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Conclusion: TrafficSwarm’s Quality is Dropping

September 8th, 2011 8 comments

A month ago I wrote about how excited I was about the silent re-launch of TrafficSwarm, but after a month of upgraded membership, I’ve got to say that I was disappointed with the outcome.  My time-tested banners didn’t convert; my time-tested squeeze pages didn’t work; even copy that rocks on AdWords didn’t perform on-par in TrafficSwarm.

I’m not sure what happened, or if maybe I just had a bad few weeks with them; I honestly wish I was getting the old performance so I could keep paying for their awesome-ness, but it’s not gonna happen based on what I’ve seen the last month.

Such is life, I guess.

On a happier (much happier) note, I’ve recently re-discovered AdSense.  Would you believe that after just one month’s work, starting completely from scratch, I’m already averaging a dollar a day?  That’s with just 2 sites showing up in the top 10 in google for *anything* and as I work on SEO, the rankings are increasing, and so are the daily profits.  Cool!

The next step is to plug in banners for some of my favorite clickbank products.

White-Hat Clickbank Product Celebrates Second Birthday

August 7th, 2011 4 comments

I know, I know.   I harp about this product a lot.  But it’s still the aboslute coolest and best that I know of in it’s niche, and still earns me the most every month.  (And I had so much fun making the video for them - especially the bloopers :D )

ClickBank Raises the Bar – Promotes “White Hat” Sales Techniques & Cracks Down on “Black Hat”

August 2nd, 2011 2 comments

I just finished reading the update to Clickbank’s terms of services for vendors, and WOW!

They’re taking real steps to help unsuspecting customers remain safe from unscrupulous vendors.

Here’s a short list of the changes:

  • No “fake” testimonials or “fake” sellers.

I love this one – I recently saw a product sold on clickbank where the sales page described a “normal” person – actually, a hobo – who climbed from living off the streets to riches within a year of using the traffic methods being advertised in the product.  It made me sick, though, when I found out shortly later that the entire “story” was a made up fairy tale – the person didn’t exist, it hadn’t necessarily transform anyone’s life – it was all a crock of s*%#

No more of that.

Also of personal interest to me is no more “video only” web pages that you can’t stop or pause.

  •  No fake scarcity

No more countdowns saying “only 13 minutes left to buy”.  No more “Only 60 37 12 remaining.  Buy Now!”  Unless it’s real.  If you write something like that, Clickbank will count how many sales are made, and when that “3″ hits “0″ they won’t let you sell your product any more for another week!  Note that “one time offers” which only really do display once, are still allowed – they’re not banning scarcity, justblatantly  made-up scarcity.

  • No more fake discounts

No more saying “This product normally sells for $997, but TODAY ONLY you can get it for just $97!” – again, not unless it’s true.  Clickbank will check the prices, and if you’ve sold the product for a while at $997, you can write it…  But you can’t just plug in a $997 price tag for the sake of offering the discount.

  • Limits on One-Time-Offers / Upsells

There’s nothing wrong with an honest upsell!  But no more days of buying a cheap product only to be slammed with tens of offers to confuse and frighten you.  There are now firm limits of how many upsells can be offered, as well as how many “wait one second!” exit offers are allowed

There are a few more, and you can view the full details at Clickbank’s website.

My favorite part of these new rules is that my products already comply with every single one of them!  (Go me!)  How’s that for honest marketing?

Do you know of products that do or don’t comply?  Let me know by commenting!

Of Pirates, Treasures, Birthdays and Lot’s of Loot!

July 12th, 2011 1 comment

Today’s a special day. It’s the birthday of a great friend, who has taught me a LOT, both directly and indirectly, about how to really make money online.

I’m talking, of course, about one of the original Clickbank Pirates, Cindy Battye.

Cindy’s been online for six years, and with her partner Soren have put together some of the bar-none coolest IM products.

Today, I’d like to walk you through one of their flagship products, Clickbank Pirate (http://www.cbpirate.net/) and entertain you at the same time (it’s really funny – make sure to watch through the end to not miss any of the good parts scattered in the video)

 

Tracking My Safelists

December 15th, 2009 No comments

So there’s a brand new product called Viral Mail Profits which is going to launch really soon (as of writing, at least :) ) that I was invited to review by the admins, both of whom are really talented and good friends besides.  I’m not going to talk about why you should or shouldn’t sign up and/or upgrade. I frankly don’t even know what the pricing structure is yet!  Instead, I want to talk a bit about my experience in reviewing it.

At first, I thought that it was just a clone of Traffic Zipper.  For those who aren’t familiar, Traffic Zipper is a service that Mike Purvis provides which will automatically log you into your favorite safelists and send your messages for you.  I really didn’t like it for a bunch of reasons.  The big 3 were

  1. The fact that on credit-based safelists I couldn’t see how many members I could email.  That could possibly translate into a waste of credits, or worse: under-sending to less members than I potentially could.
  2. The fact that on safelists with separate text/html mails, I couldn’t customize the different options.  That’s also really important to me, since in HTML mails that contain tracking links, it’s important for me for the clickable link to not be a URL.  The reason for that is that the latter might trigger phishing-detecting programs, meaning lower penetration rates for my email.
  3. The fact that I was limited to a preset list of programs, which didn’t include several programs that I regularly use

When I initially logged in to Viral Mail Profits, it looked exactly the same as Traffic Zipper.   Except for one teeny tiny detail: the one feature that I really kinda liked about Traffic Zipper – the fact that it would do the hard work for me – wasn’t even there!  What?!?

But as I explored, I found that there were a bunch of features which were much cooler.

First of all, there’s a built in link tracking on a per-link basis.  Basically, the way the system works, you prepare your email messages and list of safelists in advance, just like Mike’s program.  But at Viral Mail Profits, instead of it sending the mail for you, it just formats the message (including the first-name tags and other per-safelist specifics) and gives you the exact mail to copy/paste into the safelist you want to send from.  Like I said, this initially seemed like an annoyance.  More work for me.

Oon the other hand, it meant that I’d be keeping up-to-date on these safelists by logging in each time, and seeing how my account is doing, and maybe if there are any special offers available.

Anyway, I was saying that the link tracker was also included in the emails that Viral Mail Profits prepared automatically for you.  That’s amazing! It  means that the average use  can start tracking their safelist mailing results without doing anything that they are not already doing!  That’s a massive feature AND time saver right off the top.

At first I was a bit negative about that feature.  I do my own custom tracking, and this didn’t seem to be a useful feature.  Later on, though,  I considered that I could put this on top of my personal tracking, and still benefit from seeing which versions of the email copy performed better or worse across ALL of the safelists.  That’s something which ha’s been difficult for me to do on my own.

At that point, I already knew that even for a pro like myself, this was going to be a useful tool!

But it got better.

There were also custom programs that I could add to the list and track without the system needing to “support” the safelists that I personally use.  That’s also a huge plus.

Finally, the cherry on top was the ad reminder system, that will email me every day that I can send a new email out and get it out on time, so as not to miss out on advertising that I’m paying (or clicking) for!

There are some extra built-in features too, but there really are so many that I can’t possibly cover them all here.  But I’m expecting to see a 250% increase in my safelist-generated profits really quickly.  We’ll see how it performs, but I’m pretty hyped over Viral Mail Profits!