Review: Explosive Cash Flow System

Hi Caroline,

Thanks for providing such an honest review. How refreshing.

Actually, 56 is an even number — but I am a math guy.

Great review! Thanks for the honest comments.

Caroline,

Thanks for writing such a truthful review and not feeling obligated to love everything about it just because you’ve been asked to look at it. (I’ve been subscribed to your blog for quite a while and it’s that unvarnished style that keeps me reading!)

Not to pile on, but I really agree about the letter. Whatever the product, if the pitch is too over-the-top, sales may be hard to come by. I have my anti-sales-letter prejudice, too, but a landing page like this could be both persuasive and eyecatching without seeming quite so… “late night infomercial.”

(It also depends on who they are targeting…)

Keep up the good work!

Regards,

Kelly

I get that by 56 you meant “weird” and not “odd as opposed to even”, but it’s obvious that you are an Affiliate Marketer of this product, so ummm…

Since you will earn a commision on any purchase of this product made by one of your readers, shouldn’t you know that 56 days is exactly eight weeks–which is the standard return policy at ClickBank?

Shouldn’t you have read through the ClickBank policies when you signed up? Don’t you think you owe it to your readers/customers to know a little bit more about the policies of ClickBank before you start pitching products from that marketplace?

I’m jsut sayin’

ooops, I meant “just”.

Caroline !

you are great! I am watching you through my rss reader tool and im always informed about your posts.

your writing is easy to read even for me as an german!

so form&content are highly interesting! who can say this from himself.

(maybe yuo are more of a writer than you think!?

@Courtney

maybe Caroline just shares something with us and her intention at the first point is not plainly to sell the videos but to talk about the thought which underlies this campain.
Caroline is blogging about making money.
Caroline is blogging about stategies to make money.
Caroline is blogging about having a blog about making money.

her intentions are are openly honest and shes presenting the topic in a fair manner!

so lets stay positive and give her friendly hints instead of expecting 100% pefection and total awarenes in a harsh way.
(no “hi” or “Hello” no “regards”or see u later”)

so

freundliche Grüße

(best regards)
whylee

Well, I was so bust making my silly odd/even joke, I did not connect the 56 days = 8 weeks either.

@Courtney — you’re kidding, right? After looking at this great blog and all the information here, your complaint is that Caroline has not memorized the clickbank terms and conditions? Did you have a bad day or something? :)

I agree, @Courtney that was unnecessarily harsh. I’ve certainly never seen Caroline try to present herself as some all-knowing IM god, so revealing that she doesn’t know every salient fact about affiliate marketing isn’t exactly breaking a giant scandal.

Interesting about the sales letter. I loathe them, but then I do wonder if I’m being a chump. I would not recommend the usual red-headlined, highlighted nasty sales letter for a business audience, personally. You will definitely lose some customers–but how many will you pick up?

At at the end of the day, you have to test it to know for sure. I don’t think many IMers are actually testing a non-disgusting sales letter against their disgusting one to see what pulls better. God knows the only sales letter I’ve seen lately that didn’t make me barf was Brian Clark’s material for Teaching Sells. (Which I bought. So there’s a sample of one, anyway.)

Sonia, Caroline, and all,

Lots of companies do test styles of “landing pages” (online sales letters, basically). Getting public data about the results of these tests can be tricky, and one of the toughest parts is that if your design team creates two different styles of writing/ graphics/ offers etc., it’s still two designs from the same team, which usually means the pages share a lot in terms of style, “voice,” and the like, no matter how hard they tried.

So, how can you learn what really works? SEOmoz held a competition last year and tested ten landing pages, all from different designers. The winner was the page that increased their orders versus their original page the most, in a short period of time. I’m not going to give it all away here because it’s more fun to see it unfold:

Competition announcement
And the winner is… (with links to all the designs that they tested)

If you poke around on their site you’ll also find a couple of blog entries from the winner, explaining his work. I will spare you a bit of the suspense: as one of the designers chosen to do this ten-design run-off, I was one of the interested parties. What was fascinating about the competition was the variety of styles, from more traditional design-y pages, to over-the-top pleas, from short and sweet to long, from straight appeals to humorous ones.

With SEOmoz’s permission, I wrote up a bit about my firm’s entry here.

Check them all out and you’ll get the idea: all improved significantly over their previous conversion rate of .5% (mine, in 6th place, improved it by 330%); some like the winner had great rates of pulling people to click, but not great rates of getting the order placed (I’m happy that mine came in second in that respect… but I had to rethink a lot because it just didn’t get the clicks that the winner did!). IMHO, they tested too many for too short a period (first cut was made at just one week, which is very short for ten variables), but it was a great real-world test which the company was willing to make transparent so all could learn from it. Testing design (and copy) variations against each other is well worth it.

(Interesting note: the winning design is no longer being used, in spite of its great pulling power.)

Do over-the-top letters pull in a different customer? You bet. Is that okay? Only the numbers and your own Vision can tell you that. If you don’t know who you’re trying to appeal to, how can you know the right appeal?

Regards,

Kelly
Maximum Customer Experience Blog

@Mark, lol I meant odd as in strange (why not 60 days?) rather than as the opposive of even!

@Courtney, Nope didn’t know that and now I do so thanks for the heads up. Policies bore me, I have better things to do with my time than read them :)

@Sonia, hehe no I certainly don’t know everything, or even all that much at all - I’m learning as I go along and sharing what I learn on the blog.

@Kelly, yeah this is pretty much the same thing that I hear from most experienced people in the IM world - after much split testing, long-form sales letters convert the best. The question I have is, just because something converts the ‘best’ do we have to use it?

I’d rather sell less, make less money and be happy in my work and be proud of what I have produced than just follow the standard cookie-cutter fomula and make the most money. Seriously if I was just in this for the money I would not even be here - I would be back at my day job working my ass off for a promotion as that would pay WAY more that I am likely to earn doing this for at least a year! Hmm, that could make an interesting blog post hehe…

Caroline,

Long does not have to be gaudy.

A very important point.

Cookie-cutter is bad! I’ve been meaning to post about that point for a while, oh, now I’ll have to go do it.

Your Vision should guide you to the correct way to connect with the audience you want. The letter you linked to, was *ahem* not going to connect with me, nor with some of the other commenters here. But if they are getting the results they expect and want, great. I assume since they asked you to review the letter and the product, they must have been hoping for constructive criticism and tips on improvement.

Maybe they’ll let you know if they make changes, and what their results are. Numbers are more important than designers’ opinions if you are in business to make money and you know you’re headed where you want to be. (Besides, there’s a new breed of designer looking to provide measurable results for their clients.)

Regards,

Kelly

Oh my I had forgotten about this!

Caroline, your “can’t be bothered to read the regs” attitude sounds a lot like “can’t be bothered to care about my customers” to me, since those regs are things your customers need to made aware of (you know, little things like how the return policy ACTUALLY works).

Oh, and since you WILL EARN A COMMISSION anytime anyone clicks on your link above and purchases the product you “reviewed” that makes your readers…wait for it!…that’s right…your readers are your customers!!!

I hear ya that some of you think I’m harsh–though I’m not entirely sure how “many” you actually are. It’s a well known blogger trick to fake your own comments, and seeing as so many people unthinkingly jumped to this blogger’s defense, makes me wonder…

Look kiddies, I understand that calling her on the return policy info seems insignificant, but I just think Caroline’s blunder makes it so very obvious that she is not terribly expereinced at this internet marketing game–Anyone who’s been in the aff marketing game for any length of time would just know that little bit about ClickBank–it’s just sort of one of those common knowledge things, and a HUGE indication of inexperience. Just a major, major, tipoff.

I wanted to point this out, dear readers, as it’s important to be careful who you take advice from. It can save you money in the long run.

So consider yourselves forewarned–and to the commenter who believes that this blogger is NOT primarily trying to make a buck from you, well, I can’t help ya, just can’t, though I do have some snakeoil you might be interested in…

Caroline. You have a very strong analytical review/research skill. I bet your cash cow (from now on) will be from affiliate links.

It goes like this, the product owner will ask you to write something about his/her product. You review them honestly and at the end of the review, provide your affiliate link.

On another topic.

Your blog make me think about writing an ebook (and become the next internet millionaire…. how sad) and guess, who will be the first one to review it… ;-)

(My secret skill is in php programming) Shhhh…

@Courtney — You crack me up. The whole point of Caroline’s blog is that it is her open journal about learning how to make money on line. She doesn’t claim to be an expert — especially on affiliate marketing. That’s why I find it interesting, personally. It’s a raw account of her learning process (and a pretty damn good one at that).

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Courtney,

As one who did not “jump” to Caroline’s defense last time I am going to now. At that time I could see it was being handled ably by others, and I would rather further a serious discussion than give credence to carping.

I think the most important point that might help you in the future is to tell you that as in most blogs, here you can click on anyone’s name to find out where they are from, as it is a link to their website if they provided one.

Then you will not have to wonder at my legitimacy or anyone else’s.

Feel free, all, to click on mine, as I would welcome the traffic.

I think you greatly overestimate the commission that anyone receives on affiliate links, and you sorely misjudge Caroline’s intentions here. I’m a reader, not a “customer,” and a great appreciator of Caroline’s out-loud thinking, in which she is completely transparent about being a new blog professional. Never pretends to be anything else. The way a blog encourages a reader to purchase, whether overtly or more subtly, is by demonstrating thought-leadership we can gain from, and I gain from reading Caroline’s blog each day. I hope she cares more about honestly than about intricacies of rules, because so do I. This apparently makes me part of her target market, while I daresay you may need to find another blog to… participate in.

End.

Caroline,

I love the CommentLuv plug-in, and have even contacted its author trying to get it, but sadly he doesn’t yet make it for TypePad. Boo-hoo. I think it will do for you what I was wishing for when I emailed him: skyrocket your legitimate comments. Good luck!

Regards,

Kelly

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@Courtney, maybe it’s because I don’t see my blog readers as my ‘customers’. I’m not even promoting my own products, I’m just blogging about something as an affiliate and the only responsibility I feel is to write what I think about the product, not to know anything about Clickbank rules - that’s the job of the guy with the Clickbank product.

I’m not entirely sure where you get the idea that I am ‘experienced’ in the Internet Marketing game. I quit my day job just a few months ago to get started - I am a newbie myself and this blog is where I report about what I learn. I have never claimed to be any kind of expert.

Oh, and I don’t need to fake comments :-)

Wow. That was a good review. Hopefully this review will give some information before people decided to get ones.

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