There is a lot of very misleading, incomplete, out of date or simply inaccurate information to be found on the web, which can lead to expensive and extensive time wasting.

Gauher Chaudhry’s Pay Per Click Formula, which comprises six books, six CD tutorials and two DVDs, plus one of the most supportive and useful forums to be found on the net, is one of the most comprehensive courses available for those wanting to master the necessary skills.

As a scene setter for my forthcoming review of his course, here is my interview with Gauher Chaudhry.

Please tell us exactly what you focus upon teaching in your course.

The focus of Pay Per Click Formula is to teach people how they can basically buy traffic from pay per click search engines such as Google, Yahoo, and MSN and drive that targeted traffic to CPA (cost-per-action) offers and get paid a commission every time someone fills out a lead. The course is not really for beginners and assumes that the buyer understands the basic workings of the major PPC search engines.

How does it differ to other techniques such as Chris Carpenter’s “Google Cash” approach?

The “Google Cash” approach basically teaches how to drive traffic from Google to ALL
affiliate offers. Pay Per Click Formula teaches how to drive traffic from Google and hundreds of other pay per click sources strictly to CPA offers. Most people need to realize that there is a world of traffic outside of Google that is in some cases much cheaper and better quality.

You were an accountant in the real world before you started working solely online. Has that background helped you as you have developed your techniques?

Being an accountant has helped me tremendously because it forced me to become a
spreadsheet expert. By having advanced spreadsheet skills, I have been able to create
advanced tracking spreadsheets to help me grow my traffic brokering business and better understand the CPA lead conversions from various traffic sources.

Where did you go to school and college?

I went to McMaster Univesity in Hamilton, Ontario and finished with a Bachelor of
Commerce and then acquired two professional accounting designations in the years to
follow. I have a love for numbers and that is why I find the traffic brokering game so easy.

You have been online for over ten years now, since before PPC marketing even existed. What did you do online in those early days?

In the early years, there was no such thing as PPC. I made a lot of money in the late
nineties by publishing a variety of e-zines and selling classified ads in those e-zines. This was during the first dot com boom when advertising was sold at high prices but still got a decent response rate.

When did you first start PPClicking?

I first started using pay per click search engines when Goto.com (the first PPC which
eventually become Overture and now finally Yahoo Search Marketing) came onto the scene. It was great to get those one cent bids and drive a lot of traffic to my web sites.

How has the market and the process changed since then?

The Internet marketing world is almost like night and day now since the early years. There were not that many online marketers when the Internet first came out and now that a large number of people know that there can be money made on the Internet, it has become very competitive. There is also a lot of crap promising riches being sold today, which can cause mass confusion for people just getting onto the Internet today.

As I push my way up the steep, but not insurmountable, learning curve involved in understanding your techniques, one of the things that I find most intimidating before launching my own campaigns is the lack of certainty involved. With possibly only one or two in a hundred campaigns proving successful, it can be scary to know where to start, particularly when operating on fairly limited budgets. Any advice to make the transition from total newbie to moderately successful a little easier or less expensive than simple trial and error?

Following my techniques, you should have a fairly good success rate of 30-40% on creating ad campaigns. A lot of what I teach is common sense that can help users save time and money by doing simple steps before deciding on an ad campaign to promote. This will dramatically reduce the time testing during the trial and error stage.

The three main traffic sources you use are Google AdWords, Yahoo Search Marketing and Microsoft AdCenter. What differences do you find between them? Do you get different results from each of these traffic sources for the same campaign?

Google, MSN, and Yahoo generally have the same ad platforms. It seems lately that MSN and Yahoo are trying to make their ad platforms a lot more similar to Google. I noticed that the quality of traffic amongst the top three PPC seearch engines varies from campaign to campaign. There are too many variables to zero in on why there is a difference, but is has something to do with items such as fraud and geo-targeting ability.

The first of your two major techniques, “The Loner”, seems under threat from the increased reluctance of Google to tolerate the direct linking of ads to sites that lack much content. Do you think the days of linking to sites that only want an email address or zip code are ending? If so, will people have to rely increasingly on “The Workhorse” method and build their own content websites in order to avoid the legendary Google slap?

The loner method is not only direct linking. You can still do the loner method and create your own landing page. I only call it the “Loner” method because you are simply promoting one CPA offer, versus the “Workhorse” method where you are promoting multiple CPA offers. I don’t believe that the days of promoting emails or zip submits are over because as long as your can create a web site that has valuable content related to your offer, you can still get decent bids in Google without worrying about being slapped. There are many tools available that help in speeding up this process and getting lower bid prices.

Did you ever imagine that your early pioneering efforts would lead to such success?

If you look at some of my techniques such as the “Alexa Method” of keyword research, it simply makes sense. It is just a matter of putting all the pieces together to make the system run efficiently and as profitably as possible. What has surprised me is my customers who are only three months into the course and grossing over $75,000 per month. That type of immediate success I never suspected.

I understand you are now setting up dedicated business premises and hiring staff. Given that most people working in affiliate marketing are pretty much one man bands, what exactly are your plans for this new stage of your online adventure?

One of the biggest constraints to growing an online business (especially if you are a one man show) is time. There are only so many hours in a day. I am hiring staff to do things such as keyword research and the setting up of campaigns as this will help me test and track much faster and find winning campaigns.

It it more difficult for non-US-based people such as you and I to work in this field?

It can be a little bit more difficult to be outside the USA since almost 90% of CPA offers are for US traffic only. You need to have a US proxy address in order to be able to view landing pages of advertisers or view your competition in US-only Google searches. These are more nuisances rather than problems because you can find ways around this. The beauty of this business is that you can pretty much run it anywhere in the world.

Gauher, thanks very much for your time and the care you have put into the preparation of this course. I know it is going to help a lot of people and will be reporting on my own progress in my forthcoming review of your PPC Formula.

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.