My review of PPC Classroom 2.0 has brought to light that many people, including myself, were confused about the “PPC Inner Circle”. Anik Singal left a response and I had some discussions about it with the affiliate manager. The upshot is that the PPC Inner Circle is not just the forum, but rather everything other than the 9-module PPC essentials course. This includes the tools, the webinars, and the forum, as well as additional modules and webinars in the months to come. But they decided to lock new members out of the forum for a month in order to keep the forum from being flooded with newbie questions. I was initially interested in the forum, but from what I hear there’s not much going on there so I don’t feel like I’m missing anything. The PPC Classroom folks seem surprised that I and many others were confused by all of this, but we were.

I also discovered from several readers who left comments (thank you) that this is a re-launch of the product with a different pricing model. Previous members paid a $77 upfront fee and then $30/month going forward for new modules and webinars. The current model is $7 upfront and $97/month going forward. I’m pretty sure everyone is getting the same content.

I imagine the price was raised like this in order to attract affiliate marketers to promote the product, and I think it worked. Many, many marketers are offering big bonuses for people who purchase PPC Classroom through their affiliate link. Brad Fallon, for example, seems to have received over 3000 orders through his affiliate link because he’s offering some of his famous software products for free as a bonus.

And, as regular reader Dave Starr commented, the “free” DVD that the PPC Classroom folks are selling is still making them a profit. Look at the Kunaki price list, for example. I doubt they’re using Kunaki for fulfillment, but you can see that it’s quite possible to burn and ship a DVD for less than you might think. They won’t get rich on the DVDs alone, but if they sell enough (and right now they’ve sold over 7,500 of them) then it’s still a nice chunk of change.

At this point I feel I can finally give a detailed and objective review of PPC Classroom 2.0. So let’s get going…

PPC Classroom 2.0

Let me start with the recommendation: For only $6.97 ($9.97 outside the US), I feel that PPC Classroom 2.0 is excellent value for anyone who wants to give pay-per-click affiliate marketing a try. The basic lifetime membership has a lot of detailed material that I think most people will find useful. Even I learned some things, and I’ve actually done a lot of pay-per-click. The information in the basic 9-module course is better that most affiliate marketing ebooks I’ve read, and quite detailed. (I think the only ebook that I’d consider to be of comparable quality is Beating AdWords.)

There are some downsides to joining PPC Classroom 2.0, though:

• You can only pay by credit card, not PayPal.
• You must subscribe to a continuity program that will charge you $97/month starting one month after you join — so you have to remember to cancel it before the first 30 days are up to avoid being charged anything.
• You must endure several different upsells if all you want is the basic membership.

Perhaps the biggest disappointment was pointed out to me by a reader of this blog: access to the “PPC Insider Club” forum is restricted until after you make the first $97 payment. This goes directly against what the sales page says: A 30 Day Free Look at the PPC Inner Circle – The advanced 7 figure super affiliate secrets I won’t see anywhere else. After 30 days, it’s only $97 per month and I can cancel anytime from my PPC Classroom student page. I’ve sent in a question about this, I hope it’s an oversight on their part. If it’s not, they should take out the free trial promise. The content is still well worth the $7 fee, but I was hoping to check out the PPC Inner Circle as well.

The Essential Training Modules

The 9 “essential” training modules that I listed yesterday are the heart of the PPC Classroom system. The modules are all high-quality, well-edited (just found a few mistakes here and there, mostly dropped letters) and many include detailed videos that show how to do things.

The module on setting up your AdWords campaigns, for example, has several videos that show you how to use Microsoft Excel to take a keyword list and transform it into a set of AdWords ad groups reader for importing into your AdWords account via Google’s own AdWords Editor software. Videos are a great way to do this because they show you exactly which menu items to use, what to fill in the various dialogs, etc., so you can easily follow along on your own computer. (It’s best to watch a video once or twice in its entirety before trying it out yourself. If you have dual screens or two computers, it’s also easier to run the video on one screen and try things out live on the other.)

Note that the essential training assumes you have some knowledge of what AdWords is, how affiliate marketing works, etc. If you’re a complete newbie, there are additional modules available to bring you up to speed, but they’re more like appendices to the real material.

Almost everything described in the 9 essential modules can be done for free. There are some Excel macros that they recommend you purchase, and also a subscription to a keyword competition tool, but for the most part everything is done using free tools. And you can get away without using the paid tools if you’re willing to spend more time on things.

I’m not a spreadsheet guy, so to me one of the most useful things was seeing how to manipulate keyword lists with Excel, although I must admit I’m tempted to write a tool to do all (or most) of that manipulation.

Tools

PPC Classroom 2.0 includes a number of online tools to help you automate some mundane PPC tasks:

1. Keyword List Cleaner — helps you massage your keyword list by removing duplicates, filtering out unwanted keywords, etc.
2. Google Match Type Tool — to take a keyword list and create broad, exact, and phrase matching variants of the keywords, including negative matches if appropriate.
3. Key Phrase Multipler — takes lists of keywords (up to 3 lists) and generates all logical combinations of keyword phrases.
4. AdWords Ad Writing Tool — a simple but cool tool that helps you come up with better AdWords ads (always the hard part for me!). Has pre-canned “fill in the blanks” headlines, descriptions, and lists of “power words”.
5. Typo Generator — expands a keyword list by generating different kind of common user typing errors.
6. PPC ROI Calculator — a very simple tool to calculate the return on investment (ROI) of your AdWords spending. (Not very sophisticated… you can easily do this yourself with a calculator.)
7. Long Tail Keyword Generator — a cool tool that lets you prefix or suffix a keyword with various different keyword lists (major US cities, US states, a few others) to create “long tail” variants of the keyword.
8. Geo Keywords — another long tail generator that works with various geographical terms.

Webinars

Also included in PPC Classroom 2.0 is access to just over a dozen webinars on various affiliate marketing and PPC topics.

Bonuses

I listed the bonuses yesterday as well. The first one, the 6 affiliate page templates, is what interested me the most. I was pleasantly surprised to discover that the templates are usable, modern HTML with CSS style sheets, not some Microsoft Word-generated garbage that makes me puke.

Some of the other bonuses are useful, too. There are some graphics in the graphics pack that I don’t have, for example. And the free Excel macro lets you do many of the same tasks as the paid third-party macro mentioned above.

Niche Detective

The “Niche Detective Club” is a $20/month upsell that I accepted just to see what it was about. Each month, members who selected this option get research for 3 niches. The first month’s niches are fat loss, panic attacks and tattoos, which are all niches I’ve seen described before. Each niche comes with a document that explains why the niche is good, gives recommendations as to which affiliate products to promote and how to promote them (i.e. search network or content network), a bunch of videos showing how they did the niche research, and a broad list of keywords related to the niche.

Is this stuff useful? Only if you do something with it, but it seems like a good starting point. It’s too bad, though, they don’t also subdivide the keyword lists into theme groups, would make advertising on the Google content network (AdSense sites) a bit easier.

Final Analysis

Well, you already know my recommendation: if any of the above seems useful to you, grab your “free” PPC Classroom membership quickly before they decide to stop letting people in. Apparently over 6500 people have signed up for membership so far. Of course, I’m expecting to see a huge drop-off in those numbers by the end of the first month, as I only expect a small percentage of those to sign up for the $97/month program. I wish I could see what’s in the PPC Inner Circle to tell you if it’s worth $97/month or not, but I won’t know until a month from now, if I don’t opt-out before then.

The PPC Classroom folks fixed their order form, so I’ve finally been able to sign up. Let’s continue the impromptu review.

More Upsells!

After you fill in the credit card information, you’re presented with another upsell. Yeesh. This one is for a $97 video of PPC Classroom live training. Actually, you get 15 videos for that. But I passed on it…. when would I ever watch them?

Then there’s yet another upsell, this time a $297 training series. OK, I passed on that, too. I hope that’s all there is…

No, wait, since I declined the last offer I’m given the chance to just watch the videos from the $297 training series for only $147. No live webinars, but everything else is the same… should I go for it? Nahh….

OK, I’m done. Finally. I’m tired from slogging through all those upsells. Now I know what I’m doing wrong in selling my own products.

Let’s see what’s in my inbox.

Inside PPC Classroom 2.0

In my mailbox was an email confirming that my payment was accepted, that the DVD would soon be on its way, and login details for the PPC Classroom site. No password, though, you have to manually reset it using the link provided in the email.

Anyhow, after doing that I’m able to log in to the member’s area. What I see when I get there is a lot of stuff. The DVD is available online as a very large 400MB video if you don’t want to wait for the mail version to arrive. I’ll wait and look at the other stuff.

The main part of the member’s area is the PPC Classroom 2.0 9-part course, consisting of these modules:

1. Market Research
2. Keyword Research and Building a Kill Profit Pulling Keyword List
3. Direct Linking, Landing Pages, and Your Own Affiliate Site
4. How to Set Up Your AdWords Campaign Properly
5. How to Design a High-Converting Landing Page
6. Understanding the Google Quality Score
7. Launching Your Campaign… Do You Have a Dud, or a Winner?
8. The Importance of Split Testing and How to Do It Correctly
9. Bid Optimization Strategies

You also get a number of other training modules introducing you to AdWords, affiliate marketing, legal issues, etc. These other modules would be for the complete newbies who’ve never done anything like pay-per-click before.

Each module is essentially a chapter in a book, split across multiple web pages. You can jump around all the modules as you wish and take interactive quizzes at the end of each module to see how much you learned and how well you retained it.

Besides the training, you also get a number of bonuses:

1. 6 “hand made” affiliate landing page templates
2. Custom graphics package
3. PPC process maps
4. Campaign building checklist
5. 101 of the “top profit pulling high CTR Google ads”
6. “Profit pumping power word cheatsheet”
7. “Scentific Advertising” ebook
8. “The Super Affiliate Millionaire Code” ebook
9. Time management tips
10. How to build an affiliate “dream team” special report
11. PPC Excel macro

Plus there are a couple of offers for free stuff from other sites.

Lot of stuff there, I need to look through some of it before I can proceed with the review of PPC Classroom 2.0. Stay tuned!