Top Affiliate Challenge (TAC)

Well, I already touched upon my feelings about the production of TAC. The worst had to have been episode #5. Worst editing ever! But, I have to say there was a glimmer of hope in #5. They went into some interesting tips. A nice grey-hat nugget by John Chow. That was a good sign. Now, I watched Episode #6 yesterday, and was happy to see that they improved the video slightly. They changed the size of that annoying logo so it doesn’t cover people’s faces any longer. Glad it took them 5 episodes to figure that one out. This episode clearly lacked ‘drama’ in the sense of the competition, so they at least padded it with some good tips. I thought the tips they provided were of good quality, which got me to scratch my head a bit. I started looking at AWeber and Van Clute’s talk about PPC was good too. It was pretty fundamental concept of split testing ads, but he conveyed it well. I have to say, after #6.. I do have some hope for the show. I’m curious how they’re going to re-integrate Shoemoney.

Wealthy Affiliate (WA)

It’s been 3 days since I became a member of WA, and I have to say I’m impressed. I think initially this membership offers services and instructions for complete novices to affiliate marketing, but the quality of tools they provide and their Learning Center (Junior, Intermediate and Senior) provides some incredibly useful information for everyone. They also provide a link cloak tracking tool where you can monitor PPC campaigns with your affiliate links to see how affective they are. I already started masking my links with this tool. Along with the link tool they have a great keyword tool and great research tools for Clickbank, etc. I’m hoping to create some relationships with veterans and tap into the good stuff and advice.

I would have to say that I’m mostly impressed with the community there. Everyone is incredibly kind and helpful. Since it’s membership based, you do not see any scams or spams in the forum, etc. There is a lot of advice and great ‘sticky’ posts that are worth their weight in gold for sure.

My only criticism so far, and I’m only complaining because I’m impatient, is their 8 Week Action Plan. They provide you a 8 Week Action Plan that supposedly gets you on the road with PPC and campaigns, but you have to wait every week for a new plan. The first week was to basically familiarizing yourself with the site.. which is fine, but I’d like to get my feet wet and start on something. I know if they provided all lessons.. I would have ended up doing them all the first night and probably not take the time to really let it soak in. I understand their logic, so it’s a small complaint.

I’ll keep you posted once I start some kind of venture based off of the action plan.

Related posts:

1. Top Affiliate Challenge (TAC)
2. Wealthy Affiliate University features and benefits
3. Outsourcing Jobs with Wealthy Affiliate

Top Affiliate Challenge (TAC)

First off, I want to apologize for my lack of posts lately. I’ll go into what I’ve been working on.. and thinking about in a follow up post, but for now I wanted to talk about TAC, Top Affiliate Challenge (http://www.topaffiliatechallenge.com/).

I have to say that I was sucked in and very impressed with Joel Comm’s Next Internet Millionaire show. I really enjoyed the personalities and there were a few tips that I could apply, loosely with my campaigns. I really wished that they would give you a little more of the classes, but oh well. Thor Shrock from NIM decided to put on his own show called Top Affiliate Challenge featuring some gurus that I’ve been following for a while – Jeremy Schoemaker (Shoemoney) and John Chow. I use to read Shoemoney’s blog on a daily basis, but have been turned off by the almost constant barrage of self promotion and promotions products or services. I really enjoyed the site when he’d offer very helpful advice and provided great inspiration. I guess I’ve lost trust with the site – never knowing if a post is just a sales tool for that particular day. I know I’ll end up following him again, because I do feel he’s inspiring, and think he’s a damn good at what he does.

John Chow is someone that I know is just pushing promotions and opportunities for his own monetization. There is no question that is what he does, and I’m amazed at how he’s able to provide such a readership on content that provides almost zero benefit to people in the niche of making money. I think I need to read it more, clearly I’m missing the point.

The last guru, I have to admit, I didn’t know much about him. Apparently, I should, and since the show aired, I’ve been reading up on this guy, and will surely read a more about him, and possibly pick up his book, Impact!.

I was excited to see a show that provided teams, and teams that will be backed up with this calibur set of gurus. Surely this has to be interesting at the least. I have to first say that I’m a sucker for reality shows, and specifically shows that are related to my interests… so this should be a slam dunk for me. I watched the first 3 episodes, and I have to say the shows SUCK! I’ll continue to watch to see if something good will come out of it, but I was very disappointed. Not with the contestants. Not with the gurus. Not with the concept. But I was sorely disappointed to with the production and delivery of the shows.

The production, in my opinion, is absolutely horrible. I feel like this was AV club work at highschool. I would be concerned if I was any of the sponsors or the gurus. The editing was quite amateurish and unpolished. Now, I can look at bad editing all day if the content is good. But the problem here is that the show provides zero insight on the art of affiliate marketing. Three episodes in and all I’ve heard is ‘blog’, ‘PPC’, ‘CPM’ and buzzword after buzzword without any context or methods used.

Reading a post at Shoemoney.com he states the following…

http://www.shoemoney.com/2008/07/03/tac-episode-1-the-intro-eps/

“I made sure the camera was ready every time and drew out on a whiteboard what we were doing and why we were doing it. I detailed every single step. Its exactly what we did to finish well and yet they only showed about 2 seconds where I talk about the Amazon Gift Certificates that we were going to give away.

The rest of the time they showed Tom playing the Nintendo Wii at my office which was like seriously 2 minutes.

So ya�. I kind of feel like I went out of my way to demonstrate a fool proof method to make money� which worked� and they never showed it. I vented my frustration to the shows producers about this and they said there was just so much footage they had to cut a lot to get the show at 30 minutes. maybe I am just selfish.”

Reading this just made me madder and madder. I would have LOVED to hear what Shoemoney was doing here! I think Thor forgot about the target of his audience and the intent of why they would watch the show. The target should be geared to affiliate marketers wanting to see how teams and gurus would succeed in a competitive environment. But I feel like the target was to watch computer nerds play WII eat pizza and bitch about the rules (that we don’t even know about) and see who gets eliminated. I guess if that’s the case… I’ll stick with Sheer Genius.

Top Affiliate Challenge compared to the Next Internet Millionaire is clear. NIM had much cleaner production and they at least gave you a taste of the classes and challenges at hand. They at least showed how people problem solved or failed with incorrect decisions. I’ll watch for a few more episodes, but my expectations are low. Hopefully, you’ll see a post where I counter this one.. I really want to like this show.

Anybody have any thoughts on the subject?

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1. Top Affiliate Challenge and Wealthy Affiliate – my thoughts
2. Update on my personal 30 day challenge
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