Before going any further, it’s probably crossed your mind by now that such a bold statement as “earn $20,000 in 20 days or your money back” obviously involves some upfront cost, so let’s get that out of the way before looking at the course in more detail. The course or, as creator Michael Green dubs it, the toolkit, currently costs $247, although that will be rising to $497 after his introductory period special offer closes. There is also the option to upgrade to a “gold” version, for an additional $197, which gives access to a much deeper pool of products.

As you will see on the 20/20 front page, the key points are that internet marketing expert Michael Green offers a complete day by day plan, with no need to buy or create your own product, to hitting the target of making $20,000 in twenty days or you get a full refund of the purchase price.

His entry level course includes ten products, six eBooks and four software packages, from which you would choose one to use as the vehicle for the course, in addition to the day by day workbook and a dedicated forum for the exclusive use of those who buy in to the course.

Having signed up, the first thing to do is access the 20/20 Challenge Owner’s Manual, a hefty 250 page detailed guide to all the steps needed to achieve your goal, broken down into detailed daily actions to be taken. The very first thing you’ll read is this:-

“Can you really earn $20,000 by simply owning this toolkit? Sadly the answer is in fact NO. Because ownership of this toolkit is not the answer to your wealth creation… You actually have to act on the help and advice it offers and turn the words of this manual into action.

I can vouch for the profound wisdom of these simple words. It’s entirely possible, maybe even necessary, to read a lot of information from many different sources about different ways of potentially making money online. I have read an enormous amount of such stuff purporting to be good advice over the last year, most of it self-serving rubbish. The trick of it is always to sort the wheat from the chaff and take action. As Stephen Fry wrote in his 1997 book Making History, “You are what you do. What’s inside your head means nothing until you act”.

Michael Green advises that to succeed in his challenge you’ll require raw determination to commit yourself fully from Day 1, otherwise the result will be all too predictable failure. If you have that determination and drive to see things through, potentially unlimited riches could be yours.

If, like me, your online skills are not the strongest and you’re worried you might not be able to see this challenge through on a technical level, you need to be able to do or learn how to do the following:-

1. Surf the web
2. The ability to create a basic webpage
3. Open a webhosting account
4. Upload files to your webhost
5. Research the markets for free products in the toolkit (or make your own)
6. Either re-brand or, more probably, get a freelancer to re-brand your chosen product
7. Write a winning sales letter with interesting copy
8. Search out joint venture partners to create additional sales
9. Find affiliates to create even more sales
10. Set up product delivery and payment process
11. Spend the money you’ve made!

The course covers all the first ten points and I trust you’ll have your own ideas about the last point if you go ahead and invest in this toolkit.

Here’s a breakdown of the entire 20 day process. At the end of each day there is a set of check boxes for you to tick off to make sure that all the needed steps have been completed.

• Day 1: Read the entire 20/20 Owner’s Manual right through. This is to familiarize yourself with the overall process and prepare for the work to come.
• Day 2: Learn all about Private Label Rights (PLR) products. Learn how to accept payments.
• Day 3: Choose the product for your challenge and work out re-branding model. This is one of the most vitally important issues in the whole course.
• Day 4: Start the re-branding process and look for prospective Joint Venture (JV) partners.
• Day 5: Write the sales letter for your chosen product and add more JV partners.
• Day 6: Price your product, set up payment system, decide how to manage your JV partners, create download page, set up auto-responder and add more JV Partners. (weakness, more extras need to be bought – including author’s own, explanation lacks detail)
• Day 7: Test your sales letter and keep pushing for more of those all important JV partners.
• Day 8: Liaise with JV partners and product re-branders.
• Day 9: Start product promotion, set up test PPC campaign on Google AdWords, keep working JV partners.
• Day 10: Check on final stage re-branding, more pre-release promotion and, yes, more JV partner work.
• Days 11 to 14: Finalise sales letter, more promo and JV work. The end is in sight!
• Day 15 to 17: Add affiliates and more promo/JV work, decide on any product bonusues, and more promotion, affiliate and JV work.
• Day 18: Create product delivery system and keep working on promotion and sales activities.
• Day 19: Final pre-sales push and systems check and even more promotional work.
• Day 20: Launch your product!

Having read through this manual some three times now, I can confirm that, if you have always wanted to get into running your own online business to either supplement or even replace your day job, the 20/20 Challenge can help you get going. It’s certainly given me the confidence to start on my own project, which I’ll report on in a forthcoming progress report.

Is it complete? Certainly not. For a start, there are some additional costs, software and services which you’ll need in order to do a thorough job. These include obvious basics such as registering a domain name, which will cost about $10, getting hosting for your web site (about $10 a month), freelance services (at least $20 – $100), which are fair enough. Then there are more substantial costs like merchant accounts, JV management and download protection software ($50 – $300), most of which could have been included in the package rather than being presented as optional extras, particularly as the links to them are Michael Green’s own affiliate links.

Some of the products included as the potential vehicle for your own project are absolutely brilliant, but there are also some which are either unlikely to be very profitable or simply a bit old and widely available elsewhere, so the need for very careful and thorough market research on your potential choice can not be stressed highly enough.

The course is also a little weak in the area of JV partner research, relying on just one, albeit powerful, technique. It also, to this newbie’s mind, rather skims over the mechanics of setting up payment receipt and product delivery mechanisms

All in all, The 20/20 Challenge is a very useful and helpful beginner’s guide to launching your first online business and I certainly wouldn’t have been able to get going without it. Is the challenge of making $20,000 in just twenty days achievable? Well, the proof of the pudding is in the eating of course, but I believe it is possible to earn this and more. The real strength of this course is that the lessons learned are infinitely repeatable and I intend to use them as a springboard to launching my own little online empire.

Despite its slight imperfections, I would absolutely recommend The 20/20 Challenge to anyone looking to get started with their own online business.

I understand you’ve now brought out something new, the Google Cash Detective. What does this do and how is it different to “Google Cash“?

The Google Cash Detective is software that monitors keywords and identifies profitable Adwords campaigns. It’s completely automated! All you do is enter the keywords into the software, and it monitors them for you.

The Google Cash Detective shows you the Adwords ad, the Display URL, and the Destination URL for every keyword you enter. It queries Google daily, or hourly (depending on what you choose), and will show you the range of daily clicks, the range ofCPC for these clicks, the number of variations of the ad copy, the status of the ad, and much more!

You enter a niche keyword list into the software, and it starts monitoring. Then a few days later, you can see which keywords are consistently displaying ads for certain merchants. The longer you monitor your niche with the Google Cash Detective, the more certainty you will have as to which ads are profitable and which ads are not. The Google Cash Detective works continuously to monitor campaigns placed for your keywords. At a glance, you can see what ads have been running everyday for several days – those ads are likely to be the profitable ones. On the other hand, when you see keyword / merchant / ad copy combinations that have run for only a few days out of the last month – those ads are likely to be the unprofitable ones. These ads were run, lost money, and then disappeared.

The Google Cash Detective also identifies which Adwords ads use affiliate links. So, it’s easy to find profitable affiliate campaigns to replicate and immediately profit from. The Google Cash Detective is a competitive intelligence software that sifts through the thousands of Adwords ads and identifies persistent affiliate campaigns. Effectively, the software stakes out successful affiliate marketers and shows you the merchant, keyword, and ad formula combination that they are using.

So you use the Google Cash Detective with the Google Cash System. Instead of setting up Adwords Campaigns promoting affiliate products with trial and error, you can save time and money by using the Detective to find profitable Adwords Ads. Then you can mimic those campaigns and try to improve on them.

One method that has been working really well for me, is finding profitable “Google Cash” campaigns in Adwords with the Google Cash Detective and then replicating them on Microsoft adCenter. There is much less competition on adCenter and you still get a lot of traffic at a low cost.

You also practice and teach Yoga. When did that start and what type of yoga do you practice?

I don’t actually teach yoga. I only practice yoga. My wife teaches hatha yoga. We have a yoga retreat here in Mexico and we bring in teachers from all over the world to do week long “intensives”.

I started about 2 years ago. I have had chronic lower back problems since I was 16 years old. Every 2 or 3 months I would have spasms that kept me in bed for a few days. I lived in constant fear of “throwing out” my back. It was horrible! I started doing yoga therapeutically to help my back pain. Since I started two years ago, I have been practicing regularly and my lower back problem has completely vanished. I do much more active sports now than I ever did, and still I am pain free. I attribute it 100% to the yoga. Every morning I wake-up and do my little morning routine. In the afternoon I do the more formal class which lasts about 1.5 hours.

When I first started practicing yoga I thought it was just about the stretching and I was doing it only to heal my back. Since then I have learned that it is much more than just the exercises. There is a whole spiritual side to it as well. Since I started meditating a little each day and consistently doing the breathing exercises I have become much more relaxed, and stress free.

I used to have quite a temper issue, yelling and raising my voice often, even being down-right abusive at times. But for the last year and a half since I have been meditating regularly, I have completely lost the anger. Situations that used to throw me into a rage just dissolve when they come into contact with me now. It’s pretty amazing actually.

Before this transformation happened with me, I wouldn’t have believed it to be possible. I always thought that people can’t change like that. But they can. Not only have I seen a big change in myself since I started yoga, I have seen the same metamorphosis in my friends who have been practicing yoga as well.

You now seem to live on the beach in Puerto Escondido most of the time. Is that one of the fruits of your success or would you be doing that regardless of your internet activity?

I wanted to live at a surf spot for a long time. But the problem with that is that at most surf spots there is not a lot of work to be had. Once I figured out how to make money online, I quickly moved to the surf.

What would you say to the many millions of people that dream of quitting their dayjobs and earning a good living online? It often seems very difficult, almost overwhelming in fact, to tell which of the thousands of marketing gurus out there are worth believing and which just want to get your money and give you a bunch of recycled rubbish. How can wannabes like me tell who the good guys are?

I would say that it is very possible to earn a good living online. I did it and am doing it. I have no special skills or background. I didn’t graduate college. I worked at nights in bars and restaurants so I could play during the days.

I’m not the only one working online and living this Internet Lifestyle either. There are lots of people that have figured this out and awoken from the slave like sleeping state of working a 9-5 till your 65 JOB (Just Over Broke). We’ve been told all of our lives that we need to get a job and work for a living. Work hard now and then if you’re lucky when you’re 60 or 65 you can live. Those are our beliefs. Guess what. That’s B.S. The time to live is now, not later. A paradigm shift is taking place and people are waking up and living their dream lifestyles now. Today, right now, this instant, This is your wake-up call! You too can live your dream lifestyle.

Here’s how: First figure out what you really want to do, what you want to be. Figure out your dream lifestyle. I shared my dream lifestyle with you: adventure travel, etc. What’s yours? If you had no constraints what would you do? Oh by the way, having a family is not a constraint. I take my family with me on all of our adventures.

Get a pad of paper and start brainstorming. If you had 100 million dollars in the bank, what would you do with your time? Don’t figure out what you want to have. Having things just to have things is not important. Figure out what you want to do. And only acquire things that help you do those things. Really give this some thought and think about your passions. What do you live for?

You can’t just want to quit your job. You have to have a vision, a passion. You can’t say I hate my job so I want to setup an online business instead. It has to be that you hate your job and you want to setup an online business to free yourself so you can do the things that you love. The things that you are passionate about. That’s what you need to figure out – what that is. So the first step is getting clear on what you want to do in your life.

The next step is to look at your list and figure out how much money you need to earn to be able to do those things. That’s your Strategic Objective. For me, I figured I needed $10,000 a month of profits to support my dream lifestyle. Go through your list of things you want to do, and figure out how much you would need to earn a month to be able to do those things and still have a little left over to save and invest.

The third step is that you need to identify your limiting beliefs and get rid of them. We’ve been raised to believe that work is hard. That you need to grow up and get a job and work from 9 to 5 until your 65. We’ve been raised to believe that work is something you do daily, that people that don’t work are lazy – bums. Make a list of all of your beliefs concerning work.

We also have ingrained in us limiting beliefs about money. Beliefs that it is noble to be poor. That rich people are jerks and that if you are rich it is at someone else’s expense. Look at all of the little sayings regarding money: “Money doesn’t grow on trees”. “We’re not theRockefellers”. I bet you can think of several more. Make a list of all of your beliefs concerning money.

Ultimately it comes down to beliefs. The only thing preventing you from living your dream lifestyle is believing that it can be done. Once you have your limiting beliefs out in the open, you’ll be able to see them throughout your day as you deal with work and money. Just by noticing them, that is the first step to getting rid of them.

Your next step is to start building your Automated Online Business. You start by working on it yourself. And little by little you systemize your work and outsource it so a specialist works on it. Then you work on your business and not in it.

And in my opinion, the easiest way to setup a profitable automated online business, is to find one in a niche that you are interested in. Then you reverse engineer their business model and you try to improve on their model. This is where the Google Cash Detective comes into play. It helps you identify with 100% accuracy profitable online businesses that get their traffic fromPPC. And it shows you which keywords and which Ads are profitable for them. You really need to read my special free report “Google Cash Strikes Back ”, where I explain the above concept in much more detail and learn all the techniques in my Google Cash ebook.

Chris Carpenter Interview, Part 1

His first product was the highly respected and reasonably priced Google Cash e-book, which came out about four years ago, and his latest product is the rather more expensive and just a little bit controversial Google Cash Detective, which draws upon the work of his e-book and makes the whole process easier to implement. The Detective is software that simply makes the Google Cash techniques easier to implement but is far more expensive and currently sold out.

Tell us about your background. Where are you from and what did you do before getting into the virtual income lifestyle?

I grew up all over the world. My father was a diplomat in the Foreign Service. We moved from country to country every three years or so.

I’ve always enjoyed the outdoors and have been an adventure nut since I was a child. I worked all sorts of temporary jobs and night jobs to try to keep my days free so I could do my adventure activities like skiing and surfing and mountain biking, etc.

As an adult I lived in Salt Lake City Utah at the base of the Cottonwood Canyons, working night jobs so I could ski during the days. I worked as a waiter, as a bus boy, as a bartender, all sorts of service jobs. The good thing about the service jobs is that it frees up your days for skiing and mountain biking, etc.

When and why did you start to look to the web as a way of earning a living?

The downside to working night jobs is that the pay is quite dismal, and you’re still stuck to one area since you have to show up to work after your ski day. So you don’t have a lot of money and time to travel to other ski areas. This for me was still much better than the alternative of working a 9-to-5 JOB, but as I mentioned, you’re still stuck. You’re barely eking by with money and you can’t do much adventure traveling since you have to go to work and you have limited funds.

That’s how it was for me five years ago. I was happy. I was doing what I loved. I worked so I could do what I loved: skiing, biking, kayaking, climbing, etc. But I felt stuck — no money, no time off from work. And I really wanted to travel the world going on adventures and doing the things I love. I wanted to go helicopter skiing in Alaska, surfing in Fiji and other places.

Those things are expensive though. So I got a real job and worked like crazy. I commuted over 45 minutes each way to work, and sat in a cubicle in front of a computer five days a week. I was only able to go skiing on the weekends. I became a “Weekend Warrior”. The idea was to work hard for few years and save up money and then go on a bunch of big trips. After almost a year of working like a dog and neglecting my passions – I managed to save a whopping $0. Yup, in fact I was $11,000 in credit card debt. Now I couldn’t quit my job even if I wanted to, because I had to work to pay my bills and my debt. I was stuck in the rat race. And I was miserable.

I decided then and there that I was going to dedicate myself to finding the answer. How can I live my dream lifestyle of traveling the world and going on adventures? I searched and searched. Is it being a writer, or a photographer, or some sort of an adventure guide? Nothing I came up with satisfied the criteria of no time constraints, no money constraints, ultimate flexibility, and no geography constraints. I had pretty much given up and settled on the fact that I was going to be a 9-to-5 slave or work in a restaurant at nights so I could play during the days.

I had a breakdown and then in the midst of my breakdown – I had an epiphany. In my epiphany I saw how the Internet disseminates information. And I realized that whoever helps the information reach the person looking for it quickly and accurately and gives them exactly what they are looking for – can make money from that. So I started setting up an online business.

For the first month I worked 15+ hour days on it. By the second month I earned $30,000 of profits, still working 15 hour days. Then in the third month I systematized my business and automated the systems and outsourced most of the work. From month four until today, four years later, I’ve been earning lots of profits a month all the while only working around five hours a week. Since I systematized and outsourced the work, now I work on the business and not in it. I work on the 10% that produces the 90% of the profits. Also since it is an online business, it lives entirely on the Internet. There is no physical store. I can work from anywhere, all I need is an Internet connection. That’s the main reason I looked into working online – for ultimate freedom.

You’re obviously quite well known in the world of Internet marketing for your Google Cash e-book. Can you tell us a bit about that book and what it teaches people?

The Google Cash Method is simple: You place an affiliate link for a product or pay-per-lead offer in the destination URL of an Adwords ad. Then, you bid on keywords related to that product or service. When someone clicks through your ad and purchases or signs up, you earn commissions. If you earn more commissions than you spend on your Adwords ads, then you’re profitable. If you spend more on Adwords ads than you earn in commissions, then you are losing money.

In part 2 of this Chris Carpenter interview we will learn about the Google Cash Detective, the benefits yoga can bring, and the four steps to freedom.