Before I buy any product that I'm planning to check out, I always do a thorough analysis of the landing pages and “pitch” process. Sometimes I can tell right away that something is terrible, and don't even need to check out the product. When it came to writing this From Newbie To Millionaire review, I definitely got a lot of food for thought from the sales page, some of it good, some of it bad.

One thing for sure is that I was interested enough to check out the actual product itself.

Before I bought it, I noted down all the thoughts that I had about the whole product before checking it out. I think it's important that you make your notes before you buy the thing, in case your later experience makes you biased. Therefore, the next part of this review is based just upon and landing/sales page, and the second half is based on my actual experience with the guide.

From Newbie To Millionaire Review – My Thoughts Before Buying:

You don't have to read very long to realize that Christine Clayfield is setting herself up as the “anti-guru”. She spends the first half of her pitch just talking about the tricks that other “gurus” (scammers mostly) do, and how she doesn't do that. She always explains how they fake their account screenshots, put fake pictures of mansions and sports cars up (ones that they don't own), and make a rags to riches story about how they went from down and out to superstar overnight.

Christine hates these stories, got bitten by them herself many times, and promises not to be one of these people.

While I found this refreshing (It's amazing how many of these BS stories you find online, and nice to see someone calling them out for the lies that they are), I also found it slightly confusing. A lot of her own techniques mimic these gurus.

While she is positioning herself as a stark contrast from these guys, she pretty much uses all of their main strategies. I'll go into that now.

Her Video “Proof”

This was the part that I found most intriguing. Christine claims that it's easy to fake a Clickbank account and other “sales” proofs, and says that gurus always show you one week of their earnings only. Her tactic is to log in to her real bank account (as far as we know), and show you a whole year's earnings. This is supposed to be proof that she really did earn £1.8 million over a year.

“I'm the only one doing this, I've got nothing to hide. They are liars and I am not” is about the gist of it.

What amused me though, was that her video proves nothing. I'm not saying it's an outright lie, I'm just saying it's not proof, so what's the point? Oh right, I have to give you my email address in order to see the video. Got it.

Why isn't it proof? Simple. She blurs everything but the “paid in” section of her account. Yes, she has her reasons for hiding the details of who/what  is paying her, and she obviously has her reasons for hiding her “paid out” section as well, so it seems natural that she'd do so. However, if you look closely at the video (see my screenshot below), you'll see why I felt uneasy about it.

1.) She has 4 or 5 “Paid in” amounts every day, and 4 or 5 “paid out” amounts every day as well. Why is she taking money in and out of her account so often? Do you know anybody who receives this much activity into their account?

2.) If she makes most of her money from affiliate marketing (up until this point, I don't really know how she makes money), why is she getting paid daily? Most people get paid twice a week or once a month, it seems strange.

If those payments are people buying a physical product that she owns (most likely an earlier version of this guide), then why are the amounts always so different?

My hunch is that she was simply taking money out of her account diligently for a year, and paying it back in gradually. By doing this, you could make your “paid in” amount easily look like £1.8million, even if it was just you going in and out of the same bank yourself.

Once again, I'm not saying she's definitely lying, but her proof definitely isn't proof. It's just there to a.) set her up as different from the other gurus you've probably fallen for before and b.) make you think “wow a million!”.

Her Product Price

I've never seen a product sold for $47 that wasn't BS before. “I'm not a guru, but my product costs the same as all of these guru products do”.

I mean seriously, if you are going to teach me how to make a million dollars, why are you only charging me $47?

(Edit: Her guide is actually a legitimate guide and thorough plan to make money online, yet because you have to do all the work in order to succeed, $47 is a fair price to pay for the first step).

Incidentally, the place I learned how to make money online let's you get started for free.

The Good Parts

I DID like that she was honest about no one being able to afford private jets in a flash, no one makes money quickly, and especially not automated money. She's right on the button there.

She actually goes to a lot of lengths to dispel the myth that making money online is easy, automated, and takes no work. This is the part that I found most refreshing about her pitch, and made me think that there is probably a real product under there.

Anyone who says something is easy and automated is a scammer. I couldn't agree with Christine more on this point.

Final Concern Before Buying: Her “What's Included” Spiel.

Look at this list, it's the same ambiguous stuff you see all over the Internet. She even guarantees success (hold on, I thought she wasn't like that?).

Despite all this, I decided to give her the benefit of the doubt. Afterall, if she really does earn a million pounds a year, she probably knows a few sales tactics, so I can't fault her for using them on her page. I was expecting to find garbage, but was hoping to be proved wrong.

I hit the “Buy Now” button, and the rest of this review is based on what I found.

**BOOM – UPSELL NUMBER ONE.**

Yup, just as I expected.

So it's not uncommon to be exposed to a further upsell once you've completed the first transaction. As soon as I had completed the transfer, I got exposed to an upsell for “additional training”.

This one was for a $57 video training. As far as I could tell, it was just an extra accompaniment to the eBook, for those who want a more visual learning experience.

This is nothing new. Essentially by buying the first product I was now her customer and was more likely to buy something else she had to offer. There was the usual “This is your last chance to get it” sales tactic at the bottom. Of course, by clicking a link in the email she sent me I could get it at any time.

So far, it looked like just another Guru product.

By the way, the actual download page was ugly, just a bunch of text and dated looking graphics. For something made by a millionaire in 2012, I was surprised that it looked like it was made by me in 1996.

Hint – in 1996 I was 11.

Opening up the eBook.

So finally I was hoping to get to the information inside, and get learning what Christine was really about. So far I'd just learned that she was a good marketer and had read one or two books on positioning.

When you open it up, you see a 500+ page guide. It's going to be pretty extensive, which is a good thing! You can't learn this business from a quick brief guide (in fact, I learned it from a whole community full of training courses).

Once you've scrolled past the upsell for the video training (again), and read the updates about how Penguin and Panda don't affect her, because her methods avoid automations and scams (yeah, I got it already), you realize that the training doesn't start until page 32 or so.

She's got a nice foreword about how qualified she is (which includes all the screenshots of her earnings that she said she wasn't going to show us, because she's not like that) and I believe it's mostly true. She does seem to know what she's talking about, and she does know a thing or two about affiliate marketing.

Just because she's trying to extract a lot of money from you, doesn't mean she doesn't know how to make money. Or something.

Update:

Sorry I was wrong, the training doesn't start on page 36, there are some “recommended extras” to get through first, basically more upsells to things like Market Samurai and other affiliate tools.

Basically, let's call the first 100 pages an introduction. She covers a lot of necessary stuff, psychological things explaining to you that you need to work hard, but anybody can do it. She explains a lot of terminology and gives examples of how anybody can do it.

I'm not sure that I'd spend this many pages “warming us up” and briefing us on online business, but I did agree with what she was saying. Still, I felt that after buying her guide, I could have got some explanations about HOW TO MAKE MONEY ONLINE before page 60.

So yeah, 100 pages in and you've learned the following:

• Anybody can do it
• She is not a fan of automated shortcuts and scams
• It takes hard work
• What affiliate marketing is and how it works
• You learn too much information about clickbank, amazon, and how all their links work. Seriously, this is information overload for a newcomer, and you don't need to know what it is yet.
• You get all sorts of technical stuff thrown at you.
• You also learn about article marketing.
• You need to lie down.

So, now that you've got a basic understanding of how websites make money online with affiliate marketing, you are ready to learn some more.

->>If you'd rather learn the same information in just 1,500 words, read here<<-

Conclusion – She Does Give You Real Info

Ok, I could really go into this a lot more, but it's already coming up for 2,000 words. Basically, she DOES have a real product, and she DOES tell you the facts about making money online with affiliate marketing.

Christine knows what she is talking about, she tells you all the things you need to know in order to succeed online, from autoresponders to automated traffic (which she is against), from keyword research to affiliate links. She tells it all to you.

And that's exactly why I DO NOT recommend this product.

It's plain and simply a case of information overload, and she teaches everything in the wrong order.

It's all well and good making sure you explain all the terminology first, and explain all the finer points of affiliate marketing, but it's not going to be effective at all. You are going to suffer from information overload on every single page.

Before you've had a chance to let affiliate links sink in, you're learning about email autoresponders and bum marketing. Before you get a chance to think about how to choose your website topic (which doesn't happen in the first 150 pages), you're being told about KPIs.

Honestly, if anything I just mentioned sounds confusing at all, you'll not want to check out this product. It's an absolute bible and contains everything, but it's not at all structured in a way that will help a newcomer learn, and I know that if I had bought it instead of going the route I went, I would not have succeeded at all.

It's such a shame.

Christine isn't one of the bad guys or girls at all, she's got a real product that could probably help you get started, but it would be hard work, and as a beginner, your work is already going to be hard.

I'd much rather you followed the education system that I followed instead.

Learn It My Way