First things first, I would like to apologize for a mistake that I made in the past.

If you’ve been a reader of my list or/and blog for long, then you know that I’ve promoted a list builder program that is called TheListMachine.

At first I thought this program was good, but after having a decent list size and doing three CTR (clickthrough rate) tests on the program, I must admit that I was wrong.

The CTR tests that I have done are comparison tests. So what I was doing was sending similar emails that contain free offers about internet marketing to TheListMachine and my own list at almost the same time, and then compared the CTR generated from both lists.

There might be some limitations in these tests. For example, while the emails that I sent to my own list were free from any sponsor ad, I’ve seen some kind of sponsor ad in some of TheListMachine emails that I received. So, it’s possible that they also put a sponsor ad in some or all of my emails. This means that the emails received by both lists might not be 100% the same.

But in spite of their limitations, I still believe that these tests can give us an approximate depiction about the quality of TheListMachine program.

Now let’s go the results of the tests…

First Test Result:

Second Test Result:

Third Test Result:

Well, as you can see from the stats above, compared to the CTRs of my own list, the CTRs of TheListMachine are incredibly low. So I don’t think TheListMachine is worth your time and efforts. Instead, spend your time and efforts on building your own list.

You’ve probably seen many ads that say something like this…

“How A 20 Years Old High School Drop Out Make $12,345 Per Day and How You Can Too!”

What it tries to convey is the “foolproofness” of the product or service that is being sold.

So if a 20 years old (young and so, lack of experience) high school drop out (not smart) can earn $12,345 per day because of the system that he’s using, then the same system can make anyone achieve the same (or better) result.

At first, I didn’t see anything wrong with this kind of ad.

But Nick Usborne’s article, “One of the Biggest Lies in Advertising”, has made me think about the “ethical aspect” of this kind of ad.

According to Nick, that kind of ad is one of the biggest lies in advertising.

He believes that success is a personal matter. If someone achieves successful result with a certain method, that doesn’t mean the same method will generate the same result for other people.

And if there are people who achieve the same (or better) result with that method, it’s not just because of the method and it’s certainly not because someone has done it before them, but it’s because those people have the skills and attitudes that fit with the method.

Hmm, any thought on this?

Tags: Marketing: Internet Marketing: Internet-Marketing: Advertising: Copywriting

First things first, when I say “traffic exchange(s)” in this article, I’m referring to the free, manual, general traffic exchanges. So, it excludes autosurf programs, paid traffic exchanges and blog traffic exchanges.

Now what do you think about traffic exchanges? Are they worth your time and efforts?

Well, you may have a different opinion about this, but I don’t think they’re worth your time and efforts.

Why?

Because they produce low quality traffic. Most people who visit your site in traffic exchanges do so only to get credits, and not because they’re interested in your site.

And since traffic exchange users want to get as much credits in the shortest time possible, many of them surf several traffic exchanges simultaneously by using a multiple tabbed browser such as Crazy Browser or Firefox.

They rarely wait for the timer to end. After they click on one traffic exchange, they move on to the next, and so on, until the last traffic exchange in their browser.

Then they get back to the first traffic exchange, in which the timer is already 0. They will then click again and repeat the cycle. So, they rarely pay attention to your web page.

Now, this kind of traffic is very hard to convert. Even if you follow the advices being given out there such as using a short landing page, etc., you may still find them difficult to convert.

I know this because way back in 2004, I spent many of my times on using traffic exchanges. At first, I was hooked, because they’re easy to use. You just click, click, click and you will get tons of traffic.

However, after awhile, I started to feel that there is something wrong about them. Because I can get more then 1000 unique visitors without any results. Even after I’ve followed many advices out there, I only got low results, like 1-2 free sign ups from 100-300 visitors.

And after months of using them, I started to feel that clicking in traffic exchanges is not a fun thing to do. Actually, it’s very tedious and produces a mind-killing experience.

Now the only way to reduce this tediousness is by transferring most of your burden to your downlines. But that’s where I found a dilemma, because that means I’ll put people into this mind-killing experience.

Don’t get me wrong. I’m not against the viral downline structure. My problem is with that tedious-but-only-produce-low-result activities. If it doesn’t require any tedious work or if it produces fair results, then I would be glad to recruit people as my downlines.

Of course my opinion above might be subjective, as it’s mostly based on my own experiences. Other people might have different experiences and thus different opinion about traffic exchanges.

And by the way, if you’re promoting non-internet business stuff such as cat food, you’ll probably get nil result from traffic exchange. Traffic exchange is a “peer to peer” advertising program, which means that your audiences are also advertisers or internet business people.

Tag: Traffic Exchange

Do you know that for every email that you send to your list, there is a chance that some of your subscribers will pass it to their friends or acquaintances?

Well, it’s very easy for them to pass your email. They only need to use the forward function in their email account or software, enter their friends or acquaintances’ email addresses, and then click the send button.

And if your email that they’ve passed around contains a link to your lead-capture page or the email address of your autoresponder, then you might get a couple of new subscribers.

Of course, whether or not people will pass your email depends on many factors, such as the interestingness of your email content, etc. But regardless of those factors, you can try to increase the chance of people passing your email by encouraging them to do so.

It’s very easy to do and it won’t cost you any money or much time to implement. Just add a postscript (P.S.) in every email newsletter that you send, that says something like this:

If you found this newsletter to be useful, feel free to forward this email to your friends or acquaintances. And let them know that they can subscribe to my newsletter at http://www.blahblahblah.com or by sending a blank email to subscribe@blahblahblah.com. They’ll thank you for it and so will I.

I know that this sounds too simple, but don’t let its simplicity fools you. I’ve seen people passing around other people’s email in the net, and I believe that this “passing behavior” is quite common among internet users.

And by the way, if you want to use the postscript example above, feel free to copy, paste and modify it to suit your own needs.

Tags: Marketing Viral: Viral: Word of Mouth: WOM: Buzz Marketing

Many people out there said that “content is king” when it comes to web traffic generation. Even though, IMHO, content is not the only king, I tend to agree with them. If done properly, content can attract free, long term, targeted traffic to your website.

Here’re three ways on how content can attract free, long term, targeted traffic to your website:

1. Content attracts free search engine traffic

It has been well-known that the search engines love content. The more content you have in your website, the more keywords you can rank for, and thus the more traffic you can get from the search engines.

However, not every content can do well in the search engines. The search engines have sets of rules (also known as algorithms) to rank websites in their indexes and some of these rules go beyond content (off-page factors). You need to “optimize your site” to meet these rules if you want to rank well in the search engines.

The problem, though, is that there are differing opinions about these rules and it seems that no one can give exact answers about them. Also, these rules often change, which makes them quite difficult to be followed.

That’s why I usually only do little optimization, sometimes as little as putting one keyword in the title tag and getting links. I stopped paying attention to the details because they wasted my time more then they gave me results.

2. Content attracts links from other websites

There are two benefits of having incoming links pointing to your site. First, you can get direct traffic from people who click through the links. And second, incoming links can increase your search engine ranking. In general, the search engines count incoming links as votes to your website.

Now how can content attract links to your website? Well, there are various scenarios on how content can attract links to your websites. But since I only have limited space and time here, let me just tell you the two popular scenarios.

First, you can write articles with link in your resource box and submit them to article directories and relevant websites that accept article submission. Many web publishers out there have a “content deficit” problem, and they’re hungry for your content. You can get your links spread out fast around the Internet by using this method.

Second, if your website contains “linkworthy” content, then other webmasters might voluntarily link to your content or website. However, this is a passive method, and you may not want to rely on this method and wait for someone to link to you.

3. Content attracts viral traffic

Viral marketing works by encouraging other people to transmit your marketing message to the others. If done properly, it can spread your marketing message around the Internet just like a contagious virus spreads around a society.

There are various motivations that can encourage other people to spread your marketing message. One of them is the “desire to obtain material possession.” You’ve probably seen the tactic of giving people incentive to spread a marketing message.

However, not all people are moved by the “desire to obtain material possession.” Many people are moved by mere excitement or other non-selfish motivations.

This is where content can attract viral traffic. If your content (that is part of your website or contains link to your website), is extremely useful, informative, or just downright funny as hell that people will say “Wow!” when they see it, then people might spread or tell others about your content.

You can also try to increase the viral effect of your content by making it easy for people to spread or tell others about your content, for example by providing an email link to your site’s visitors to email their friends or acquaintances about your content.

Tags: Business: Marketing: Web Marketing: Increase Website Traffic

If you’re marketing via blog, then you might want to know that Google has just launched its blog search engine. It’s still in beta, but it’s already available to the public at http://blogsearch.google.com, http://google.com/blogsearch and http://search.blogger.com (Blogger-style interface). You can also access the Google Blog Search via Blogger homepage or dashboard.

I first found this information from The Blog Herald’s review on the Google Blog Search. It then led me to Scoble’s review and thus to Chris Sherman’s article at SearchEngineWatch. In Chris’ article, I found out that just like many other blog and RSS search engines, the Google Blog Search crawls blogs and feeds’ content in real-time to serve up fresh search results.

What this means is that theoretically, you can get your blog post indexed fast by the Google Blog Search. The only thing that you need to do is to ping the popular pingservers everytime you update your blog. You may also want your blog to publish a feed because Google Blog Search will only include blogs that publish web feeds.

Now can this Google Blog Search become a new traffic source for blogs? Yes, I think so, at least after this new service has become popular. And since this one is founded by the famed giant, Google, I don’t think it would take long for this new service to become popular.

Tags: Blog: Blogs: Blogging: Weblogs: Blog Promotion: Blogging Services: RSS

You’ve probably heard hundreds of times that “the money is in the list,” but why’s that? What’s so special about having your own opt-in email lists? The answer lies in the three benefits of having your own opt-in email list:

1. It Can Increase Your Conversion

Let’s face the fact. Most of your site’s visitors usually don’t purchase at their first visit. Not everyone that comes to your site is an impulse buyer. Most of them may need to be followed up before they make their buying decision.

Also, most people prefer to buy from people they trust. This means that you may need to build a relationship first with your visitors to earn their trust before you start seeing some sales from them.

Now if you’re just generating traffic without building your opt-in email lists, you don’t have any means to contact your visitors. You can’t contact them with your website, because a website is a passive medium.

But if you capture your visitors’ contact information and turn them into subscribers, you’ll have the ability to contact them, follow them up, and build rapport with them, thus increasing your chance of getting sales from them.

2. It Can Give You Ongoing Profits and Repeat Business

Let’s say that you have 500 people subscribing to your e-course that pre-sells some relevant products. From those 500 subscribers, 25 bought your products. Is that means your efforts to get the other 475 subscribers are wasted?

Of course not, because you can always market to your subscribers again and again with other relevant products and/or services. And this is actually the number one benefit of having your opt-in email lists, namely ongoing profits and repeat business.

One thing that you may want to do though if you plan to send ongoing content and/or offers to your subscribers is to express it explicitly in your opt-in form or page. In this way, they know what to expect when they subscribe to your list, thus reducing the risk of SPAM complaints.

3. You Can Leverage Your Subscribers to Promote Your Business

This is perhaps one of the most neglected functions of an opt-in email list. Many people only see their lists as a means to generate direct sales. They fail to see that they can actually leverage their subscribers to become their partners in promotion.

And I don’t only mean recruiting joint venture partners or affiliates from your opt-in email lists. There are various other ways to leverage your subscribers to promote your business. And you can always leverage even if you’re in a business-to-consumer market.

Let me give you one simple example. For every newsletter that you send to your lists, there is a chance that your subscribers will pass it to their friends or acquaintances. And if your newsletter contains links to your website, opt-in page or sales pages, you may get some visitors, subscribers or even sales.

Now to increase the chance of your subscribers passing your newsletter, you can encourage them to do that. It’s a no-brainer and it won’t cost you any money or much time to implement. Just add a postscript in your newsletter that asks people to forward it to their friends or acquaintances (you can read more about this technique on my other blog post, “A Free, No-Brainer, Way to Turn Your Subscribers Into Referrers”).

Final Words

If you’re still generating traffic without having any list building mechanism in place, then you’re making a big mistake in your Internet business. This is especially true if you’re still pushing for traffic. Come on, you’ve worked hard, spent your time or maybe paid some money to generate your traffic, why let most of them leave empty-handed?

Even if you’re already in the level of enjoying tons of free, perpetual traffic, there is no reason why you should not have a list building mechanism in place. Because it will enhance your business, giving you the ability to actively engage your prospects and recycle your traffic.

In one of my previous posts, I told you about a ping service called King Ping that can be an alternative to Pingomatic. Now, there’s another ping service that’s far more then just an alternative to Ping-O-Matic or King Ping. It’s called Pingoat and IMHO, it’s the coolest ping service available in the blogosphere. I first found this awesome service via Willie Crawford’s blog post, “2 Places To Automatically Ping Your Blogs”.

So, what’s so cool about Pingoat?

Well, if (at the time I wrote this post) Ping-O-Matic and King Ping only cover 20 and 18 services respectively, Pingoat covers 49 services. Almost all the services that are covered by Pingomatic and King Ping are also covered by Pingoat. Besides that, Pingoat also supports XML-RPC ping, which means that you can add Pingoat XML-RPC url to your blog application and make your blog application automatically ping Pingoat every time you updated your blog. Of course, the later only applies to blog applications that support automatic pinging.

Tags: Pingoat: Ping: Blog and Ping: Pingomatic: Ping-O-Matic: King Ping: Blogging Services: Blog Promotion

I’ve just completed my transition from Blogger to WordPress. Actually, I moved from Blogger because I often encountered the annoying problem of getting stucked at certain percentages (5%, 25%, 50%, etc.) when I republished my blog in Blogger. And initially, I chose WordPress simply because of WordPress popularity.

However, after playing around with WordPress for awhile, I felt in love with it. WordPress has some features that Blogger doesn’t have such as the ability of having categories and posting to multiple categories. And also, WordPress has a lot of plugins that we can install for additional functionalities.

Tags: Blogger: WordPress: Blog

If you’re a blogger, then you may have known and familiar with Ping-O-Matic.

It could be a little annoying when after updating your blog and wanting to ping that update, you find out that Pingomatic is down. Of course, you can wait until they’re up and running again, but sometimes it is still a little annoying, especially if the downtime takes more then one day.

Now, you don’t have to be worried about that anymore, because Frédérick Giasson has made this Ping-O-Matic alternative called King Ping. I first found his service via Thomas Pierce’s blog post, “Ping-O-Matic Alternative”.

Tags: King Ping: Pingomatic: Ping-O-Matic: Ping: Blog and Ping: Blog Promotion