You have to admit the title is more than a little intriguing. Who doesn’t want the "secret" to getting 1 million visitors per year without spending a dime in advertisement? In addition, the pictures on Stephan’s site of him rubbing elbows with the latest Guru’s and cavorting around his lavish estate have an appeal to many as well.

The site can certainly sell.

You will hear much more about Stephan and his book in the months to come. You can’t get that many visitors to your site without almost everyone hearing about it sooner or later.

Still, the site left me a little baffled.

Stephan fancies himself the "Free Ad Guru". Not a bad bit of marketing. But when I went to the site, I was told about the many, obvious benefits of getting 1 million visitors to a site, but I was left a little bit in the dark about where these visitors would be coming from.

After all, when I think of ads, I think of classified ads, solo ads, possibly bulletin boards, as well as offline advertising. That is what I assumed Steve was going to teach me—the ins and outs of doing advertising for free that would give me a tone of free visitors.

That’s not what the book is about.

Instead, it is about how to effectively set up an affiliate program that will motivate other people to advertise for you. If that sounds like a trivial thing, trust me, it is not.

I have an affiliate program that is very successful. Last month (December 2002), the average affiliate in my program sold one course for every 30.4 visitors. That is 3x the average of most programs.

Yet, Stephan’s insights were very helpful to me in refining my techniques to recruit more affiliates and help them to be more effective in advertising for me and my products.

In addition, he has a great tack on getting people recruited beneath you in various other affiliate programs so you can benefit from their sales as well.

All in all it is a great program.

If you own a website, you need to do the things outlined in this book. I would recommend you purchase the book. If you have read my reviews for any length of time, you know that I do not say that type of thing very often. Yes, it will require work. Yes, you will experience frustration. No, you will probably not get 1 million visitors to your site this year. But if you will put together the principles outlined in this book, you will see your sales and your profits skyrocket.

If you do not have your own website, but are simply an affiliate for other people’s programs, this book will help you to recruit sub-affiliates. This can be a huge income producer for you, but you have to ask yourself a couple of questions:

If your answer to both of the above questions is "no," then you probably would be better off taking your money and putting up your own site. Of course, in about six months you will need to buy Stephan’s book…