Review by Jonathan Paston

I must admit I became pretty excited watching the introductory video to Simple Money Machines. Here at last, I thought, was a program that Internet Marketing newcomers have been looking for. In fact I wish I had a dollar for everytime I’ve been asked ‘How Do I Get Started’, ‘What Is Affiliate Marketing?’ and ‘How Do I Set Up a Website anyway?’.

Yet here is a program of coaching, web hosting and auto-website setup that claims to provide the answers to all those questions, and more! Let’s start with what Simple Money Machines does offer.

Simple Money Machines (SMM) provides a website and webhosting as part of the SMM program. In fact my start-up package included five, yes five, websites, each on my own choice of domain. Fantastic, I thought, I’ve got a couple of domains which I hadn’t got round to populating. Time to put them to good use.

Secondly Simple Money Machines allows you not just to sell SMM on your sites as an affiliate (earning 30% of each sale) but gives you the possibility of promoting up to five different products which you choose. Now I’ve got a whole bunch of affiliate products I want to promote so, again, time to put them to good use.

Then there’s the training. Chris Carpenter’s famous Affiliate Project X is included as part of the package plus there is an in-built coaching system that will bring you up to speed on affiliate marketing and bringing traffic to your site.

Finally the system includes in-built Split Testing, tracks your sources of visitors to your sites and includes a fully-fledged autoresponder to capture your visitor’s names and emails and broadcast follow-up messages, all run automatically.

Phew, What a Package!

At this point I was thinking this has just got to be the answer to every IM Newcomer’s prayer. I couldn’t wait to get started.

As soon as I did I hit disappointment. Yes, Simple Money Machines can provide all the primary functions outlined above, but it’s not as simple as it makes out.

To be fair the program layout is excellent and very easy to find your way round thanks to tabbed screens and links to wherever you want to go in the system. There’s also an auto-setup Wizard which takes you through setting up a website step-by-step with hints along the way.

So far, so good. But, perhaps not surprisingly, Simple Money Machines is initially set up to sell, er, Simple Money Machines. Your first website is preconfigured to sell SMM as an affiliate. All you have to do is enter your name for the autoresponder and choose SMM as the product link on the landing page. Click Next and your first website is on-line to start receiving sales.

Oh, if only it was that easy! You see your website has a domain selected by the program as a subdomain of smmsites.com. Yes you can change it but you might find that most of the domain names favored by Search Engines have already been taken.

And what about using your own domain names? There again you can use them but you have to pay an up-front fee of $10.95 to have each one hosted - a bit mean I thought.

So then I turned my attention to using the program to sell products for which I am already an affiliate. Again I was in for a disappointment. I had to enter all my own html sales pages, sign-up forms, affiliate links and so forth. Well that’s OK if your product author has provided his affiliates with a ready-made sales page which you can copy and paste into place, but it’s still a bit daunting to the marketer who is still a bit green when it comes to website construction.

What this program does save you is the bother of uploading header graphics and html pages and setting up split-testing and tracking. But I can imagine a lot of users just giving up and settling for selling SMM alone.

But if you can get past this hurdle then, yes, Simple Money Machines does start to live up to its promise. Why don’t you find out for yourself - I’ve arranged for you to have a 14 day trial for just one dollar here!