Issac G's Blog

Dear Diary (er, Blog),

It’s been a LONG time since I checked in.  I’ve been busy.  My day job.  The family.  Stuff.  You know how life is…

But I’m in a writing mood.  I just wrote two long letters to some of my SuccessQUIK prospects and downline members, and even if I don’t manage to inspire them, I’ve already inspired ME.

I wrote about how sad it is that people aren’t willing to invest $10 is signing up because they’re saving up to waste $100 when (IF) they do sign up later to “position themselves better”.  Come on…  Where’s the sense in that.  The whole point of the program is to be able to sign up for $10 and earn money through the program to “position yourself better”.

I’m sorry if I offend anyone, but every time I hear about how someone’s jumping through hoops to pull together $10 to join in 2 weeks, I hear bullshit.

I hear how someone “gets it”.  Really has interest (the nice thing about online marketing is that people don’t need to make excuses like that if they really are afraid to join because they think it won’t work; in online marketing, people like that just don’t respond, so EVERY RESPONSE YOU DO GET is a GENUINELY INTERESTED PROSPECT.  I wish offline marketing made it so easy to differentiate between the two…  But I’m getting off topic).

They really do want it.  But they’re afraid.  Afraid of failure.  Afraid of self-inflicted failure.  Afraid of self-inflicted failure because they know in their deepest hearts up front, that they have no intention of putting effort into it.  But they’re willing to save up 100 dollars so they can dump it in later and say “Well, look how hard I tried.  I invested a LOT of money!  Of course I put in effort, because who would throw away so much money!”

I’ve quoted him before, and I’ll quote him again and again:  Randy “It’s Self Sabotage, Baby!” Gage.  Self sabotage is how you waste your money, ruin your financial situation, and excuse your self from the blame.  It’s premeditated blame of a third party for a problem you make for yourself.  And the online marketing business is full of people who love to do it to themselves.

I know I’m getting off topic a bit, but let me rant a little bit more about the people who love to suffer in our little industry.

Traffic Exchanges.  Safelists.  Social Marketing.

90% of people who use 2 or more of the above, will swear up and down that they’re sincerely trying to make significant money.  I don’t mean 7-figure money.  I mean 3 or 4 figure money, would REALLY make these folks happy.

So what do they do.  They click, click, click. Click.  Click  Click Click.  Spend hours surfing.  Spend hours clicking on safelist credit pages.  Spend hours reading what every one else has to say on facebook and twitter.

Then their payday comes.  They’ve saved up 10,000 page impressions.  They’ve saved up 2,500 email blasts.  They’ve really, honestly earned their hard-worked free advertising resources, and they’ve done it the right way.  Really – no cynicism (yet).

And then what do they do?  They see 10 new programs.  They salivate over them.  They might join for free.  They might pay a little money.  They might pay a lot of money.  And then, they get to work.  They copy and paste some emails together, and slap them into the safelists without even glancing at what’s in the email.   They don’t want to waste their hard earned credits, so they’ll take 10 of these cookie cutter emails and send each out to 100 or 200 people.  Then, they’ll do the same and give 10 landing pages 100 credits each at the 10 different exchanges.  And it’s ok that they’re using these cookie cutter pages and emails and tweets and stuff…  Because they’re saving valuable time to really work on the important part of their business: the endless click, click, click.

And they swear to themselves that they’re honestly, by G-d surprised, that the programs just don’t work out for them.  The landing pages must suck.  The emails must suck (only in hindsight, of course – NOW maybe they’ll read what they sent).  The program must not convert.  I mean, it’s not their fault.  They put in the effort, right?  And surely, they didn’t – couldn’t possibly have – premeditated this failure!

Yep, we sure do pity those people.

But guess what?  They’re the minority.

The more clever marketers are much better at the game.  They know that you need to do your own thing.  So these enlightened folks make their own little landing page.  They write their own email.  They mix THAT in with the cookie-cutter stuff (because deep down inside, we all know that program owners put SO much effort into writing emails and pages that will work for YOUR audience, right?  Those pages got so much effort, and look so nice, it would be a shame to not use them at all).  And they surf LOTS of exchanges.  LOTS of safelists.  So they’ll send to 300 people across 40 safelists, and they’ll even do that 4 times based on the assumption (sorry, but it’s wrong) that they’ve hit critical mass of 12,000 recipients (even the gurus send the same email to massive lists of tens of thousands lots of times, because it takes a LOT to do the numbers game), and they’ll promote it for a whole WEEK on their 4 favorite traffic exchanges.

And then…  then… then…

“I put in the effort.  It’s not my fault!  Really!”

Self Sabotauge.

I’ll say it again: SELF SABOTAUGE.

Honestly, you can have the suckiest page in the world (look at mine) and it will convert if you keep pushing, month in and month out, week in and week out.  You don’t have to change it every day, but you DO have to keep going at it.  Keep adding MORE pages.  Keep writing new copy.  Keep sending new emails.  But keep going at it.  Don’t assume that because it didn’t work in the one or two week period that you’re hyped about it, it’s not going to work.

Because, while an initial blast is a critical and proven way of making money in marketing, the majority of success comes from the continual ACTION you take over time.  And when I say time, I mean over a YEAR.

Take a program.  ANY program.  Use the most generic and crappiest cookie cutter materials that you can find for it.  And promote that, and ONLY that for 12 months.  I promise you’ll have a downline (or whatever) at the end of it.

Are you one of those people?  Honestly?

Then you have the elite cream (and I include myself in this bunch).  We know how to play the numbers game.  We might have more money to spend.  We understand the branding value of keeping the same opportunity focused over a long period of time.  We do everything right.  And in 20 years, we might hit 5 figures at the rate we’re going (IF we keep putting the same effort over that 20 year period and the program doesn’t dissappear by then).  But deep down, we also know that the same things grow boring eventually.  How often do we really put in the time to write a NEW email.  Make a NEW splash page.  Make a RENEWED marketing surge for ourselves?  I know I personally do it few enough times a year that I can count it on both hands – on a good year maybe I can add my toes in to the count, but surely no more than that.

Because it’s hard.  And I don’t know about anyone else, but I’m personally lazy.  Very, very lazy.

So My 2011 resolution starts now, in 2010.  TAKE ACTION!  And STOP the self sabotage.

I’m going to hit the next level in 2011.  Will you join me?

Happy 2011,

Issac

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!

It’s been a while since I had the opportunity to write a bit. I’ve had an enjoyable month full of activity in all honestly, but slumped a bit in my online social activity.

So what have I done?

Well, first of all, I unveiled a really cool new feature to my splash pages, which has an audio welcome that’s customized based on what traffic exchange you’re viewing the page from. It’s really cool! To see it in action, try adding http://www.TheTrafficExchangeBook.com/ to your favorite traffic exchange and see what it looks like when you’re previewing it (try refreshing a few times, too )

Then, later in the month, I started a limited beta test of my new dedicated server offerings, which you can read more about here, if that’s the kind of thing that interests you.

Finally, I broke 100 downline members at SuccessQUIK, and promised my 100th downline member a free upgrade on me, just for being number 100. Oddly enough, the guy never took me up on the offer.

*shrugs*

Anyway, just wanted to drop a quick line to say that I’m still alive, and up to new and cool stuff to keep my business growing.

I’ve also been loving the thank-you page rotator at TE Toolbox which has kept signups to various programs flowing in even when I take my hand off of the pulse of my traffic-exchange-centered business. Kudos to Tim, Jon and Paul for that!

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!