Day Job Killer Hype: Horse Racing and Amazon

Last week I mentioned that Day Job Killer (DJK), the follow-on to AdWords Miracle and Affiliate “Project X” (APX), is coming soon to an inbox near you. Tomorrow (February 6) at 3pm EST, to be exact. A long promotional video appeared yesterday on the official site.

Like many other Internet marketers, I sent a message out about DJK to my lists this morning. My message was different, though, than the ones that the others sent out. There is an incredible level of hype being generated for DJK as affiliates try to out-do each other with bonuses and special offers in order to sell as many copies of DJK to their lists as possible. The hype is approaching and will surely surpass the hype around APX, which managed to sell over 10,000 copies since its release.

Now, don't get me wrong, I like APX (see my review). What I liked about it most, however, was that it make me think differently about affiliate marketing. Books — especially ebooks — that make me stop and think are rare and I treasure them for that alone. It seems doubtful to me that DJK is going to repeat that experience for me, but we'll see — I will still purchase it and do a review. Might as well complete the “trilogy”, after all.

Still, if any of you who bought APX decided to put some of its methods to work, you've probably noticed that everyone-else-and-their-dog is doing the same thing, at least for all the high-priced, high-gravity ClickBank products. That's what happens when you sell thousands of copies of a money-making system. You have to be in the game early to make the really big money. The fact that some big-name Internet marketers have been given advance copies of DJK makes me wonder how many of the techniques it describes will already be used in full force by the time those of us low on the totem poll get around to implementing them ourselves.

About the video, let me give you the summary. It's mostly a static shot of a Google page with Chris (the author) talking about DJK. In the video, Chris “gives up” one of his profitable niches. The niche is “horse racing system”. Betting on horse racing is big in the UK, something that us North Americans don't realize. Anything involving gambling is a ripe market for infoproduct producers and sellers — gamblers are always looking for the “sure bet”.

The other thing Chris talks about is the “direct linking X” method. “Direct linking” is the method by which you place ads that link directly to a vendor's site via your affiliate link. (It's also called the “Google cash” method, named after the first ebook that popularized the method.) Direct linking worked extremely well in the early days of AdWords, but then Google changed the rules because too many ads for the exact same product were being promoted. So only one ad gets shown now, which means most affiliates have to direct traffic to another site for their ads to show, and then get people over to the official site.

As far as I can tell from seeing the video, “direct linking X” is just direct linking to higher-priced products on Amazon. Do it right and you can get lower-cost clicks because Amazon itself is an authority site full of quality pages.

But… if 10,000 affiliates start linking to Amazon all of a sudden, click prices are going to go up, no matter how authoritative the site. Affiliates will resort to the same tricks as before, and it won't really be different than the ClickBank situation, except that the Amazon payouts are much smaller and it's therefore much harder to make a profit. Unless I'm missing something — I guess I'll see when I read DJK.

As you can see, I'm setting myself up with low expectations for this product. If you're thinking of buying it, you might want to hold off until my review is published. I'll try to get it out as quickly as possible tomorrow. I'm doing this strictly out of interest, I won't be doing a big push to my lists or anything. So stay tuned!

P.S.: If you're going to try direct linking to Amazon, be careful. Amazon's reporting is not real-time, so you won't see any stats on how well your campaign is doing until the next day. You should carefully monitor your spending for the first few days until you figure out if you're going to make money or not.

Sponsored Link: For no-hype help with AdSense, check out my Uncommon AdSense book.

Eric Giguere is the author of Uncommon AdSense and the award-nominated (that just means it lost!) blog Make Easy Money with Google and AdSense.

Comments