But are they true?

Is the MLSP system the magic pill everyone who is promoting it says it is? For example,

• One promoter claims to be earning over $10,000 a month after using the system less than 10 months.
• Another claims to have personally sponsored 207 people into his primary MLM business in four months.
• Yet another claims going from $300 to $6,000 per month in 30 days!

Of course it is illegal to make false claims when advertising or promoting any product or service so we have to assume all these published claims are true. But can they be replicated by the average person who signs up after reading a glowing mlm lead system pro review?

Let’s take a look close, hard, honest look.

MLM Lead System Pro Review – The Good

MLSP was launched in September 2008 by Norbert Orlewicz, Brian Fanale and Todd Schlomer as the network marketing industry’s first completely generic, self-contained, self-brandable, automatic follow up, lead generation “funded proposal” system.

Translation, please?

Sign up, set it up, personalize the MLSP program pages, add your primary MLM opportunity to the back office and begin promoting it your perfect target market – frustrated network marketers.

They read your tweets, your forum posts, your classified ads, articles and blog posts and get interested. The click through to your MLSP splash page, opt-in and are immediately added to your automatic email follow up system.

They are AMAZED and MESMERIZED by all the “rags-to-riches” stories and sign up!

You earn a nice commission. Then another and another as they invest more heavily into their business.

So not only have you “funded” your lead generation efforts, you now have a list of people who are actively looking for a way to promote their primary network marketing opportunity. Which means, usually, they have yet to “crack the code” and make any money. So you contact them. Offer support, accountability, free training and more… the opportunity to work with you! Because you’ll teach them, guide them and reveal all the secrets to success.

MLM Lead System Pro Review – The Bad

When your car breaks down you take it to the mechanic to be fixed. You are buying a solution.

When people invest in “mlmleadsystempro” they often think they are also buying a solution. A magic pill. Sign up, set it up and watch the leads flow like water. But that is not the case.

MLSP is nothing more than a powerful TOOL…

… which is absolutely worthless unless you actually use it.

Which means getting inside, personalizing the pages, and learning how to promote your article pages.

Because nothing happens until you learn how to take what you created within the MLSP system and get it in front of hundreds, even thousands of potential prospects on a consistent basis over an extended period of time.

Without promotion, nothing happens. Which is true for every business. So the questions begs:

If you are having challenges promoting your current business, how do you intend to promote your business using mlm lead system pro? What makes the promotion of this product (and it is a product!) any different than your current opportunity?

MLM Lead System Pro Review – The Beautiful

The magic behind the incredible MLSP success stories is the amazing training made available by some of the most well-known, most accomplished internet marketers in the world.

Sign up, set it up, and then learn from the best marketers in the world. Copy them. Follow the instructions. Dig deep and work through the learning curve.

Then apply what you have learned and take action. Massive marketing action.

And, you too, can watch the magic happen. Guaranteed!

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Included with the purchase of Site Build It!, you get one domain license, a site building ‘Action Guide’, video tutorials, access to keyword research and  topic research tools, an online site building tool (with ability to upload pages  created offline), mailing list functionality, access to a supportive community of fellow users, and much more.

Site Build It! is a service run by Dr. Ken Evoy in Canada who started his online publishing business with a book titled “Make Your  Site Sell.” I have personally had one Site Build It! site about web audio since 2003 and have seen continuous improvement of Site Build It! over these last several years.  (I use the FTP version of site design.)

See some sample Site Build It! sites including a very famous one built by Evoy’s daughter.

The Positives

Site Build It! is truly an all-in-one solution of training guide, research tools and website hosting. There is no other affiliate/content publishing system that, in my opinion, effectively combines those three items  into one package.

The Action Guide

The Action Guide walks you through a 10 “day” process of building a site. In Evoy’s parlance, a “day” is not necessarily a calendar day, so think of it as a 10 “step” process. It might take you a month to go through the first four “days”.

The first four “days” (no matter how long they actually take) are all about researching your topic  and finding the best topic around which to build a site. The concentration is  on finding and analyzing keywords, including sifting through their supply, demand  and their popularity using a variety of online tools provided for that purpose.  The fifth “day” you finally decide on a domain name and register it in the system. Then, you can start building your site, either using the online  site building tools or designing your site elsewhere and uploading pages.

Personally, I like the concentration of analyzing your intended topic to a  complete extent before purchasing your domain name. Ken Evoy stresses the “turtle  philosophy” of moving slowly and doing it right from the start. Thorough  research up front really makes for a better site in the end. They really want  to make sure you have picked a worthwhile topic that will bring visitors to  your site, which I thoroughly applaud. James Martell follows this approach,  too, as does Dr. Andy Williams.

The concentration of the Site Build It! philosophy is abbreviated C>T>P>M. Early in the first day of the Action Guide, Evoy adds the  letter “B” to the front to turn it into B>C>T>P>M. In  English, this translates to: Brainstorm your topic and keywords -> Develop Content and your site -> Get Traffic coming in -> Presell Visitors with the Content -> and finally, Monetize the Traffic.

There is a “day” devoted to building relationships with your visitors through an email list (a simple autoresponder and mailing list software is built  into the purchase price). There is a “day” devoted to analyzing your traffic stats (stats included with the purchase price).

Back when I got my first Site Build It! site in 2003, the Action Guide was a PDF file, and the keyword research tool was a piece of software that you installed on your computer. As of July 2007, everything is online which makes updates by the SBI crew much easier. (Case in point, comparing a January 2007 printed version of the online manual against the current online manual, I see that almost all references and examples using the Yahoo/Overture Keyword Suggestion Tool have been seamlessly removed from the manual since that Tool was phased out in early 2007.)

The online Action Guide is very clearly written with pictures, links, and colored text, with links to other relevant materials throughout the members area as needed. It also assumes no technical knowledge. I’d rank it right above a “novice” level, but it certainly doesn’t come across that way.

Video Training

The video training is comprehensive, too. In fact, it was created by one of the students who won a competition that Ken Evoy ran for the purpose of finding someone to create video tutorials!

The step by step instructions are broken into 20-30 minute segments and are visually interesting to watch. Very clear. There are even two versions of the video training: one featuring a voice track with an accented male voice, and the second featuring a woman speaking with an unaccented American accent.

Research Tools

On the keyword research tools side, the system is proprietary to Site Build It!, but appears to be an amalgamation of Wordtracker results, Google counts, and Yahoo counts. I’ve used used Nichebot.com for keyword research,  too, and see some similarities between NicheBot.com and Site Build It!  in this department.

For comparison, James Martell primarily stresses the use of WordTracker for  keyword research, however, WordTracker doesn’t give popularity rankings. Dr.  Andy Williams also leans toward the use of WordTracker, but uses it in conjunction  with his keyword analysis software which lets him slice and dice the keywords  in all kinds of wonderful ways.

The content research programs are also quite good, giving you one-stop access to a lot of sources for content ideas for the pages of your site.

Site Builder Software

The online site builder is very well organized and simple to use. As you create pages, it automatically checks your META tags (title, description, keywords), as well as the keyword density of your page content before you save the new information. You can incorporate pictures, graphics, audio, Flash, and video into your site, too. Any links you include in your pages are trackable, whether they refer to other pages in the site, or whether they go off to affiliates or other sites.

There are many templates for your overall site design, and you can tweak colors and lettering as needed. The resulting sites are clean and professional looking, without being too slick or too amateurish. Remember, the overall focus for the sitebuilding efforts is on the content (which is what visitors really care about), not the “look” of your site. The cool part is you can change the look at any time without having to do a lot of rework, and sites look pretty much the same across all browsers. Additional templates were created and chosen through a contest among SBI users.

And, as you build pages, SBI automatically submits them to search engines. Wow! There’s also a “where each page ranks” in Google, Yahoo, and MSN, plus instructions for submitting by hand to manual directories.

Private Forums

Perhaps the best part of Site Build It! is the crowd of success-oriented people in the private forums. They are there to help you through your struggles and frustrations, and they are helpful and encouraging. Building websites in the privacy of your home can often be a lonely endeavor. When you have a question about the process, it’s nice to have a cadre of other users (and even Ken Evoy himself) you can turn to rather than remain frustrated forever.

If you feel you might need such support and encouragement, Site Build It! is definitely the way for you to go. James Martell just started a forum in 2007, but it’s not nearly the size and depth of the Site Build It! forums. My personal experience is that public forums, which tend to sometimes be helpful too, tend to lean toward being more negative. SBI Forums are great.

If you follow the guide through all 10 “days”, you should have a highly performing site at the end.

The Criticisms

I have very few criticisms about Site Build It! It’s a solid web publishing system with great support and continual upgrades and improvements.  The current version is so much better than the first versions I used in 2003.

If you have a lot of website design experience, you might find the online site  builder a bit restrictive to your abilities. If you’re a PHP hound like myself,  you’ll probably go nuts at all that you CAN’T do since all the pages are .html  extensions and there’s no PHP allowed (as of July 2007).  Therefore, there is no WordPress allowed either, and no MySQL provisions.   

You can’t “preload” content for delayed appearance on the site.  Therefore, if you want to continually update the site, you need to login to SBI every day to make your changes or new pages.  That’s a small bother from my “advanced-user-status” viewpoint but might not challenge the novice who doesn’t really know any other ways to update a site.

You CAN incorporate Javascript, but that option also has it’s own problems in cross-browser functionality.  

If you don’t like the templates provided by the online builder, or you want more control over content layout, you can always design your site in Dreamweaver or some other software tool and then upload the pages through the “FTP It!” section of the site. (It’s not “true” FTP, and that might bother some people, but I’ve found it to work fine.)

Some advanced web designers might balk that you’re beholden to Sitesell (the parent company of SBI) for your site. Also, some people might complain that “everything” is online through SBI. I say, “well, tough luck to you.” This is the system Evoy has setup and it seems to work pretty well. If you don’t like it, go for the “do it yourself from scratch” approach of Martell or Williams.

If SBI works for so many people who have followed the process from start to finish, then it must work well. One respected affiliate marketing expert, Allan Gardyne, is an enthusiastic fan of Site Build It! and has several sites on the system, and a couple of public case studies of his own success. Good enough for me.

Note: Since everything is based online, you’ll do best if you have a high-speed internet connection.

Comparing James Martell’s Affiliate Marketer’s Handbook, Dr. Andy Williams’ Building FAT Affiliate Sites, and the Site Build It! Action Guide, I find that the SBI Action Guide is a little light in how to pick a narrow enough niche for your site topic if you want to build a content-based site for the purposes of building affiliate income.

There is a separate area of the Site Central Members Area called “Niche Choose It!” which is helpful, and a downloadable ebook on “Info Product Ideas”, but I still find that Martell and Williams do better on picking raw topics for the purpose of an affiliate-based site.  This may not matter to small business owners who might be building a site to promote their own products and services.

In the “Day 6″ chapter on building your site, there’s a lot about how to make pages of content from the technical perspective, but not a lot of help on “how to write good content.” That’s not really terrible though, because there is Evoy’s separate FREE PDF book titled”Make Your Content PRESell” which covers the topic of writing in complete detail.  Plus, you can get a FREE copy of Gary Antosh’s excellent book “Web Content Made Easy.”  Great supplement material for sure.

Overall Recommendation

So, is Site Build It! worth $299 per site (July 2007)?

Considering all that you get for the price including:

• one hosted domain
• an excellent step-by-step action guide that stresses the slow and steady approach
• fabulously clear video tutorials
• comprehensive keyword research tools and topic research tools
• a good online sitebuilder with many bells and whistles including a short autoresponder and mailing list capabilities
• webmail
• an RSS feed for your site, and
• a success-oriented helpful crowd on the private forums …

… Site Build It! is one heck of a great value!. The total investment of US $299 is really less than $24.95 per month which you might easily pay just to host a site somewhere else, but not get similar support and encouragement from others that you get through the SBI forums.

Site Build It! is primarily targeted towards less-technically-inclined site builders. 

If you have website design experience, you might find the online sitebuilder to be a little bit too clunky for your tastes and levels of patience.

Of course, if you have trouble following directions, prefer to do things “your way”, and don’t have the patience or discipline to follow the success trail laid out in the Action Guide, you’ll probably struggle along, too.

The SBI System is not just limited to people who want to build affiliate/content websites. Even if you own a small business and are trying to attract clients, Site Build It! is a great solution, too.  However, if you don’t want to build your site yourself, there are SBI Certified Webmasters all over the world who will do it for you!

The army of SBI fans are truly devoted to the SBI because of the way it has helped them develop great sources of income while working from home. The fans love Site Build It! and they have made videos to prove it!

These periodically updated case studies give testimony to the power of Site Build It! 
http://case-studies.sitesell.com

The James Martell Product Line

As of July 2007, James Martell provides the following catalog of products:

• A training manual in PDF format called “The Affiliate Marketer’s Handbook”, combined with Camtasia instructional videos and videos from a live-training event especially created to be paired with the manual.
• A bi-monthly audio program called Affiliate Buzz to help keep you motivated.
• An online version of his "Affiliate Marketer’s Bootcamp" that takes you through the entire site building process over the course of several weeks.
• An online Backlinks Workshop to help you become an expert in getting the pages of your site to rank well in the search engines.
• An optional online website building software.

I got interested in affiliate marketing by purchasing the 2002 version of Martell’s “Affiliate Marketer’s Handbook.” At the time I found it to be very good and helpful to me. I also subscribed to his bimonthly audio program called the Affiliate Buzz.   I actually built two sites following his methods.  One is a patio furniture site.  This site has since dropped out of Google because I did some subversive things to try to get it to rank higher and later abandoned it.  Shortly after I purchased the manual, Martell announced that many of his affiliate sites dropped in the rankings because of his interlinking of sites and some updates at Google.com  He recovered by building new sites, using new methods, which are outlined in his most recent version of the manual. 

The Positives

I like the Affiliate Marketer’s Handbook because it clearly lays out in eight steps what any beginner would need to do to become successful in affiliate publishing.

Martell covers everything from assembling your basic materials of papers, pens, and passwords, to choosing a topic, to registering a domain name, to building the first few pages, to getting incoming links, and more.

He also is very realistic about income levels and to set your goals appropriately.  He emphasizes this is not a “get rich quick” business model. It can be up to four to six months or more before you start seeing significant traffic to your site from which you might earn some money.

I also like that, although most of Martell’s income probably comes from his online bootcamps, he continues to build affiliate sites and tweak his methods, occasionally sharing his findings with listeners through the Affiliate Buzz.

The 2006 version of the manual is much better than the original version I bought, with a much clearer and specific example of building a website around the topic of barbeques which he does from start to finish in the manual. He covers everything very clearly and gives many specific examples.

Throughout the book are various links to Camtasia videos of how to do certain steps in the process. Because I’m fairly experienced as a website builder, I found the videos to be a little bit elementary. However, I understand that the target audience for the material is the complete novice. So, on that level, I think the Camtasia videos would be clear and helpful to any novice.

Included with the purchase of the book are a set of downloadable videos from the “live” version of James Martell’s Affiliate Marketer’s Bootcamp. The videos are very high quality, done with a three-camera shoot before a live audience. The videos help clarify what is in the manual … especially the video about choosing a topic … but I didn’t find that they add any noticeable content beyond that.

For the most part, James talks and shows things well in these live action videos, but I found he spent a lot of time puffing up his own sites and how great they are and how high they rank. Late in each video there are questions from the audience which help to add a little bit of clarification to the topics.

The Criticisms

Of course, this wouldn’t be a fair review if I only noted the good things.  But, I only have a few criticisms with Martell’s approach.

1. Product and Service Suggestions in the Handbook

EZ-Webbuilder.com – There are less expenisve versions available 

Martell spends a significant number of pages in the manual telling you how to use an online website builder (ez-webbuilder.com) for $29.95 per month. What he doesn’t tell you is that he OWNS the ez-webbuilder.com domain. It’s simply a private-label version of an online site builder created by WebsiteDynamics.com that you can find elsewhere for $10 cheaper.

Of course, you don’t have to use his sitebuilder suggestion and he says as much in the manual. You can use anything you want to build websites and there are a lot of options like Dreamweaver, FrontPage, WordPress, Dr. Andy William’s SEO Website Builder, Site Buildit! and many more. 

However, if you don’t want to explore those options, try CityMax.com, macWebsiteBuilder.com, or BuilderSpot.com for the same exact online sitebuilder for only $19.95 per month. 

When I first read his 2002 manual, I was exclusively a Dreamweaver guy. In the last year, I have started leaning more towards WordPress, so I found the extensive number of pages on ez-webbuilder.com to be a little too long and, in this case, self-promoting.

Note: Martell is a true affiliate marketer by referring his students to a website building software and extracting a monthly commission from the sale.  It just rubs me the wrong way that he charges more for the exact same product offered elsewhere at a lower price point.

Website Templates through GoldenPineCone.com 

If you choose to build sites using DreamWeaver, FrontPage or SEO Website Builder, you don’t have to buy the templates Martell recommends.   Granted, the templates are really great looking. In fact, you might buy one for the first site just to get up and running quickly, but, in the long run do you really want your sites to look so similar to Martell’s and a lot of his students?

Domain Registration – Less Expensive Alternatives

Martell recommends buying your domain names through domain-maniac.com.  As you might expect, this is just a Martell private-label version of a Domain Reseller Program from Tucows.com. 

There are cheaper alternatives like Godaddy.com, MyDomain.com, and hundreds of other registration sites with domains less than $10 per month. 

Remember, James Martell is making a commission off just about everything he recommends in the book. But that’s not a bad thing, because that’s his career and if you wrote a similar book, you would probably do the same.

2. Very Few Page Layout Instructions

I would like to see more information about how to design the layout of your page. Some ideas on where to put a product photo, or “best places to put affiliate links” and other such topics would have been helpful. I’ve learned such information from other sources over the years, but I would have liked to see some here, especially if this is geared toward novices. 

On the other hand, if Martell wrote to "specifically put your links ‘here’, and use ‘x’ number of pictures on the page", EVERY student would do so and there would probably be some penalty inflicted by Google for so many sites leaving the same footprint! 

3. Few revelations about how he currently builds sites

What James doesn’t tell you in the manual (but you learn after listening to his Affiliate Buzz newsletter) is that he currently outsources a lot of site building and maintenance tasks to other people.

Martell currently hires a lot of writers through Elance.com for the writing of his site content, but he only started using Elance in the last couple of years because of a recommendation from a student. He has another person help to edit the articles he gets back from Elance writers.

He hires other people to do a lot of his site setups, and mentions on one audio recording how he even outsourced the simple 5-minute installation of WordPress. He also has some type of custom software arrangement to post an article almost every day on some of his sites.

It might be helpful to think of Martell as the true embodiment of the term affiliate "publisher".  Primarily he farms farms work out to other people, and occasionally does some things himself.

However, he does say that when he started in the business, he did write all of the content and did all the tech work himself or with the help of his wife and kids.

You have to remember Martell now runs a successful affiliate publishing business. It’s not a hobby to him, it’s a business. If you treat your website building like a business with diligent effort on a regular basis, you will eventually begin outsourcing such activities, too.  You will eventually reach a point where you simply cannot do everything yourself. 

4. You might struggle, but follow the manual

If you don’t have the inclination to follow directions and recommendations, you might struggle with Martell’s approach.  If you have no sense of self-discipline, you will definitely struggle with the approach. 

If you are coming at affiliate marketing with pre-conceived notions and previous website design experience, you might struggle with Martell’s approach and think of “better ways” to do the process. However, realize that Martell’s teachings have been used by thousands of people worldwide who have experienced success. And, they have worked for James Martell and they continue to work for him.

In fact, one of his more famous students is a woman named Bronwyn Bamber. She recently testified on one of Martell’s Affiliate Buzz recordings that she really didn’t experience true success with Martell’s process until she went back and read the manual again. Whole new paragraphs on the need to get inbound links “suddenly appeared.” In other words, by rereading and following the manual she really got all the information she needed. She now makes tens of thousands of dollars each month from sites built around personal checks, recipes and other topics (just search for her name in Google).

5. The live action videos

As noted previously, the videos from the live bootcamp included in the purchase price came across to me as a little too much about James, and not so much about the real purpose of building affiliate websites.

For several years I had a career as a professional computer software trainer, and also evaluated other trainers as part of my responsibility. I would put James in the “I need an audience and to be the center of attention” category (lots of public speakers and trainers project a little bit of this aura, too).   I got a strong vibe of ego from hearing Martell talk about his high-ranking sites, which he uses to great excess as demo material.  Some of the videos are better than others, but as a whole, I consider these videos only an “average” supplement to the manual.

On a sidenote, the cutaway shots to the live audience are a real hoot. I might be reading the people wrong, but to me, the audience seems to look bored, disinterested, expressionless and morose a good bit of the time!

6. Not really a bad thing …

Martell doesn’t readily share the URL’s of his websites. Some students would argue that Martell does everyone a disservice by keeping his websites “secret”.

I personally would like to see more examples of his sites beyond his original “1st-in” sites (1st-in-babies.com, 1st-in-cell-phones.com, and others which have since been penalized because of interlinking), but I completely understand his reasoning. Martell has had too many of his sites completely copied, word-for-word, by lazy students seeking a quick buck. Consequently, both his site and the copy site get search engine penalties slapped against them for duplicate content and a dozen other reasons.  So, except in limited cases (which I have seen), he has kept quiet about his current roster of some 90 websites. 

Note: Martell is not the only person to keep quiet on his URL’s. So does Michael Campbell, Dr. Andy Williams, Colin McDougall, and many other famous and not-so-famous people.  Think about this in the larger business context:  would you expect the Pepsi Corporation to publicly share all of its soft drink recipes? 

My Overall Recommendation

So, is James Martell’s “Affiliate Marketer’s Handbook” worth $197?

I say yes, if you are a complete novice and really need a good foundational education in affiliate publishing. The target audience is novices, and I think Martell’s materials are good for that target audience. The book contains solid and thorough content, written in an easy-to-follow style. 

If you have some sitebuilding experience and you have worked with other similar training products (like SiteBuild It! or SEO Website Builder), then I would suggest you might want to continue working with what you already have. You really don’t need to add Martell’s materials to your library. If you do, you might get a couple of good nuggets, but they might not be worth $197 to you.

Just remember, as with any content-based affiliate website, you can’t just build one Martell-like site, put up a few pages, forget about making further updates and expect to make shovels of money.  This is NOT a "get-rich-quick" process and you must be committed to the long haul.  You have to be willing to continually add new content and adapt your site as necessary to the ever-changing algorithms of the search engines. 

James Martell’s Affiliate Marketer’s Handbook is available at http://www.work-at-home-net-guides.com.

As a supplement to the Affiliate Buzz, Martell has also recorded a series of audio programs called Coffee Talks. In these recordings, James Martell plays the role of interviewer and has conversations with various people in affiliate marketing. His guests have included affiliate managers at major affiliate networks, Bronwyn Bamber (one of his top students), Sherman Hu of WordPressTutorials.com, and experts on the topics of autoresponders and adding audio to your site.

Affiliate Buzz Review

What I like:

I like the short format of the audio recording. I like that sometimes there is actually occasionally useful information in the conversations. I stay subscribed because I do get some benefit from the recordings.

What I don’t like:

Sometimes I find that Charles Johnson, the interviewer, really plays it way too dumb. For a guy who supposedly makes his living from the internet and has worked alongside James for many years, Charles asks some really basic questions and often just repeats what James has said. Perhaps his role is to ask the questions that a newbie would ask. In the last year, his simplistic approach has really started to grate on me.

Oftentimes the recordings are just 30 minutes of fluffy nothingness about James’ Cobra replica (a car), or how “beautiful” or “awesome” an undisclosed student’s site is, or some other discussion about James’ methods that dances on the perimeter of disclosing something of value. I’m often left wanting just a wee bit more information, and when a new issue is released, I have high hopes for some good solid content. On a rare basis I get a nugget, and I suppose that’s what keeps me subscribed.

There was also a time when Charles was the case study for one of Martell’s “Affiliate Bootcamp” training seminars in Canada. Supposedly, Charles built some sites following Martell’s methods on the topics of hammocks and bean bag chairs (if my memory serves me right). In the last two years, however, we haven’t heard a peep about the progress of those sites. I like to think that Charles just got busy with his other projects or changed focus, as any of us might do. However, since he was a “case study”, I would like to hear some updates.

Coffee Talk Reviews

What I like:

The interviews with Bronwyn Bamber, one of Martell’s most successful students. Her real-life, down-to-earth sharing of her successes and failures with Martell’s methods was simply captivating. The two recordings of conversations with her were simply put: pure gold. I also like some of the other interviews, and have gained some new perspectives listening to these industry insiders speak out. I also like the uncapped length of the conversations. Some have been short like 45 minutes, and others have been close to 90 minutes long.

What I don’t like:

Too often James talks about himself and his own successes when he is supposed to be interviewing someone else. 

For example: In the first Bronwyn Bamber interview, Bronwyn shares how she first met James and his wife at an Affiliate Summit Conference. Her little story was just fine. Then James practically repeated the story from his perspective and went on and on adding very little new information and eating into time that could have been devoted to some real content.

I find Martell does this in a lot of the Coffee Talk conversations, taking over for the guest instead of simply letting the guest speak and then asking further probing questions.  I have occasionally found myself talking back to the recording saying “Shut up, James, and let your guest do the talking.”

Overall Recommendation

Is the Affiliate Buzz (and Coffee Talks) subscription worth $9.95 per month?

If you’re a newbie and want to hear some fluffy conversations about James successes, then sure. The Coffee Talk interviews are useful to a point and help give further context to the world of affiliate publishing beyond James’ personal methods. I’m a subscriber and occasionally get a nugget out of all the recordings.

However, if you’re looking for solid content, as of July 2007, it’s rather lacking and I would say use the money to pay for site hosting instead.

The subscription is available when you purchase James Martell’s Affiliate Marketer’s Handbook, and is also available separately at:
http://www.affiliate-buzz.com

The workshop is an online training session in which you log into an electronic “conference room” and watch as James Martell walks through the step by step process of obtaining inbound links, and calculating how many inbound links you need to rank well.

The length of the training is five weeks, one session per week, each 2 hours in length. Each session is recorded to audio and ‘video’, plus transcripts are made available.

Positives

To summarize the training in a word: fabulous. This training was simply fabulous. I liked the amount  of content that James shared. I liked how he kept the pace quick and covered a lot of valuable information. I also liked that the sessions were ‘video-recorded’  (screen-capture video) because I couldn’t attend most of them live due to scheduling conflicts.

I liked the weekly breakdown of topics, and I liked that we had “assignments” at the end of each week. I had never attended any of Martell’s training events, and I was thoroughly pleased with this one. It was so good, I almost registered AGAIN at a discounted rate, but then I remembered I had all the videos I could review anytime I want. 

There was ample time for questions throughout the sessions, and James answered every one of them.  During the last sessions he had guests on the line talking about how they used the techniques.   In the days between sessions, he created audio recordings of himself answering questions that had come in after the session was over. 

Criticisms

As on other Martell recordings, he spent a little too much time (in my opinion) talking about himself and his background. In the first session he spent a lot of time (an hour) talking about the history of search engine optimization and what it takes to rank well in the search engines.

To a complete newbie, this kind of information may have been very valuable. However, I’ve heard these topics discussed in many Affiliate Buzz recordings already, and any student of Martell already knows who he is and how he has built an amazing publishing empire. Perhaps in future workshops he will trim down this section and get to real meat faster.

He also follows a very labor-intensive process for analyzing competing sites which could be done faster with programs like OptiRank, OptiSpider, or SEO Elite.  He even acknowledges this point during the training. However, he is correct in saying that you need to visit the sites anyway and apply human eyeballs to evaluating a competing site in a way that no software can ever duplicate.

So, it doesn’t matter if you use software to speed up the process. There is still a strong manual component to the process.

Overall Recommendation

Is the Backlinks Workshop worth $497 (or whatever discount special price Martell is running)? Absolutely.  The content is great and Martell really overdelivers in service to the students. 

Sign up for James Martell’s Backlinks Workshop if you really want the inside scoop on getting high-value inbound links to your website so your site(s) rank higher. Be aware, the process is very labor intensive. But, as the saying goes, “if it were easy, everyone would be doing it” and ranking highly in the search engines.

If you follow Martell’s teachings from the workshop, you are very likely to meet with success and improved rankings in the search engines. I’m still reviewing the videos and getting ready to apply the knowledge.

Get details on the workshop and listen to samples at the following address: 
http://www.backlinksworkshop.com