Neil Shearing’s Internet Marketing Strategies

Ok, so what’s with the post title? Have I lost my mind?

No. I’m trying to make sense of a conundrum.

Let me share it with you…

I know Keith Baxter. He’s the marketer behind ModernClick.com, a website bringing together advertisers and affiliates. I believe it specializes in Pay Per Lead (CPA- cost per action) programs.

Keith’s main company is Gibble LLC.

Keith recently released the report “Giving PPC the finger” which I mentioned at the blog because I didn’t like the lengthy sign-up process or title. The style of the report giveaway was like that done by “The Death of Adsense” (Scott Boulch) and “The Death of Internet Marketing” (Mike Filsaime) in that they paid people to distribute the reports.

OK, so “Giving PPC The Finger” by Keith Baxter promoted his ModernClick service. Makes sense, right?

Scott Boulch’s most recent report, “The Autopsy” promotes a site called ClickFlipping.com whereby you can supposedly make money by referring leads to companies and get paid per lead. If you buy your clicks (from Adwords or other Pay Per Click search engines and sell them as potential leads to other companies, you’re “click flipping”.

The company running ClickFlipping.com appears to be Archimedes Lever LLC. But the company mentioned at the bottom of the “Terms and Conditions” page on the ClickFlipping.com site is, ahem, Gibble LLC. Also, in the T+C it states…

“Payment for services to Archimedes Lever LLC must be made in US Dollars. Charges for services at Archimedes Lever LLC are processed by the one shopping cart system and all charges will appear as Gibble LLC”

So, my question is…

Does Scott Boulch exist, or is he a pseudonym for Keith Baxter?

(a comment on this blog asks “How is Keith Baxter(modernclick) really associated with Scott?”. Although, the actual blog post itself, by the blog owner, contains this… “Scott is a good friend of mine and I have helped give him advice on what he’s doing with click flipping”. So perhaps Scott does exist?)

(and another comment on a forum says, “I could be wrong but I’ve got a hunch that the author is really the illustrious Keith Baxter and not Scott Boulch.”)

Has Keith Baxter pulled off an incredible marketing ploy by promoting ModernClick directly using one viral report authored by himself, and also indirectly via a different viral report authored under Scott’s name?

Actually, ClickFlipping.com promotes an opportunity where you buy in at $997, then pay $297 per month to use software which tracks your ClickFlipping campaigns and automatically lets you know which keywords are profitable… so there’s probably a lot of money to be made selling the “opportunity” as well as the fact that it, most likely, encourages you to use ModernClick.com for your campaigns.

I can see that starting ModernClick would require a great deal of initial momentum… after all, advertisers want to see affiliates and affiliates want to see advertisers. But, if Keith has done both of these viral campaigns, from different angles, to effectively “launch” the ModernClick service then, quite simply, it’s genius!

note: I tried three phone numbers (one was an answer phone where I left a message, two were unavailable) and sent two emails, one was refused, one bounced as over the limit) to try to get Keith’s comments for this post before publishing.

This entry was posted on Wednesday, January 10th, 2007 at 1:38 pm and is filed under Current posts. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.