Interview: Google Cash Detective Chris Carpenter, Part 2

In a new series of articles comprising interviews, product reviews and actual progress reports based on his own efforts and experiences trying to generate a real virtual income, Blogcritics writer Christopher Rose starts to explore the true potential, the good guys, the liars and the charlatans of the online moneymaking webiverse.

From affiliate marketing to making and selling your own digital or physical products, Christopher is going to put his life and his own personal future on the line to tell the truth and report on the best and the worst online marketing people and products out there.

The following is Part 2 of an interview with one of the more interesting people out there, one Chris Carpenter, a young American who has gone from working as a waiter in Salt Lake City to living his fantasy beach bum freestyle life in Mexico through his clever take on using Google Adwords.

His first product was the highly respected and reasonably priced Google Cash e-book, which came out about four years ago and his latest product is the rather more expensive and just a little bit controversial Google Cash Detective, which draws upon the work of his e-book and makes the whole process easier to implement.

I understand you've now brought out something new, the Google Cash Detective. What does this do and how is it different to Google Cash?

The Google Cash Detective is software that monitors keywords and identifies profitable Adwords campaigns. It’s completely automated! All you do is enter the keywords into the software, and it monitors them for you.

The Google Cash Detective shows you the Adwords ad, the Display URL and the Destination URL for every keyword you enter. It queries Google daily or hourly (depending on what you choose) and will show you the range of daily clicks, the range of CPC for these clicks, the number of variations of the ad copy, the status of the ad and much more!

You enter a niche keyword list into the software, and it starts monitoring. Then a few days later you can see which keywords are consistently displaying ads for certain merchants. The longer you monitor your niche with the Google Cash Detective, the more certainty you will have as to which ads are profitable and which ads are not. The Google Cash Detective works continuously to monitor campaigns placed for your keywords.

At a glance you can see what ads have been running everyday for several days – those ads are likely to be the profitable ones. On the other hand, when you see keyword/merchant/ad copy combinations that have run for only a few days out of the last month – those ads are likely to be the unprofitable ones. These ads were run, lost money and then disappeared. 

The Google Cash Detective also identifies which Adwords ads use affiliate links. So it’s easy to find profitable affiliate campaigns to replicate and immediately profit from. The Google Cash Detective is a competitive intelligence software that sifts through the thousands of Adwords ads and identifies persistent affiliate campaigns. Effectively, the software stakes out successful affiliate marketers and shows you the merchant, keyword, and ad formula combination that they are using.  

So you use the Google Cash Detective with the Google Cash System. Instead of setting up Adwords Campaigns promoting affiliate products through trial and error, you can save time and money by using the Detective to find profitable Adwords ads. Then you can mimic those campaigns and try to improve on them.   

One method that has been working really well for me is finding profitable "Google Cash" campaigns in Adwords with the Google Cash Detective and then replicating them on Microsoft AdCenter. There is much less competition on AdCenter and you still get a lot of traffic at a low cost. 

You also practice and teach yoga. When did that start and what type of yoga do you practice? 

I don’t actually teach yoga. I only practice yoga. My wife teaches hatha yoga. We have a yoga retreat here in Mexico and we bring in teachers from all over the world to do week long "intensives".

I started about two years ago. I have had chronic lower back problems since I was 16 years old. Every two or three months I would have spasms that kept me in bed for a few days. I lived in constant fear of "throwing out" my back. It was horrible!

I started doing yoga therapeutically to help my back pain. Since I started two years ago, I have been practicing regularly and my lower back problem has completely vanished. I do much more active sports now than I ever did and still I am pain free. I attribute it 100% to the yoga. Every morning I wake up and do my little morning routine. In the afternoon I do the more formal class which lasts about one and a half hours. 

When I first started practicing yoga I thought it was just about the stretching and I was doing it only to heal my back. Since then I have learned that it is much more than just the exercises. There is a whole spiritual side to it as well. Since I started meditating a little each day and consistently doing the breathing exercises I have become much more relaxed and stress free. 

I used to have quite a temper issue, yelling and raising my voice often, even being downright abusive at times. But for the last year and a half since I have been meditating regularly I have completely lost the anger. Situations that used to throw me into a rage just dissolve when they come into contact with me now. It’s pretty amazing actually. 

Before this transformation happened with me, I wouldn't have believed it to be possible. I always thought that people can’t change like that. But they can. Not only have I seen a big change in myself since I started yoga, I have seen the same metamorphosis in my friends who have been practicing yoga as well.

You now seem to live on the beach in Puerto Escondido most of the time. Is that one of the fruits of your success or would you be doing that regardless of your Internet activity?

I wanted to live at a surf spot for a long time. But the problem with that is that at most surf spots there is not a lot of work to be had. Once I figured out how to make money online, I quickly moved to the surf.

What would you say to the many millions of people who dream of quitting their day jobs and earning a good living online? It often seems very difficult, almost overwhelming in fact, to tell which of the thousands of marketing "gurus" out there are worth believing and which just want to get your money and give you a bunch of recycled rubbish. How can wannabes like me tell who the good guys are?

I would say that it is very possible to earn a good living online. I did it and am doing it. I have no special skills or background. I didn't graduate college. I worked at nights in bars and restaurants so I could play during the days. 

I’m not the only one working online and living this Internet Lifestyle either. There are lots of people that have figured this out and have awakened from the slave-like sleeping state of working a 9-to-5 till you're 65 JOB (Just Over Broke). We've been told all of our lives that we need to get a job and work for a living. Work hard now and then if you’re lucky when you’re 60 or 65 you can live. Those are our beliefs. Guess what? That’s B.S. The time to live is now, not later. A paradigm shift is taking place and people are waking up and living their dream lifestyles now. Today, right now, this instant. This is your wake up call! You too can live your dream lifestyle.

Here’s how: 

First, figure out what you really want to do, what you want to be. Figure out your dream lifestyle. I shared my dream lifestyle with you – adventure, travel, etc. What’s yours? If you had no constraints, what would you do? Oh, by the way, having a family is not a constraint. I take my family with me on all of our adventures. 

Get a pad of paper and start brainstorming. If you had 100 million dollars in the bank, what would you do with your time? Don’t figure out what you want to have. Having things just to have things is not important. Figure out what you want to do. And only acquire things that help you do those things. Really give this some thought and think about your passions. What do you live for?  

You can’t just want to quit your job. You have to have a vision, a passion. You can’t say I hate my job so I want to set up an online business instead. It has to be that you hate your job and you want to set up an online business to free yourself so you can do the things that you love. The things that you are passionate about. That’s what you need to figure out – what that is. So the first step is getting clear on what you want to do in your life. 

The next step is to look at your list and figure out how much money you need to earn to be able to do those things. That’s your Strategic Objective. For me, I figured I needed $10,000 a month of profits to support my dream lifestyle. Go through your list of things you want to do and figure out how much you would need to earn a month to be able to do those things and still have a little left over to save and invest.

The third step is that you need to identify your limiting beliefs and get rid of them. We've been raised to believe that work is hard. That you need to grow up and get a job and work from 9 to 5 until you're 65. We've been raised to believe that work is something you do daily, that people that don’t work are lazy bums. Make a list of all of your beliefs concerning work.  

We also have ingrained in us limiting beliefs about money. Beliefs that it is noble to be poor. That rich people are jerks and that if you are rich it is at someone else's expense. Look at all of the little sayings regarding money: "Money doesn't grow on trees." "We’re not the Rockefellers." I bet you can think of several more. Make a list of all of your beliefs concerning money. 

Ultimately it comes down to beliefs. The only thing preventing you from living your dream lifestyle is believing that it can be done. Once you have your limiting beliefs out in the open, you’ll be able to see them throughout your day as you deal with work and money. Just by noticing them, that is the first step to getting rid of them. 

Your next step is to start building your Automated Online Business. You start by working on it yourself. And little by little you systematize your work and outsource it so a specialist works on it. Then you work on your business and not in it.

In my opinion the easiest way to set up a profitable automated online business is to find one in a niche that you are interested in. Then you reverse engineer their business model and try to improve on it. This is where the Google Cash Detective comes into play. It helps you identify with 100% accuracy profitable online businesses that get their traffic from PPC. And it shows you which keywords and which ads are profitable for them. You really need to read my special free report Google Cash Strikes Back where I explain the above concept in much more detail.

Read Part 1 of the Chris Carpenter interview.