Google Assassin: why I asked for a Refund – by Rev. David B. Smith

I first became acquainted with Chris McNeeny through what I still consider to be the seminal work on Adwords – Adwords Miracle (see my review here).

Adwords Miracle introduced me to entirely new concepts and an entirely different way of working with Google Adwords, and it took my Adwords campaigns out of the red and into the black for the first time. It was expensive, and the sales page made bold claims, but the claims held true and it has paid for itself multiple times.

On the strength of that first impression I purchased each of the three subsequent products produced by Chris McNeeny. First there was Affiliate Project X, then Day Job Killer, and now finally … Google Assassin.

I say ‘finally’ more as a guess really, since he’s developed this as a membership site, with a monthly fee that is greater than the standalone price of most internet marketing products, so I’m assuming that he won’t need to produce any more products in order to keep his sales figures at astronomical levels. This of course assumes that McNeeny has limits to him ambition and that he can retain members, which may prove difficult for, quite frankly, Google Assassin doesn’t give you a lot of bang for your buck!

The membership package is a combination of training modules and software, both of which will hopefully be expanded for members over time. The current software suite includes:

• The Daddy Keyword Tool, which can build a large keyword list from one seed keyword or key phrase, and include figures on keyword popularity and advertiser competition.
• The Adwords Micro-Nicher, which identifies appropriate sites for Adwords site-targeted campaigns.
• The Campaign Kidnap Tool, that spies on the ads of your competition, allowing you to copy the copy of the best of your competitors, and …
• Article Spotter, which searches out the number of articles that have been written, currently targeting your keywords, giving you another indicator as to their potential profitability.

Now there’s no denying that these pieces of software form a handy arsenal when it comes to keyword research, but there is nothing remarkable about them, and there is certainly nothing original about them.

If you want to build a list of popular keywords, there are plenty of free tools available that will help you do this (eg. www.addme.com/keywordsuggest.htm) and if you want statistics on competition, an online tool like Nichebot will give you all that the ‘Daddy’ tool will and a whole lot more for a relatively insignificant price.

Alternatively, If you want to go a step further with your keyword research, Brad Callen’s ‘Keyword Elite’, will duplicate the functions of both the Daddy tool and the Campaign Kidnap tool and adds in-depth pay-per-click analysis and more. Admittedly, at $176, Keyword Elite is not cheap, but you’ll only pay for it once

In addition to the software, of course, Google Assassin does include McNeeny’s own online training materials – two ‘blueprints’, focused specifically on Adwords and Article Marketing.

These training materials, like their software counterparts, are solid without being in any way remarkable. There is nothing in these guides that has not been said before and, ironically, much of it has been said better elsewhere by McNeeny himself (eg. in Adwords Miracle). Quite frankly, you’ll find more comprehensive training in Brad Callen’s 86-page guide, ‘Adwords Made Easy’, which you can have for free (right-click here and choose ‘Save Target As’ to download a copy).

In short, Google Assassin contains some solid software and decent training materials, and I think if McNeeny had been asking $67 as a one-off price for the lot, I would be recommending it to you without hesitation, but at $67 per month the package is nothing short of outrageous!

I do believe that you can see a gradual but steady deterioration in the quality of McNeeny’s work over the years he’s been on the NET. The hype of his sales letters has been increasing, while the quality of his products has been decreasing at an inversely proportionate rate! With the publication of Google Assassin, his journey to the dark site is complete.

• For finding hot Clickbank products: Paydotclickbankalert (cost = free)
• For training in Google Adwords: Adwords Made Easy (cost = free)
• The King of Keyword tools: Keyword Elite (cost = $167)

Rev. David B. Smith

Parish priest, community worker,
martial arts master, pro boxer,
author, father of four.
www.FatherDave.org