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]

What were the results?

In May I added over 1,500 new subscribers to just one of my lists using these two simple techniques!

so here’s a few bits of what I’ve learnt along the way to help you do the same: -

A. Giveaway Events

You can keep up to date with the latest giveaway events in a facebook group run by Alex Perez-Prat: -
http://www.facebook.com/group.php?gid=6405644093

To take part you need something of value to giveaway.

Here’s just a few suggestions on how you can create your first “product” to giveaway: -

1. record and interview with a well known marketer

2. make some tutorial/instructional videos

3. get hold  of a plr product that you have “giveaway” rights for, not all do, check out the SBO site for some great offers

4. have a bunch of articles written that you can give away

5. grab some brandable PLR software that you can giveaway, I made a video on this one a while back that you can watch here: -

Using PLR Softare to Build Your Lists

or just check out the software on offer here: -
IM Buzz PLR Software

Obviously you also need a squeee page to grab those new optins and the thank you page for your new subscribers to download their gifts from.

and the more unique and interesting/valuable your offer is the more optins you’re likely to get.

B. AdSwaps

I was approached by a fellow marketer back in March with a proposal for an “AdSwap”, where we each mail our own list with an offer from the other person.

It’s not something I’d done before so I let the offer mull over in my head for a while before deciding to give it a go.

I’m glad I did.

That one mailing brought in over 200 new subscribers to my list in just 2 days.

The results got me fired up enough to have a chat with the marketer in question, Sean Mize, to find out how long he’d being doing swaps and what sort of results he’d got with them.

Sean had been doing it for a while and was used to adding 2,000 or more new subscribers to his list from adswaps each month, not bad for just a few minutes work each week…

I decided I needed to not only add it to my own ongoing list building plan, but also find a way of making it easier for people to get together and do adswaps, as a result I ended up setting up the Internet Marketing AdSwaps forum, which is free, as well as a facebook group - http://www.facebook.com/group.php?gid=10901414126

I’d highly recommend adding both of these simple methods to your own list building process!

Tags: email marketing

Share This

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.

The tool can take anywhere from 4-5 mins up to 15-20 mins to run through all the submissions, but you can run moe than one “instance” of the application at a time, so if you’ve got more than one feed to submit with different keywords then it’snot aproblem.

I’ve just run it today for a dozen or so blogs, so I’ll keep an eye on the results and report back soon.

Oh, and Pete also gave a real cool tip for a different way of using it, you can grab your own twitter account (http://twitter.com/mattgarrett) and submit that, to get your twitters indexed in google and get a bunch more backlinks and traffic, neat idea, thanks Pete!

Internet Marketing Product Reviews

Tags: blogging

Share This

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.

Making money from my blogs is obviously something that is important to me, but making a visit to one of my blogs an enjoyable/useful/informative experience for the visitor is at more important, otherwise there’s no one to buy any of my recommendations..

Tags: blogging

Share This

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)?

Well every time someone does click on one of those ads I earn a credit in the RealTraffic system, and here’s the important bit, that credit is not just for my advery to be displayed on someone else’s blog, but for it to actually get clicked on, so the ad will be displayed on other blogs until all my credits have been used up on brining new visitors to my blog.

It’s obviously very important to make sure the advert you create for your blog is not only “attention grabbing”, but also “accurate”, in other words what is described in the advert is what the new visitor will see when they click on the advert, otherwise you will end up with un-targeted visitors, which is a total waste of their time and your credits.

Somake sure your ad takes the visitors to a page that is exactly what the advert says it’s about and you’re going to end up with the best traffic of all, highly targeted traffic.

I’m so happy with the results I’ve been getting so far that I’m actually going to try out paying for some extra credits to bring in more targeted visitors..

If you haven’t signed up and put the RealTraffic Exchange ads on your blog yet, I’d recommend you go and do so now, it’s free to sign up..

Tags: blogging

Share This

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.

PlugIM - each visitor spends on average 1 min 51 seconds on the site and just over 11% used an affiliate link of some sort to leave the site.

The PlugIM and Sphinn visitors had come to the site from a post being tagged, so there is obviously a big difference in their reason for coming to the site, they have chosen to click on the link and visit, where as the paid traffic from StumbleUpon ads the visitor is just shown the site, although obviously the ads are, in theory, reasonably targeted.

My conclusion?

Well, I still need to test out Stumbleupon ads for non “make money/internet marketing” niche’s, but I won’t be paying for any more visitors to the “IM” based sites, it simply doesn’t seem to convert.

One additional point that I noticed and thought I’d share, according to my stats, almost 90% of the web 2 social bookmarking site traffic I received recently was using FireFox, not Internet Explorer, so it’s obviously VERY Important to make sure your blog theme looks good in firefox..

Tags: web 2.0

Share This

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.

You may be wondering why it needs tutorial videos if it’s “just another wordpress theme”, well it has a few “extras” built in.

For example, you may notice the new banners at the top and bottom of pages, they’re not specifically there because I’m dying to “monetize” this blog, my other new, in testing (paid) product is taking care of most of that (more on that one soon), the banners are a built in feature of the new theme, so I’m testing them out..

The new “custom” header graphic is also a built in feature of the theme, along with a couple of other bits I’ve not used on this blog yet, what, you thought this is my only “testing” blog…

Have you tried grabbing one of the menu “options” in the sidebar and changing the order in which they apear, or minimizing the ones you don’t want to see…

I am of course interested in hearing what you think about the new theme, so I’d really appreciate any feedback and comments you have..

Tags: blogging

Share This

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.

So you get a whole bunch of free content that automatically posts to your blog over time with monetization built in, that’s a nice plugin for any blog..

Neil tested the plugin out on a brand new blog he made for the purpose and the site was indexed in google and getting traffic within just 3 days of having been registered, not only that, it then made the first sale on day 10!!!

Neil didn’t spend any money on promoting the site, he basically just got one free backlink from an “authority” site and let it run.

the site has made over $3,851 in sales in it’s first month online.

You can grab a free report from Neil giving more details about the site, the plugin, what he did to promote it and the full results here:

10DaysCash

there’s a link in the report to get on to the early bird notification list as well, so you can get in on the 50% discount, if you’re quick..

Tags: blogging

Share This

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.

You can find carnivals for blogs related to your blog and submit your blog using the BlogCarnival.com site and it’s pretty quick and easy to do, so I’d highly recommend adding this tactic to your daily or weekly schedule.

I’ve already seen new visitors from my submissions as well as the extra backlinks, so for a few minutes work each day I’ve found it a pretty effective use of my time, although to be fair I have to admit that I’ve outsourced the work, but it’s something you could easily do yourself..

Tags: blogging

Share This

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

second it’s only $0.05 per visitor, which if you can get properly “targeted” visitors through your selection of category for your campaign, could be very cheap traffic..

I decided to give it a try with my BlogTactics.com blog.

there’s no real tracking built in, so you’re reliant upon whatever tracking you have built in to your site.

as you can choose different categories for you site to appear in within stumbleupn, I decided to run a campaign for 2 days for each of three different categories to see which preformed the best, my aim was to get people to sign up for my newsletter.

my results?

over 6 days I received over 1,500 visitors for a cost of $75

this traffic resulted in an extra 8 signups each day (on average), giving me a toal of 48 new subscribers that “probably” came from Stumbleupon (I’ve no way of being certain that they were however), which gives a cost of roughly $1.5 per new signup.

I then checked my stats in aweber to see how many of those new “optins” had actually confirmed their subscriptions and discovered it was under 50%, so in fact the “Real” cost per new confirmed signup is over $3, which is not great to say the least..

I suspect this is partly because the traffic is not targted well enough, and possibly also because web 2.0 social bookmarking site users don’t tend to like “internet/affiliate marketing” style sites on the whole.

I believe it will be possible to do better with the Stumbleupon ads in non-”IM” markets, so that’s what I’ll be testing next week…

If you want to stay up to date with the results just sign up for the newsletter or the RSS feed in the sidebar on the right.

thanks and here’s the audio: -

and here’s the link for the ads

Stumbleupon Ads

Tags: web 2.0

Share This

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..

BlogRush is also working better for me now that I’ve narrowed my account down to just those blogs that seem to get higher click through rates, although I do seem to have a rather large “credit balance” of over 100,000 which doesn’t seem to be getting used up at all and I need to work out why.

Tags: blogging

Share This