I’ve got to take my hat off to the creators of this one - Peel Away Ads.

I know it’s pretty old news as far as internet marketing goes but if you haven’t seen it in action before, take a look at the sales page:

Peel Away Ads Salespage (opens in new window)

See in the top left hand corner?

Hover over that little triangle and the corner just “peels” away to reveal an advert.

Click on it and you are taken to whichever page the advertiser wants to show you.

It’s eye-catching, innovative and looks great…

Problem is, it isn’t advertised very well in some cases.

For example, check this screenshot I found on somebody’s blog today:

It says “Currently 250% Off Standard Price“.

Fair enough, you may say - until you think about it.

How can something be 250% off? Isn’t that impossible? Surely the most you can discount a price by is 100%?

Without getting too technical, let’s consider the maths:

Example -> 50% off £250

£250 x ((100 - 50) / 100) = £250 x 0.5 = £125

Another example -> 75% off £250

£250 x ((100 - 75) / 100) = £250 x 0.25 = £62.50

So, it follows that 250% off £250 would be:

£250 x ((100 - 250) / 100) = £250 x -1.5 = -£375

Minus £375?

Unless I’m completely wrong, does that not mean that to give a discount of 250% on a price of £250, you would have to give the customer £375 in cash?

Peel Away Ads, brilliant advertising idea let down by poor maths!

Peel Away Ads

Here’s some great news if you’re an product owner and want to severely ramp up your traffic and sales.

By far the easiest way to get a lot of traffic to a sales page is to offer an affiliate program.

Affiliates will send you traffic day and night and you only pay them when they produce sales.

It’s a great traffic generating method.

What holds some people back from promoting your products as an affiliate is that they are worried about losing their commission.

If they send visitors to your site using an obvious affiliate link then some visitors may use their own links to get a “discount” on their purchase.

Clickbank can be a nightmare for this.

This is where this new product that I’d like to tell you about is so powerful.

It’s a system that allows people to market products as an affiliate but without using affiliate links.

It’s a brilliant idea, even if I am biased (a couple of my friends have developed it).

I’ve written a review explaining why this is such a great program for any digital product seller:

http://www.BizOppsUK.com/affpaypro.php

AffPayPro takes payment for the product, delivers it securely and also emails the customer with the download link to make sure they can get their product.

But, on top of all this “standard” stuff, it has a built-in affiliate system which doesn’t use affiliate links.

Find out how it is able to do this here:

http://www.BizOppsUK.com/affpaypro.php

It’s ingenious!

Someone pointed out to me that a book I recommend has now become out-of-date due to changes to Overture (or as it is now known, Yahoo Search Marketing).

When I was first introduced to keyword research in early 2005, the tool to use was the Overture Keyword Selector Tool.

You typed in a couple of keywords and clicked “search” and the tool would give you a list of searches made on Yahoo for the previous month along with a count of how many times each search was made.

It was pretty useful and most people seemed to think it was very accurate - accurate enough to base important marketing decisions on anyway…

As it turned out, the Overture Tool disappeared a while ago - not sure why but it was up and down for a bit and now it seems to have gone for good.

The other tool this vigilant reader told me about was Nichebot - which used to be free to use but is now a paid-for only resource.

Well, I saw the author of the book over the weekend and he said that he had realised that both the Overture Tool had disappeared and that Nichebot was now charging visitors.

He suggested that, until he can update the book and provide the update to customers, you should use Wordtracker’s free keyword suggestion tool at:

http://freekeywords.wordtracker.com/

Just make sure to remember that results provided here are for DAILY searches, rather than monthly…

I got an email the other day from Wordtracker saying that my membership had expired. I’d forgotten I had access to it to be honest. Anyway, looking back I don’t think I ever really used it for anything useful but I paid £140 for a year’s access. What a waste of money when I rarely used it!

A good friend (John Sikora, the marketer behind the excellent http://www.GuruDAQ.com) told me that he uses Wordtracker occasionally but not enough to warrant signing up for a year’s access.

His tip?

When you need to use it, get a 1 Week Pass for Wordtracker and hammer it over a week. That way you only pay £15 and you can judge whether a full year would be worth the expenditure.

Sound advice if you ask me, especially after I’ve just checked the Wordtracker site - the annual subscription is now £165 a year…

I was recently looking for some good quality graphics for my site and had a hard time finding a decent pack for a reasonable price. 

Basically I wanted some professional looking images to make my websites and sales pages look great - to “jazz them up“! 

A lot of graphics are, admittedly, great but you just can’t be sure that you are buying royalty-free images. 

Use them without knowing who owns the copyright and you could end up in some hot water. 

The solution? Well, have a look for yourself… 

http://www.MegaGraphicsPack.com

I love WordPress blogs because they are so simple to use.

You just login, write a short message, click ‘Publish’ and it is up on the web.

An added bonus is that people can add comments to your posts to discuss what you have written.

Of course, as with anything good on the web, spammers and scumbags have to try and take advantage of it.

WordPress blogs, unfortunately, attract idiot comment spammers. These people run automated programs which visit your blog and leave comments about all kinds of unwanted subjects - porn, drugs, get rich quick schemes etc.

If you don’t moderate comments, your blog could pretty quickly get filled up with crap.

After almost a year of running this particular blog, I think I have pretty much stopped the spammers now. I get the occassional junk comment but now it is just one, rather than the 50 or so I was getting daily.

What I did was ensure that every comment had to be moderated before it could appear on the blog, EXCEPT for comments by people who had been approved before.

So, if you’ve written a comment on here which has been approved in the past and you write a new one, it should appear immediately - no moderation required.

As I was deleting all of the spam, I kept track of all the stupid words that the spammers were using.

Every time I got a new comment about a certain drug I would add that drug’s name to the Blacklist.

This means that any comments written that mention “cialis” for example, are deleted immediately so I don’t even see them.

Soon I also noticed that the spammers were using similar domain names everytime so I would add part of the domain name into the Blacklist.

Almost all spammers on this blog were using dot info domain names.

I was tempted to add “.info” to the Blacklist but I decided not to just in case someone genuine was using this kind of web address.

So far there are about 250 terms that trigger deletion of comments on this particular blog and they seem to be keeping it clear of any crap.

And good thing too.

I’ve seen blogs that are left to rot and it isn’t pretty once the comment spammers take hold so if you value your own blog, please make sure to keep your Blacklist up to date!

Thanks for reading,

Ben

P.S. If you haven’t already, make sure to check out The How To Lay Off Your Boss Home Study Course - surprisingly good!

P.P.S. By all means leave a comment on this post but please don’t use any dodgy words…