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.

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