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Archive for the ‘Informational’ Category

Delicious Is About To Move – Why Is That Important For You?

September 16th, 2011 3 comments

If you have a delicious account, you probably got a notice asking you to log in and consent your approval to allow your account to be moved to a new company called AVOS next week.

So why, you ask, is that important enough to blog about?

Well, AVOS is a new internet company being put together by Chad Hurley and Steve Chen, the creators of YouTube. YouTube has become one of the top websites on the Internet today, and people who have traffic coming to their videos are able to easily profit off of that.

It’s a pretty safe bet that Chad, Steve and their team will work tirelessly to make Delicious just as big.

Social networking is already known as a great traffic source, but can you imagine what it’s going to be like in two or three years if giants like the YouTube founders are pushing at it?

It’s probably going to be huge!

So what’s the point?

The point is that now you have an opportunity to be in the “pre-launch” of the next big thing on the internet. Start using your delicious account now, keep at it, and by the time it’s become even more massive, you’ll have yourself a nice well-aged profile that Google will use to feed traffic to your websites.

Yes, it’s a very long-term investment, but think about where you’d like to be in a few years, and how much traffic you’ll want then.

Do you think I’m wrong? Leave a comment below and let me know.

Banners Bite @ TrafficSwarm

August 18th, 2011 3 comments

The other day, I blogged about the re-launch of Traffic Swarm.  While I still think it’s great bang for the buck (paid or free), I have to admit that I’m very disappointed by the banner results so far.  They’ve been… dissappointing, with the worst click rates on my traffic-exchange banners (like the one below) in the industry – like 0 clicks for almost 15,000 impressions.

To put that into proportion, this particualr banner – as is – usually brings in 0.3% – 1.5% click-through-rates in every other traffic exchange I rotate it in (the better exchanges tend to give me higher clickthrough rates), meaning 3-15 clicks for every 1,000 views.  Meaning I’d have expected at least 45 clicks from Traffic Swarm to stay on par with the worst performing exchanges…

Maybe it’s the fact that the banners are only placed on the bottom of the pages with the surf ads (to choose the next site to click on) combined with the fact that you don’t earn credits for clicking on them (the only 2 links on the page that won’t earn you credits).  Whatever the reason, I’m very disappointed with the results.  Taking into consideration that banners cost 10 impressions per credit in addition to the sucky results, and I personally doubt that I’ll be using banner ads there any more unless some serious changes are made to where and how they’re displayed…

Issac – Mighty Warrior (At Last!)

August 16th, 2011 2 comments

After knowing about it for years, but recently seeing a lot of activity from the WSO world in the last month or so, I finally took the plunge and joined The Warrior Forums.

For those of you who aren’t familiar with them, the Warrior Forums are an old and pretty respected forums in the Internet Marketing niche.  Once a paid-only forum (when I was first introduced to it, it cost money and I was too careful over every dollar spent to “risk” joining – sound familiar?), it later changed to a free membership.

Currently, it’s still free to join, with many paid-member-only areas on the site.  As Allen said, the incredible PR value of the forums was causing a lot of folks to take unfair advantage of the free membership to spam the system without contributing to the forums.  Even with high moderation, to keep the content high quality and clean, that was making problems.

So this morning, I finally joined (and paid for the upgraded membership that I foolishly turned down years ago) and really hope that it will prove worthy.  If you’re a member there, make sure to send me a friendship request – my username is “issac”

Categories: Informational

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!

No more videos?

July 28th, 2011 No comments

Well, that’s not quite a given (yet).  Actually I do have another few video reviews that I plan on doing in the next few weeks, but this week I’ve been insanely busy trying to understand how my subscribers interact with me and how to provide real genuine value back to them.

Surveys are a great thing for that kind of homework, and having surveys bundled with my Autoresponder provider makes things even easier.

So before I go on spending a LOT of time on the next video…  Do YOU like the last two (on Tezak Traffic Power and Clickbank Pirate)?  Would you be interested in more?  Leave a comment!