1. I looked at some of the other Affiliate Marketing websites available but decided to try this one out as I’ve read that Chris X is an experienced marketeer with a proven track record.
2. The sales page states ease of setup, ease of use and, ultimately, quick results.
3. The sales page states they do all the work (somewhere between all the work and all the hard work – depending on which paragraph you’re reading).
4. Ultimately, with all this ‘stuff’, there’s a 60-day money back guarantee.

So, what happened and where are we?

The setup of the website was easy – AffiliateX did all of it. All I had to do was choose the niche and the domain name. I wasn’t impressed with the fact that I could only choose a .com but I understand why they enforce that. I’d done some keyword research and referring to GB’s GS of targetting long-tailed keywords, the one’s I’d selected (.org or .net) couldn’t be used.

I then picked [what I would consider to be] a poor domain name which would never rank well; that was the first negative part.

I logged into the Affiliate X site and tried to get started with the Ads by X. This didn’t work for something like 4 days. I kept getting SQL errors and as I mentioned in an earlier post, when you purchase something, you want it working.

The email support wasn’t the quickest. Initially it was almost a 24-hour turnaround and, linked with the comment in the previous paragraph, this is an age when you’re trying to get somehting off the ground.

The next thing was the backlinks and then they sent me the 4-month old keywords. Now I’m new to this game and am fairly sure that an ‘automated process‘ should churn out keywords far more regularly than two to three times per year. I have to admit that this shocked me.

In conjunction with the SQL errors, the slow email response, the Ads by X not working, the Auto-keyword tool not working, and the fact that though I was getting traffic, I wasn’t getting sales, was hacking me off.

I am generally an impatient kind of person but especially so when the promises are so much and when I’m paying for it!

I’m kind of figuring that I will be getting fast sales and at least some return on my investment. I’ve got 60-days on the money-back guarantee so no need to be hasty or rash, some money will come in…soon.

I’ve read in a few places where a 1-2% ROI is good so 200 hits on the site should equal between 2 and 4 sales (on average). Well, I got over a 100 hits in the time of the site but no sales.

I hadn’t done anything more than the initial setup of the website. I hadn’t configured any additional hoplinks or other affiliate links for sales but, at that stage, neither did I intend to: THEIR promise was to do ALL THE WORK/ALL THE HARD WORK.

Now, I’m not naive enough to think that I don’t have to do anything but also know that you shouldn’t really promise things if you don’t intend to deliver. You promise to do it all and for myself, as a newcomer to this, I want you to take me by the hand and walk me through it. That is, is it not, what you promised? I need your assistance and that is the prime reason that is why I chose you over your competitors.

The back-breaker for me was you have to read these 4 pdf’s to really start getting going. I didn’t have the time. Plain and simple.

Also, in that time [that I don't have] I can’t sit here and go through AffiliateX in the infinite detail that I need to get my head around all of this. It just isn’t going to happen at this point. In the future maybe, but now, no!

But, there’s no rush, I have 60-days. Well, yes I do. But during that time, when I have a free hour and want to do some more work on the website, I want to login, go to the Auto-keywords tool and do some investigation. I don’t want to login and then find that once again, it’s not working.

That, was enough for me.

I didn’t give the product enough of a trial to really, honestly, 100% evaluate it. But then and again, I’m not going to pay money and spend time trying to learn, to evaluate and understand something if it’s not working and unfortunately for me, that was what I found.

• Is it a good product? It could be!
• Is it value for money? It could be?
• Does the sales page reflect what they provide? In the time I used the product, yes.
• Is it value for money? Not for me it wasn’t.
• Is it a scam? No, I believe it’s genuine. Like everything though, unless you’re either just plain lucky or just happen to be in the right place at the right time, then it’s not going to be a get rich quick scheme.
• Can I make money off it? I believe you can. You need to get that product, that niche and offer somethng that someone wants to buy. It can work. Someone has to be on page 1 of Google, right? You just have to get there before the other guy.
• Is FatLoss4Idiots a good niche? Not a chance! It is or was for some but at the time of writing this there are in excess of 26 pages on Google all offering Fatloss4idiots reviews/scams/the-truth-is-out-there/the-truth-is-here-kinda sites. You’ll be hard pushed to make a bean from that.
• Where are we today? Well, frustrated at the non-working elements of the site and the other bits and pieces, I cancelled on the 8th June; a mere 10 days after signing up. A very quick trial but that was enough for me. I don’t have the patience to wait for things to work. I’ve paid for it, it should be working. I understand that things break or malfunction but this was too much for me. If they could sort this out then it may be a different story but as it was – no thanks!
• How much money did I make?

• Did I get my money back? Yes I did. No questions asked, full payment back. A cast-iron guarantee which they honoured as they said they would.
• Would I try it again? That’s a difficult one and the answer is maybe.The two main points for me are those I’ve stated already: firstly, they really need to iron out those faults! The functionality has to work. Unless they get this right, users will get frustrated quickly – I did!

  Secondly, I need time to digest the information so I can come into this with more knowledge. Time is against me at the moment and that’s unfortunate. I wish this website had been available for me to read and I could’ve made a more educated decision.

Anyway, there it is. Unlike other review sites that promise to ‘tell you the things other sites won’t‘ and then just put you through four or five paragraphs that are  straight off the sellers page, I’ve told it like it is. – my experience with AffiliateX (click here if you want to try it out – remember, there’s always that 60-day money back guarantee).

It could be a good product. You just need some time and to to give it a go. They will set your website and traffic up within a short time but to make it work, you need a bit more than that. You need to read, digest and implement the information in the guides. Then it may work.

If you do try AffiliateX and find that everything on the site does work then please let me know. I’m moving house next week and will be a bit busy for the foreseeable future. Who knows, if it’s good, I may try it again.

Anyway, that’s enough of me. I’m off to review Killer Content now. With the house move that may take a while to get posted.

UPDATE

- I’m currently in the process of reviewing Killer Content and so far I like what I see -

— Click here to read my review —

The page setup is the default one. I’ve changed the logo a bit, re-written the post away from the standard spiel but kept it ‘tight’ and still no sales.

The support at AffiliateX is saying I have to work through the pdf’s and I’m sure there’s a wealth of information in there to evaluate, absorb and regurgitate to make this site work. I’m getting hits on the site but still no-one’s clicking through to purchase.

Where am I ranking in Google? My backlinks have been setup (the other day), where am I?

I perform a quick search and at the moment I’m around page 20.

So, in front of me, at 10 sites per page, are around 200 other sites with a large proportion of these with some variation on the fatloss4idiots.com domain name.

Ahhhh, I get it…!

So, at the time of writing this post, Googling ‘Fat loss 4 idiots’ comes up with around 26 pages worth…one review site (suggesting that all the others are scams and you must read this site first) has the line, “If you did not read through this fat loss 4 idiots review first, you could be kicking yourself in the head later on.” as an attempt to get someone to believe them..Mmmmm, maybe I’m missing something. The amazing thing is they’re on page 1 of Google so they must be doing something right.

As for me. At the moment I don’t have the time of the energy to push this. I have to admit the AffiliateX site has a wealth of stuff on their website. Almost to the point of overwhelming the reader, the user, the Affiliate.

What to do? What are my thoughts at this stage?

Time to ponder and take stock.

I download the pdfs:

and then have a look at the preliminary reading:

Okay, that’s not too bad and hopefully not too intense – 187 pages all told.

Shouldn’t take too long to read but to read, digest and understand. I’ll see what I can do.

In the meantime how’s that traffic and those sales doing…?

Still no clickthru sales though…

Anyway, I have a bit of time on my hands so I look at the AffiliateX site a bit more. The only problem is, a lot of the links don’t work. Another email to AffiliateX (the gist of which is here):

I’m trying to get this to work, insert the hoplinks, etc., but a lot of the site functionality is either down or just isn’t working. It’s frustrating to say the least.

As I mention in the email, my time isn’t infinite and if I’ve a few hours which I can utilise to set something up then you want that time to be productive and not emailing supprt telling them I’m still getting SQL errors or their SEO Sauce page is still not working.

I also understand that having multiple websites will increase chances of sales and also if 10 sites pull in $50 each right…?

As you can see,  I ask the question in the last paragraph. I get a response the following afternoon (red lines are my emphasis):

Each website costs another $47.

I have to thoroughly read the PDF’s in step 1…ahhh, just remind me:

This is a long post. Time for a new one.

I go though the steps outlined in the email, download the zip file and then notice something and email AffiliateX with a few questions:

As you can see, I’m querying the date on the file I’ve been sent. It’s over 4 months old!!

I get Chris’s reply on the 3rd June:

Okay, but not that regularly, the date on this one is February! Now, I’m only a beginner at this but I have been doing some cursory reading and, because of using GB’s GS (and other sites), I am aware of Google Panda, – a major update which was introduced by Google in late-February – mmmm….not that regularly indeed!

I’m beginning to have my doubts about this AffiliateX…still, I’m getting traffic. No sales, but increased levels of traffic. I have never had traffic on a website this fast before. Not a huge amount granted, but traffic nevertheless.

Now, as I mentioned, I’ve never had traffic at my other sites quickly before, it all takes time. And, I’m very pleased to say, though it’s only a few hits, I’m getting traffic now! Nice one!

(As I mentioned in an earlier post, this is all being done retroactively). From clicking the ‘Activate Traffic button’, I started receiving traffic the very next day – no purchases, but traffic.

The day after the website is set-up I get an email saying [to the effect of] ‘It’s time to get traffic to your website…’

I click on the link and get taken to this page:

Now this form seems a bit strange to me as they (AffX) know my URL, they know the niche I’ve selected so why do I have to fill in a form and activate it? I selected the niche yesterday, chose a domain name, they then set the website up; it all seems a bit too lame to me. Almost like, ‘We have to show you we’re doing this, as opposed to just doing it.’

Nevertheless, I fill it all in and hit ‘Activate Your Traffic‘

Now, I’ve had a few websites in the past and it does take a while to get traffic to sites. It’ll be interesting to see what traffic I get and how fast it comes.

Okay, over to the website. I chose a website in the weight loss niche remember.

The product I’ve been given to promote/use is FatLoss4Idiots.

Browsing around the AffiliateX wesbite and looking at the other niches and the setup/spiel for these, I see a pretty standard format for each. How do I make my website stand out from the crowd? Well, it’s going to be difficult because there are already a lot of websites promoting this product. Looks like I’m going to be another ‘review’ website giving my take on this ‘fantastic’ product.

Anyway, there’s a lot of bonus material on offer. I’ll be downloading this for a while:

There’s a lot of stuff here. Lots to read, to digest, to understand. It’s a good job AffiliateX are doing all the work for me.

Now, please remember that the sales spiel says all is done for me, the site will be setup for me, traffic will be driven to the site without me having to do anything, effortless…we shall see.

Onto step 3… Ads by X

I click on the link and go to the page. Nothing works, I get SQL errors.

Try again, nothing! SQL errors again. Okay, site might be down. Try later.

Next day – SQL errors.

Raise a query with the helpdesk:

and sit back and wait for a reply.

Thankfully, this is only a day or so coming but when you’ve just bought into something, the last thing you want is for the functionality to be ‘down’.

Anyway, onto Ads by X:

I’ve taken a little but of artistic license here and squeezed it all onto the one page (you can’t have two drop-down lists open at the same time on a page) just so you can see how easy it all is.

You select your niche, arrange by popularity, select your other options from the tick boxes, and click on the Search button.

This then performs the search and show you the affiliate ads based on your selection criteria. This enables you to use this material to copy to your website and begin ‘making money’ (my emphasis) right away.

Now, I had, and still have, a bit of a problem with this. If I’m looking for a review on a product, then I want the review from someone who’s qualified not just anyone. If I goto a website and just see lots of banners promoting other stuff, then I’m going to question what this site actually is and what I’m actually doing here.

This seems to be the way some of these ‘schemes’ work – set your base site up then just put lots of links on it. Now this may work for some but I’m not sure I’m confortable with this. It doesn’t work for me. Is AffiliateX going to be just another one of these?

Figures, statistics…access to more figures, graphs, statistics…what’s good? What’s bad? Where do you learn all this stuff?

“Oh right! You don’t have to do anything.” so sayeth the sales spiel. If I don’t have to do anything, then there’s a lot of info here for me to do nothing with.