue program is the members’ forum, which is free to all customers. I’ve found these types of member forums to have been the most valuable ones I’ve ever participated in. This was true of Jeremy Palmer’s HPAM, Dennis Becker’s 5BucksaDay, and Michael Plante’s “Adsense Arbitrage and Leveraging“.

The CommBlue forum is no exception.

Steve Clayton seems to live on the forum and goes above and beyond to answer even the most basic of  questions. He recently hosted a Webcast on the Google Quality Score that was very informative. Steve’s PPC methods can be applied to products well outside of the CB marketplace and he has clearly stated this on the forum.

I haven’t completely given up promoting CB just yet. There are a handful of products that I personally own from CB and have no problem promoting them. I’ll just go with organic traffic generation methods in order to promote them forn ow.

It’s just easier on the ole budget and nerves that way.

“Affiliate Bully 144” – this eBook from Andre Chaperon is a very nice complement to CommBlue. Without giving too much away, the CommBlue method is predicated on driving PPC traffic to a presell landing page. Andre strongly advocates the same technique for promoting CB products, but he really goes into depth on how to properly craft your presell pages.

Andre places a lot of emphasis on copy writing and understanding user demographics. Steve Clayton also advocates this, but his real strength is Adwords PPC.

Well, I think that about covers the highlights of my PPC info-product purchases for 2008. As you can see, I don’t regret a single purchase. Sure, some delivered better value than others, but as I approach the end of the year, I know I’m a better PPC marketer because I not only purchased them, but because, I at the very least, read and consumed each and every one.

I didn’t completely apply the methods for all of them and that’s on me.

Perhaps the most important lesson I’ve learned, especially after closing my books each quarter, is that the second largest expense in my business after tithing to Google, is my info-product purchases. I take from this that I am now armed with all the essential information I need to be successful using PPC and affiliate marketing.

The challenges remain and continue to mount with Google’s aggressiveness in enforcing the Quality Score and the ever increasing competition from other affiliates.

It’s now on me to knuckle down and apply these methods on a consistent basis and forge ahead to the next level. One thing I can promise you, is that I will be drastically  cutting back on purchasing more info-products in 2009.

That change alone should be worth several thousand dollars to my bottom line.