This is part 3 of my review series on Tifffany Dow’s Guide to cashing in on Shiny New Object Syndrome. If you want to find to read more, you can find part 1 here and part 2 here.
This is going to be a much quicker post than the others because I wanted to report back on my results over a period of a couple of weeks. Given the nature of the WSO market, this seems like a fair time and I’ll explain why below.
Over the course of the last 2 weeks, I have bought and reviewed several of the big WSO launches (trying all the time to be open about my thoughts) and have been fairly pleased with quality of what I have seen.
Not only that, but as my blog has been around a while, with a reasonable number of updates, Google quite often show my posts within around 15 minutes of me making them, and quite often on the first page. You’d expect then, if I am getting the reviews out fast enough, that I would see reasonable traffic and who knows, maybe even a sale or two.
Well, I regret to say that this is just not the case. In fact, on a good day maybe 1 or 2 people visit the blog as a direct result of searching for a particular WSO review – and that’s often on launch day! It’s not just that I write poor reviews, they just don’t visit from searches.
You can guess how many sales that makes – yup, the square root of f*** (not very much at) all.
It may be that WSO buyers are now completely trained to just buy from recommendation emails and use the forum for quick feedback and reviews. When you couple this with the almost instant withdrawal of WSO from sale that seems to be very prevalent these days, there isn’t even any hope for long-term sales.
Maybe, just maybe, if I were throwing up guesswork reviews without buying the products, there might be a few products with longevity and fame that would drive traffic and make me money over time.
What works against that idea is that Google is now so in love with itself, that any Tom, Dick or Harriet can throw up a crappy Youtube video (based on very little research) that big-G will value over my paid-in-full 1000-word critique pushing me to the bottom of page 2 faster than you can say “whoosh”. So now I need to do video reviews more than text and presumably have to build some trust factor doing that too.
Can you tell what I think of all this yet? 🙂
The Summertime Profits factor.
One of the WSOs that came out during all this, was Summertime Profits (review here), which adds a twist to the idea of reviewing WSOs. In particular, list-building plays a bigger role in that product and I can see that it may be possible to merge the two sets of ideas into one and still make this work in some way. That is where I am headed next…..watch the skies for reviews updates on that product.
Summary and final thoughts on “The Guide”
If I had to summarize, I’d say that Cashing in on SNOS is so much better as a “thought experiment” than as a practical experience. The cost of buying WSOs quickly racks up and in my limited test I have made nowhere near enough to cover my costs, let alone profit.
Looking around the web, I find several sites reviewing Tiffany’s product like me. Only one has gone on to do any other WSO reviews as I have. This may partly be down to Internet Marketer Lack of Follow-up Syndrome (hey, a new WSO title!), or it may just be that no-one else made any money promoting her book and so gave up quicker than me.
As an exercise in getting her own product reviewed and advertised, this has been a blinder for Tiffany (don’t get me wrong, there’s no animosity here, I like her other stuff), but as a means to making money it is not working.
As a result, I’m going to have to revise my scoring. I reckon it’s a great book quality-wise (8 out of 10-ish) but as a real business model it’s going to get a 3.
Tiffany, sorry, I tried, I really did!
If you, or anyone you know is making this work, let me know below, I’d be happy to find out what I’ve screwed up.
