Affiliate marketing has existed as a concept long before the Internet arrived – but it sure didn’t become as popular and widespread until the Web gave us the connectivity we have today. And nowadays, there are numerous niches and specific ways to operate on the market, and therefore people who specialize in different aspects of affiliate marketing.
No matter how good you are though, and how much knowledge you’ve got of the system, having the right tools is an absolute prerequisite for becoming successful in this market. Remember, everyone here is using a compute as their primary tool – and a computer can do much more than just display web pages for you. Today, we’ll be reviewing a unique tool that allows you to automate a great deal of your work if you’re heavily involved in blogging – the WP Mage by Greg Jacobs.
Overview
The tool is a complete package that features several separate programs that do different tasks. There are three main components to the system – Affiliate Mage, Content Mage and Posting Mage. The cool thing is that while they’re set up to work very well with each other, you’re in no way required to run all three – you can just use whichever ones you need for your purposes.
And while Affiliate Mage and Content Mage are the ”blue collar“ units of the operation – the tools that work on the more mundane tasks and can also be controlled manually – it’s the Posting Mage that makes it come all together, working with the other two plugins in an interesting synergy which may take a while to get used to, but in the end proves to be a very flexible platform for your automated blogging.
Posting Mage basically lets you configure the style of posts, defining templates for them and even applying the new styles retroactively – e.g. you can set up a new shiny template for your blog and have Posting Mage automatically apply it to all the posts you’ve already made without you having to go through the dreadful hassle of manually updating them all!
Speaking of blogging automation, you’ll also get CPMage, which is a fully fledged autoblogging package. It’s an intuitive control panel to the posting interface, allowing you to easily install WP on any number of websites, deploying it following some strictly defined rules. It becomes very easy to multiply your operations and spread around as quickly as possible once you get the hang of CPMage.
The one thing that caught our attention were the advertised results – if you browse around the forums of the package, you’ll get the impression that it’s the norm to make around $4,000 - $5,000 a month from a few hundred websites with it. But in reality, this seems to be a rather exceptional case of people who put in a lot more effort than others. In the general scenario, on the other hand, you should expect around $2,000 - $3,000 if you know your stuff and know how to avoid the basic mistakes. Still, it allows you to earn back the tools’ price fairly quickly so you shouldn’t be at a loss buying them no matter what.
Extras
Apart from the main advertised tools, there are also some extras in the package which are nothing spectacular but will surely save you a few bucks considering the cost of regular scripts of this type. For example, you get Sitemap Mage, which as the name implies is an automated sitemap generator, creating a neat-looking layout of all your website’s pages for quick access. Link mage allows you to create an interconnected database of pages, very handy for keeping track of your operations from the inside.
Index Mage is a continuously updated list of free directories where you can submit your sites to, allowing you to get better indexing a lot more quickly; last but not least, there’s Domain Mage which is a nifty little frontend to GoDaddy that gives you information about domains, including the option to spy on domains that have an expiration coming up so that you can snatch them in time.
Downsides
WP Mage is great overall, but it does have some inherent problems that may make it seem like a worse choice compared to some of its competitors, depending on your needs. First, it’s aimed at more experienced marketers – this means that you won’t get the same high level of automation for all tasks by default, and you’ll have to put in some work yourself. However, this is intentional in order to allow you to have full control over the outcome of the campaigns you’re running from WP Mage.
Also, if spreading out dozens of websites quickly isn’t your thing, then WP Mage will definitely not live up to your expectations – it’s designed around the idea of mass marketing and setting up lots of websites to develop quickly, and those of you who like to do things the opposite way, taking their time to carefully flesh out each campaign, will probably not like how WP Mage does things.
Conclusion
Does it work? Yes, definitely. Is it suitable for anyone? Not so much. WP Mage is great if you know what you’re doing, but it’s not one of those tools that holds your hand through the process and does all the heavy lifting for you. You’ll still have to sweat up a bit but in the end, it’s definitely worth it if you know how to use it properly.
In the very least, WP Mage comes packed with so many tools that putting them together and summing up their costs (even on the unprofessional freelance market) will likely yield a higher price than the cost of WP Mage – so even if you’re not that interested in the ”spraying“ method of releasing websites, the toolset is still a very solid investment if you just want to get a good value for your money when buying a bunch of useful scripts. If you’re a fan of precise campaigns though, you’ll probably not put WP Mage to much use. If you’re a fan of making more money online and scaling your business, it’s definitely worth checking out.
Note: The views and opinions of the author of this guest post may not represent the views and opinions of Affilorama.
I have affiliate mage on a couple of sites. I know this is Greg Jacobs software so I wasn't surprised to see him giving a review of his product. The affiliate mage software works alright, however, again you have to be after the mass website type of campaign, as opposed to building your sites slowly and methodically and tweaking things until you have them right where you want them, if that's possible in this day and age with Google's unpredictable algorithm changes popping up every few months whether we want them or not!
I stopped using the software because it really takes away a tremendous amount of your being able to run things yourself. I would have to agree with the software not being for everyone, and definitely not for newbies! Save yourself, and whoever is selling the software now the headache of you wanting a refund because if your new to this the chances of you getting things set up and running optimally are slim to none! Its not for the faint of heart either!
If it's anything like the affiliate mage software, and I have a sneaking suspicion that it is, because of things I have heard Greg Jacobs say about it on videos, and from emails he sends me.
Just be careful if you do invest, half the time he isn't even taking any new subscribers because he is full to capacity.
Greg Jacobs does try very hard to service his customers! Honestly I cannot say anything bad about Greg, nor would I.
Thanks for allowing me to share! By the way, I also own Traffic Travis Pro Version, what a great tool!
Thanks Mark for your dedication to your trade!
I just noticed you have a free sign up here for your affiliorama program, I think I'll sign up and check it out?
Thanks again Mark!
David
http://relentlesstraffic.com
Hello Affiliorama Team!
Well I feel like I have come full circle landing on your site.
This was one of my first sites where I used to come and study.
Now I have a dozen or more sites up and I am learning a whole new set of guidelines for SEO and lots of other things regarding working online in general.
Have a great weekend, when it gets here! That shouldn't be too long considering how much time I spend online.
Thanks again everyone for all the things I have learned since I purchased Traffic Travis come time ago?
David
It is a spam blogging software. The software will build a junk auto-blog with unreadable spun content.
Once you learn how to do it, the websites can be built very quickly. It is an easy process. However you find out that you need to learn a lot of tweaks to make it work properly. You have to read the forum to learn it. There quite of a learning curve.
You will need to spend money on a not so cheap hosting (you can get just any host) an on a ton of domains. Greg recommends expired domains, but many people in the forum was doing alright .infos domains though, even though the results are inferior. You will need to build about 15 or 20 wesites to start with and then build up to 100 at least to get a reasonable income. You will need a new hosting account for every 20 websites or so.
So.. there is an investment to be made after the purchase.
FOLLOWING IS THE 2 MOST IMPORTANT OBSERVATION:
1) If you buy it you will quick realize that it is absolutely WORTHLESS WITHOUT AN EBAY AFFILIATE ACCOUNT, which is very difficult to get. It is simple doesn't work with any other network. Greg may tell you that ebay is the way to go but that you could make money with other stuff. Don't fall for that. You will be frustrated and it will take longer then the 30 days money back guarantee to realize that.
If you are an ebay affiliate it may be worth, because it indeed work, however....
2) Beware that it is extremely blackhat, it is junky spammy stuff. You can get all you sites to the sandbox overnight. You can also lose you ebay account if it happens to send then too low quality traffic. There are ways around these issues though. The thing is that you will have to dig in the forum to figure out how. Actually you will need to rely a lot on the private forum.
So... overrall... i don't recommend it. If you are already an ebay affiliate maybe. If you are not don't buy the software and then hope to get approved, since it is a hard process to get in and will probably take you a few months, or may never get in at all.
Agree with Leo...the power of this comes from having an ebay affiliate account...without that, it is pretty worthless. I felt a little decieved by the fact that was unknown to me prior to purchasing.
I agree with Leo I bought Mage in year 2010 when I was a newbie. I didn't do enough research I believed everything Greg said, since then I will never buy his products or any products he promotes.