This week I attended the Ultimate Marketing Seminar in Dublin. The seminar ran for 3 days so I only got to visit on the first day so my review is roughly only based on that. My main reason for attending was to see Brad Fallon, so you can imagine my disappointment after registering I was informed that he couldn’t attend the Dublin event but would make the London one. Not a great start but I decided I’d see how it goes.
Reading the speaker list I picked up a little when I saw that the first two speakers were Affiliate Marketers. Before I get to the actual speakers I should say that this seminar was very americanised and I din’t think it would work well here in Ireland but it went down better than I thought. It was very much like that seminar scene in the film Yes Man!, there was a lot of high fiving and pats on the back. So to the speakers, first up was @JamesSchramko from Australia.
James runs a site called Internet Marketing Speed. He had a very entertaining presentation and engadged with the audience quite well. There was the usual story of working in the rat race and then he discovered affiliate marketing which allowed him to make more money and have the lifestyle he wanted and to work from home. I have to state that this was a free event so I wasn’t expecting many tips and truth be told I didn’t really get any. The event was more geared up as an intro to affiliate marketing for people who had never heard of it and to get you to sign up to their training courses obviously. There was one thing I would fault James on and that was he recommended to an audience of mostly newbies to buy links! Now in very competitive niches sometimes you have to buy links but if you don’t do it right and get caught it can be a disaster and you could recieve a nasty penalty from Google that will kill your business.
The next speaker was basically a repeat of James, the only difference being that he is based in the U.K. but I have to admit I found his presentation more enjoyable probably due to his andecedotes. Simon Coulsons story was that he used to work for BT, took redundancy and found himself writing ebooks about overseas property markets after he had invested in one. He began making a few sales and basically repeated the process and diversified until he had built up good revenue streams.
What I liked about Simon’s presentation was that he didn’t state he was making hundreds of thousands from each site. His stratgey seemed to be have loads of sites making maybe a thousand a month each and then repeat the process. Simon talked a lot about his hobby which was a Coldplay tribute band that had been quite successful and even played to audiences of 40,000 and I have to admit this was the feeling I got from both speakers, they were a tribute band. By this I mean, they were no Shoemoney or John Reece, and it was obvious from there presentation slides that they follow some of the same people I do in the affiliate marketing world.
The real question is, is there a market for them and their courses? I’m still on the fence for this, is their information really worth two grand? I mean you could find the same information online probably cheaper if not for free but in saying that how many other affiliate marketing “gurus” have taken the time to visit Ireland and pitched their courses?
At the end of it the highlight of the seminar for me was the chance to meet and talk ideas with some other affiliate marketers from Ireland such as Kevin O’Connor from internetmoney.ie . I enjoy when I get a chance to meet with people in person that I deal with online.
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