StomperNet SIMPLE vs The 30 Day Challenge
Back from London and I’ve had a bit of a chance to recover by diving into the 30 Day Challenge like mad. I’m now going through day 27, so made some progress over the last few days. In fact there aren’t too many action points, most of it is listening/watching the podcasts/videos and so it has been relatively easy to steam ahead.
I’m still with StomperNet SIMPLE, although I haven’t picked that project up again after the summer yet; I’ll do so soon and continue where I left off, but it’s still pulling in some orders, but not enough to actually make any money yet. It is moving closer towards that objective, but nowhere near as fast as I would like, but then since I haven’t worked on it for a month that is perhaps unsurprising.
So we arrive at an interesting point; how does StomperNet SIMPLE compare with the 30 Day Challenge? The both appear to be aimed at the same target market and the approach isn’t very different in some respects, but in others they don’t compare at all.
1. So far I haven’t made a sale with the 30DC, but at least I’m pulling in free traffic within 48 hours of me first publishing some content. Given that I managed to get to day 3 in August and then picked it up last week, this is a huge difference with SIMPLE where it took me around 6 weeks to get any traffic and then it was paid.
2. There are absolutely no costs involved in the 30DC, while with SIMPLE there are startup costs for domain, webspace, Aweber ($20/month starting in mid-May and we haven’t even been shown what to do with it yet - not a problem for me as I was with Aweber already, but shows a lack of thought when putting the course together).
3. Part of the SIMPLE process teaches in-depth analysis of affiliate info-product landing pages, with 30DC the idea is just to test how good they are.
4. SIMPLE may encourage spam; one comment I remember (from Leslie Rohde) is that it doesn’t matter what you write on MySpace etc as no one will read it, it’s just about getting links. I don’t know how you feel about this, but how much more junk do we need on the internet, this is just spam. In the 30DC there is a ton of stuff about creating good content and not to spam - defintitely the way to go.
5. StomperNet SIMPLE has loads of really great internet marketers on the faculty and the 30DC has just Ed Dale and Dan Raine. While it is good to be able to talk to the StomperNet faculty on each person’s speciality the course as a whole doesn’t hang together well sometimes and there are inconsistencieswhere one person takes over from another; when asked about a specific point the answer has sometimes been “I didn’t say anything like that, I said this”, when someone else on the faculty did. Different people have different opinions, but it gets confusiong if you have a bunch of internet marketing newbies who have been told to “follow the process” constantly and then the process isn’t consistent.
6. 30DC isn’t selling anything, although Ed and Dan run Immediate Edge (which I just joined), StomperNet is constantly about the hardsell, even when they claim they are selling nothing. This really grates with me and probably something that has put me off joining the full $800/month package.
Both have good and bad points, but on the basis of the first month I think the Thirty Day Challenge wins hands down.
There are other things I am still unhappy with about SIMPLE which I’ll outline below:
1. Towards the end of the first month we had nearly finished sections A and B, with C nowhere in sight. When people started saying “how are we going to get through C in the time available” we were told that C was never promised as part of the $1 trial and we’d have to pay $97/month for C. This would have been a fair point except we were never told how far we would go except we would have a viable internet business at the end of the 30 days - my SIMPLE business is still not viable.
2. At the end of the second month (June) we were suddenly told that there would be no more daily action points and that it would move to a weekly podcast. We’re currently getting about one per fortnight.
3. The jutification for $97/month seems to be that we can watch the first 10 minutes of the full StomperNet videos and listen to Brad Fallon and Andy Jenkin’s Stomping The Search Engines. I have watched some of the videos where they discuss the problems but not the solution, although I have managed to work that out. And quite frankly Stomping The Search Engines was a waste of time listening too; perhaps it was ok in 2004, but it is completely out of date now and therefore next to worthless.
4. Some new content was promised for August, September and October, but a tiny fraction has appeared so far. Looks like they’re too bust with other projects.
So somebody tell me, what is the $97/month for?
I’ll keep on for a while longer, but no more. I would have loved to say “it’s a great product, sign up here” and collected an affiliate commission when they open SIMPLE up again, but I just can’t. The $1 trial was great on the whole, the first $97 month was good too; but after that I don’t feel that I have received value for money and I don’t even think that StomperNet want to bother trying to deliver.
This is one of the things I hated when StomperNet first launched last year; Andy Jenkins was talking about a massive launch with no hype, but Andy, are you kidding me? All StomperNet is about is hype and over promise.
I’ll let you know how I get on with Immediate Edge.