It looks pretty good, Brad normally creates some decent software, and in some ways it might also be better than current market champion Market Samurai (you can still pick up Market Samurai through the 30 Day Challenge for less than half the price of Keyword Elite through a special deal, which includes a 40 day trial)

I have been having fun observing the ducking and diving among those promoting KE 2.0 and I thought I would add some commentary.

1. No Money?

If you are tight on funds, use the free trial of Market Samurai… enough said

2. It is a Clickbank Product

http://nommus.bryxen4.hop.clickbank.net/

If you are feeling insanely generous just use that link, but I’m certainly not going to look down on you if you replace my clickbank ID with your own. Some people get review copies, and others have to buy them, the least you can do is grab a “discount”
Don’t worry about Brad, I am sure he will make things up on “Integration Marketing” of various kinds.

3. Keyword Elite Bonuses

The bonus wars are going crazy

Some of the better bonus offers I have seen include

Alex Goad
Chris X / Andrew Fox
Vita Vee (great effort on the review)

However Some Of This Is Sickening

Cashback Offers

If you are a 7-figure Clickbank affiliate, it is quite possible Clickbank will overlook flagrant disregard for their long-standing rules against cash bonuses.
It doesn’t set a “safe” example for new marketers.

Bonus Terms

Clickbank require when offering bonuses to include something along the lines of

From Nov 2006

Official

Affiliates may offer bonuses that are not cash or cash equivalents if
they adhere to the following:

1) Affiliate must state clearly and prominently that the bonus offer is not the responsibility of ClickBank or of the seller of the primary product.

2) Affiliate must state clearly and prominently that ClickBank will not honor any refund requests that are based on non-delivery, quality, or functionality of the bonus materials.

3) Affiliate must provide their own direct contact information (email address, etc.) and state clearly that any issues regarding bonus delivery, bonus functionality, or bonus quality must be addressed with the affiliate, not with ClickBank or the seller.

ClickBank Note:

It is not posted on the website yet, but our security team will be using this policy from here on out unless we experience any additional problems from affiliate bonuses.

Sorry Anik / Lurn Inc – if you are meant to be the pinnacle of teaching affiliate marketing, any disregard for 3 year old Clickbank policy (even if it isn’t very well publicised) isn’t acceptable, thus no link to your otherwise decent bonus.

To be honest I shouldn’t really link to the others above for the same reason

Clickbank Bonus Delivery

Everyone seems to be living in the dark ages – there is no real need to be delivering bonuses by requiring people to send a message via a contact form.

Even if you don’t deliver a bonus itself immediately, some level of Clickbank Bonus Delivery can be used to immediately contact a user, and if you can’t deliver the bonus automatically (possibly hard to script a membership for 6 months), at least the customer is added automatically to the sales funnel and internal procedures.

Surely the better service is worth investing $100 or less?

If you are not offering a significant bonus, I hope you did very well in the leads contest. Bonus Automation isn’t just a great way of providing good service, but capturing buyers to add into your own sales funnel, with the immediate possibility to upsell customers who have purchased someone else’s product often even before they have even received the email confirmation from Clickbank themselves.

Am I going to buy Keyword Elite 2.0? Possibly, though it remains to be seen whether it can excel in international foreign language markets.

Update

I mentioned blatant transgressions, here is an example doing a quick search for keyword elite on Twitter

Keyword Elite Spam

If you really need a lower price, isn’t it better to grab a 50% discount using your own affiliate link? (note you would still need to achieve 4 credit card sales from different locations, wait up to 2 weeks plus time to cash a check/process XACH)

I came across another decent bonus from Perry & Ryan – clear disclosure but still a little lacking on the responsibility for bonuses.

Update 2

Jason “John Cow” Katzenback has a stonking bonus as well.

If you purchase KeywordElite version 2, with the below link, I will get you into Web2Mayhem for FREE for the first 2 months and then i will only charge you an extremely ridiculous low amount after that for each month.

I am not giving it for free forever though… cause it uses resources on my end that cost me money.

PLUS you also get access to SyndicateKahuna with this which is a $67 a month service by itself.

I am pulling this as soon as i hit 200… so go now…

I am not sure how long this has been in the rules at Clickbank, as Clickbank currently block archive.org – that being said I am sure it would have been brought up by someone during the last few months in discussions regarding various paid review services such as PayPerPost, ReviewMe and Sponsored Reviews.

The A-List bloggers concentrated their attacks on the paid reviews services because it made good headlines, and most missed the much more serious implications for affiliate marketing.

Clickbank isn’t a small startup company looking to carve a niche – their daily sales turnover is probably higher than the funding received by any of the paid posts companies. It is only possible to estimate their sales figures, because they are a privately held company. They claim 20,000 sales per day on their website, and typical prices of their digital products are $47 to $67 each, with many of the top sellers costing $77 to $97.
In the past I have asked Clickbank directly for more accurate figures, but as is their privilege that was declined.

As an example, the current top selling ebook launched 6th February, Day Job Killer, an ebook that provides tactics for affiliate marketers using Adwords PPC to drive traffic to various affiliate merchants such as Amazon and Ebay has sold more than 5000 copies in the first 24hrs of release, with a $77+tax price tag, thats $385,000 in sales which many Web2.0 statups can’t achieve in advertising revenue in one month.

A large chunk of that revenue will go to affiliate partners, but that will easily be recouped by backend sales. As an example this is the 3rd Ebook published by the same authors, and I am sure many of the 5000 sales recorded were direct sales by the authors to their private mailing list.

I am not a lawyer, and this blog article is purely a discussion topic for your own amusement and does not represent legal advise.

Here is the specific clause from the Clickbank Rules:-

If you promote products listed by ClickBank, then:

* You agree to make no such promotions that suggest or imply any warranty or other policy that might conflict with ClickBank’s eight week return policy.
* You agree to make no such promotions that involve unlicensed use of materials protected by copyright or trademark law.
* You agree that you will not engage in activities that interfere with our tracking of commissions, or with the normal flow of traffic from affiliates.
* You agree that all such promotions will be fully compliant with federal and state laws, including US federal and state laws regarding network abuse, unsolicited messaging, and FTC Advertising Rules and Disclosure Rules.
* You agree to make no such promotions promising customers rebates, coupons, tickets, or vouchers in connection with their ClickBank purchase.

I have bolded the first line and 2 sections, and I will deal with the second section first

Offering Bonuses for Clickbank Products

The wording is clearly aimed at monetary bonuses as we expected the clarification in Clickbank rules from back in November to contain. Many Clickbank affiliates are still offering cash incentives as this advert for Day Job Killer grabbed yesterday confirms.

I have also received many emails offering cash rebates. With those who I trust and have business dealings with in the past, I just sent a friendly note. It is not like Clickbank send out email notifications of rule changes. In fact the rules changes don’t even make it to their internal news system.

Clickbank and Disclosure

I don’t remember seeing the statement regarding disclosure within the Clickbank Terms of Service when I was last reading them in November.
Whenever Google change their policy statements, everyone knows about it, and discusses it. When they change their Terms of Service, you normally have to agree to the changes, and there is normally word for word analysis by many sites.

The above clauses are clearly intended for affiliates, because the opening line is “If you promote products listed by ClickBank“.

The FTC Disclosure Rules don’t mention the word affiliate, but they frequently mention advertising. I am clear in my own mind that the rules cover both placement adverts, and various forms of word of mouth advertising.

For an Affiliate Marketer, I am fairly open about disclosure. I have a disclosure policy, and there is a link to my disclosure policy with my feed items, both in the form of a custom footer in my posts and RSS feed(Disclosure Policy Plugin for WordPress), and as a Feedburner Feed Flare. Those are my own developed solutions for affiliate disclosure as an alternative to adding (aff) after affiliate links, which might not have meaning to a casual reader.

As I pointed out in my fairly neutral review of Day Job Killer, it is important to conform to all the rules, and some of the techniques in Day Job Killer would be less successful if you plastered “I am trying to sell you something” all over a squeeze page.
I offered a bonus for Day Job Killer, but none are cash equivalents.

Duncan Riley’s research into one of the endorsements on the Day Job Killer sales page is also intriguing. There is also the possibility it is a real person, or a real testimonial with a made up pen name.

I just read a Squidoo Lens promoting Day Job Killer written by a Tax Attorney – it is a shame he is breaking Clickbank’s rules on disclosure, not a disclosure in sight.

It is interesting that Clickbank now require disclosure, and Google effectively prevent disclosure for their referral units.

I would be very interested in the opinion of some more legal experts such as Brian @ Copyblogger or Mike Young