Updates on how is the software performing?
Hard to tell. It's been 3 weeks and there are some issues with it. When you submit a youtube video url, it asks "How many days to you wish to span for organic appearance of your Video Embeds/Backlinks to your YouTube Video?" and gives you a dropdown menu. You can choose 7, 14 or 30.
What the fuck does that mean? After a struggle I found out how to email the guy who I'm paying the $47/mo to, and I asked him. He blathered an equally incoherent response.
Does it mean, e.g. if you choose 7 days, that it'll create an embed once every 7 days for x weeks? Or does it mean it'll embed it once a day for 7 days then stop? Who knows.
I still don't know. I sent him 2 more emails seeking guidance and have not received a reply.
On the plus side, my videos are indeed ranking #1 for some of my targeted keywords in quotes, and much lower (so far) for that same keyword without quotes (youtube search, using Tor in multiple countries to rule-out youtube algo hanky-panky.)
One of the keywords for which the corresponding video is ranking #1 in quotes gets 900 searches a month on youtube according to ahrefs.
Not many total video views so far and no clickbank sales so far (I've tested only Clickbank so far since that's what I've gotten sales from in the distant past), but I have gotten a few hops.
One very telling thing is that the videos are jumping around a lot for the targeted keyword. I was #7 one day - and one day only - for a very competitive keyword in quotes, but the video has since vanished from youtube search results. Others have jumped up & down by 20 or 30 positions.
This is exactly the sort of behavior my youtube vids would display back in the days that I was embedding manually using Web 2.0 sites. After awhile they became firmly attached at or near the top of the rankings. So the fact that these videos are behaving that very same way is encouraging to me.
Of course, there's no way to know if all of this is due to merely following all the keyword rules Mark sets out in his video, and whether Action Video Ranker is having any effect at all. Or if it's even doing anything, since I can't figure out how to find out if a video has embeds and if so, where.
I'm intrigued enough that I'm going to give it some time. A few months at least. Meanwhile, I'll keep testing various niches and veer away from Clickbank etc just to see what happens. Of course at some point I'll have to do a scientific test where I use the ranking software on one video & not on another (all else being equal in terms of following Mark's keyword rules) and gauge the results.