Those are pretty strong alegations you’ve made… I’d be interested to see what others have to say.

I’m not in a position to comment as I’ve not studied that particular course. I will say, however, that I’ve read a couple of Michaels books, subscribe to his ezine ‘Early to Rise’ and have found immense value in them.

Bob Bly also commands a lot of respect from myself and other prominent marketers.

I was on the phone with Clayton Makepeace the other week and he stated that if anybody wants to become one of his ‘Copy Cubs’ the absolute MINIMUM requirement is to have completed the AWAI copywriting course.

Clayton is held in high regard among business people the world over. He also has 34 years experience as a top level copywriter so if he thinks there is value in the course I’d be inclined to agree with him.

Do any other readers have the same or opposing views? Leave me a comment and let me know.

Stuart.

First, there is no such person as Michael Masterson. His real name is Mark Ford.

The business operates out of a dingy little building on a crime ridden side street in Delray Beach, Florida. If you ever saw the place you’d never buy a thing from them.

There is so much that is wrong with the program. It is, of course, actually a homestudy/correspondence course. They like to pretend they are some kind of a school and recently got in trouble with the State of Florida because they are not a school and never have been.

It’s all a most clever and effective scam. They use testimonials from family members to sell their products. Other testimonials come from business associates *such as Mr. Bly) who get fees for speaking at their “bootcamp” seminars. The critiques they offer to do for “students” are done by copywriter wannabes for a whopping ten bucks each. The course is about 500 poorly written pages with lots of blank pages designed for you to do your “assignments”.

The promotions they use to sell the course are full of half-truths, distortions, vague innuendo, careful omissions, lies, deceptions, selective memories, phony testimonials, exaggerated claims, over-simplifications, forced conclusions, unsubstantiated “facts”, trickery, etc.

They’ve been running the same promotions for years and have continually “improved” upon it so it’s no wonder it’s so effective. I’ve seen it compared to the old “get rich stuffing enveloped” fraud of previous decades.

The truth is, it’s a worthless rudimentary correspondence course. It will not prepare you to earn $100,000+ a year and that’s really the sad part. The scam is so good that people buy into the dream and waste a ton of money and a few years of their lives before they finally realize they’ve been duped.

The course is so weak that they like to load up “bonuses” to persuade you to buy. They throw in a bunch of worthless booklets filled with “copywriting secrets” and other such nonsense.

And if you try to hustle up some copywriting work and say you graduated from the course, you’ll be laughed at. It hold no credibility and gives you no credentials.

And along the way, AWAI works on convincing you to buy more of their programs or attend their silly $2000 “bootcamps” which are equally useless. Given the chance, they’ll hit you for $5000 or $6000 in bootcamps, teleseminars, CD’s, DVD’s and other materials and you still won’t have a career in copywriting.

It’s also interesting to note that AWAI employees never seem to take the course themselves, and run off to become high paid freelance copywriters. Looks like they are either stupid or don’t believe the baloney they are peddling.

It’s all a most elaborate and carefully crafted scam.

But if you still want to go with it, you can often buy the course on eBay. A couple sold within the last month for $132.