Note: When I’ve finished writing this review I realized how lengthly it got, so please bear with me. I’ve bolded some key places that I think are the most important. So if you want to skim it, you can at least check those.
I’ve bought Commission Blueprint 2.0 yesterday and had my chance to go through everything now. So I figured I’d sum up my impressions and uses I have found for it. Now mind you, it’s only my subjective opinion and it very much depends on my level of experience. It contains training for the complete beginners to advanced topics, the tools and services may also be used differently. It also depends on what you’re already doing. Obviously, I have my business plan and I don’t want to digress, so I will only be using what helps to improve my business.
First of all I have to say it really is the most comprehensive IM kit I’ve seen. And I’m using the word “kit” very responsibly, it really is. It not only has well done videos and manuals, it has the most essential tools and services. I can only agree with them when they say it’s the last IM product you’ll need. It has everything you need and anything else may be just extra expert tools that are only optional if anything else.
The videos are basically in two formats – one in which Steve gives an overview of each module and explains how to get most of it for newbies, intermediate and expert marketers. Then the rest of the videos are tutorials in which the subjects are explained step by step.
The manuals are concise with no filler content. There are a lot of case studies in which real life examples are explained – usually there’s a problem indicated and each action taken, and the final result. You can see all keywords they used in SEO, PPC and so on, so it’s not just generic blurred Google page with who knows what keywords and results behind it. You can see it, you can understand it, you can confirm it and finally you can model upon it your own keywords and so on.
On top of it all, there are two action plans – free and with advertising expenses. If you’re new or just need a plan, you can follow one of them and use the training and tools provided in Commission Blueprint 2.0.
There are a bunch of tools and services, Keyword Blueprint and Article Blueprint are clearly being the main accent. The other tools are just as good. Hippo Jaw for instance is a great tracking service for PPC campaigns, AdSpy tool is a software you can install on your server and track competition ads on Google (something like PPC Bully 1.0, if you’re familiar). I’ll expand on Keyword Blueprint and Article Blueprint a little bit more, since they’re the most important to me.
Keyword Blueprint I think can be compared to Micro Niche Finder, although I’ve never used the latter. Essentially it’s an easy to use and efficient keyword research tool. What it does and does it well is automate the manual process you’d do with other keyword tools (such as Market Samurai) as much as possible, and make it easy to find great keywords. I cannot describe well enough how it makes my life easier. Usually I would enter my main niche keyword in Market Samurai, find relevant keywords and then repeat the process on each of them. Then I would find keywords with traffic and low competition and analyze first page of Google for them. Market Samurai does that well but it still takes way too much time and it’s easy to get lost. With Keyword Blueprint I’m able to start off as I would with the main keyword and related keywords it gives, then just click on the keywords I find relevant and it expands on them at the spot. That makes things easier already. Then I would simply select keywords with traffic that I think have good commercial intent and “ask” Keyword Blueprint what it thinks about beating the competition. It then gives a score 1-20, a red cross for no-no keywords and a star if it’s easy pickin’s. I can quickly choose a handful of keywords like that and confirm each of them in Google before I work on them. This process is so much faster than with other keyword tools that the time saved already pays off for the price of the whole kit.
In PPC it gets even more interesting. Keyword Blueprint works in two modes – SEO and PPC. I’ve described the SEO mode above, and in PPC it simply takes into account different characteristics. You start off by selecting a commission of the product you’re gonna promote (this can be an arbitrary amount if you don’t have one yet) and adding the main keyword. It then expands on it like in SEO mode allowing you to also expand on individual keywords on the spot and evaluates the daily clicks and CPC. If the CPC is humongous, it simply says ‘too expensive’ otherwise it gives the actual CPC you’d pay. It’s also important that the CPC is not the bid you’d pay for position #1 in Adwords but a more realistic calculated bid for lower positions that you’d normally bid. That gives a much better estimation. Finally, once you select the keywords you can move them to the evaluator tool where you immediately see if you’ll make any profit at those bids and conversion rate. You can make adjustments from there and see if you can make this campaign work. That’s what you used to do with spreadsheets, the whole thing is now fully automated.
The Article Blueprint is an article distribution service that is comparable to Unique Article Wizard. And again, because you get life-time access to it for no extra cost it pays off alone. For instance, I’ve already canceled My Article Network subscription, because even though it’s a little bit different than AB, I used it in the same way I can use AB. So even if it was the only thing I’d use Commission Blueprint 2.0 for, it would pay of after 10 months alone. I will of course won’t have to wait that long in reality.
Article Blueprint covers hundreds of article directories and the private high PR site network. I’ve only submitted one article and it’s been submitted to 5 directories yet so I don’t have any real results but if it works as it’s supposed to, it will do the job for me. My only complaint is that it doesn’t support jet spinner syntax and only rewrites articles by accepting 3 rewritten versions of each paragraphs. I’m not used to that nor I like it, so what I did for my test article was to spin each paragraph and submit them. It got approved but obviously it’s a little bit of a poor man’s solution and I’ll try to persuade them to add jet spinner syntax support. That would increase the rewriting ability so much more.
There are also two unannounced tools. One of them is a tool to find hub pages to get links from – a replacement for Hub Finder from SeoBook, which to quote them, “allows you to find sites which link to common resources that you manually enter, or resources that rank well in Yahoo! for a specific term.” That’s usually useful when trying to rank for high competition keywords.
The other tool is another link building service. As far as I know it’s gonna be a 3 way linking network with a unique twist. While I’m not a big fan of 3 way links since the back-links you get are from a page full of irrelevant content with tons of other outgoing links, the unique twist sounds intriguing. I also know that they were working on a service comparable to Linkvana, so this might be related.
From the training what I found the most useful is the video series on how to build your own high PR website network. They explain step by step how they do it in the fastest and cheapest way. So for instance to create a network of 20 sites would cost $120/month for hosting and ~$30 one time fee per domain. You would buy domains with PR, change the former site’s theme to what you need and retain the PR. Great strategy the concept of which I’ve already had in mind, so it will be a good opportunity to implement it.
To wrap it up, it’s a great value in all aspects – knowledge, entertainment (I find the videos and how it’s all done quite so!), tools and services. You don’t have to look far for examples where you pay $2k and get perhaps only 10% of what you get in Commission Blueprint 2.0. So if you’re still on the fence, unless you’re really short on money and can’t do anything about it, get it and get it fast. It’s gonna be closed in no time, and that’s not a marketing gimmick.