PPC Classroom Live: (My Review)

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It’s 4Am, I’m still here in Vegas after missing my flight, and I can’t sleep so I figured I’d write a review of the PPC Classroom event.

PPC Classroom Live (installment 1) is officially over, but was well worth making the trip. I wasn’t too sure what to expect in terms of content from the speakers, but it was well worth the 2 days sitting in an overheated, overcrowded conference room. I met so many interesting people here, including many of the speakers who were more than happy to chat during the breaks.

Day 1 consisted of some great presenters, though I got less out of Day 1 than Day 2. Most of the material presented I had already learned elsewhere, as was more interested in networking in between speakers than actually expecting to gain some some “insider” strategy. But Day 2 really kicked up the learning and I was really impressed with some of the presenters, especially Greg Cesar. More on that later…

Due to excessive partying on Saturday night, I overslept and missed half of Day 2’s speakers. So I arrived for the afternoon session, only to have missed the presentation by Kirt Christensen, of which almost everyone said was the most informative yet. (of course I missed the best one, thanks Murphy) This guy apparently had some great Adwords strategies and unique tools to talk about, many of which even the other speakers weren’t aware of. In private, one speaker even told me that Kirt is even more knowledgeable in Adwords than Perry Marshall, so I had to see what I missed. I ended up forfeiting my $97 rebate to buy the DVD being filmed so that I could catch Kirt’s presentation. The DVD though should have been free in my opinion. The attendees already flew from all parts of the world, paid for the course and hotel, only to have to fork over more money for a DVD which really should be complementary to the original participants. (hint, hint guys)

Some of the highlights though I’d say were hearing Simon Leung, who is a former Google employee who worked on the Adwords team and developed many of the features we use today. Simon traveled 45 hours from Singapore to give a 90-minute talk. His presentation was a bonus session which lasted well into the evening, but was one of the better presentations of day 1.

Then there was Greg Cesar, who was not only hilarious, but a really cool down to earth guy. Greg revealed a lot of great stuff on how he takes his Adwords marketing offline and makes a killing with very little competition. I was tempted to buy his course since his business model is so unique (and profitable), but I don’t need anymore courses. I want to be an eternal student of marketing, but not get stuck in course after course. This is often the downfall of many affiliates. At some point you need to say “enough is enough” and just throw up some campaigns and get to work.

I ended up missing most of Anik’s talk as I got caught talking to Greg and a few other guys during the break. We ended up talking and sharing strategies for an hour and a half. Again, we’ll worth it as Greg revealed a few things he didn’t mention to the rest of the group. Even though I didn’t buy Greg’s course, I know the basic premise behind how he markets in the offline world and I think that is one of the first things I’m going to try when I get back home. I can only imagine how profitable it can be to hit some niche newspapers or magazine with very little competition. Plus, Google has zero control of how an offer is being marketed which means no Google Slaps!

The only downside to the whole event though was the sales pitches. I knew we were going to be sold coaching, courses, etc, but some of the pitches were a little harder than they needed to be. From a business perspective, it’s a perfect opportunity for each speaker to pitch his own course or coaching, but a few of them were too strong and cliche’ for my liking. Like I said, Greg’s was tempting, but I resisted. Overall though, the material was pretty good. For some of the people there who were new to PPC, I could see that they probably got a lot out of the entire event and maybe needed a more intensive course or coaching. For me on the other hand, since I’ve been doing PPC awhile and have learned Adwords almost inside and out, I got more out of the networking than anything.

Like Jeremy mentioned at the beginning of the event, the networking alone usually makes the travel and costs worthwhile. I met some great guys and was sure glad I had made some “ghetto” business cards the day before I arrived (now time to get some professionally made). A few of the people I met, including a former Microsoft programmer, an SEO guy, a web designer, and another PPC affiliate decided to form a mastermind group to exchange ideas, and keep each other motivated to push harder. This will be great as I tend to get lazy and need that constant motivation. Working from home in isolation can get to you and having met like minded people with similar goals and interests makes the job (or lack there of) alot more fun.

And fortunately, I bumped into Simon Leung later in town, who I was able to network with as he doesn’t live to far from me in California. (It might be wise to keep in contact with a guy who used to work in the Adwords dept.) I was able to met and talk with almost all of the speakers at the event, though I missed meeting Jeremy Palmer. I had every intention to at least meet the creators of PPC Classroom (I met Anik), but unfortunately couldn’t catch Jeremy among all the other people pressing for his time.

Instead of purchasing another course or coaching, I dropped $800 for a year of Affiliate Radar, which was also presented at the event. I had already known of Affiliate Radar, but since I owned Xtreme Conversions among a few other tools, I thought I didn’t need it. Honestly, I don’t like hosted/monthly tools, which is why I never bought it. But after seeing what Affiliate Radar can really do, combined with Offer Vault which is included, this tool is going to make me alot of money. When I say alot, I mean ALOT!

With Affiliate Radar, you can create keywords using an integrated Wordtracker interface, create campaigns, adgroups, and ads on the fly, track keywords to sales on 20+ affiliate networks, and quickly export to Google, MSN, and Yahoo all from one interface. Now exporting campaign data to each search engine via .csv files doesn’t sound like much fun to me, but that’s going to change. I talked with Affiliate Radar’s programmer, and he is going to soon be making use of each engine’s API to be able to upload the entire campaign data solely from the Affiliate Radar interface. Imagine being able to instantly have a huge campaign driving traffic from the 3 major search engines to an offer within a mater of minutes! Automation and scalability is what I’m looking for, so buying Affiliate Radar was a no brainer to me.

Well, its now 5:30 in the morning. I guess I should probably get to sleep, though I’m not sure that I’ll wake up on time for my flight if I do. PPC Classroom Live was a great event and if you missed it this time, definitely come check out the next one sometime next spring. I’m out…