Issac G's Blog

When I was a kid, I used to love the story “The Little Engine That Could”.  I guess it was an early sign of my coming entrepreneur-ism that I loved.  The big engines wouldn’t pull the big train cars, but this pipsqueak little engine tried… and tried… and tried.. and DID!   Proving that the little guy DOES have power to play with the big boys.

This past friday, Logiscpae announced the launch of their new monster, called Monster Splash.  I’ve got to be honest.  It’s cool… but in my opinion, not THAT cool.  It’s kinda like having another BIG engine.  Yeah, sure it’s nice and shiny, but is it really doing something difficult or even helpful to bring into the industry?  Or is it going to stand there looking shiny, and doing good things… but not the things that you’d expect from a big shiny engine?

Basically, it’s very similar in idea to the “splash page network” from Traffic Era, in that you can create ads and ad placements on your website, and then you basically barter people’s ability to place ads on your website for your ability to place ads on other websites.

Honistly, I’m a bit curious as to why they’d have selected this particular business model so recently after releasing their traffic exchange oriented TEBrowser web browser.  The TEBrowser helps people click between their favorite traffic exchanges and thus totally miss ads that will be displayed with Monster Splash…  And if their surfing with a fast surf counter on any exchange: well, to put it lightly, anyone who allows ads over their site on an exchange with a 6 second timer isn’t doing anything useful to themselves to begin with.

So, good thinking Logiscape, but I’m kinda left wondering how useful their full portfolio is together.  They’ve got lots of GREAT sites, but I’m not liking things in 2010 so far (even HitSilo doesn’t seem to be doing so well, which is disappointing).  And don’t get me wrong: for the record I LOVE LOGISCAPE!  TS25, TrafficPods and HitPulse were some of the early exchanges that I surfed, and are still some of the best converting (for me) exchanges out there!

On the other hand, a big (albeit belated)  kudos out to Gary Ambrose with his recent launch of List Wire, an incredible site that lets you have a 100% fully-functional autoresponder for free!  So there’s no more excuses for saying that you can’t afford iContact or aWeber (although they do have better services which are worth the money!).  Start building your list today.  Thanks for that, Gary!

I’ve been having fun with these new audio greetings that I’ve got up on many of my websites.

Today, I’m going to steal an idea from Google. Google’s got this nifty feature where they tribute special occasions by changing the Google logo on their search page.

Well, I’ve decided to do the same for my audio welcomes. All of my sites will be switching from their normal, random (quirky?) welcomes in celebration of the great Superbowl Sunday

Tell me what you think!

Today, or yesterday more accurately, I screwed up.  I sent out a big campaign to 1,500 subscribers to a page with a broken sign up form.

Ouch.

I found out that it was broken when one of my subscribers told me that he couldn’t manage to sign up (thank goodness the copy was good enough to get that kind of eagerness!).

The interesting bit about this was not only my neglect to check that it works – I actually did check the link, and saw the signup page, but the neglect was that seeing that the signup form submitted, too – but more my surprise that it had taken me so long to catch this mistake.  You see, this is a page that I’d been using for months, and based on the fix that I had to make, I’d say it was broken for at least 2 months until now.

But it gets better:

I’ve actually been allowing my extended downline to use this particular signup form (rebranded with their name, picture and referal link of course) and none of THEM caught it for the past few months either!

Moral of the story: If you want to make money, you must check, and double check, and triple check (and then check that you triple checked just for good measure).  Otherwise you’re checking money down the toilet!

OK – I’ve been good and wrist slapped now, so it’s time to get back to making that money back!

One of the first mentors I found in the online network marketing world was a guy named Mike Dillard. His book, Magnetic Sponsoring, was the first marketing-related product I ever bought online, and both was and continues to be a paradigm shifter for my way of thinking, and my path to success!

This evening, he blogged a very long quote of my 2nd favorite part of that book, Magnetic Sponsoring.

I’ve been trying fruitlessly to properly paraphrase the concepts he talks about in this post to my downline for years, but nothing compares to the original.

So if you’re at all interested, curious, or envious of my online success and you want it for yourself, go give it a read!

(To be honest, I think it’s part of a pre-launch to a product he’s launching this week, but this blog post is 100% affiliate-link-free.)

I’ve been wondering lately what makes people buy. (I’m wondering that because my experimenting budget is running low and there’s a bunch of new stuff that I’m dying to try out, but need sales to pay for it).

I’ve been looking at what’s been working for me, vs what hasn’t, and the bottom line is that I’m still getting most of my sales from “organic” traffic.

That’s content about something that I want to sell that continually pulls traffic in over a steady period of time, and I pre-sell them on REALLY good preview content.

I’ve noticed that people who want to buy generally tend to take one small bit on the freebie content and bite on the paid offer almost immediately.

I’ve rarely seen anyone go for the long-term free content and convert later into a customer (although it’s hard to say that I have a statistically relevant sample to determine that), so I’m going to have to start re-focusing my effort (and marketing budget) on sending traffic to my free stuff and we’ll see how that affects my bottom-line conversion rate.

Stay tuned…