At 11am EST your inbox probably exploded with the latest “solve all your ills” WSO – this time it was Daredevil Infohero by Robert Stukes that was the big push. So, in the time-honoured fashion, here are my initial thoughts about it.

You can find it on the Warrior Forum if you want to check it out.

First up is the sales page. I know I’m going on a bit about these things recently but I’m hoping there are some guidelines in amongst all my ramblings that will help you if you ever release a WSO of your own.

Sales page, then. Lovely graphics (maybe) but  made up of 4 honking great images. They took an age to load – enough to tempt me to move on. Robert, please take note!

Just as an experiment I ran one of them through Photoshop and made a perfectly passable jpeg (size 700k) out of a 5.9 meg original. Come on guys…..that’s unacceptable. 20 or so megabytes downloaded just to see your sodding sales page!!

Not only that, but they are all still stored on the main Daredevil Infohero site, clogging up all the download speed for folks that have successfully purchased.

Just squeeze them and put them on Amazon AWS.

I’ve bought other Daredevil products in the past, so in a sense I was going on “trust” for this one, but if I were starting from scratch, I’d say the evil spacehopper logo has taken over too much of the sales page space.

It just feels image heavy and while I know that testimonials are good for social proof, having so many from old products in the image blitz does nothing for me.

Does anyone read those reduced Warrior Forum images?

What’s Inside Daredevil Infohero?

The product itself comes as 5 modules which are all downloadable pdf files. Each module page also contains a box for personal notes that you may make while reading the pdf.

I’m not sure what I think about that. I’m sure Robert is an honourable guy and all that, but I’m always wary of making specific notes on a site which is accessible by the product creator. Maybe I’m too suspicious.

Now, of course, I haven’t had time to implement any of this stuff yet as I’m a buyer like the rest of you (no up-front freebie here :)) but here’s a quick overview.

Robert basically walks you through the whole task of finding a “desperate” crowd, answering their question using a particular format and then monetizing that answer.

Along the way, you ‘ll be using a few very specific sites for research and traffic generation, but at it’s heart this is a good solid “how to do infoproducts” course.

Module 3 may look a little light for those of you who already know all about WordPress sites, but even in here I found the discussion of payment engines to be a useful summary of Robert’s own experiences.

Ironically, the section on copy writing and sales pages talks a lot about simple, clean-looking pages – not something we see on the WSO sales page, Robert 🙂

It’s probably not going to set the world on fire for new techniques, but Daredevil Infohero manages to be comprehensive enough to be good for beginners and also to add enough tweaks in for the intermediate crowd – some of those tweaks may just be reminders, but we all need reminders now and again.

Robert makes a claim that he puts sites up in around 5 hours, so I’m going to see if that’s a feasible claim for his technique.

If you want to follow along with me, you will find Daredevil InfoHero here.

STOP PRESS: Robert has closed this WSO.

I have no idea why you’d need to close a generic thing like this, it should be offering value for some time to come. Anyway, there it is.

What is your opinion of the firefly lifetime of WSOs these days? Chime in below.

Tiffany Dow encourages folks to create a series of posts that all relate to progress using a particular product (you can see more about her WSO in part 1, here) and so, in the spirit of doing the right thing, here is a follow-up to my earlier post.

SNO Review SEO

I’m fairly sure by now, that Google doesn’t absolutely hate my site (faint praise, I know!). It’s been running for a few years, there’s a fair amount of content up on it and I’ve made a few posts every month – hardly a race to the finish line, eh?

As a result, I do see my posts appear quite quickly on the first page, they often hang around for a while and using the new author tweaks has also given them that shiny new “here’s me” picture when they do show up.

So, I was fairly pleased when my review of Cashing in on Shiny New Object Syndrome showed up on page one – mind you, you can’t get much more long-tail than a 7 word phrase 🙂 Imagine my joy, when it then disappeared off the map completely – I’m talking somewhere out beyond page 15. I got bored looking for it!

I worried that I’d been penalized for using an image with an SEO-style “alt” tag as the first thing in the post. Google seems to have taken to actually showing that alt text in the post summary if you don’t set the text explicitly in something like All-in-one SEO and I worried that it showed up as being too SEO’d.

Anyway, today it is back on page 1 and is up to slot number 3 without me doing anything to prop it up, so I need to remind myself to chill out a bit during the Google dance.

Is a WSO a good target?

All of that preamble brings me on to what I think is the biggest potential failing of the whole “Cashing In” idea.

In fact it may be a failing of the whole IM world in that regard.

That failing is this. If you are going to invest a load of your time and money in a WSO for review purposes, you have almost NO guarantee that the WSO owner will keep that thing running for longer than a firefly’s lifetime. Now, ideally, if you are doing a long-term review, you want the product available for sale all of that time (if you like it).

A case in point would be the recent CPA Superstars product from Kenster – I’m happy to supply opinions about the materials inside the course, but it’s highly likely that they will have closed the program before you even read my review.

How useful is that?

Not only that, but just say I get my review up mere seconds after the release. Well first, it will definitely be a facts only review, but secondly, what if Google decides to hide my post for a few days? All advantage is gone and it would have been a total waste of my time (maybe).

I’m not sure how to combat that problem with WSOs and the tendency for larger releases in the whole IM field to have very limited “windows of opportunity” means that they are very similar.

What it probably means is that the plan will only work for much smaller releases on the forum, ones which have a decent lifetime ahead of them. Unfortunately, these are probably going to be the ones which have less of a “blockbuster” launch and pricetag…..and we all have to eat sometime.

I suspect my long term view of Cashing in on SNOS will be that I’m reviewing WSOs as a service to my readers (not as a revenue stream in its own right) and maybe you’ll all love the reviews so much, you’ll buy other things from me.

Does that feel like a deal? Anyone want to tell me I’m living in cloud-cuckoo land?