Issac G's Blog

One of the things that I’ve quickly fallen in love with ThumbVu for is… No, not the thumbnails allowing you to pick which site you want to view next, although they’re cool too.  Not the voting buttons on the surfbar either – but they’re cool too; they allow you to send positive or negative feedback about the page you’re on to the site owner.

Anyway, before I get carried on about the things I didn’t want to talk about, let’s try to focus on what I did: the “Connect with” button on the surf bar.  When clicked it opens up the surfbar to show more information about whose page you’re currently viewing (including contact information for those people).

I like the feature for two main reasons.

Firstly, it lets me learn a lot about what people whom I already know are promoting.  For example, Tim Linden promotes his TE Toolbox rotator, whereas Tony Tezak promotes a splash page for Tezak Traffic Power.  But by watching what is being promoted, and by whom, there’s a lot that you can learn and take away from

Secondly, it helps me find interesting people who are marketing good pages and try to connect with them.  Like take Penny Cannon, who was randomly selected to be featured here by virtue of having a picture uploaded to ThumbVu and a matching picture branding her on this page.  That’s someone who understands the basics of Traffic Exchanges and is therefore someone whom I’d want to connect with more than people who keep rotating generic affiliate salesletter pages, who have a lot to learn.  (One might argue that I could do the opposite, too, and connect with people who don’t know the basics and give them a free copy of my book to help teach them )

The best part about this nifty feature is the fact that I asked for it to be available as a default option in my surf, and was rewarded with the admin’s agreement and it being added as an option in your “Profile” page just 24 hours after I’d made the request.  Kudos to John for making that happen so fast!

Anyway, in conclusion, there’s lots to learn from this exchange and I get the feeling that the social marketing potential will exceed even what I got out of Hitsilo (you’re gonna have to search the blog archives for that – I’m too lazy to post a link.  Sorry)

So anyway, what do you like (or hate) about ThumbVu?

I hope the new year’s going well for you.

Let me get straight to the point.  First, yes, this is going to be a “sales pitch” post.  Bummer – sorry.  But there’s a bright side to it.

There’s a program that just launched a few days ago – made a lot of noise for just a few days…   And then got quiet again.  I had a tragedy in the family (great uncle had a heart attack and passed away ) so I only saw the launch emails a day late, and didn’t really act on them.

THEN, today I got a tweeted something from my buddy Jamison Raymond, and I went to look and it was this same site that I’d heard about.  So I figure, ok let’s take a look.

And, boy – it was REALLY really REALLY cool!

Like check out this splash page (I love it and it’s available for anyone to use!):

I haven’t used a splash page out-of-the-box in ages, but I loved this one!

The program is really cool too.  It’s new and slick – like Traffic Dealer and Top Tier Traffic were when they came out.  They have really amazing social media and list building integration (pro members only :/ ) which is amazing, and may convince me to keep my upgraded membership just by itself.

And it’s semi-targetted traffic; people see a thumbnail of your site and click on it to visit it, so you’ve already got people who are semi-interested.  I love it!

They’re also very person-branding oriented.  There’s plenty of places to get your face and your links in front of people.  Whenever someone clicks on your site, in addition to your site being displayed, your picture, blog, twitter, facebook, skype, and any other details you want ALSO can be displayed – that’s personal branding on a whole new level!

The best part is, I happened to notice that there’s a cash contest for referals.  The leader, Jon Atwood, has only 11 referrals, which means that noone is promoting it, meaning that there’s HUGE potential to still build a massive downline there!  Even better, they give their pro members random referals.  I can’t promise results from getting in early on random referals, but I jumped in at High Hits when it just launched an random referals alone have built me a downline of 10% of the membership base there!

There’s an upgrade option, which I found to be a tad on the pricey side, but if nothing else, at LEAST try a 1-month trial at $17 (inside the site it’s more) – the social media, 250 free credits EVERY WEEK, and the rest are all worth it.

Definitely check it out (hey – at least sign up for free and maybe help ME win the referral contest, maybe? )

Heck, they even desigend it specifically to work from your iPhone!  How friggin’ cool is that?!?

Anyway, I’m still loving my first experience with it and hope this one will both be a keeper and teach us some new ways to market ourselves better!

So I was checking out @timlinden’s blog where he was asking his followers what they thought of 2009, advertising wise, and saw something which I’d been waiting to see for quite a bit, although most of it was in the form of “Yeah, what she said…”.

People seem to want a better reason to sign up for your list than to get a free download.

That’s cool with me, as I’ve already got something like that going with Insta!Login – now all I’ve got to do is monetize it

On the subject, I’m still waiting for more people to fill out my end-of-2009 survey, but there are some interesting findings already and once I get a slightly more significant sample of answers, I’ll be sharing what I find, so fill yours out if you haven’t yet so I can get the answers out ASAP!