Marketers will always be happy to tell you that “the money is in the list” and I whole heartedly agree with that sentiment, but it can be a lot more difficult to find simple and effective ways of building your list.

I have mostly built my subscriber lists with article marketing, Joint Ventures, Blogging and some PPC, which does work, but I’m always looking for good ways to add even more subscribers to my lists, so a while back I decided it was time to test out two new methods which I’d heard of, but not tried: -

Giveaway Events & “Ad Swaps”

I have to say that I was so pleased with the results that I have not only added giveaways as part of my regular list building tactics, I also took the time to set up a forum and facebook group specifically for doing adswaps! [details of both are below]

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With my house move and divorce finally out of the way, I can get back to doing some product tests again, the only problem now is I’ve got a pretty big backlog of stuff to test out, so I thought I’d start with an RSS submission tool that will submit your rss feed to 20 of the best rss sites to get more backlinks and visitors.

You can check out the tool itself here:

BadAssRSS

It’s from a guy called Peter Drew who has an excellent reputation for providing top notch tools that do some pretty cool stuff.

It’s also a real easy tool to use, although it does take a few minutes to get the accounts you need set up, but then it’s just a case of popping in your rss feed url and a “keyword/phrase” and hitting go.

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I added Peelaway Ads to quite a few of my blogs a couple of months ago to test them out and see how well the perform.

Today I’ve started removing them from all my blogs…

Over the test period of 2+ months the ads have resulted in exactly 2 sales, which is pretty poor considering the amount of traffic that the blogs they were on get in total, but that’s not actually the main reason for removing them.

I’ve had several emails that the peelaway would get “stuck” and not peel back, and it seems there’s also some incompatibility issues with the FireFox browser where the peel away ad can stop the “Recent Posts” and other links from working.

Not making many sales is something that I could potentially address with different product offers and new graphics to “catch the eye” of visitors, but causing problem for visitors to my blogs, resulting in them leaving the blog, is simply unacceptable, so I’m dumping them.

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As I’ve just done a video to show how to add the RealTraffic exchange ads to your blog for my BlogTactics.com readers, I also had the chance to check my stats for RealTraffic Exchange and I’m very pleased with the results..

On most of my blogs I’m getting a CTR of over 1%, showing that the ads are relevant.

Now you may be thinking that this is not good, as it means people are clicking on those adverts and leaving my blog, well that’s true, but I look at it on the basis that those people would probably have left my blog anyway, so if I can provide them with something useful to go look at, then I’m helping them out and creating “good will”.

so “WIIFM” (what’s in it for me)?

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I’ve been running another test for StumbleUpon Ads to try and work out the value of the visitors it brings in.

For this test I was simply interested in seing how long each visitor spent on the blog to try and judge the “visitor value”, again I was sending the visitors to my “internet marketing” and “Blogging” related blogs.

The sample was over 2,000 visitors and on average each visitor only spent 29.4 seconds on the site before leaving, and less than on in each 10 visitors would leave the site via an “affiliate link” of some sort.

Compare this with recent visitors I’ve been getting from two other Web 2 social bookmarking sites and you can see there’s quite a difference:

Sphinn - each visitor spends on average 1 min and 36 seconds on the site and almost 6% click on a “montezied” link to leave.

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If you’ve visited before you’ll probably have noticed I’ve got a new theme installed.

Now as this is my “testing things” blog it shouldn’t come as too much of a surprise to find out that it’s my own new theme that I’m testing out…

When I say “my own”, I’m not going to claim to have coded it myself, I’ve got a RaC coder called Andre to thank for it (as wel as pay), and I’m pretty pleased with the results, we’re just trying to iron out the few last wrinkles, which always seems to take the longest..

When it is finished it will be available as a free download from my BlogTactics.com blog, which hopefully will be within the next few days, although it may take me a bit longer to get al the tutorial videos for it done and uploaded.

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I’ve only just got my hands on this sweet new tool from Neil Shearing, so I’ve got no results to post yet, but I wanted to make a post about it as it goes on sale tomorrow and there’s a 50% discount for the first 278 buyers..

that may seem like a lot of people, but I’ve spoken to Neil andI know that there are over 432 people already signed up for the “early bird” notification list to get in an hour early, so those 278 discounts will go VERY quickly!

So what does the tool do?

It’s a wordpress datafeed plugin.

If you don’t know what a datafeed is it’s basically free content provided by big suppliers through some affiliate programs (like link share and CJ). The content is lots of info about their full line of products and can have your affiliate code embedded.

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I’ve been testing out using blogcarnival’s for getting new links and traffic to my main “blogging” blog, BlogTactics and it’s working so well that I’ve started using it for a couple of other blogs, including this one.

The Technorati backlinks count for BlogTactics has jumped by 30+ links in the last couple of weeks from this simple tactic, so I figured it was time to make a post here about it.

BlogCarnival’s are simply blog posts on other blogs where the owners of those blogs post links and comments to a bunch of other blogs that are related.

The better the quality of the posts on your blog, the more likely you are to be included in any specific carnival, although it’s still entirely up to the blog owner which blogs they will include in the carnival, so make sure you post some good stuff before doing a carnival submission.

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You may not even have realised that Stumbleupon.com offer an advertising option,

I didn’t until last week, when I found out thanks to Yaro Stark.

obviously I needed to go and have a play to see whether it’s an undiscovered gem of traffic, or not…

You can listen to my thoughts about the results I received on the short podcast below, it’s less than 4 minutes long, so you shouldn’t fall asleep..

But I’ll give a quick written summary of my results as well.

first it’s worth noting that you’re not paying for “ad displays” or even clicks on ads, you’re paying for actual visitors to your site, as your site is added to the selection of sites in your chosen category that are presented to Stumbleupon users to “stumble” and vote on

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well, it’s been long enough now and I’ve come to a decision on one of the traffic widgets that I’ve been testing..

I’ve just removed the Link2Blogs widget from my BlogTactics site as the results suggest it’s losing me far more traffic than it’s bringing in:

213 visitors sent to other blogs, and only 10 incoming visitors from Link2blogs.

I’ve replaced it with Jon Ledger’s Real Traffic Exchange to see how this fairs on the site, as I’ve been getting “Click Through Rates” (CTR) as high as 1.3% on other blogs that I’ve got this on.

RTE hasn’t actually sent me any visitors yet, but that’s simply because I hadn’t set up any “ads” for the system to display yet, as I wanted to build up some credits first..

I’ve now got a nice little credit balance with them, so I’ve just created an add for the system and I’ll report back here once I’ve got some results worth posting about..

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