20/20 Challenge: Day Zero - Alternative Small Office Home Office

Apparently, I’m still prone to peer pressure because I’ve just invested in the newest guburu product release — The 20/20 Challenge.

Quite frankly, I had no intention of purchasing this product. Lynn Terry was the first person I saw mention it followed very shortly by Dr. Andy. But, that’s not what swayed me to jump in. You see, I have my own concerns when it comes to the hype-filled sales letter…

Net vs. Gross

People tend to forget there’s a difference between net and gross income. In fact, there’s a huge difference as the comment I left on Lynn’s blog illustrates:

It’s one thing to take in $20,000, but it means nothing if your expenses for generating that revenue are $19,999.

Loosely explained, gross means your total income and net means your income after you take out your expenses.

I scoured the sales letter and there was no mention of earning $20,000 net profit, but I did find a cop-out in the second post script.

Let’s face it, even if you only make $10,000 over 20 Days, then the chances are you’d find a useful home for all that cash…

And I also found mention of JV (joint venture) partners and possible affiliates. Eventually, those people will need to be paid and that $20,000 sum is beginning to shrink.

But, that’s not my only concern with the product…

Incidental Expenses

It’s day zero and I’ve already incurred my first incidental expense — $40 to print and bind the 250 page tome. (Actually, it came out to 453 pages when I combined the “Read Me First”, “20/20 Manual”, and “Marketing Manual”.)

Granted, printing the ebooks to FedEx Kinko’s may be considered a luxury expense by some, but reading a 453 page book on my laptop doesn’t scream “lovely afternoon pastime” to me. And my poor little Lexmark printer would rue the day I bought it if I even thought about sending that many pages through it, not to mention going through a black ink cartridge or two which would have come out to $40 anyway and be nowhere near the same quality as FedExKinko’s. Not a headache I was about to deal with.

But, that’s not the only incidental expense that has me lifting an eyebrow. There’s mention of PPC (pay per click) product market testing and the last time I checked, PPC costs money. Plus, there’s mention of Elance. Last time I checked, bids on Elance were for a form of currency.

Sure, there are probably ways to test without PPC and you can modify the PLR product yourself without outsourcing, but that would just make things a tad more difficult and take more time. Suddenly, this isn’t seeming so “part time” anymore.

Explicit Expenses

Honestly speaking, you can’t expect not to have expenses when you’re talking about bringing in 5 figures, now can you? Of course there will be explicit expenses. For this particular challenge, you’ll need to shell out $9/year for a domain name and $10/month for a hosting account. (And that’s if you go through Namecheap and HostGator.)

When you think about it, $20 to get started isn’t a bad deal at all. Just remember that these are recurring expenses and aren’t going away unless you cancel them. One is yearly and the other is monthly.

All told, if you’re going into the challenge, I’d say to have at least $200 extra handy in addition to the price of the package.

So, Why Do the Challenge?

By now, you’re probably wondering what good reason I could possibly have for buying this product if I have such reservations. Well, I have two good ones:

1. I know that earning $20,000 is 20 days is possible and this is just one method to do it. I’m curious and it could be fun.
2. My friends and customers keep asking for my take on it. So, what better way to give it to them by actually going through the motions and reporting on it?

And So Starts the Objections

I’ve already received some objections to my unbiased participation. The main one being that I’m already “known” and have an audience to whom I can market my product. (To me, that’s a stretch.) But, here’s the kicker: I’m doing this project as though I’m a newb. No pre-existing domain, hosting, website, or mailing list. Plus, I’ll be using an alias. How’s that for evening the odds?

Then, at the end of each day, I’ll update with what I’ve done in the 20k challenge, my experience and my feelings about it for the curious. I’ll be providing an unbiased on-going review for the next 21 days. (I’m counting day zero.)

Something Suspect Just Popped Up

After going through all of that and making my purchase, something extremely suspect just popped up on my radar.

Honestly, I’d never heard of Michael Green (have heard of How To Corp, though), so I couldn’t vouch for him as an individual. But, something I’m seeing on his websites certainly has me suspicious of his methods.

(Click the image above for a surprise. Be patient while it loads, it’s a larger image.)

Are those hidden links to random, highly questionable websites that could be construed as using spam tactics? Why yes, yes they are. And those same links, all in a lovely pale color to blend into the background, appear across all those websites, too. It was only by chance that I happened across them.

This reminds me of a really bad trip to the web 1.0 link stuffing spamcapades of the 90’s. I certainly hope his techniques don’t involve teaching us how to stuff poker and credit card links at the bottom of our sales pages as a proper optimization or link building technique.

Guess we’ll just have to see.

I’m heading off to Kinko’s to pick up my bound manual and I’ll update on Day 1 tomorrow.

Today’s Expenses	$282.03
Gross Expenses	$282.03
Today’s Income	$0.00
Gross Income	$0.00
Today’s Time Investment	30 min.
Gross Time Investment	30 min.

Updates

• 20/20 Challenge: Day 1
• 20/20 Challenge: Day 2
• What Makes the 20/20 Challenge Special?
• 20/20 Challenge: Day 3
• 20/20 Challenge: Day 4
• 20/20 Challenge: Day 4 (Part 2) & 5

Tags: 20/20 challenge review, 20k challenge, internet marketing