Posted by Ray White on March 8, 2010 Comments (4)

Early in my marketing career, I looked for the cold hard facts of sales. I wanted numbers. I wanted statistics. I wanted tried and true, TESTED methods of promotion. I wasn’t going to waste my time on crap. Every time I heard someone say something like, “Using quotation marks on headlines improves conversion rates,” I would jump right in and ask “Really? Says who? By how much? Tell me, tell me, tell me!” I would never get an answer. It was very frustrating.

Years of experience has taught me that no one can give you industry-wide statistics. There are no hard, fast numbers. Any information that is available is anecdotal. How did I come to that conclusion? Elementary, my dear reader. There are too many variables involved.

• your ad copy
• your audience (how well targeted it is)
• your price point
• your promotion effort
• your venue (traffic exchange, safelist, personal list, etc)
• your product or service (how good is it? what need does it fill?)

So what is an internet marketer to do? TEST!

Throw all of your traffic exchange credits at one splash page for a week and see how many sales or signups you get. Track your signups from specific exchanges to see which ones work best for you. Blitz your safelists with one promotional email, sending out as often as your membership level allows, and see what happens. If it turns out to be a dud, try a different email. Test different subject lines to see if they make a difference in the open rates of your emails to your list. Don’t stop testing until you are satisfied with your results.

Yes, it will take time to test things one at a time, but in the long run, you figure out where to advertise to get the most bang for your buck. You’ll also figure out if you like writing emails or making splash pages. You’ll find what fits your personality, what works into your schedule, what you do best. It is worth the time and effort to figure that stuff out so that your promotions will become the streamlined, well-oiled machine that we all strive to make our business.

Posted by Ray White on March 3, 2010 Comments (5)

You’ve seen the ads on the traffic exchanges. Those products that promise you will have thousands of followers within 1 week of purchase. The services that will make you $1,021 in seven days. Splash pages that scream, “Pay just 5 bucks and get your own ready-made business.” No one would make promises like that unless they can deliver, right? No one in their right mind would believe such outlandish claims, would they?

Traffic exchange owners agonize over banning specific ads. We want the best for our members, no doubt about that. But is it really our decision to make for you?

Banning sites open traffic exchange owners to claims of libel and slander from the owners of the banned products and services. If we ban some sites, but not the one that cheated you, our member, then we can could be found liable for your loss. Traffic exchanges have members from all over the world. Some business practices and models are legal in some places, but not legal in others. Banning specific ads also smacks of censorship.

Traffic exchanges have hundreds to thousands of members, each with at least one site submitted for rotation. Traffic exchange owners do not have the time to investigate every single program and product submitted to them. Traffic exchange owners do not have the resources to determine which practices are legal where in the world. Traffic exchanges are advertising venues, not filters.

Traffic exchange owners agreed as a whole to ban investment auto surfs because we watched one suck in thousands of members, take their money, then collapse and disappear. We could not, in good conscience, let that happen again if we could help it. As for other services and products, we usually go by how “traffic-exchange-friendly” their web sites are. The framebreakers, the Live Agent sites, all the things that interrupt surfing, it’s a no-brainer to kick those web pages out. But something that we might think is a really bad idea, you might think is a golden opportunity.

So what does that mean for traffic exchange members? You, as the CEO of your business, the captain of your life, must do your own due diligence.

When you consider a new opportunity, do some digging. Who is behind the program? What is their track record? Do you have the resources that you need to make a success of the opportunity for you? How does it fit into your overall business? Do you have the time needed to put into using the product? Do you understand how the program works? Is support available? Does the payment structure make sense to you?

Seriously, you don’t really want me to decide what you can and cannot join, do you?

Posted by Ray White on February 27, 2010 Comments (0)

You’ve worked hard to establish your brand on Twitter. You carefully crafted your 140-character bio with important keywords and phrases related to your niche. You have your website url on your profile. You put out great information in your tweets. Your followers are all perfectly targeted. Now it’s beginning to pay off. Your superior knowledge is getting you recognized. You are being added to Twitter lists, putting you on the same level as the leading experts in your field. How do you leverage this newfound notoriety? Use Listorious to spread the Twitter love.

Listorious.com is a directory of Twitter lists. Lists are not automatically added, but anybody can submit a list to the site. You can submit the lists that you have set up on your Twitter account, or you can submit someone else’s lists. If you submit someone else’s list, it would best benefit you if you are on it along with other leading experts in your niche. What does adding your Twitter lists, or lists that you are on, do for you? Every list is tagged, meaning they can be easily pulled up on a search engine result for those tags. Every Twitter profile associated with that list is also added. That means your bio and your website url are added, too. Having your Twitter lists on Listorious puts you, along with your link and bio with related keywords, on a high-traffic website where you can be found by spiders for search engine results. If you have Google Alerts set up for monitoring your brand, you will be notified within a day or two of the list submission.

To better clarify, you want to submit lists that are specific for your niche, not the lists of “friends” or “tweeps to follow” that have people from different niches. You want to submit “blog” or “blogger” lists if that’s your thing, or “marketing” or “crafts” or whatever your expertise is. And you want everybody else, or as many as possible, on that list to be in the same niche. The point is to bolster your standing as an expert in your field, and to add another search engine result for you under your keywords.

How to submit your Twitter lists to Listorious

Grab the url of the list you want to submit

You find the url of the list by going to your Twitter profile and clicking on the “listed” link under your bio. Then you will be taken to a page with the list of lists that you are on. Click on the list name. Then copy the url from the address bar of your browser.

Go to Listorious

Click the “Add List” link at the top right of the page

You will need to allow Listorious access to your Twitter account. If you are comfortable doing this, click the “allow” button and continue. If you are not comfortable allowing access to your Twitter account, someone else may submit the list. Maybe you know someone who will do it for you if you don’t want to wait around for that to happen.

Put the url of the list you want to submit in the “Enter URL of any Twitter List” box OR Choose the list from the “Or select a Twitter list you created or are part of:” dropdown box

If you copied the list url earlier, here is where you paste it. Alternatively, you may choose from the lists shown in the dropdown box. Note that the list in the dropdown box shows Twitter lists that have not yet been added to Listorious.

Put your keywords in the “Tags:” text box

The tags is how people can find the lists that you are on. You want the tags to be associated with your brand. Use your keywords or phrases. You might try to choose tags from the “Top Tags” list, too.

Click the blue “Add List” button

Congratulations, you are now listed in Listorious!

Posted by Ray White on February 24, 2010 Comments (3)

Rotator urls are a wonderful tool, particularly for traffic exchange users. They are a real time saver. You simply submit the same rotator url to all of your traffic exchange accounts. When you need to make changes, you only need to do that once where you control the rotator url. You don’t have to login to all of your traffic exchange accounts to make the changes needed. I fully understand and support the use of rotator urls.

What I do not understand is the trend of putting other rotator urls inside of rotator urls. You know what I mean — when you see sites that have more than one rotator bar at the top of the surf window. Just today I saw 4 rotator bars on a site. Why is this a bad practice?

It really slows down the loading time of the site.

With most traffic exchanges, you have at most 10 seconds before the viewer moves on to the next site. You would like to have your site seen before that happens. Putting a regular url into a rotator url already slows loading somewhat because what you are doing is essentially redirecting from the rotator url to the site url and that takes time. Multiply that by the number of rotator urls inside the rotator url, and you will never get your site seen. Either the browser will freeze or the viewer moves on to the next site. Kinda defeats the purpose of showing sites in a traffic exchange.

It decreases the amount of your page being viewed.

Some rotator bars are fairly thin and unobtrusive. (I’ll save the rant on huge rotator bars for another day.) They leave behind plenty of space for people to see YOUR site, which is what you want people to see. Put a regular site in a rotator url, and you get one bar at the top of the site that moves your page down in the surf window. Put a rotator url in a rotator url, and you get two bars at the top of the site and your page is moved down twice as much. The surf window doesn’t get bigger. The viewing area of your page gets smaller.

It does nothing for your branding.

What will be memorable about your site is the overly-prominent rotator bars which are probably branded to whatever service the rotator is from. I told you that today I saw a site with 4 rotator bars. What was the site? I couldn’t tell you. All I saw was 4 rotator bars.

Now, let’s make a bad idea even worse

In your multiple rotators, why not add a cloaked link? One of those shortening url programs that also cause a redirect. Think about it. What would be the reason to put a shortened url in a traffic exchange? None that I can think of, maybe in emails etc, but certainly not in traffic exchanges. Then add one of the new bottom loading traffic bars with their own timer which takes even more time to load.

In other words, if you want your site to load quickly and actually be viewed in a traffic exchange, less is better. That is the main reason most traffic exchange owners and seasoned users suggest a quick loading splash page, keeping it simple, no clutter, no mess, not a ton of redirects or slow loading sites. Deliver your message quickly, make a strong call to action, that’s it.

Most traffic exchange site checkers now reject sites with too many redirects because they either freeze up the browser or never load in time to be seen. Food for thought, totally your decision.

Posted by Ray White on February 21, 2010 Comments (1)

Many affiliate programs provide pre-written email messages for members to use for promotion. It would seem that using a pre-written message is the smart thing to do because they must have been done by a professional, or at least by someone who knows more about email marketing than you do. That might be a good bet, but how many other members do you think are going to use the same reasoning, and therefore, that same email message? Chances are, people on your list are on other people’s lists too. How is it going to look when your list members see you using the same tired message that everyone else is using?

You want to stand out, be different, in email marketing. Take those pre-written email messages and make them your own. Here are 3 tips on how to personalize those pre-written email messages.

Rewrite the message in your voice.

It’s time consuming to compose the perfect email marketing message. Save yourself some time and simply rewrite the pre-written message. Take the information in the message and write it down as if you were telling it to your best friend. That will put your own voice in the message.

Add a personal story.

Share a little tidbit about yourself. Tell a story about how the product or service helped your business. Share one important thing that you learned from reading that ebook. Explain how you met the product owner at the conference you went to last year. Put something in the message that no one else can.

Relate the product or service to a current event.

This one is a little tougher, but fantastic when you can pull it off. As I write this post, the 2010 Winter Olympics are going on in Vancouver, Canada. If I were to promote something now, I might say that the product will “give you sales worthy of a Gold Medal,” or that the service will coordinate your email marketing efforts “as smoothly as Olympic figure skaters glide across the ice.” You can come up with better ideas, I’m sure. Just use your imagination.

Posted by Ray White on February 16, 2010 Comments (1)

Warning: This is a rant

I came across a cool copywriting blog on Twitter yesterday. They were giving away an ebook on copywriting for signing up for their newsletter. I liked what I read on the blog, so I entered my name and best email address on the opt-in form. I get sent to a new page where I am thanked for signing up, and given a second offer. I can get a companion “cheat sheet” for the ebook that I will be able to download as soon as I confirm the opt-in, and all I have to do is fill in their “tell a friend” form with a few names and email addresses. Of course, those email addresses will NOT be saved anywhere. I thought of one person and filled in her first name and one of her email addresses. Next page says great, thank you.

I go merrily off to my email inbox and confirm the opt-in. I get the obligatory welcome email message immediately thereafter, complete with download link for the ebook. I am promised another email with the link for the “cheat sheet” that I was promised for telling a friend about the ebook. So far, so good. A couple of hours later I get an email from a name that I do not recognize pitching me some product that I have absolutely no interest in. Worse yet, there’s an unsubscribe link at the bottom of the message, and I am so sure that I have never heard of this person. So I click the unsubscribe link, and lo and behold, it’s the list I joined from the copywriting blog. Okay, I do remember joining this list. I joined for a “newsletter.” Maybe I joined at an odd time and the next message in the autoresponder was the pitch. I’m upset, but I’ll forgive this message. I mean, I did join. I know people are online to make money. I expect to get a few ads along with a newsletter. I decide not to unsubscribe from the list.

This morning, I get another message from that same list. It’s another pitch for that same product. Just for kicks, I click the link to check out the price on this puppy … it’s $1997. That’s one thousand nine hundred and ninety seven dollars. I didn’t miss a decimal.

I have yet to receive any “newsletter.” Heck, I still haven’t got the download link for the “cheat sheet.” But it’s only my second day on the list. Maybe I should be patient.  How many more messages should I accept about $2000 products before I give up on getting the free newsletter that I signed up for? Or is the “newsletter” those email pitches? Hmmmm.

Well, I got an ebook. THAT promise was kept at least.

Posted by Ray White on February 15, 2010 Comments (1)

Athletes are a dedicated bunch of folk. They have to be disciplined and focused, not to mention talented. The Winter Olympic Games shows us the best of the best. People who have trained their entire lives for this moment of glory, or defeat since whenever someone wins, someone else has to lose. But they all have a goal – the gold medal. And they all know exactly what they need to do to get it. Each sport has its requirements for the perfect performance. Training for the Olympics is a lot like planning a internet marketing campaign.

Let’s pick a winter Olympic sport – figure skating. Each skater wears a fantastic outfit and picks soulful music for their routine, but that doesn’t figure into the final score of the performance. Figure skating routines are judged on various aspects, all of which apply to the success of marketing campaigns as well. Let’s discuss a few of those aspects.

technical difficulty

Flash, CSS, javascript, all those bells and whistles that can make your web site stand out. Not so much an issue unless you are trying to do something that you have absolutely no experience in and have no back up. We all need to branch out and test our limits, but unless you know what you are doing, leave the programming to the experts.

performance/execution

The best written ad can go to heck with a single minor typo. We can all forgive typos since they are so easy to make, but sometimes they can have humorous or disastrous results. You can change the meaning of a sentence by leaving out the word “not.” That could cost you some serious money too. Or a time-sensitive message about your affiliate marketing campaign goes out to your list a day too late. What can go wrong usually does, so plan to avoid it.

choreography/composition

How often have we seen a big buildup for a program launch only to have the server crash five minutes after opening? Plan ahead, and plan BIG. Expect huge traffic and prepare for it. Get reliable hosting. Get a dedicated server if you have to for the expected traffic. Have your programmer on call on the day of the launch to put out fires. Have extra help at the support desk. Better to be overprepared than underprepared.

interpretation

The most important part. You can’t please all of the people all of the time, yet you don’t want your words to be misinterpreted or twisted into something inappropriate or even downright ugly either. It is very hard to have tone come across in print. What is considered funny in the United States may not be so funny in the United Kingdom. You want to be clever and memorable, but be careful with your slogans. The internet is a global stage so you need to be mindful of cultural differences.

So do marketers have to train like Olympic athletes to be successful? Well, it probably wouldn’t hurt to put some of that enthusiasm and dedication into the planning of the perfect internet marketing campaign. I mean, we are going for the gold, too, aren’t we?

Posted by Ray White on February 13, 2010 Comments (2)

In the HTML source code of every webpage, there is what is called a title tag. What does the title tag do? It tells the whole world what that web page is all about. Well, it will when you set it up right.

According to w3schools.com, the HTML title tag does the following

• defines a title in the browser toolbar
• provides a title for the page when it is added to favorites
• displays a title for the page in search-engine results

So that means whatever you put between <title> and </title> in your HTML code will show up in three different places.

First, when someone is looking at your page in a browser window, the title will show in the very top bar of the browser window.

Second, when someone bookmarks your webpage, your title is what shows in the list of favorites.

Third, what you put as your title will be the clickable link to your web page in search engine results.

As you can plainly see, you do NOT want to leave your title blank!

So what should you put in your title?

For branding purposes, it would be nice to have your name or business name in there. But don’t stop there. Your title should be unique to that specific page. It should describe the content of the page, so that it is easily identified in a list of bookmarks. It should ideally have some call to action to entice people to click the link in search engine results. Keep it short though. You want the entire title to show wherever it shows up. If you can keep it under 65 characters, including spaces, then kudos to you!

Posted by Ray White on February 9, 2010 Comments (1)

You finally did it. You finished your first web page in HTML. You are so proud of yourself. You can’t wait to see it online. You anxiously upload the file to your server. You open a browser and type in the url of your new page. ACK! Why does it look like THAT?

It’s usually a minor thing. You probably forgot to close a tag or missed a bracket somewhere. But where? That’s gonna be pretty hard to find even if you knew where to look.

Here’s a simple solution.

WDG HTML Validator

Go to the above website and put the url for your web page in the text box. When you click the Validate it! button, the site will scan your source code. The site will then return a report of errors that it finds in your source code. It even tells you where they are! It makes proofreading your source code a whole lot easier.

Posted by Ray White on February 7, 2010 Comments (1)

All traffic exchanges offer text ads, those text link ads that appear on the surf bar and in various places on the traffic exchange web site. There are millions of ways to come up with catchy ads that convert to sales. I’m not going to address that here. I want to go over the basics of submitting a text link ad because if you don’t do it right, the ad will drive no traffic to your site and your conversion rate is guaranteed to be zero.

A text link has two parts, the text that shows on the link and the url for the webpage that you want people to go to when they click the text link. At Soaring4Traffic, you add text ad links on the My Text Links page. The box marked Link Text is for the text that will show on the link. The box marked Link URL is for the url of the webpage that you want people to see when they click on your text link ad.

There is a limit to the number of characters that you can have in your text link. At Soaring4Traffic, and at most traffic exchanges, the character limit is 26. Remember that a space is considered a character! Anything over 26 characters will not be included in the link text, even if it cuts off a word in the middle. Make sure that what you write makes sense and doesn’t go over 26 characters. People won’t click on your link if it doesn’t make sense.

The Link URL needs to be the complete url starting with http://. Make sure that you don’t misspell the url. Better yet, copy and paste the url. Using copy and paste removes any chance for error.

When you are done, you should be shown what the text link looks like. It should be an actual link that you can click and go to the site that you want shown when the link is clicked. In Soaring4Traffic, it is the link that follows “SAMPLE:” on the My Text Links page. If everything looks the way you want it to look, go ahead and assign some impressions. The text ad link won’t get shown unless you assign impressions to it.

If your text link does NOT get added, then what you should do is look at your text again. Sometimes the traffic exchange script doesn’t like characters that aren’t a letter or a number or a space. If you have any other kind of character in your text, rewrite your text without the special character and try submitting it again.

If all else fails, contact the support desk.