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

First things first, I’m not a legal expert and so this article DOES NOT represent any legal or professional information and nor can I guarantee its accuracy. I only wrote this article to introduce you to these email laws that might affect us, email marketers.

OK, so what’re these email laws?

They’re the Child Protection Registry laws that have been taken into effect in the State of Michigan and Utah.

These laws established “Do Not Email” registries into which individuals or institutions that primarily serve minors can enter minors’ email addresses or any email address to which minors may have access. Institutions or entities that primarily serve minors can also register their entire domain names.

People are prohibited by these laws from sending email to the addresses that have been in the registries for 30 days or more if the email contains material or link to material that is illegal for minors. And it doesn’t matter whether the email is solicited or unsolicited, you still can’t send such email.

You might think that the materials must be something obvious such as pornography, gambling, alcohol, etc. Yes, but they’re only part of the materials.

The other part consists of less obvious stuff, namely stuff that looks fine, but might be illegal for minors because minors are prohibited by law from viewing, receiving, participating, possessing, or purchasing this stuff. This includes automotive sales, etc.

And according to the Institute for Spam and Internet Public Policy, these laws apply to almost all people in the United States and even those outside the United States who have a physical presence in the United States. (see http://www.isipp.com/child-protection-email-address-registries .php)

So, imagine you have some email addresses in your list that happen to be already in the “do not email” registry for 30 days, but you’re not aware of them. And one day, you send an email that contains a link to a webpage that has some Adsense ads that advertise some automotive sales, guess what may happen to you?

Well, your action may be considered as a computer crime and you might face civil suit and fines or/and you might even face criminal suit and penalty.

So far, there are two things that you can do to prevent you from getting trouble with these laws.

First, make sure that you never send email that contains material or link to material which is illegal for minors. This is so obvious, right?

Second, if you think that you can’t comply with the first option, then you can purge your list by matching it against the registries in a regular basis. But there are fees for this.

Don’t panic about these laws. Instead, find more information about it. You can start learning more about these laws by visiting the references below:

- Michigan Children’s Protection Registry site:
https://www.protectmichild.com

- Michigan Public Act No. 241:
http://www.legislature.mi.gov/documents/2003-2004/publicact/ht m/2004-PA-0241.htm

- Michigan Public Act No. 242:
http://www.legislature.mi.gov/documents/2003-2004/publicact/ht m/2004-PA-0242.htm

- Utah Code - Child Protection Registry:
http://www.le.state.ut.us/~code/TITLE13/13_26.htm

- Michigan government’s press release:
http://www.michigan.gov/gov/0,1607,7-168-23442_21974-121645–,0 0.html

Tags: Email: Opt-in Email Marketing: Email Newsletter: Newsletter Marketing

Have you ever watched a television drama that drew you deeply in and then ended suddenly with a cliffhanger?

How did you feel? Was your adrenaline pumping? Could you wait to find out what happened next? Did you feel discomfort? If you answered “yes” to any of these questions, the drama had successfully created a “zeigarnik effect” within you.

Wait a minute…what’s a “zeigarnik effect”?

In 1927, a psychologist named Bluma Zeigarnik pointed out that people tend to better remember a task that was not completed because of an interruption, than a task that was completed. According to her, an uncompleted task creates a mental tension that persists until the task is completed. This “mental tension” causes retention of that task in your memory.

If you’ve been in this internet marketing world for awhile, then you know how difficult it is to grab people’s attention for your commercial message. The reason for this is because the internet has many wonderful things that pull people’s attention to various directions. And all they need is one click to move from one thing to another.

In this case, zeigarnik effect can be a powerful device you can use to interrupt people’s surfing preoccupation and make them pay attention to whatever message you want to convey to them. You can also use zeigarnik effect to influence people to click on a link or to buy your product. In a nutshell, zeigarnik effect can be used to get your most wanted response from your traffic or prospects.

In commercial messages, zeigarnik effect is usually employed by using incomplete information to create curiosity and thus a feeling of discomfort and tension in the reader’s mind. If you want to see an example of zeigarnik effect in commercial message, you can see it in a viral report titled “The 2 Things Porn Sites are Doing to Make Billions Annually, and How You Can Too” that you can download at http://www.webtrafficideas.com/pornviport.exe.

As you can see, the “teaser page” of the report (the content that shows up first when you open the file) gives hints on what is behind the success of the internet porn industry, i.e., two tactics that have nothing to do with exploiting sexuality or traditional marketing and which are easy to apply to any business. But it doesn’t provide the complete answer. It only teases you to get you to send email to 3 of your friends and the complete answer will only be revealed after you get the job done.

Of course, zeigarnik effect is not a Jedi mind trick. Its effectiveness is relative to various factors. For example, if you’re using the aforementioned viral report to people who are looking for baby items, it might not work, because you’re saying it to the wrong people. Besides that, to get the most out of zeigarnik effect, you still need to combine it with other copywriting techniques.

Tags: Copywriting: Advertising

I feel sorry about what happened to this mom, Alice Seba. One of her websites, malcolmsweb.com, has been banned by Google, even though that website was full with good content. Since May 21, 2005, her visitors instantly dropped from about 700-800 per day to 200-250 per day.

There is an important lesson to be learned here. Never rely your business on the search engines. They’re unstable, always changing their algorithms. Instead, use the search engines only as ONE of your traffic sources and look for other traffic generation techniques to build multiple sources of traffic.

OK, to read Alice’s story, go visit her blog post, ‘Alice “White Hat” Seba Has Been Banned’.

Tags: Search Engine Marketing: SEM

In my previous post, I shared with you Jack Humphrey’s special report that shows us the fact that the search engines only constitute a small portion of his website’s traffic.

Now, I found another similar fact from Tinu Abayomi-Paul, the free traffic chick. In her blog post, “Site Promotion is Multi-Faceted”, she said that the search engines only constitute 6 - 10% of her traffic in any given month. While she didn’t tell us about the monthly amount of traffic to her website, I believe that her site gets huge traffic every month, because she has an Alexa ranking of 41,407 (that’s what my Alexa toolbar showed me at the time I wrote this post).

Tags: Search Engine Marketing: SEM

I wonder why some net marketers are too obsessed on getting top listings in the major search engines as if it is the only way to get targeted traffic to our website/blog.

I know that the major search engines are one of the biggest sources of targeted traffic in the net, but getting top listings in those engines is not the only way to get targeted traffic to our website/blog. And it can be quite tough and stressful to get high ranking in those engines, especially if you’re targeting crowded, competitive, keywords.

Jack Humphrey, the power linking guy, has given us a picture that it is possible to get huge amount of targeted traffic without the top listings in the major search engines. In his Special Report, “What if Google Didn’t Exist?”, he shared one of his sites’ stat in April 2004 and guess what? From 71,444 unique visitors that he got at that month, “google search” referred only a small portion of them, i.e. 0.07%.

This doesn’t mean that you should completely abandon your efforts on getting top listings in the major search engines. The purpose of this post is only to, borrowing Jack’s words, “help people relax about search engne marketing.”

Tags: Search Engine Marketing: SEM

The first time I found this traffic generator program, I was very skeptical. I thought it must be the same as some of the other “junky” traffic generator programs out there. But what made me curious at that time was that one of the names associated with this program was Mark Joyner. Well, some people may not like him, but it doesn’t change the fact that he is one of the legends of internet marketing.

But Mark alone didn’t eliminate my skepticism. I’ve used many traffic generator programs out there and what I found was that they all require some kind of tedious work, or initial traffic to generate traffic, and the results are poor. That’s why I’m so skeptical at those generators on the net. However, the curiosity triggered by the name “Mark Joyner” led me into joining this program.

After I joined this program, I asked my upline, Javier Salces from Opt-InLeads.com, about his result with this program. And his email really made my scepticism vanished. In only two weeks, he earned 30 new subscribers, 15 new members to his viral list builder and $134 from two direct sales. While this may have happened because he has many referrals, his answer gave me a picture of the potentials of this program.

OK, so what is this program that has such a good potential?

This program is called InstantBuzz and it’s a viral ad exchange. It has three advertising formats, i.e. the bar ads, the mailspace ads and the hyperspace ads, and it works just like any ad exchange, where in return for showing other members’ ads, you will get credits to show your ads. It’s also viral in the sense that you’ll also earn credits when your downlines show other members’ ads.

The bar ads, which is a text link ad that appears in InstantBuzz toolbar (a Google like toolbar that is required to be downloaded when you first join InstantBuzz), is what made me fond of InstantBuzz. The bar ads is great because it overcomes the shortcomings of other types of traffic generator programs. To know why, I’ll just make some comparisons here…

In traffic exchanges, to generate traffic you need to do the tedious work of clicking and the traffic is of poor quality, because users are forced or persuaded to see other users’ sites.

In the bar ads, you still need to surf to generate traffic, but it is different from surfing in traffic exchanges. You only need to surf as you normally would, e.g. to Google, to your favorite websites and forums, etc., and every time your browser reloaded, you will earn credits that can be used to show your ads. And the traffic might be better in quality than traffic exchanges, because members aren’t forced or persuaded to click on your ads. They click on your ads voluntarily.

In banner exchanges, text ad exchanges or any kind of pop up exchanges (pop under, pop exit, fly-in ads, etc.), you don’t need to do any tedious work like in traffic exchanges. But you do need to have traffic first to generate the ad impressions.

In the bar ads, you don’t need to have initial traffic to generate the ad impressions. As I’ve mentioned above, you only need to do your usual daily surfing.

But, just like everything else in this world, the bar ads also has a shortcoming. The bar ads is a “peer-to-peer” ad exchange and so its reach is limited to InstantBuzz members. This means that you can only get targeted audiences if you’re promoting business or webmaster stuff (it is so obvious that all InstantBuzz members are marketers). There might be stories about people who made sales on non-business or non-webmaster stuff via the bar ads, but I think the odds of getting sales with these kinds of products/services are slim.

If you’re interested in trying InstantBuzz, you can contact me at zaki@webtrafficideas.com and ask for an invitation (please include your first and last name, since they’re required for sending the invitation). Up till the time I wrote this post, the “official rule” of InstantBuzz said that one can only join InstantBuzz with an invitation or by using a link in the mailspace ads/hyperspace ads.

Tag: Traffic Exchange

Finally, I have this blog up and running.

To be honest with you, I’m no expert on web traffic generation and conversion techniques, but I’m passionate and a kind of obsessed with this web traffic thingy. And that’s one of the main reasons why I build this blog.

For me, web traffic is very important because it comes prior to almost everything else in internet marketing. You can have a killer salesletter, excellent product, etc., but without web traffic, all of them won’t do you any good.

So, if you think that web traffic is important, please join me on my ramblings, give comments to my posts, share your findings with me, etc. I would be glad to share and learn from you about this web traffic thingy.