I have an in-house affiliate program. Run by myself. Due to some acts several state legislatures are taking I no longer feel comfortable running an in-house affiliate program and am going to phase mine out and move it to an affiliate network within the next few weeks – probably Clickbank.

The reason why is that several state legislatures have passed bills making it so sales made by affiliates now must face a state sales tax. Non affiliates sales don’t get hit by this, but this bill makes it so that eventually vendors and affiliates are going to be put up against the wall if they don’t account for this tax.

I do my transactions and pay affiliates through paypal and next year paypal is going to start to report every transaction made in your account to the IRS to try to find people who aren’t reporting their income. That doesn’t bother me because I report all of my income and expenses so have no problem with that, but I’m worried that if I keep using an in-house affiliate program and use paypal to pay the affiliates then it could become a big mess, trying to account for sales taxes etc and maybe even being asked who they are etc..

Over the summer Amazon pulled the plug on all its North Carolina affiliates. You can find reports on it here. And here.

I can fix any problems any of this can cause by moving to an affiliate program like Clickbank – that does all of the transactions and pays out the affiliates itself. If there are any sales tax issues or special rules some state makes Clickbank will take care of it for both the vendor and affiliate.

My plan is to set up a Clickbank affiliate program and launch a product on clickbank before the end of the year. Once I have this going I’ll contact all my affiliates about it and hope they get involved. We’ve made a ton of money over the past year on my launches and my goal is to make things even better for them – instead of paying just on the first transaction once I go to Clickbank I’ll set it up so affiliates also get recurring subscription revenue, which I haven’t been giving them.

If you are a current affiliate don’t worry about promoting this launch. I’ll have a new system set up within a month and will notify you about it. I’m just going to keep the current program going for the moment in order to track any leads that were sent in the past – so if they generate sales you’ll get commission. Will probably have past leads tracked for at least the next six months, but will be replacing the current affiliate program with a clickbank program. This announcement is my first step in phasing out the current program and moving to Clickbank.

If you run an online business you may want to think of doing something similar if you have an in-house affiliate program. I don’t think there is a real problem at the moment, but there is a clear trend emerging of states trying to find ways to tax anything moving – and that means looking at online commerce. This could eventually become a massive burden for people running in-house affiliate programs at some point in a year or two. I just want to be ahead of the curve and am always extra careful to make sure nothing I do falls into any grey zone now or in the future.

Like something new and huge is going to happen.

Well, the day comes and I find out all that is happening is that Brad Fallon decided to reduce the monthly price for his Stompernet Internet marketing membership service from $700 something to $100 something.

That’s a huge drop in price and obviously is a tactic designed to create a massive influx of new buyers. It’s a price sale

I thought it was going to be something new but it isn’t.

Reducing prices for online information products is a dangerous thing to do, because it tells the world that you need sales, makes people think the old price was too high, or that there are problems. It weakens your position in the market.

Back in 2001 I had a guy call me on the phone and tell me he had a stock picks advisory service business he was trying to sell. He said he lost over half of his members in the past few months due to the bear market and a decision he made to lower the price.

When he lowered the price he thought it would make his current customers happy and make it easier to attract new people. But it had the complete opposite effect – people who were current customers saw it as a sign of weakness. They were in effect being told the product isn’t worth X that you’ve been paying for. That made them wonder if it was even worth the new lower price. Enough of them decided no that the guy decided to end his business.

Stompernet has been in turmoil from months and desperately had to pull off a big launch. We’ll see how it goes, but lowering the price to me is a sign of weakness and suggests that Stompernet’s position in the Internet marketing space is actually shrinking.

Brad Fallon’s involvement in the Arbitrage Conspiracy garbage program a year ago probably hasn’t helped matters and if others are like me it puts a black cloud over anything else he gets involved in.

Of course Stompernet is different. I did buy it myself early last year and found it helpful. I was a member for a month or two. I found the DVD’s sent for your initial membership worth the cost of membership alone, but also little value in the monthly membership. I had no need to call and get “coached” and have people hold my hands in my business. Time doing that is better spend building your business and actually working. So I found little use in the membership part of it personally.

But if you are new you could get that info on the DVD in their “Stomping the Search Engine” course for only $1. I’m not sure, but it looks like Fallon stopped that offer, so that low priced deal didn’t seem to work out well or he decided he didn’t like it.

If not they are probably including it with this 9/9/9 offering. If you want to learn SEO it is worth paying just to get that and then chunking the monthly membership.

One thing that is a bit disgusting, is this AM when 9/9/9 came the site didn’t load up to the sales page. It looks like Fallon is trying to play the game of pretending like you have server problems to make people get excited. This is the same thing that happened with the Arbitrage launch. There is no need to play deceptive tricks in your marketing message. It makes you look like a snake oil salesman. And it also makes it more hard for those of us that are honest and try out best to provide value harder to get customers because it makes people who feel like they are being tricked or deceived hard to get to trust you.

It’s 10:30 AM and still not sales page. He’ll probably load it up in an hour or two, maybe even after reading this blog.

Yesterday, internet marketer Markus Allen invited me on as guest co-host of his weekly business building broadcast called Stump Markus…

… He asked me on to his broadcast to discuss the massive coverup of the Stompernet “situation”. If you missed it, I wrote about it here titled How the Stompernet Controversy Started (Bombshell) and Markus published Stompernet Exposed.

While we did talk about the Stompernet coverup for a few moments, we got sidetracked, and I asked Markus about building up my blog traffic here… and boy did that open up a can of worms (in a great way for me at least)… he revealed stuff I’ve never heard before — like how to title my blog posts to get to the #1 spot on Google (and Bing) for any 3-word keyword phrase. He revealed lots of keyword tools (all free by the way). And his method for discovering “buying keywords” (search queries that attract hungry buyers to my website) was AMAZING.

And the best part of the broadcast was when Markus showed me how to find a particular 3-word phrase related to my stock picking business that gets searched over 1.5 million times a month. He showed me how to get in the number one search result on Google — totally 100% ethical and legal. I already started working on it. Getting a fraction of that search traffic to my site would let me retire decades earlier than planned.

I listened to a replay of Stump Markus last week and after being on the broadcast this week… I’m VERY impressed. And hardly anything impresses me anymore. I’m going to make room in my schedule to listen regularly (and recommend you do the same). And the best part is it’s FREE. He even offers a replay of each week’s call for a full 7 days (then it’s moved to his archive for members only).

(By the way – I did register for Markus’ affiliate program so I do get paid some beer money if you buy anything from him via my links above. But I’m not sure how he makes money as most of his site is free to view.)

Have you ever listened to Stump Markus before? If so, leave your thoughts in the comment section.

That means there is a big hole for real objective information about the niche. Last week I got several dozen emails from people about Stompernet and some Internet marketing gurus. These were people who have worked with different gurus and know some of them personally. People on the inside.

One guy had a product launched by a group of gurus a few years ago and is now blacklisted by them. Another person saw a Stompernet “faculty” speaker give a presentation and then give off the cuff comments very critical of the company. I got a lot of rumors and it seems that people want me to pass on the information, because they are afraid to do so themselves or want to remain hidden in the background.

My intention with this blog isn’t to just slam people and marketers for the sake of doing so. I want to also talk about what I’ve learned in the IM niche and about the good people in it – not just the bad. Also I’m not going to pass on any information that I can’t verify or that comes from people who will not give their name out no matter how shocking and juicy it may be.

I want to make one comment about the IM niche and who you should trust and stay away from from the perspective of being a consumer of products or someone doing a business relationship with any of the big name marketers.

Here is the deal. These people are great at selling. Some of them do huge launches and many launches a year to generate millions upon millions in sales. They have studied human psychology and selling and have it down to an art form.

When they do million dollar launches using these techniques it gives them a sense of power. It can make one feel they are bigger than life and certainly have a huge power of persuasion over their audience.

Such a thing is going to change a person. It can give a person a sense of humility. It can give a person a sense of honor or joy. But for these good feelings to happen the person has to believe in their product. They have to believe that they are really providing people value and helping them.

If they are not doing these things with the things they sell then they are more likely to look at the people buying them with contempt – to think they are stupid or that they are smarter than they are because they tricked them into buying their product.

People tend to justify the things they do to themselves so instead of recognizing the reality that they ran a scam they hold contempt for the people who bought – thinking it is their fault for being so stupid. They are idiots for just buying stuff and never opening them up or using them they think. 90% of the IM buyers won’t even consumer what they bought – so I can just play my tricks and revel in my power and look down on the little people they may tell themselves.

The thing is any business person who thinks about their customers like that is more of a narcissistic con man than an ethical businessman. They also are likely to begin to hold the whole world in contempt, because they provide no value to the rest of the world, but suck on it like a parasite. As these feelings breed they also will come to see business partners and associates as people to just use too. They’ll even “launch” new products to not give a damn about the people they use to front them – not caring if they crash and burn. All they care about is making money and will do anything for a buck.

So, you can easily tell who in the Internet marketer space you can trust as a buyer or partner and who you can’t. All you need to do is look at the quality of the products they put out. That will tell you all you need to know.

We have two launches coming up right now that are going to get all of the attention in the IM space over the next few weeks.

First Tony Robbins is going to launch his “Money Masters” program. It is really a new rendition of his “Power Talk” series, which was a monthly subscription audio program mailed to people on CD. It’s turning into “Money Masters” which will be a series of Interviews with Internet marketing gurus, the first one being Frank Kern.

According to Kern, “On Tuesday, Sept 1, Tony’s releasing a new product called Money Masters that’s all about achieving financial security and freedom using “new” business models such as info marketing and other cool stuff. It’s a series of DVDs, CDs, and workbooks that are being delivered monthly.”

It will be going out to a lot of Tony’s customers who have never heard of the Internet marketing world or the bigger name players in it so it will give a lot of people a lot of exposure.

The next launch coming up is the Stompernet 9/9/9 launch, which no one really knows what it is about. It is being kept a secret.

On the audio podcast Internet Marketing This Week affiliate marketer Lynn Terry said she wasn’t going to promote the 9/9/9 promotion. She has promoted Stompernet in the past and wasn’t happy with the fulfillment problems they had with the Net Effect last year, being a top 20 affiliate for it. She likes to look at and consume the products before she promotes them to her people and simply hasn’t been told what 9/9/9 is. All she has he so far is “simply hype.”

Who knows what it is.

To watch the video go here.

These are some thoughts I’ve had today about this video and the recent one with the two of them and Frank Kern.

First I want to say that I already like Reese as I’ve learned from things he’s said. I’ve always found Reese to be a very good and powerful speaker in his videos and a few taped things I’ve seen him on. A lot of good ideas and thoughts not just about online marketing but business in general I’ve heard from him. Maybe more so than any other IM marketer. He has a few great concepts here that are so powerful if people would just apply them.

However, in these two videos you get the appearance that Robbins is bigger than Kern and Reese. That they look up to him and he is almost their boss or something. Which is odd for me as they are giants in the Internet marketing world and here seem smaller in comparison with Robbins – of course he’s taller, but they are going to his place, he is showing them around – they are asking him for help. Almost makes you wonder if he also has the upper hand in whatever business relationships they are planning or getting involved in with each other.

But of course this is on Robbin’s site and designed I would guess not just for the IM crowd, but also the people he reaches – and there may actually be more people on Robbin’s email list than there is on the IM marketers lists collectively. Robbins may reach more people than Kern/Walker/Reese etc. – because the IM guys share a lot of the same leads and Robbins may have a list bigger than any of them so he may reach more people than there are in the IM niche.

For instance when stompernet had their first launch they had less than 50,000 opt-ins. I think Kern has around 60,000 opt-ins at least he did a year ago, probably bigger now. I don’t know how many Filsiame has but Kern is one of the biggest in the industry and has around 60k – or had that before infomillionaire that you could see in some his screen capture videos.

I’m in the stock market niche and at one point had 80k people on an opt-in list of my own and I’m not one of the biggest players in the niche. I know of a company with 200k leads personally and know of three big stock market publishing companies with one million leads. I talked with a guy with 400k people on his list a few months ago. It is very possible that Robbins has one million or at least 200k leads. So Robbins network alone may be bigger than the number of people that are collectively on the Internet marketing lists.

The Internet marketing niche is actually fairly small. Weight loss, stock trading etc are probably bigger niches. However, these guys are making and generating more money in the IM niche due to their superior marketing and business sense. But Robbins may have a network and customer base so big that he is about to dominate the Internet marketing niche like no other marketer has yet to date. He may in fact take IM mainstream to the benefit of all of those involved.

For more:

Within a minute the thread was deleted.

I’ll get to the question in a second.

First some background.

I’m sure you know who Tony Robbins is. You couldn’t miss him and his info commercials in the 1980’s selling self-help tapes and material with an underpinning in NLP to them.

John Reese and Frank Kern are two of the biggest name Internet marketers out there and I own and have benefited from courses that both of them sell – and recommend them to you with no affiliate link or money motive. I just know that if you apply the information in them to an online business it will help you.

The three of them released a video together the other day that has gotten a lot of attention in the Internet marketing world. You can watch it here.

In the video Kern and Reese ask Robbins why it is that so many of the people who buy their products don’t act on the information they give them.

It’s a good video and worth watching – especially if you are just starting out in online marketing, because it is true that 99.99% of the people who get into Internet marketing end up doing nothing. They just buy dreams and don’t do anything to make them come true. This video can help people starting out get through that barrier.

But anyway, what I tried to ask on the Warrior Forum was if something big is being planned by them that may change the IM niche. Robbins is releasing a product called Money Masters with interviews with several Internet marketing gurus, including Jeff Walker who also has been talking about the new product. All three of these guys have been instrumental in teaching me about marketing with their courses.

Again I recommend them to you. And they all seem to be good guys.

It appears that Robbins is making a push into the Internet marketing niche.

Kern is located in the San Diego area and Robbins also lives in the same area. John Reese was based in Orlando and recently moved to San Diego. Andy Jenkins also moved from Atlanta to San Diego.

The thread I tried to start was very short and just mentioned these facts.

I then asked if something Is going on? Are they all working together and planning some big things? Could we be seeing some television info commercials? Is Robbins going to make Internet marketing more mainstream?

That’s all I asked. And immediately my thread was deleted. The people on the Warrior Forum apparently do not want you to ask anything about the industry or what is going on in it.

There are people in the Internet marketing niche who think they are the masters and want to completely dominate it. They don’t want any other people to enter the niche and want total control of the information flow.

My thread was totally innocent. And someone saw it as a threat.

My own blog is the only place I know I can write and be assured 100% that my posts won’t be censored.

The funny thing is I made this post just a few minutes after seeing someone make a post complaining about these messages being deleted! Then when I finished my post I saw theirs was gone too!

Well, if I can’t discuss a simple question there, I’ll ask it here. Do you know what Frank Kern/John Reese/Andy Jenkins are planning and have any idea of how it may impact the IM niche? Is it going to go mainstream?

Yesterday Jenkins did that on his blog where he wrote the following to explain the circumstances behind the lawsuit:

“In the winter of 2009, Brad took an unscheduled distribution of $110,000. For about six weeks previous, between Brad traveling, the StomperLive Seven event, and the Stomping the Search Engines 2.0 launch, we didn’t speak a word to each other. I was slammed and he was… Brad. Heh. And I mean that in a good way.”

“But at the time, it seemed like corporate theft. It wasn’t.”

“It’s not a secret that Brad had fairly little to do with operations at StomperNet, and we have previously gone similar lengths of time without talking. Nothing unusual there. So naturally, that was held up as further evidence of a conspiracy. Heh.”

“But our operating agreement is specific – Cash Distributions to shareholders of StomperNet are by mutual agreement.”

“That didn’t happen – that was wrong, and Brad has since apologized for it. It wasn’t about the $110,000 – I mean, are you kidding? StomperNet was an EIGHT FIGURE COMPANY according to its 2008 tax returns. This was about being short $110,000 in the specific operating account where payroll is funded from – and not knowing about it.”

“Do you take my meaning? – It was about the sum total of ALL of the bank accounts being exposed with no understanding what was going on. And when you’ve got a lot of people depending on payroll, you don’t mess around.”

“But the company had better things to do, so I wrote a check from my personal bank account to cover the difference and then some, called my attorney, and forgot about it for a little while.”

First I have to confess that I sometimes get confused when I read Andy’s blog posts. They tend to very long and sometimes go off into tangents, even sometimes saying one thing and then saying another in a different paragraph, so my brain can’t always keep track of where he is going so if I am mistaken in my interpretation of what he says I welcome any corrections from him.

For instance in what I quoted above he says that Fallon withdrew $110,000 and – “But at the time, it seemed like corporate theft. It wasn’t.”

The implication I take from this here is that Jenkins thought at one moment Fallon stole money from the company, but he didn’t.

Then he says, “But our operating agreement is specific – Cash Distributions to shareholders of StomperNet are by mutual agreement.”

“That didn’t happen – that was wrong, and Brad has since apologized for it. It wasn’t about the $110,000 – I mean, are you kidding? StomperNet was an EIGHT FIGURE COMPANY according to its 2008 tax returns. This was about being short $110,000 in the specific operating account where payroll is funded from – and not knowing about it.”

“Do you take my meaning? – It was about the sum total of ALL of the bank accounts being exposed with no understanding what was going on. And when you’ve got a lot of people depending on payroll, you don’t mess around.”

Now he says “It wasn’t about the $110,000 – I mean, are you kidding?”

The presupposition here is that he wasn’t mad about $110,000 missing, but being short $110,000 for payroll and being short, because of confusion.

Frankly I find these paragraphs very hard to follow, because just in the earlier paragraph he said he did think the money was stolen at one point.

Maybe I’m just not smart enough to follow them. Maybe they are written in a deliberately confusing manner. At the beginning of his blog post Jenkins wrote, “First, I’m told that I have a tendency to use NLP unfairly when I write (I’ve read exactly One book about NLP, and I still can’t spell it), so instead of (cough) hypnotizing you with my mad writing skillz (whatever), I’m gonna be OVERLY transparent to the point of nausea and foolishness.”

I don’t know if he trying to be confusing or not when he writes about the lawsuit, but what he wrote is not clear crystal to me.

When I try to write I try to be as exact as I can and only write things that I can verify. I don’t try to engage in rumors which some have done over this.

But I also try to write so people can easily follow what I’m saying. It’s not that I think my readers are stupid, but I think you have to write in a more simple manner on the Internet than in print, because it is harder to read off a computer than in a book. And I want to be as precise as possible when I write, because often I write about complicated things.

So anyway, I simply found his explanation for the lawsuit very hard to follow.

My conclusion from it though is that when he first learned about the Fallon withdrawal he thought Fallon stole the money. I say this, because he writes, “But at the time, it seemed like corporate theft. It wasn’t.”

Now he doesn’t think Fallon stole anything, but at first he did. Now if I’m wrong I’ll post any corrections anyone wants to make.

But he filed a lawsuit.

He seems to give another explanation – and very interesting one – for the lawsuit and that was to protect Stompernet from the fallout of the Arbitrage Conspiracy launch Fallon was a part of:

“”But the straw the freaked everyone out, and thus precipitated the formal complaint was The Arbitrage Conspiracy.”

“Brad was a Joint Venture partner of that launch, while StomperNet and I stayed on the sidelines with no material or strategic interest.”

“And while the launch was very successful the public blow back because of (according to public forums) delivery and customer service challenges that STOMPERNET got blamed for (because of it’s association with Brad) was EPIC.”

“WE got threatened with a lawsuit and it wasn’t even a product of ours!”

The Arbitrage Conspiracy was one of the worst launches of last year.

I was a critic on the Warirorforum when it was happening. I thought the promotion for it was misleading and unethical and many of the customers who bought it complained and demanded refunds – more than normally do for an information product.

One of the reasons I thought it was unethical, was because several Internet marketing “gurus” had video testimonials on the sales page and were acting as affiliates for the product. This meant they were in effect making money from their testimonials.

In the financial world you must disclose any interests you have when you talk about stocks or sell an interest in a company. If you own a stock and write about it in a magazine for example you need to disclose that you own it if you do. If you are a broker and you own a stock and tell your client about it you have to tell them. Everything is based on transparency and full disclosure. You violate that and it’s big trouble.

On television when they show testimonials they disclose whether or not the people giving the testimonials are paid and whether they are just actors. It is FTC rules.

The video testimonials clearly violated the spirit of full disclosure. Whether or not they were against the law I don’t know – but they clearly were disgusting. To me the gurus doing that had very low standards and ethics in this instance – at least in comparison with what people I know and myself do on a day to day basis in the stock market world. They appeared to simply be giving their testimonial to do Fallon and favor and expect reciprocation when they do promotions of their own in the future.

They were also promoting a product that had very bad reviews from the people who bought it as you can see here. So caring for their readers was taking a back seat in my opinion.

Apparently some of the customers were so angry they threatened Stompernet with a lawsuit.

If I understand Jenkins correctly one reason he filed a lawsuit was to distance Stompernet from the Arbitrage Conspiracy by distancing the company away from Fallon. So if something serious in a courtroom happened about the Arbitrage Conspiracy then the Jenkins civil suit could be used as a shield for Stompernet by keeping it all on Fallon.

Luckily nothing bad has happened and I would guess any problems the Arbitrage Conspiracy people have had with their customers has been fixed by now.

Anyway – again that is my interpretation of what Jenkins wrote – and if I misunderstand what he wrote I welcome any corrections.

What is clear to me is that what he writes is designed to convey the message that Fallon and him are now on good grounds and there is no fighting between them now. They both have gone their separate ways and wish both the best. In the end I’m not too worried about the real specifics of the lawsuit – the exacts why’s and but’s and who’s – the past is the past and what the current situation is now is pretty clear.

Jenkins to me is someone who has always put out good products and done his best to run Stompernet. He is going to put out more things in the future and I think it is safe to assume that they will be of good quality and will be able to help people reach their dreams on the Internet just as Stompernet has helped those that have taken action with the materials it has provided.

In the end of his post Jenkins also wrote, “P.S. Shout out to a couple of very decent bloggers who are treating this responsibly. Their concern seems to be more focused on their dissatisfaction with the way that third parties are treating this subject – and they’re not insinuating worst-case scenarios or filling in the blanks. That takes restraint and intelligence.”

I assume he was writing about me here, because my main beef about this whole thing wasn’t the lawsuit, but the way people were being treated on the warriorforum and how the moderators were trying to suppress the very existence of the lawsuit from becoming public knowledge.

Other people posting on this he says were basically trying to make a name for themselves as Internet marketing gurus by dragging other people down. Well I can’t speak for these people as I don’t know them, but I think he is right to criticize those that posted anonymously for doing so.

On a side note about all of this – I was once a director of an Internet financial website company. I got disgruntled with the way it was being run and and resigned. The CEO then filed a civil suit against me for my interest in the company. We reached a buy out agreement and the suit was dropped.

So civil suits aren’t wildly uncommon or the end of the world or something.

As for myself I have no interest in making money in the Internet marketing niche. I’m in the stock market niche and discovered the IM niche last year and have found the resources in it to be helpful with existing business – and interesting to look at as an outsider interested in human nature.

I like to write and I have learned a lot from following the IM world. I want to share that with people I know in the stock market field that don’t know anything about the IM niche.

So one goal of my blog is introduce it to them so I can help them in my own business associations.

Some of these people are content owners and creators like myself and others are affiliates of my stock market website. I also hope to attract people interested in Internet marketing into being affiliates for my stock market website.

There are things in the IM niche that aren’t being done much in the stock market niche – so there are things I want to share with my friends there.

The niches are very different.

And there are things that go on in the IM niche that are different from what happens in the stock market world. The markets are different.

One difference – and a big business opportunity someone could make in the IM niche – is that there are no real IM portal websites with good information on them.

In the IM world you have basically pay sites that sell online courses and a a few message boards where people gather – with the warriorforum being the biggest one.

Most of the posters on these boards are small guys trying to build a following of their own or sell something.

In the stock market there are a dozen or so high traffic websites that are free and provide news. There is also real reporting on what is going on in the stock market – with companies, financial websites, everything.

There is no real news or reporting in this IM niche. The niche is simply too small to attract corporate America to create a portal site and no one wants to give away free information for the sake of doing so.

Almost every single review is created to generate affiliate commissions. I don’t know of a site that review products without making money off of affiliate commissions so there is no real flow of information with a money motive behind it. The whole niche is built upon affiliate commissions.

The opportunity is this – if someone made a free portal website that had good content about IM – including free mini courses and real unbiased news and reviews they would dominate the entire niche in a matter of months.

If you don’t believe it consider this. I put up this blog just a few days ago. Spent not a dime to do it, no adwords, no traffic, and my posting about the Stompernet thing got attention throughout the niche and prompted a reply from one of its biggest players.

This shows you what a giant hole there is in the IM niche for a source of real unbiased information and news.

The thing is though – how would such a thing make money? I don’t know, but I’m sure someone could figure out a way. So here I’ve just given you an idea that could make you a million dollars. But one characteristic of the IM niche is that 99.9% of the people in it do nothing, so I don’t really expect to see such a portal appear.

I hope I didn’t just give a bad guy a million dollar idea.

My intention with this blog isn’t to create such as site. I don’t have time to make such a site myself. I make money in the stock market by trading and running my online business and my time goes to that. I don’t have an army of employees to do multiple projects and am not interested in hiring a bunch of people.

But I do like writing. And I’m going to write here with no bias and no attempt to make money off of affiliate commissions or anything like that, because I like communicating my thoughts in a totally independent manner.

Now I don’t think affiliate marketing is wrong. I do it with a few people in the stock market – but I only do it with people I know have good products and services – and I rather not do that on this blog, because I want it to be different from what anyone else is doing in the IM niche.

And I simply don’t even care about making money. That’s kinda funny, because I spend a lot of time making money in the stock market and by growing my online business. But I do it because I think its fun. Not for the sake of the money itself.

I’m also really stubborn and being independent is really important to me. I don’t like the feeling of being bought. In the stock market I get offered bribes every once in awhile to recommend stocks and always turn such deals down and tell the people where to go. I have more fun by being my own person, than selling out to some pump and dump crooks. Likewise, I have no desire to get in with the right people to get into the affiliate circle email list in the IM world, because I don’t want to be dependent on any of them.

I do like to write though and get my voice heard though. So if you want to read more of what I have to say please sign up to my update list:

As a result rumors have swirled and multiplied to fill in the blanks. One rumor was that Stompernet was having or has had financial trouble.

Internet marketer Markus Allen wrote that he was getting emails from people inside Stompernet saying that they were not getting paid:

“Employees of StomperNet haven’t been paid in months AND StomperNet is indeed in receivership status… employees have been given IOUs in lieu of payment.”

According to the lawsuit at one point Andy Jenkins injected his own money into Stompernet in order to keep it afloat.

Now none of this is a big deal for a business – especially a business growing fast. With my own business myself I pile most of the money it generates back into it to make it grow. I see it as an investment.

Yesterday, Dan Theis, who is on the Stompernet faculty responded to rumors clouding Stompernet and Andy Jenkin’s resignation. As far as I can tell this is the first response from someone inside Stompernet to all of the talk going on.

He confirmed that there have been some financial problems at Stompernet and why:

“Some members of the faculty have been asked to take pay cuts – I just offered to take a cut myself. This has happened more than once since StomperNet opened. StomperNet’s membership has not been replenished by a significant promotion for more than a year, and the current business model has high fixed costs that depend on having a certain number of members to operate profitably. ”

“The idea that StomperNet is going out of business is a little over the top – not gonna happen. StomperNet needs to bring in new members (customers) – just like any business does. StomperNet needs a different business model that isn’t driven by large spikes in membership followed by a slow decline. Both of those things will happen in a BIG way with the offer that will be made in September. ”

Stompernet is planning a big launch on the 9th of September in order to bring in some big bucks.

Theis is right though and as an outsider looking in it is easy to to see where Stompernet is going.

There is a path that most successful information marketing companies take when they grow.

They begin with a successful product that generates positive cash flow. At some point though that product loses the initial hype around it or simply reaches a maturation point. To grow to the next step companies then need to make new products.

With Stompernet they began by launching an $800 a month membership site.

That launch generated over $10 million for them in just a few days.

But at such a high membership rate it wouldn’t be shocking if they had a high cancellation rate and refund rate.

The standard refund rate for information products is 10-20%. I’ve found that historically my refund rate is 5-15% when I do promotions.

But I was talking last month with the lead marketer for a $30 million plus online website – one of the biggest sites on the Internet – a top 1000 Alexa site – who had a lot of experience working with financial newsletter publishers and he told me that he found when they charge over $1000 a year for something the refund rate would be in the range of 30-50%. I would think monthly would be at the top of that range.

So I think its safe to assume Stompernet probably had a high refund rate simply because they charged so much money.

Even if they had a low rate though simple attrition could be a problem for them if they have high costs to run their business.

Last year they launched The Net Effect newsletter as a new product at a lower price point to attract new customers. Now it looks like they are going to make yet another product or offering next month.

It is almost imperative that they do a promotion – not only to inject money into the company – but with the Andy Jenkins fallout – in order for those running Stompernet to assert their power in the market place and with their affiliates – to maintain the presence of Stompernet in the market.

As far as the lawsuit goes, Theis wrote that it “makes it plain that these guys did not always agree about how to run the business. However, they did agree on how to resolve their differences, and a process to protect both partners during the negotiations. In the end Andy was happy to sell, Brad was happy to buy and invest. Yes, it took a while for them to haggle their way to a final agreement, but so what?”

Well, the problem is the way people have been treated by just asking about it and the obsessive active cover-up on message boards to prevent news of this from getting out.

It also would appear that what happened was more than a simple disagreement. Even if wrong doing was done then at the least a very nasty fight occurred.

You would think they wouldn’t have tried to hide this, but would have just said we had a nasty fight and are parting our ways. But they didn’t. They wanted to create a false impression – and maintain some sort of illusion, which is not even necessary to maintain their dominance in the IM niche.

That in itself isn’t what interests me. This was an eye opening thing for me in another way. It gives me the impression that the Internet marketing niche is tightly controlled. If you take the WarriorForum for example – the biggest IM forum and meeting place on the Internet – there are threads were people and products are bashed for weeks on end and then specially favored people and products were if a critical comment is made the poster is instantly banned.

For the past week every time someone makes a post asking about what is happening at Stompernet that post has been instantly deleted.

It is an attempt to hide the truth and control the news flow.

I’ve been running a successful online business for over ten years now, but I knew nothing about the Internet marketing niche until early 2008. I learned about marketing from print books. I never knew about Internet marketing courses, forums, or the big name “gurus.”

Then I found about this niche last year and spent a good bulk of my time using the resources in it – buying some of the big name courses – to learn how to improve my business. And I got good results.

However, as an insider looking inside the Internet marketing niche – and as someone who has been successful on the Internet in my own niche – I think I have a unique perspective on the niche.

Stay tuned. I will continue to post on this.

First what is happening has got to be one of the biggest stories in the Internet marketing arena this year and most people probably don’t even know about it.

A few weeks ago Andy Jenkins left Stompernet. For those that don’t know Stompernet is one of the biggest Internet marketing training companies. They teach people how to do search engine optimization and attract mostly an audience of people trying to create businesses by building online stories and selling merchandise on the Internet.

It was co-founded by Andy Jenkins and Brad Fallon several years ago and hit the map with a $10 million plus launch. A lot of the people involved in that launch became some of the biggest names in Internet marketing.

Stompernet did annual seminars and taught countless people on how to do SEO and build businesses. They have reached thousands of people and I’m sure were instrumental among the success of many.

However, last year some people got disgruntled when they launched a print publication and had fulfillment delays. Then Fallon got involved in the Abritrage Conspiracy launch – which I personally thought was a subpar product and not up to the standards of Stompernet.

I didn’t seem to be the only person who disagreed, because Jenkins distanced himself from the Arbitrage Conspiracy and a few people on the Stompernet “faculty” were critical of it.

Well, all of a sudden a few weeks ago Jenkins announced that he was resigning from Stompernet. Then one of the biggest names in SEO left them too. He got replaced by someone who was one of the biggest affiliates of Arbitrage Conspiracy.

On his blog the main reason Andy Jenkins gave for leaving was to pursue other interests, such as to make a product about video marketing:

“I’m spending so much time talking about media marketing that it might seem to you the sole reason for my decision to leave StomperNet. It’s not. It was just the most clear and tangible reason. It was the most familiar.”

Then he went on to say that Fallon wanted to take on a more hands on approach to the company when he hadn’t been involved in daily operations so their relationship was changing and he decided to leave.

Some people on Internet marketing forums thought he got a big pay day and cashed out.

Of course rumors swirled. But some people thought this was a healthy sign for the industry.

As one person put it in this post:

“While many people are trying to spin this into something sinister, decipher hidden meanings or look at someone leaving a high-flying internet marketing company as negative – in my mind, exactly the opposite is true.”

“After all…isn’t this the promise of building a successful business? To be able to cash out, retire early, take your money and build something different, take on new challenges? ”

Then I wondered and did some searching and discovered that Jenkins actually filed a civil suit against Brad Fallon months ago. And that suit was dismissed from court just days before he announced he was leaving. It appeared that most likely some sort of settlement was made between the two parties.

A few days ago someone leaked a copy of the lawsuit. You can see it here.

The allegations are serious.

They include:

“10. In violation of his duties as a member of Stompernet, Fallon has used company credit cards for personal expenses and to pay the expenses of third-party ventures in which neither Stompernet nor Jenkins has an interest.”

“12. Fallon also utilized customer lists, technology, brands, good will and other proprietary information owned by Stompernet (collectively, the “Confidential information”) for his own purpose and to advance the interests of third-party ventures in which neither Stompernet nor Jenkins has an interest.”

“20. On December 3, 2008, without prior notice to Jenkins or authorization from Stompernet, Fallon withdrew $110,000 from Stompernet’s bank accounts at Sun Trust Bank.”

“21. Fallon’s unauthorized withdrawals jeopardized Stompernet’s ability to conduct its day-to-day operations and to pay its vendors.”

“22. Fallon’s unauthorized withdrawals also put Stompernet at risk of having multiple returned checks and could have irreparably harmed Stompernet’s credit and its relationship with its vendors.”

“23. To avoid such harm, Jenkins made substantial capital infusions to cover check the company had written.”

Of course I have no way to know whether these allegations are true or if any wrong doing by anyone had occurred, and personally I don’t really care.

What gets me mad though is people are actively working to suppress this story and are attacking people who just ask questions about what is going on.

On one of the biggest Internet marketing forums – the Warriorforum – over the past week anytime someone starts a thread bringing this up the moderators delete it.

Obviously someone has decided that it must be a forbidden subject.

That disturbs me, because this is a big forum and yet it is clear that it is a place where certain people are favored and others not. There are threads were products and people are bashed over and over again and others were if a simple question is asked or a critical comment made about a product the thread gets deleted. Certain people are favored and anytime people work to suppress the truth it isn’t a good thing and makes it so I don’t feel comfortable about that site anymore. It gives me a bad taste for this teach people Internet marketing industry.

This has got to be one of the biggest stories in the industry and no one is talking about it hardly anywhere. Only one forum has a thread on it and I have the impression that there is a total blackout trying to be put on this Which is stupid, because anyone can find this information out. It seems to me it would make sense just to hold a press conference and say differences occurred so the partnership is over. We had a messy fight, but all is good.

What is going on at the Warrior Forum gives you a creepy feeling that the whole IM industry is closely controlled.

You also have to assume that some big split is going on in the industry. Last year during the Arbitrage launch I had the feeling that was happening and it looks like I may have been right more than I knew.

Interestingly last week Andy Jenkins did a telesminar with Frank Kern – a IM teacher I have a lot of respect for and have learned a lot from his products – so it would seem that Kern and his group are openly associating themselves with Jenkins.

If you want to stay up to date on the happenings in the IM industry and this story subscribe to my free email list:

You can see what he wrote right here.

Here’s the thing – he doesn’t have a giant email list. On his site it says 2743 readers through feedburner – yet he banged out almost 1k dollars with a blog post.

It shows how you can make money with blogs – and I’d guess that one promotion would make more than he would using google adwords for two months.

That is almost 50 cents per reader generated by the affiliate link.

Interestingly that is the exact same value per reader Matt Morris of Microcapmillionaires.com got back in the January launch with his email list.

In May we are going to do a bigger and much more planned out launch that I think will get even better results. I’ll be sending you some more articles and ideas about marketing and boosting your own business over the next month and then in the beginning of May lay out the plans for my May launch.

After that I don’t plan on doing another one until September or October so its going to be a big one.