LIVE CASE STUDY - Bring The Fresh vs. Extreme Niche Empires vs. Google Sniper 2

[Nile Vincent]

Just wanted to check in and see how this is going...

Looks like we're all still holding our breaths!

Patience...

[HenkJ]

I just came across this thread today while checking Warrior views on EME before buying into it. I have had some success with GS2, but have been folloing Matthew Carter's training over the past few months.
This thread is easily the most valuable forum contribution I have seen in my two years in this game and I am happy to contribute to the Tip Jar. $3.50 just seems far too little to keep Mikel motivated... Is anything happening on the idea? Mile, are you still at it?

[Nile Vincent]

Originally Posted by HenkJ

I just came across this thread today while checking Warrior views on EME before buying into it. I have had some success with GS2, but have been folloing Matthew Carter's training over the past few months.
This thread is easily the most valuable forum contribution I have seen in my two years in this game and I am happy to contribute to the Tip Jar. $3.50 just seems far too little to keep Mikel motivated... Is anything happening on the idea? Mile, are you still at it?

Yes, one day at a time...making progress on all three...damn, these are not the easy so called "make money quick" programs...I don't give a damn what the promoters are saying...

[Srdjan]

Well done to all, especially to Mikel, count me in

Good contribution thanks everyone!

Best regards
Srdjan

[rusy123]

No update so far in this exciting thread?

[xxxJamesxxx]

I haven't read the entire thread but I bet GS 2.0 got it's ass wupped.

James Scholes

[hendarin]

I really eager to see the result over the next 2 or 3 months. I don't know about BTF and GS2 (I don't have them) but ENE is very very good tutorial, top notch, unfortunately it has One drawback. Within the course, Sean shows an example (real website that he built from the scratch step by step, so anyone can follow it easily) with all the easy but very smart traffic strategies and excellent tools that he provide, but I could not find that site live, why?

[itchydog]

Sean took down his example website after he finished making the videos.

[hendarin]

I become Bring The Fresh Full Disclosure member recently, I have to say that the materials are excellent, but as a fresh member, I have also to say that communication with Bring The Fresh Owners are very insufficient, because I bought their "Deluxe Guaranteed Rankings DFY package" on 29th January 2012 (My PayPal payment ID transaction number is 05B072838G158230U), but up until now I don't know the status of my order. I have sent e-mail twice to 'kellysfelix@gmail.com' (on 30 and 31st Jan 2011) and another one to 'kellyandmike@bringthefresh.com' early today (1st feb 2012). Those 2 e-mail addresses are the official contact point within the members area.

I write this not to rush bring the fresh team with my tiny order, I just want to know the status of that order.

I am still waiting for the reply, and I write this in warrior forum, hoping that either Kelly or Mike or their staff can see this post and can help me out

[hendarin]

@Itchydog : thanks for your info

[hendarin]

Mike have contacted me, and also Mario from BTF, it seems that we had little problem on e-mail communication but now everything seems OK.

To Mike and his team, Thank you very much for your attention

[mikel.perez.01]

Hello all, I'm back!

This may be a long post, as I plan to cover the following:
1 - An explanation of why I've been missing all this time, which I think I owe you.
2 - The situation with the sites I created for the experiment as of now
3 - Important conclussions about this experiment
4- What do you want me to do of this thread from now on?

So, here we go.

1 - What I've been up to.

Well, I've been up to a lot of things in the past months, and there's an important lesson I've learned in that time:

No matter what your plans, intention and schedule are, LIFE GETS IN THE WAY.

I was moving to a "new" apartment closer to the center of my town (BIlbao), which I was having rehabilitated. Long story short, the works that should have ended in July ended in October, after no few headaches for me. Moving there was also a slight nightmare, and afterwards I had quasi-legal problems with one of my new neighbours.

So I was severely distracted for months, and I could only focus on several offline projects I had signed contracts for with a few customers.

So, lesson learned: never again assume that things will always go smoothly, and plan your efforts and compromises assuming you'll be working at your maximum capacity and efficiency.

The good news is all is well now, so I'm up and running again. And I don't plan to move to a new place EVER

2 - The situation with the sites

As you can ssume from the previous section, I haven't had time to work at all on those sites, so they've been "on their own". How have they done since I last reported?

- The GS2 site stabilized at position #1 in Bing, and page 3 in Google and Yahoo. The daily traffic curve looks like a function generating random numbers between 1 and 7 , with less than 100 visits a month. I only achieved one conversion (physical product sale), so I've lost a few bucks with this site.

- The BTF site is stable at position #11 in Google, #5 in Yahoo and #3 in Bing. It receives a few more visits than the previous one, but nothing significant. I've also made a single sale, that mostly covered the cost of the domain.

- Regarding the ENE site, the situation is more complex. If you rememeber, I created 9 money pages, plus many automatically generated posts. Supposedly, the auto-blogging part of the equation should help the main pages get up in the rankings.

Well, here's what's happened:

• The money pages have not reached any top positions. The highest one in Google is at position #15, the lowest one is nowhere to be seen. The highest ranking one is at position #14 in Bing, the lowest is nowhere. And the best position they achieved in Yahoo is #36.
• But, and that's important, the auto-generated posts, being focused in longer tail keywords, are in fact ranking for many different keywords all around the keywordsphere (nice term, huh? ), and driving traffic. The site got approx 400 visits / month last year, in january they grow to 800 / month. And these pages that get traffic for long tail keywords are funnelling part of that traffic to the money pages.
• And, regarding monetization, I haven't made any physical product sales, but if you remember I installed Adsense (in the money pages and the home page), and am getting -after tweaking and optimizing placement of ads- an average CTR of 5,8%. It is not the best of my sites, but it's not bad at all either. The CPC is not high, though, so I've made close to 100$. Enough to cover for the expenses and make some profit, but not to live off of it.

I'd like to give my opinion on the programs themselves, apart of how my sites performed:

• GS2: The site is active, and George is still running webinars for members and adding content. I think that honors him, considering how many marketers launch a site and then never add a single comma to it, or even take it down after some time.
• BTF: The site is also active, with a forum where members can interact, and Mike and Kelly show up often to interact with members.
• ENE: As I already said in some previous post, Sean mainly disappeared, leaving the members with a plugin that only partially worked and with no replies. If this has changed lately, please correct me, but that's how things were when I last checked.

3 - Important conclussions about the experiment

Here's the thing... if we think of this experiment as a pure "case study" of what someone wanting to build an affiliate site can find on his way, I think I can consider it a complete success: I think I found every possible issue you can come across

I had technical issues in the case of BTF, I had personal matters getting in the way, I had to decide that I'd do some things myself and outsource others, I found that each method recommends different services (for instance, backlinking services) and you can't follow instructions to the t you will end up being a member of every service out there...

If we think of it as a SEO experiment, my feelings are my performance has been so-so. I did most of what was advised in the methods, but not all. I think the final positions in the rankings prove that finding an easy keyword, an EMD, and throwing a few backlinks at it, is not enough to get to #1. But it doesn't disprove it's possible, either, you just need more consistency over time, something I have not done.

Of course, even though it was not the objective of this thread, money-wise the experiment has been a complete failure. But I think I'm the one to blame; the reason lays in the ultra-strict constraints I set in the beginning trying to be "scientific".

If you re-read my first post, in order to try to give each method an igualitarian treatment, I forced all of them to target main keywords in the same niche, related to physical products, using the Amazon marketplace, and centered around products that shared some "functionality" or benefit to the user.

Well, this may have helped me compare them SEO-wise (though, as you may remember, I had to stretch the limits of GS2 a bit), but has set the foundation for a complete monetary failure.

I now think I should have let each of them "fly free", and lead me to whatever keywords I could find in whatever market, and see how they performed, each on their own merits.

My final conclussion, if someone didn't already know that: this thing ain't as easy as we're sometimes made to believe.

Sure, these methods can work, and I know because I have some other sites that are profitable, but only after a lot of work, testing and tweaking. "throwing anything" at Google or the visitors is not enough, not anymore.


4 - And now, the final question: what do you want me to do from now on?

Regarding the three sites I built, I will let the GS2 and BTF ones die, and keep the ENE one, and work on it a bit more because I think it has some potential.

So, the alternatives now are:

a) I do nothing more with this thread, and leave it here as an interesting experiment. Sometimes things have to have a beginning, and have an end, and maybe the time has come to close this thread.

b) I try to run the same experiment again with three new sites, this time focusing on monetization, giving more freedom to the three methods. I'm not especially motivated to building another ENE site, but what the heck, if that's what you want I can do it.

c) I run my own experiment, based on the GS2 / BTF / ENE techniques, but mixing and tweaking them, following a strategy that has given me good results in other cases. And this time, giving you much more detail (even revealing the sites and keywords) This would be like a WSO unfolding in front of your eyes.

Oh, by the way, I don't plan to make a WSO of this thread, though I'm really really thankful to those that offered to heklp me on that endeavour. I have several WSOs in mind but they'll be centered around what I want to be my core business, and it's not "how to make money online", so if I do something else here, it would be for free.

So, what would you like me to do? I'd love to hear from you!

[notquiteaguru]

First of all thanks for your great case study it was a great read!
As far as where to go from here, I think you have 3 solid options. I say you should go for C with a twist...
take on myself and two other students to each work one of the methods and document everything to turn it into a WSO

[denominator]

Thank you for doing the case study, great read.

[marketwarlord]

Thanks for the work you have put into it and your report of the results.

I was happy to hear that ENE came out a little bit on top. I have been using it for a while in a few different ways and have been pretty happy with the results. I have been making about $100 per week using it on a site and haven't really pushed hard on getting the site ranked well. I am back in the saddle on it and expect to drive this to the point where I am making upwards of $50 to $100 per day with it on one site.


I look forward to seeing anything else that comes out of this study. Let us know if we can be of assistance.

Best regards,

Anthony

[freelinks]

I love this case study because you are only promting physical products.

[HKSEO Rotzee]

Gotta love case studies, thanks for the time and effort.

[KellyFelix]

I think you hit the nail on the head with option C:

"I run my own experiment, based on the GS2 / BTF / ENE techniques, but mixing and tweaking them"

I think this is the most important lesson you can get from any product. When you follow something to the T, you are doing yourself an injustice, because you are likely able to add additional steps or creativity that we as product owners may have over-looked, simply because we aren't you and we don't have your own unique perspective.

[Jnorman]

Mike,

I like "option C" also. I think you have brought great knowledge to us and I for one would look forward to seeing more of your case study. Please let us know if there is anything we can do to help in your endeavor.

[Big Al]

Option C as well.

Markets differ and people differ. You have to find out what's working for you and make that better. That'll differ for everyone. Experience is the best teacher and courses are simply guides that teach you (hopefully) from other people's experience so you don't have to start from scratch.

[itchydog]

I say you build 100 of each, log the time you spend on each, the money you spend, earnings, traffic and then create a nice table showing which method is more efficient when you look at time spent vs money spent vs earnings, lol.

[mookes]

I think your 3 methods is totally great for long term,

1. Bring the Fresh by Kelly Felix and Mike Long
2. Extreme Niche Empires by Sean Donahoe
3. Google Sniper 2 by George Brown.

[Nile Vincent]

Option C: this one sounds very interesting...and also sounds like you'd have your
heart in it to the hilt!

Good luck, and let us know if there's anything we can help with...

[Steadyon]

Hi Mikel Perez,

Thanks for taking the time to do a case study and for posting back recently.

I don't want to pour water on what you have done, but am i right in saying that for all the work you did, you only made two sales?

If this is the case, then surely that can merit doing all the work you did or paid for.

Please correct me if I have misread something. It's just that I see so many people try their hand at IM and make zero or next to zero.

I make money online but mainly by selling physical stuff.

Thanks.

[bolaji]

Hey folks.

Don't know if you're aware or not, but Kelly Felix just launched Bring The Fresh 2012 as a Warrior Special Offer.

http://www.warriorforum.com/warrior-...s-revenge.html

[llncm]

Do you own this my friend?

[bartholomä]

I was especially interested in hearing how Google Sniper perfoms vs Bring the Fresh as I am definetly going to sign up for one of those two.

Everyone has some bad luck once in a while, glad you found a place finally.

Thanks again for the case study, maybe you can repeat that from time to time or even build a website around it? (sounds like quality content and interesting to me).

[Vija]

I really appreciate the time and effort you put in this. Thank you very much for the amazing case study.

[Piero]

I'm a brand new buyer of Kelly's BTF (bought a few days ago), and I'm still wading through all the content, so am not in a position yet to offer any meaningful feedback. (Bought it and prepared to settle in for a few days of undisturbed, focused study and preparation/implementation....LOL, and life intervened...still- onwards and upwards)

Hey! Idea for one of the "serial" WSO creators: "Life intervenes: How to ....."(fill in the blanks)

However, it has become clear to me from reading this really excellent thread of Mikel's that things aren't as easy/simple as they might appear on sales pages and that a certain amount of improvisation/addition may be needed to really crack it (as Kelly also points out)....time will tell though, as I intend following the BTF method to start with. From what I've seen to date, their forum and support is alive 'n well and a good source of support- for me, this resource alone is priceless.

MANY thanks to Mikel for freely sharing the result of your time, money and dedicated work...this is truly priceless (using that word again, I know, but I do use it quite literally). Not many IM'ers would do this kind of thing. Thanks again.

Mikel, as to your question of which way to go: I fully agree with Kelly that option c) I run my own experiment, based on the GS2 / BTF / ENE techniques, but mixing and tweaking them would be great.

I look forward to your future posts in this thread.

Piero

[Plato]

Hey there Mikel,

thanks for your time and input to this interesting case study.
Option C. sounds nice ..

[immoneymagnet]

Originally Posted by KellyFelix

I think you hit the nail on the head with option C:

"I run my own experiment, based on the GS2 / BTF / ENE techniques, but mixing and tweaking them"

I think this is the most important lesson you can get from any product. When you follow something to the T, you are doing yourself an injustice, because you are likely able to add additional steps or creativity that we as product owners may have over-looked, simply because we aren't you and we don't have your own unique perspective.

Not trying to be negative here whatsoever....but I can't help but point out Kelly your sales page says "You need to follow my instructions EXACTLY"

I mean I do know that in every method there has to be some creativity...in other words I agree completely with your post here. BUT I remember thinking when I read that part on your sales page about following your instructions EXACTLY...made me think maybe I should just do that...not deviate at all from the steps.

But maybe not

[mikel.perez.01]

Hey, guys

I'm back here, thanks for your attention and compliments.

OK, I'll be running a new experiment. I'll be starting next Monday, which I think is May 7th.

It will be an interesting experiment, as I'll do two different things:
- Create, rank and monetize (well, try to) a new site.
- And try to relive two old sites of mine that have tanked this month due to Panda? Penguin? Any other weird animal?

It'll be interesting to see the results.

I'll create a new thread for that, though. I'll post the link here so that you can all get to the new one.

[Ebiz Mom]

Mikel -

Thanks for your time and effort in sharing your results with us. I will be following your new adventures closely!

Ebiz Mom
WebPro Golf

[inazuman]

I've bookmarked this. Great thread- thanks for this. Learning about some great WP stuff too

[mikel.perez.01]

Hi, guys!

I just started my new experiment.

I decided to open a new thread, you can follow it here (and don't forget to subscribe to that one in order to stay up to date):
http://www.warriorforum.com/adsense-...xperiment.html

[robftprod]

Hi
I really enjoyed reading this thread
I was hoping you had time for one more post on this experiment
What happened to each site after the recent Penguin update?

Thanks
Rob

[mikel.perez.01]

That's easy to answer: nothing. Neither good nor bad, they are getting the same traffic they were before, and ranking in similar positions.

Unfortunately, that was not the case with all my sites, as you'll see in my new case study

[rankinghero]

Originally Posted by mikel.perez.01

So, what would you like me to do? I'd love to hear from you!

Hi Mikel
I used to live in Getxo - near Bilbao

Although I love the idea of case studies, I think we need to face the facts
this is 2012.... you can't build an authority site as a case study, an authority site needs to be build with a BUSINESS MODEL in place not with a "keyword sniping mentality"

Building a site to get ranking for just 1 - 2 keywords is like working on a beautiful sand castle ... it will be destroyed eventually.

what it will be cooler is .. instead of you creating these sites based on SOMEONE ELSE model..... create your own

Don't follow other people, instead tell us what you have learned, and create an amazing authority site but with a clear business plan and not with a "let me follow what so-called gurus are telling me to do"

just my 2 cents.
Un abrazo!

[mrultra]

Originally Posted by mikel.perez.01

That's easy to answer: nothing. Neither good nor bad, they are getting the same traffic they were before, and ranking in similar positions.

Unfortunately, that was not the case with all my sites, as you'll see in my new case study

Speaking of sites dropping, the kidney diet site mentioned in BTF dropped to about number 5. What's most interesting about the site is how it makes all the money they say it is making when the main affiliate link goes to a parked page, and has for about a year now.

[omgfirstmillion]

Hi,

Thanks so much for this experiment, you´re awesome. I must say I´m shocked with the poor monetization results from the sites. The BTF sales letter talks about incredible figures, like 1 million wise! And yet your BTF webpage had this results?? I´m aware you didn´t work that hard on it, but still... definitely not so easy as they make it look!

And by the way I´d love if you make a new experiment with option "C", would really like to see your mind completely free to create an experimental site mixing these three methods and making a case study like this one.

I live also in Spain, by the way.

[SamDermot]

Great advice and tutorial for experienced as well!