Under The Radar Profits [review]

Today I’m taking a look at a new training product called Under The Radar Profits by James Canzanella

This training is centered around WSO’s. Its actually for this reason that I was initially interested in this product. You see I started off doing WSO’s myself. My first 4 product launches where WSO’s, I have sold over 1500 copes of my software as WSO’s. Further I have used WSO’s for list building and for branding myself.

I contacted James on Facebook and asked him for a review copy. Its a 25 page PDF. Also I was given access to the sales page review.  The first thing I noticed is that the sales page makes some serous claims. In fact here is a bit of the sales copy I was shown.

The second thing I noticed is that what James is doing is very different from how I used WSO’s. You see his tactic is to give away a free WSO which leads to an optin page. People optin to get their free WSO. The WSO that they get after opting is in a bit of a training video that is designed to be a ‘teaser’. Basically its really a presale video. Under the video is a link to a related affiliate offer. The concept is that people will opt in, you get their email address, then they watch the presale video and hopefully be interested in buying the affiliate product via the link below the video.

Now at first this seemed like a solid tactic to me. But for some reason there was this nagging feeling in the back of my mind that things just where not adding up. You see as I have said I have a lot of experience with WSO’s. Also being that Im a very detail oriented person I actually have saved data on WSO performance statistics. When you do some math you see that the claims that this guy makes just do not add up.

Ok first some givens. This says you can turn $20 into $632.86. Now we know that a WSO costs $20 to post, it also costs an additional $20 to bump the WSO. Since our entire budget is $20 we know that it must be done with 1 WSO posting that is never bumped. Also because I have so much data on WSO performance (I saved hit counts for every WSO I posted or bumped for over 6 months), I know that on average a WSO with a decent title is going to get about 250 hits. So now lets do some math.

250 hits to the WSO, thats people who actually view it.

Lets assume 30% click the WSO. Thats 75 people to the SqueezePage

Lets now assume that 50% of those people opt in. That means you got 37 opt ins, 37 people will see your affiliate link. (this is actually consistent with my results over several free WSO’s)

Now lets assume that 50% of those people who watch your video will click on your affiliate link (this is actually a generous assumption) that means that about 18 people will actually get to the product sales page.

Now lets say we are promoting a $27 product that’s converting for affiliates at 20%. This means that for affiliates, on average, 5 out of 100 people will buy. However these affiliates have a relationship with their list. To the 18 people you just got to click your affiliate link your a stranger and have no long term relationship. This means your not going to get anywhere near the conversion that the other affiliates are getting. In fact you can expect to get around 5% in this situation.

What this means is that from the 18 clicks you got you will be lucky to get 1 sale. Assuming you do get one sale and that it is a 50% commission product you have earned $13.50 in affiliate commissions. Basically you lost $6.50. Loosing $6.50 is a far cry from making over $630.

Now I know what your thinking. I thought it to. But you have that email list right? You have 37 people added to your auto responder. Well first of all even if you managed to to get every one of those people to buy your affiliate offer you still would not make the money that is claimed. But thats a moot point because once again, even with follow up emails, you likely wont get any (perhaps 1 if your very lucky) to buy this affiliate offer.  Why? Because they already rejected it once. You still dont have a relationship with them and finally because most of these people will be non buyers. People who just wanted the freebie anyway. In short you will be lucky to cover the cost of the WSO. This sure does not seem like a solid tactic and it sure does not seem like a way to make over $630 from a $20 investment.

But I wanted to be fair. You see any projection like the one I just outlined must make assumptions. Thinks like conversion rate and number of hits to the free WSO had to be assumed based on my data I saved. Because these are statistics I recorded over a 6 month period the projected hits and conversions are likely to be accurate but there is an inherent margin of error. Because of this I wanted to question James before I wrote my review and give him a chance to show me that contrary to my projections people can this money in the way he describes.

The first thing I did was ask him to send me an affiliate request to one of my products. Now I did not do this because I wanted him to promote for me. I did it because by sending me a request JVZoo will tell me how many sales as an affiliate he has had. If this is working for him then he should have quite a few sales. When the request came in it showed me that he made 500+ sales as an affiliate. Well I started thinking that this was working for him after all until I asked him about it on Facebook chat and he told me that these affiliate sales where not from the system he is teaching.

So my next question was how many sales did he get from his free WSO using this method, his response was that he never actually counted the sales he got this way.

That made no sense to me. If the never counted the affiliate sales he got this way then how can he know a dollar amount that he earned?

I mean how can you say I earned $632 this way without knowing how many sales you got? It did not add up so I pushed him for some more info. Unfortunately he did not like me pushing for info.  I asked him several times how he can know a dollar profit amount and not know the number of sales he got but he refused to answer and instead became very defensive and said I was ‘interrogating him’.

James really did not seem to like the fact that I was not going to blindly accept his income claims without him explaining to me where they came from. From this point the conversation started to degrade. On final thing of interest that did come up though is where he told me that this $632 profit is actually from multiple free WSO’s. Well now that’s a contradiction. Since each WSO will cost $20 this means that your not making $632 from $20 at all.

He never did answer that question and once again became defensive and perhaps a little hostile. I could see that there was no point in continuing the conversation so I ended it.

In my experience the people who get angry or defensive about their income claims are the ones who simply invented them out of their heads. This products sales page makes outlandish claims of turning a $20 bill into $600+ over and over. It claims that his system will “spew cash like a broken ATM”. These claims go beyond hype. They are ridiculous. Anyone who knows affiliate marketing knows that its basically a numbers game. Anyone who cares to put in a little bit of thought can see that the numbers dont add up. However despite this I tried to give James the benefit of the doubt.  But  his vague answers, defensive behaviors and self contradictions did little to alleviate my doubt. In fact all it did was increase them.

This product is being sold on dime sale starting at $7. Its a 100% commission product so its likely to get traffic from some marketers. However Im going to recommend that my readers pass on this one. I do not believe the sales copy. James did little to convince me that his method works and my own history with WSOs indicate that this is not a solid tactic.

UPDATE: Since publishing this review James has now blocked me on Facebook.  It boggles be how these so called professionals lie to potential customers yet they somehow find a way to make me the bad guy in their heads. A quick note about the reviews I do on this site. The product vendors give me access to their products for free in order for me to do my review. However I make no promises to them regarding the results of my tests or what I will write in my review. Should you click a link that takes you to a sales page for a paid product for sale this link will be an affiliate link and I will be paid a percentage of the sales price should you decide to invest in it.

About the Author

Brett Rutecky

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Brett Rutecky is a full time online marketer, web developer, and entrepreneur. He has developed scores of Facebook apps, dozens of custom web sites and hundreds of scripts.

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