Ubercamp – highly praised and promoted on certain websites, it caught my interest. Uebercamp is supposed to be for the advanced Internet Marketer who needs a little help to get up to the next level. Exactly what I needed (and still need). I had signed up for Ubercamp and was accepted easily. $199 later I had access to an almost empty forum, but it began to fill up with good content easily. The first week was very interesting and a lot of good info surfaced. However, since then the content flow is decreasing and overall I have to say: Where is the meat?

Paul, the uber affiliate is not really delivering that much value one would expect for that price tag. He started a case study on how to build an affiliate PPC campaign from scratch. Some information he provides is great, other pieces you have to pull out of him or guess since he is not communicating much info in between steps. Overall he is not as often in the forums as one would expect (in my opinion). I’d rather have the impression that he runs the forum as a second level project while doing his main business first. That would be Ok for a free forum or low-priced solution, but if you charge a premium I think you have to provide a little more value. Here are some bullet points that I see as an issue.

• Unprepared: The whole project or business model seems to be lacking preparation. Things look more improvised and stiff. He is reacting to customer input, but there is no pro-active initiative
• Cheap: If you provide a premium service, why (as an example) settle for cheap tools like phpBB – the most unsecure forums software that also lacks in features. If you charge $199 per month from a customer and accept 80-100 customers, is $180 for a quality product like vBulletin too much? Provide tools and samples – share what you promised to share, don’t let other affiliates do your work.
• Dedication: If you open for business with a new business model, show presence. Don’t expect you can dedicate the same amount of time to your other projects + run a high-profile premium service at the same time without running into resource issues. If you expect to see the premium service to take off long-term, dedicate enough time to it and show presence.
• Uber: Uber Affiliate and Uber Camp. If you promote “uber” as the standard, provide uber service. Don’t go for standard or average.

Now, you might think that I am whining and complaining, but this is not the case. I don’t expect to get the secret to affiliate marketing delivered for $199 per month. But what I expect is that if a product separates itself from other coaching programs or training programs like Uber Camp (thinks it) does, that it also lives up to that. There are a lot of smart people at Ubercamp (as paying customers) – they show much more dedication and willingness to share knowledge than the owner of Uber Camp does. I did not expect a perfect start or a huge knowledge base right from the batt, but the lack of “meat” coming from Paul put into consideration with the price is what makes me feel that Ubercamp is way overpriced and not living up to the expectations. There is also not that much activity in the forums as one would hope to see. Sure, part of it is use paying members to be active, but I would also expect the business owner to be more visible.

Some brownie points for Paul though. The case study he is doing has some good information and the money he spent for it was real. There was some good learning stuff in there. Provide more these things and the membership price might be justified.

Conclusion: If you are in the market for a coaching program, sign up for maybe the Click Consultants forum and the PPC Coach program. For less than $100 a month you get a good set of solid information. At the current price Ubercamp is overpriced – even though there is some solid information available. I canceled my membership …