Niche Profit Classroom Review – Account Suspended

We watched a video playback of a webinar which was promoting Niche Profit Classroom earlier today. Niche Profit Classroom is a membership site whose stated purpose is to teach you how to build profitable affiliate niche sites. The showcased site was Betta Fish Center, which promoted a ClickBank product on betta fish care which the presenters had created.

We checked out the site during the playback and thought it interesting that AdSense was on many of the pages. We then noticed that the customary screenshot of ClickBank earnings showed earnings from 2009 – several years ago!! Our thought was the site was still getting traffic even though perhaps the sales dropped off, so they decided to put AdSense up; SEMRush stats showed 1500 visitors in organic traffic with many top ten ranked keywords, which seemed to back up our theory.

We then decided to poke around some more on Betta Fish Center when we got this message:

This Account Has Been Suspended

We first thought we had clicked on a bad link, but in actuality, the site’s account was suspended in real time while we were watching the playback!!. We looked up their product on ClickBank and clicked the site link, and the same thing happened.

Now, it’s possible that they let the domain expire accidentally, although it seems highly unlikely for a so-called profitable site. In our minds, this makes the effectiveness of their program dubious at best. So we say to Niche Profit Classroom, “Thanks, but no thanks”.

A few words to the wise:

• Check out any demo or showcase sites that are presented during site building product promotions and wait a few weeks before buying anything to make sure they still exist.
• Check the dates on any sales screenshots to make sure you’re not looking at stale obsolete data.

Update 3/27/12: Betta Fish Center is back online, so apparently this domain had expired. But again, why would you forget to renew a profitable domain?

AdSense for 2011 and Beyond Review – Save Your Money

There is a video series titled “AdSense for 2011 & Beyond” that is selling at Amazon (CD format) for $12.95. We purchased it as a discounted referred promotion for $7.00. Our advice – save your money.

The “new method” of site building is not new; this product promotes building what are called mini-sites, “Xfactor” sites or “Google Sniper” sites. These sites have been, or soon will be, de-listed from Google since the Panda and subsequent algorithm updates. A better strategy is to build larger sites, expand your current sites or consolidate your smaller ones.

Some other “beefs” with this product:

• Hyphenated .info domains are recommended. These are exactly the type of domains you do NOT want. Stick to .com, .net or .org.
• Keyword analysis is done checking the box “Only show ideas closely related” in the Google Keyword Tool. In reality, sites should be built around a wider range of keywords to get more traffic. You won’t get totally unrelated keywords if you don’t check this option.
• Free hosting services are recommended. Please do NOT use any free hosting services if you want your site to be up and running without any problems. The video demos bombed as a result of the site being hosted on a “free hosting service”; error messages kept appearing. While comical, we wondered about the competence of the presenter at the same time.
• The site used as the example in the videos, summer-houses.info, has never loaded in spite of multiple attempts to access it (“The connection has timed out”). Obviously this was not a successful site.
• The author is anonymous, hardly inspiring confidence in this product (which we don’t have anyway).

In summary: DON’T BUY THIS PRODUCT.