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.

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

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