You may be familiar with the names Jane Mark and/or Phil Basten.
They run a number of lead generation platforms such as Sokule and have been in the lead gen business for almost 20 years.
I’ve come across them many times over the years but never been enticed to sign up to any of their platforms.
They look tacky and low-grade and never inspired confidence in me.
But I decided to relent for one of their recent offerings – Profit From Free Ads.
The Profit From Free Ads Platform
While you can join this platform for free, you really have to work at it to get any benefit from it, at least as far as I can see.
As a free member, you get 1 text ad and 1 banner ad with 10,000 to 70,000 ad views depending on who you signed up under.
When these credits expire or are used up, you will need to upgrade at the site to get more credits.
So, the platform is based on buying ad packages of credits.
These give you a set number of credits to use for text ads and banner ads.
You then allocate whatever number of those credits you want, to each of your ads.
Buying Ad Packs
There are 7 ad packs available. Each is a one-time cost.
The number of credits in Ad Pack 1 are in addition to whatever number of credits you receive when you join Profit From Free Ads (everyone starts out as a Free member).
You also cannot go in and buy Ad Pack 5 for $197 to start with, for example (see ad pack prices below).
You have to buy all the previous Ad Packs first.
You do get bigger discounts the higher the Ad Pack you want to start with.
So, in the Ad Pack 5 example, you get a $76.00 discount because you have to purchase everything in Ad Packs 1, 2, 3, 4 and
5 in one go!
If you want to start out on Ad Pack 5, you actually have to pay $399, not the $197 you might think at first glance.
You can only avail of the discounts if your first Ad Pack purchase is Ad Package 5, 6, or 7.
It’s also important to note that you can’t buy the same Ad Pack again.
You have to buy the next one up to get more credits.
I wasn’t prepared to commit much money to this as I just didn’t have a good feeling about the results I’d get.
So I splurged a whole $17 on Ad Pack 1! 
These are the costs of the individual ad packs and what you get with each one:
With my fist Ad Pack purchase being Ad Pack 1, if I later want to get Ad Pack 5, I have to buy Ad Packs 2, 3, and 4 as well.
So the total cost of Ad pack 5, for me, would be: $17+37+77+147+197 = $475 (with no option for a discount).
The obvious goal with this site is to get members to buy bigger and bigger Ad Packs until they reach Ad Pack 7.
You’re looking at a $997 to $1,169 spend to achieve that, depending on how you get to Ad Pack 7.
And this is a closed ecosystem – the only people you can reach are other members, all of whom are there to promote their own stuff.
My Text Ads
So, my $17 got me 30,000 credits for text ads and 30,000 credits for banner ads.
I could also only create 2 text ads and 2 banner ads.
Only 2 banner ad sizes are allowed – 125×125 pixels and 468×60 pixels.
With this test, I promoted Funnel 2 for the Partner With Anthony Program (the funnel that offers bonuses) as outlined in the first post in this series, and the second ad promoted the 30% Lifetime Discount on Builderall 4.0 plus my bonus package.
I decided to start by posting the two text ads and assigning 10,000 credits to each.
Literally, within a few minutes, all those credits were used up.
These were the results:
I set up tracking links for both ads in ClickMagick and, while Profit From Free Ads reported clicks on my text ads, ClickMagick reported that I had received zero ad clicks for both ads.
It turns out that Profit From Free Ads puts your ad links into an iFrame and then puts a link to that into the ads it shows on its pages.
So, when someone clicks an ad, they’re clicking a link that’s on the ProfitFromFreeAds·com website.
The display of my pages in the iframe should, at least, have triggered a click for my page, but it didn’t.
This makes it impossible to track the true performance of ads.
You have to rely solely on the stats that Profit From Free Ads gives you.
I got no signups from either ad.
My Banner Ads
I had to create 2 banner ads to display inside of Profit From Free Ads.
They mention that 125×125 ads get a lot more views than 468x6o ads, so I created two 125×125 ads which you can see here:
I only used 5,000 credits each on these ads, and here are the results:
Again, because of the way Profit From Free Ads handles my tracking links, it’s impossible to say how many of those ad clicks are actually valid.
Again, I have to trust that the stats reported by Profit From Free Ads are correct.
What I can say is that I got no signups to anything today, so none of those ad clicks resulted in me getting subscribers.
It did take longer for the credits for these image ads to be used up than it did for those applied to the text ads.
Observations
Navigation on the Profit From Free Ads site is broken.
You go to some pages and there’s no way back to the previous page except for clicking the browser Back button.
Sometimes the options in the navigation menu change and the “Home” link, as an example, may end up taking to you to the Profit From Free Ads sales page instead of your ads dashboard.
Other times, menu items disappear or have different names.
I’d expect, given that this site probably has earned its owners a tidy profit is that they could at least put some of that into fixing the site issues.
But I guess not.
It explains why I just had a general “this site is tacky” initial reaction to the site before I even signed up.
While I’ve no direct experience of using Jane Mark’s and Phil Basten’s other web properties, it wouldn’t surprise me if they’re as equally badly designed.
All this suggests to me that they’re interested in taking your money and not interested in providing a good customer experience.
I can only conclude that either the traffic in the Profit From Free Ads ecosystem is next to useless and/or there’s some questions to be answered about how reliable their ad statistics are, especially when they seem to be preventing real tracking of ad performance.
I received no new signups from any of the reported ad clicks – I know this because there were no signups during the short time these ads were actually active and I didn’t get any signups for several hours after I ran these ads.
For these reasons, I can’t recommend Profit From Free Ads as a traffic source (and you won’t find any affiliate links for it in this post) and I won’t be spending any more money with them.
So this part of my lead generation experiment has come to a conclusion and has been terminated.
On foot of my experience here, I won’t be investing any money in any of Jane Mark’s & Phil Basten’s other platforms.
I’d love to hear your opinion of them and their advertising platforms if you’ve ever used them.
All the best,
Gary Nugent
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P.S.: Don't forget, if you want to create an internet income of your own, here's one of my recommended ways to do that:
