Ok then, below are the things I’ve taken a look at lately. Btw if you have something for me to review I’ll happily do that. In the mean time, let me know what you think about this little project.

Best,

Matt, webmaster@cbexposed.info

— Update Nov 29th 2010

I have now added a very brief guide as to how to get a refund if you feel you are unsatisfied with a product marketed through Clickbank.

I’m not trying to sell some guru ebook, because I will write the blog myself and I’m certainly no guru. But if any of you are interested in the business you may be interested in following my trials and errors (mostly errors) of my endevours. It will probably mostly focus on PPC (which is short for pay per click, paid advertising) and what I come up with.

As to some background I did lots of this in the past up until 3-4 years ago. Back then things were really easy (yes really) and I managed to make a nice living from it. That was then though, and you didn’t really have to know anything (which I didn’t) and since then the market has changed in ways that are almost mindblowing. Still (if this post implies it) I’m not really bitter over that fact. I got a slice of the pie when it was served and now there’s a new pie but it seems to be in the oven and it’s easy to burn yourself silly when trying to get it. (?)

I’m gonna call the blog something like “itwasalongshot” or matthewmakesanattemptatmarketing. The former might overly well imply my omnious defeat but it’s all up to which goals are set. It’s not that hard to bank a few bucks a day but it is hard to bank lots of bucks.

That was all for now. Let me know if you have any thoughts on this or are even trying something similar. I stumbled on a blog doing the same idea a while ago (which address I’ve unfortunately forgotten) and I found myself reading lots and lots cause it is more fun and credible to see every aspect of someones marketing efforts, than (and what is much more common) the rise and rise of someone ultimately selling an ebook*. Also I tend to be very interested in trying tweaking and analyzing data so why I’m really doing this is because I suspect I will have fun with it myself.

cheers

*Disclaimer of this statement should I some time in the future find myself actually selling an ebook.

Btw I just made one and put it at http://matthewmakesanattemptatmarketing.blogspot.com/ I may buy a domain for it later, right now I will get some sleep and see how the idea looks in the morning.

Here comes another of these “easy casino busters”. As the name of the product suggests, Roulette Sniper is a system that picks which numbers you should bet on, based on some genious formula. The thing is, there can be no such formula. Roulette is a game of pure chance. You can invent whatever “system” you wish, and nothing will change this. You may as well throw your chips randomly on the table. Roulette always maintains a house edge of 5.26% or 2.7% (depending on whether playing a european style table which has one zero slot, or an american style which also has a “double zero”. Wisely enough the Roulette Sniper guide advices only to play european style tables).

What does Roulette Sniper do then to pick its magic numbers? Well it keeps track of which numbers have recently passed in the spirit of “now there have been ten black numbers in a row, a red one MUST be due to come up”. It also does this with partilcular numbers, high and low numbers and so on. This kind of thinking can be a bit seductive at first glance. What are the odds of eleven black numbers to come up in a row right? Right?
Well eleven black numbers in a row is roughly one in 2^11 = 2048. So pretty unlikely.
The thing is though that this figure is calculated before the first of the black numbers had come and has nothing to do with what number we can expect next. Think about it. Eleven black numbers in a row is 1 in 2048. But ten black numbers followed by a red one is also 1 in 2048. That shows that what history of numbers that have come up lately has nothing what so ever to do with what number will come up next.

I’m going to try to keep this short, but there is also one more argument that should be addressed that the Roulette Sniper guide uses, and that can seem probable if not thought through. It claims that the laws of probability holds that if you spin a roulette wheel many many times, the average number value that will come up will be around the middle, that is 18. This would suggest that if the wheel has turned up lots of high numbers lately, then laws of probability would somehow favor low numbers to make the average closer to 18 over time.

Also looking at a standard deviation curve will show that the likelihood of the average number being close to 18 after say 1000 spins is much more likely than it being 5 or 30. This, however, still does not say anything about what number will come up next. That is because the likelihood of every combination of numbers that can come up is exactly the same. The table showing 3-18-31-14-20-5-1 in a row has the same probability of it showing, say, 1-1-1-1-1-1-1. The thing that makes the average tend to be in the middle though is that the number of combinations of numbers that uses numbers from all over the place are much higher than the number of combinations of numbers showing only 1’s, which is one.

I hope that made sense. I’m not that good of explaining these things but however sound roulette systems sometimes can seem, they never can break the law of probability which states that any number has exactly 1 in 37 (for european tables) chance of hitting on any given spin. Hitting black is 18 in 37. As is hitting red.

Therefore systems of this sort is just a playing with the mind, not the casino. Any system that claims otherwise is mathematically impossible. And if it claims to give you an edge and make you money it is a scam. Roulette Sniper falls under this category. What is even worse is that it also advices to increase your bets to recoup for losses. This is a kind of martingale strategy which is very dangerous in the long run and can potentially deplete your bankroll in a short time when you hit some unlucky spins. That said, Roulette Sniper, after telling you to increase your bets when losing, then also tells you to stop playing when losing too much. It also tells you to stop playing after winning a bit of money in a kind of yey hit and run strategy. And finally it tells you to stop playing after a time limit that you can set yourself. Somehow it’s a bit ironic that a good deal of what this claimed super system does is to tell you to stop using it.

Lastly a few words on the actual software. It is fairly easy to use and can be customized in a lot of ways to accomodate for which kinds of bets you like to place (corners, dozens, trios, singles etc). It shows you which bets to place in a pretty straight forward graphical fashion, so it is perfectly usable. It just won’t make you any more money than playing your familys birth dates, your telephone digits or the atomic number of silicon. And paying $37 for that is hardly any value.

The Forex currency exchanges are the most liquid markets in the world. In contrast to stock exchanges the Forex market never sleeps (except weekends then). All day long huge amounts of dollars, pounds, euros, yens and whatnot are changing owners. This makes the prices fluctuate very rapidly and lets you buy and sell currency without having to sit around long waiting for the prices to move.

Buy low, sell high right. How hard can it be? Turns out pretty hard. Contrary to the seemingly predictable zig-zag pattern that typically shows itself when looking at a market curve in hindsight, knowing what moves are to come is unfortunately not that straight forward. That said there are lots of techniques that can be used to try to predict future Forex price changes. And a fair amount of experienced traders using them and making a good deal of money. The drawback is that this method requires endless studying of charts and curves, book reading and ability to take significant losses once in a while. And, as in poker, even still, not everyone can be good at it.

Ta-da this is where FAP Turbo enters. It turns your computer into a relentless super trader, doing all market analysis and mind numbing math for you. And yes, it works “even when you sleep”.. Any sarcasm? Still though a trading “robot” for Forex markets is not a terrible idea. The fact that also human traders rely heavily (and mostly) on technical analysis for knowing when to buy and sell should make a fine tuned computer program the ultimate trader right? And myself though speaking from limited experience of Forex trading I guess there are trader bots that are profitable in the long run. Or at least it doesn’t seem impossible. Still the bots are just more or less successful attempts at emulating good traders, and the holistic market view that comes with experience unfortunately can never be fully accounted for. Also, the bots don’t tend to follow the 9 o’clock business news which have a tendency to screw up an ever so carefully and mechanically analyzed trade.

So far lots of info about the Forex market, which many of you reading this may already know, and may know better than me. What about FAP Turbo again then? What is it said to achieve? The first thing the selling pitch claims is that it is not illegal. And no it’s not. How could it be? We’re not selling our neighbors hub caps, we’re selling dollars. It then claims to “win” 99.68% of the trades. Here it’s time to raise our eyebrows. How is this possible? Do they purposly want to lose their credibility already? It turns out their system is based on many very very small profits accompanied by the occational huge loss. (Pretty similar in profit curve as martingale betting systems will provide). This is done by setting the bar for collecting a profit much lower than the bar for “stop/loss”. A simple numerical example would be if you bought something for 45 and looked to resell it for 50, and if there were no buyers in sight you decided to keep looking for that price of 50 until market price hit 10, and you gave up and sold it at 10. This, like pilots say like about a mid-air collision, can ruin your whole day.

Even still, 99.68% winning ratio to me seems impossible over time. Long term user tests also indicate that you will see very different numbers. Such numbers largely though depend on what risk you are willing to take (yes you can adjust the stopp/loss levels), but acheiving somewhere near 99% would mean huge risk, and that you will eventually go bankrupt if you hit a few losses in a short time span. Amusingly, and probably strategically, the word “risk” is never used in the FAP Turbo selling pitch. One of the testamonial guys, though, claims that the system is “risk free”. I guess he deserves a silent prayer from all of us.

Risks aside, what you all want to know though I guess is whether this robot on average can be expected to be profitable or not in the long run. Unfortunately I haven’t had the monetary means putting my hard earned cash on the line for this type of long term data. But there are those who have, and while the results in that, and other real money account histories I’ve seen, are not altogether conclusive, my overall impression is that Forex trading with FAP Turbo might lose you all, might win you some, but on average probably will lose you some. What I can safely say is that the numbers you should expect are not remotely close to what the FAP Turbo page is advertising. Also claimed drawdowns (the share of your bankroll you can expect to lose when losing a trade)  of 0.37% is simply insanely false. Judging from their bankroll, profits and T/P and P/L levels on single trades their drawdowns can be up to in the ballpark of 30%. That is, a losing trade like that means you lost 30% of your money. Finally I should add that FAP Turbo is hardly the first trading bot to emerge. There are lots of others, and many of them are free. At least sites like fxcm.com provide one or two dozen of them to use with their trading platform.

FAP Turbo is notoriously reported ignoring refund requests, but as with any product marketed through Clickbank, if you contact Clickbank directly before the end of the trial period, you should not have any problems getting refunded.

http://www.fapturbo.com/

Well, in short Satellite Direct isn’t nearly as good as promised. I’m not sure if they have any fine print that disclaims the “3500 HD Channels” statement, but everyone should know that you won’t get that many HD channels. Heck, I can’t imagine that there are that many High Definition channels around yet even on a world wide basis. Claiming that you’ll get 3500 HD Channels is simply fraud.

So Satellite Direct leaves some things to wish for. Also many of the probably better quality channels arent available in the “one time fee” version that they’re selling. Instead you can upgrade your account for a “$4.95 trial month” subscription (not sure what it would cost from there on) to get access to them all.

Also some channels aren’t even live but “recorded programs” that start the same every time you start the channel.

So far it looks pretty fishy, borderline a scam. So should everyone forget about putting $49.95 into a thing like that?

I’d say so. The fact that you can make your favourite foreign or local channels readily accessible may be of some worth though, if it wasn’t for the fact that you can do the exact same thing on free sites like wwitv. Heck, Satellite Direct really is nothing more than a software shell for a free streaming site. Plus the navigation system in SD doesn’t give you much overview, at least until you’ve constructed that list of “favourites” that are more easily accessible. From the start there is no system to sort out channels by category and such. The only way to sort is by country, and when selecting for example “sweden” you get a list of about half a dozen channels (of which all of them aren’t even swedish). Compare this to the 300ish swedish channels that are promised on the Satellite Direct home page.

All in all there aren’t 3500+ channels. Maybe about half of that. I don’t intend to count them, cause there is still a bunch. Satellite Direct Channels List.

Further many channels aren’t available a large portion of the day, and channels like Animal Planet HD, or FOX HD, ESPN HD and bigger networks like that, that at least some affiliates of Satellite Direct claim that they provide, are nowhere to be found.

To put it short. What Satellite Direct is, again, is a pretty poorly constructed interface to watch tv channels online that also are accessible for free at the networks own web sites, or free streaming sites. Even if the service can be of marginal use for some, they are basically selling what can just as easily be aquired for free, plus the fact that it is half a world away from what it promises (especially as to picture quality) and certainly isn’t something that is to replace your cable provider, makes it at the bottom line a scam. And since even a good internet connection often will struggle with stuttering images and buffering timeouts, I doubt anyone will feel the service is worth a $49.95 tag.

I rate it 1 / 5.
http://www.satellitedirect.com/
Update May 25th: It seems satellitedirect.tv is now offline. Satellitedirect.com claims to be the official site (that site though used to load content from satellitedirect.tv, but now instead uses “digitalsatellite.tv” as content source). Also clickbank hoplinks have started pointing directly to digitalsatellite.tv (they previously pointed to satellitedirect.tv, not satellitedirect.com). Sorry lots of domain talk here but the bottom line is that Satellite Direct are switching domains for whatever reason. Maybe their old domain or email is getting black-listed here and there, or they just want to get away from their old name out of bad publicity or otherwise. Either way it sure doesn’t look good. — end update.

The average picture quality of Satellite Direct:

(click the thumbnails for bigger versions)

Most are terrible. Some are ok, but I actually have yet to find one channel that lives up to true HD.

——-

Any site that claim to offer quality Internet TV for a one time fee I feel can safely be labelled scams. It’s simply an impossible business model to provide hundreds of quality channels legally without charging a pretty hefty subscription fee. There are working options for Internet TV, but then you have to pay accordingly. A2btv, for example, but the price tag is $99/month. There are also sites offering the same deal as Satellite Direct, but for free. An example of that is iFreeTV (affiliate link), and if you like to see what Satellite Direct is offering or if you simply prefer an application rather than free streaming sites, you can try that one out. They are all free streams though of course.

—-

Other services profiting the same way as Satellite Direct and offering either the same or similar content as them include domains tvnoop.com, hdtvkanaler.com, streamdirect.tv, tv-in-pc.com, satelliteultimate.com, satellitesoft.com, itv-pro.com, worldtvpc.com, direct-pctv.com, livetv4me.com, football-tv-live-online.com, satellitetvtopc.com, dtv4pc.net, to name a few.

If you, like me, have been in the “affiliate marketing business” for quite some time, you may have seen products such as The Google Cash Detective and services of that sort. AdSpy Pro is a lighter version of many of those. And at $27 it is much cheaper than most.

What does it do? Well it looks up ads displayed on Google for certain keywords that you choose and takes note whenever an affiliate product is promoted for any of those search keywords. It does so for a chosen period of time (like a couple of weeks) and whenever an ad is spotted a large percentage of the time chances are that ad is being profitable which leaves the field open to basically copy that “winning ad” and make some money for yourself promoting the same product.

I’m not going to write in length about this. If you know how to promote affiliate stuff you do, if you don’t the net is full of guides and do’s and dont’s about it. Adspy Pro is certainly no get rich quick scheme, but in contrast to many other clickbank products it isn’t really promoted as such so that can’t be held against it. I’m going to put it short in a few bullet points for and against.

• It really does much of what it promises. And as such it can be a valuable tool to see which markets and offers are currently hot.
• The price is way below much of the competition. Also and importantly, Adspy Pro is not a subscription service like most of its competitors.

• Adspy Pro is a server php script that needs to be installed in a pretty manual fashion on a server that you have access to. The server also needs to be able to do “cron jobs” that is the script needs to be able to automatically execute every 6 hours or so, so it’s a good idea to look that up before settling for a server.
• The script misses a lot of affiliate links being promoted. Not only does it only track certain networks, but it only detects some sites that are promoting the offers via a “splash” landing page.
• When other services claim to track millions of keywords readily researched in a database, with Adspy Pro you are limited to a few hundred at max (or you risk being slapped by google) that you track yourself. I guess this is one of the effects of the low price tag. Another downside of not having access to already tracked keywords is of course that even if you can spot the affiliate ads the same day you start scanning, you have to give it a few weeks to have any confidence that an ad has stayed long enough to be profitable.
• The admin page can be painfully slow. This of course partly comes down to the speed of the server where the script is being hosted, but the script itself seems pretty slow. Though not as bad that it can’t be used.

The conclusion is that if you’re not running any similar type of program, AdSpy Pro really can do some good in that it can give pointers as to which offers and keywords are likely to convert. Sure you can use a free app like PPC Web Spy, but with that one you can’t scan for many keywords at a time, and see which ones stays online over time. Adspy does indeed have some drawbacks as stated above but all in all it is a decent alternative for the task. As many of you may know these days the use of an app like this is somewhat limited by the fact that Google doesn’t like several advertisers marketing the same offers for a keyword, so simply copying and pasting a successful ad campaign isn’t that straight forward anymore. There are ways around it though like custom landing pages and such and bottom line as a research tool I think Adspy Pro does do a decent job.

My rating: 3/5

http://www.adspypro.com/

Rating: 0 / 5

This one pretty much reviews itself. A “win 97% of your bets” system of course is too good to be true. Not that clickbank never lets shady products slip through for promotion, but I’m amazed that even they won’t stop things like this. It’s amusing though that lines like ” Locking eyes and wave at all the fine ladies along the way before arriving to the sportsbook!” have a place in the sales pitch. Oh well.

The Sportsbettingchamp system claims to make the author over $70,000 a week. That is pretty amazing since the system is nothing more than a good old martingale. If you’ve been anything into betting chances are you’ve either heared some excited friend tell you about this or you’ve come up with it yourself in a stroke of genious. Anyway how it works is say you bet $10 on a 50% outcome and if you lose you will double your bet for every loss which guarantees that as soon as you win you will be up $10.

I probably don’t need to say that while this in theory does work, it assumes infinite deep pockets and so even if you have all the money in the world eventually you will lose it all as the bets grow exponentially larger.

I’m amazed though that if the author of Sportsbettingchamp claims to win $10k a day with his system, he better not start his bets with $10.. Of course he doesn’t follow the system but it is such an obviously false statement for anyone purchasing the product and realising what it is about.

The claim to “win 97% of the time”, it turns out is to be interpreted as “winning 97% of the group of bets that will end with a win”. In other words a LOSS-LOSS-WIN in this universe will count as a win. Interestingly he admits to lose 3% of the time, and by his group-win reasoning to lose means he couldnt afford betting higher, which of course means that any loss means he then lost it all.

I guess I can go on more about this product but you probably see what it’s about. Just don’t buy it. It’s beyond crap.

Another Martingale variation scamming people through clickbank is “Underdog Wealth System”. Stay far away from that one as well.

http://www.sportsbettingchamp.com