Happy Monday!

I guess I let the list building tutorial slip for a few days.  Sorry about that.  But now that I am back let’s get back into it.

By now you should have your squeeze page up and running.  Great!  Today I want to start talking about how to generate traffic to your squeeze page so that you can start getting some sign-ups in your autoresponder.

There are all sorts of ways to drive traffic to your new squeeze page.  There’s search engines, pay-per-click advertising, article marketing, forums, blogs, safelists, etc.

One source that I have successfully been using to drive traffic to my my sites for the last 7 years is free traffic exchange programs.

Traffic exchanges are sites that allow you to generate traffic to your sites by spending some of your time visiting other people’s websites.

I’ll be honest.  Traffic exchanges are terrible for trying to sell stuff because the people who visit your site through them are only there because they are trying to generate traffic for their own sites.

Traffic exchanges are only for two thing:

1. Building Your Brand
2. Building Your List

If you read the lessons in Affiliate Funnel you will know why it is important to always be building your personal brand online.

What you may not know about Affiliate Funnel is that it was created by the owners of some of the world’s largest traffic exchanges. As a result Affiliate Funnel has become one of the best resources available for traffic exchange users.

Affiliate Funnel is also home to one of the most important traffic exchange ranking systems which is updated every week. If you want to know what the top traffic exchanges are this is the first place to look:

http://www.affiliatefunnel.com/rank-report.php?rid=6698

Of course Affiliate Funnel will also provide you with all sorts of other traffic sources too but for now let’s just focus on TEs.

As I mentioned earlier, traffic exchanges are a great tool that you can use to build your list but only if you use them correctly.

I have a friend named John Guanzon who has really perfected the art of building his list using free traffic exchange programs.  John and another friend of mine (Winter Perkins) recently wrote an excellent book called “TE List Building” which I highly recommend reading.

John has given me permission to give away free copies of his book to my reader. If you want the secret to building a huge list with free traffic exchanges then you need to read this book:

http://getrichwithjerry.com/downloads/TEListBuilding.htm

TE List Building also makes a great gift to give away to your list.  To make money with the TE List Building ebook be sure to click the link on the download page for more info.

Happy Thursday!

Got a banner ad you want to promote?

My friend Steve Ayling (aka “The Duckman”) is launching a new banner  exchange today which I will be using to generate thousands of impressions for all of my banners.

You can check it out here:

In spite of what you may have heard banner advertising is NOT dead.  In fact, I still get quite a few click throughs on my banners every day.

Probably the biggest benefit of promoting banner ads is branding!  You gotta get your face or logo out there as much as you can.  People really do remember things and the more often they see your banners the more they will think of you.

Buckets of Banners gives you multiple ways to earn free impressions for your banner ads.  There is even a free affiliate program that let’s you earn cash commissions and free banner displays from your direct referrals.

This is something I have never seen offered before and is sure to become very popular.

Sign-up for Free here…

Hello.

Happy Wednesday!

I know.  Other than my weekly jv giveaway updates I haven’t been writing much lately.  Sorry.  I will try to post more content soon.

In the mean time I am happy to be able to share with you a book written by my good friend William Brant called “13 Deadly Traffic Exchange Tragedies”.

This isn’t a new book but until now William had been selling it on his website for $37.  Not cheap but worth every penny when you consider that these 13 tips are going to be a kick in the pants for some of you who make these  mistakes every day with their ads.

I just got the ok from William who told me I can give away free copies of his book to my readers provided they actually put these strategies into practice.

So, here you go…

http://getrichwithjerry.com/downloads/13deadlyte.htm

Nothing to sign-up for.

Just download and enjoy!

Happy Tuesday!

I am very excited today because the long wait is finally over…

Thumbvu is here!

In case you haven’t heard Thumbvu is the new traffic exchange program that i’ve been testing for my good friend John Guanzon.

I know…  Another new traffic exchange.  Big deal.  Right?

No. Thumbvu is different.  It’s like nothing anyone has seen before.

Thumbvu is a totally unique traffic exchange which prequalifies your visitors right from the surf bar.  It also ties directly into your social media sites like
Twitter and Facebook allowing you to build your social network like never before.

There’s even an app for your phone

You gotta try this…

Thumbvu is free to join, but I urge you to carefully review the one time offer
you will see after you do. They are practically giving you everything you will need for your advertising needs this year at a rock bottom price you can’t  afford not to take action on.

Click the link below to join Thumbvu now…

It’s been almost two years since I released my first ebook which was about making money with free traffic exchange programs.  The information in that
book was good for it’s time but some of it is starting to get a little outdated plus I have learned a lot of new stuff since it first came out.

I decided to create a 2010 edition with all new information but I need your help with it.

You see, rather than write another ebook that tries to explain everything I know about traffic exchanges I want to write an ebook that focuses on the things that my readers want to know about.

So, I created this survey:
http://getrichwithjerry.com/TE_Survey.htm

Don’t worry, it’s really short.

You can participate anonymously if you wish or include your name and email for a chance at winning a free upgrade when the new site launches.

You can also submit any specific questions you have about traffic exchanges to me here.  Not only will I try to answer your questions personally but I may even include them in the book.

Here’s the link again:
http://getrichwithjerry.com/TE_Survey.htm

Thanks for your help!

Happy Sunday!

One of the key points that I try to emphasize to people who are just getting
into Internet marketing is how important branding is to their business.

Branding is something that is often overlooked by marketers as is evidenced by the number of people out there promoting generic affiliate pages without any kind of personal branding.

Branding is important!

I learned this first hand from working with the “TE guy” Jon Olson himself.

Click here to access an exclusive interview with Jon Olson where he breaks down exactly what you need to know about branding in safelists and traffic exchanges to get better results from your efforts.

You will also get a sneak peak at what is sure become one of the most innovative TE launches of 2010.  I have been beta testing this site and it’s really like nothing you have ever seen before.

Check out the interview with John Guanzon to get a front row seat to the launch of this exciting new traffic exchange where quality advertising and social media blend seamlessly together.

Click here to continue…

Sheesh.  I’ve actually been keeping this site fairly active lately.  I guess 10% of the reason is because I keep finding really good stuff that I want to share.  The other 90% is me trying to avoid starting my new ebook.  I’m great once I get started but actually writing that first chapter is like pulling teeth.

Anyways, I just wanted to give a quick shout-out to another blog that I think totally rocks called Traffic Exchange News.

If you use traffic exchanges you know that every day your inbox gets filled with emails from owners trying to get you to surf their exchanges.  Sometimes I just delete these but if I plan on surfing there are usually some really good specials that get me to surf one exchange over the other.

Traffic Exchange News sorts through all of these emails every day and lists all the exchanges that are having specials.

I’d be lying if I said I had never thought of doing something like this myself.  However I know that I would get bored and I probably wouldn’t last more than 2 weeks.  Somehow Keith manages to do this almost every day making it one of the best resources for traffic exchange users.

If you plan on surfing any traffic exchanges today make sure you check out Traffic Exchange News first.

Wow.  It’s been awhile since I have done one of these.

In case you are new here… I am an Internet marketer and I track my stats.  Every month I like to go back and look to see where all of my traffic is coming from and see which traffic sources are making me the most money.  Once I have that information I can know where to focus my advertising to make more money next month.  Neat, huh?

At the moment I am focusing on promoting my Safelist Marketing Tactics website.  Since I am mostly using free traffic sources I am promoting this splash page.

Just a quick disclaimer… these are my own personal stats.  I make no guarantees that my results will be the same as yours.  There are probably better places to advertise.  These are just a few sources that are working for me.

Ok, ready?

Safelists

List Joe – Hits: 2,939  Clicks: 237  Sign-ups: 49
List Auction – Hits: 1,233  Clicks: 97  Sign-ups: 22
AdSolutionline – Hits: 2,793 Clicks: 100  Sign-ups: 15
Elite Safelist – Hits: 1,608  Clicks: 58  Sign-ups: 10
European Safelist – Hits: 950  Clicks: 34  Sign-ups: 10

No big surprises here.  My site is geared towards safelists so it makes sense that I would get a lot of sign-ups here.  List Joe has always been my top performer and it continues to get me the most sign-ups every month.

The only real surprise here is European Safelist.  I resisted  joining this site for years.  I decided to give it a shot last month.  The site doesn’t have a lot of bells and whistles but it seems to be working better than a lot of more popular safelists.

Traffic Exchanges

Tezak Traffic Power – Hits: 3,083  Clicks: 87  Sign-ups: 23
Traffic Splash - Hits: 1,967  Clicks: 56  Sign-ups: 8
Dragon Surf - Hits: 3,170  Clicks: 48  Sign-ups: 8
I Love Hits – Hits: 4,137  Clicks: 58  Sign-ups: 6

Wow.  Tezak Traffic Power rocks!  This brand new traffic exchange has been breaking all sorts of records.  Definitely a good place to advertise your splash pages and lead capture pages to reach a large audience.

Text Ad Exchanges

Muscle Mail – Hits: 853  Clicks: 36  Sign-ups: 8

I gave up on text ad exchanges for awhile.  There’s just too many of them giving away too much free stuff to make them worth while.  I decided to try and give them another shot last month.  I joined about 20 text ad exchanges with over 1,000 members each.  The results… meh!  I got a few sign-ups but not enough to make it worth working with them every day.

Muscle Mail is the only text ad exchange that has continuously performed for me month after month.  Not sure why.  I guess it has been around longer than most text ad exchanges and targets a slightly different crowd.

That’s it!  I mean I had plenty of other sign-ups from random places but those are the big ones that you can use to promote your own splash pages and lead capture pages.

Make sure you track your results!  That’s the biggest mistake most new marketers make.  Knowing where your traffic and sign-ups are coming from is the easiest way to tailor your marketing campaigns to get the best results for your efforts.

Click Here to Track Your Ads with HitsConnect

I just got out of the Affiliate Funnel conference room with some of the owners of Tezak Traffic Power and I am blown away by some of the numbers I am hearing.

In case you have been living under a rock Tezak Traffic Power is a brand new traffic exchange from long-time surfer Tony Tezak and super TE owners Paul Kinder and Tim Rash.

If you have surfed any traffic exchanges in the last 10 years chances are you have seen one of Tony Tezak’s splash pages.  Tony is the surfer’s surfer.  I usually don’t bother joining new traffic exchanges because it seems like there is a new launch every other day but when I heard Tony Tezak was launching his own exchange I had to join.

Tezak Traffic Power was created with the surfer in mind from the ground up on a brand new traffic exchange script which has lots of cool features that have never been seen before.

So how was the launch?  When I left the Affiliate Funnel conference room about an hour ago they were 80 members short of 5000.  That’s 5000 new members in just over 48 hours.  What does that mean for you the surfer?  That’s a lot of new eyeballs on your webpages.

Hey, I just received an email from Paul Kinder.  Here’s the official stats:

24 hours in…

Gross nearly $22000, amazing numbers!
4823 members already in
13.5% conversion on upgrade offers
Commissions earned: over $11,500
Loads of members due a payout
$2.40 average per referral – exchange wide
add $1 per referral for the contest and that’s $3.40

Crazy!

My own personal stats… I am getting a new sign-up over at Safelist Marketing Tactics for every 200 hits I get at Tezak Traffic Power.  That’s way better than any other traffic exchange I am using right now.

The $1.00 per active referral promotion is going on until next Sunday.

If you are not a member yet join now.

I just received an email from Jay Hines about a bunch of major changes on his Quick Tab Change program.

For those who don’t already know… Jay Hines created Quick Tab Change as a way to make earning credits on multiple traffic exchange programs easier by assigning a key on your keyboard that lets you switch between tabs on your browser. It doesn’t sound like much but you would be surprised how many more credits you can earn from traffic exchanges using Quick Tab Change.

The software itself has stayed mostly the same except there are now two versions of Quick Tab Change: Pro and Lite. They are pretty similar except the Pro version loads quicker and has a few more options.

Most of the big changes are in the Quick Tab Change site itself. QTC has been one of my best performing affiliate programs for awhile since it is such a valuable tool that almost every traffic exchange user will want to use. There are now a lot more options for rebranding Quick Tab Change with your own affiliate links in many other top converting free affiliate programs. There are also a few new OTOs that so far are converting much better than the old site.

If you use free traffic exchange programs and you are not using Quick Tab Change you are missing out on lots of extra credits that you could be using to promote your site. Click the link below to download your free copy now.

Sorry, I am late again.

I know this is a pretty popular feature on this blog but unfortunately there isn’t a whole lot to report this month.  I spent a good chunk of December traveling and doing light shows around the midwest so I didn’t have as much time to spend promoting as I normally do.  Still, i’ll give you what I got.

The following stats come from promoting my own “Traffic Success Formula” ebook which was created to show people how to take advantage of free advertising programs to promote their business.  These are just some of the places I used for advertising during the month of December 2008.

Traffic Exchanges
As I said, I didn’t have a whole lot of time to surf in December so I didn’t get much TE traffic in December.  I did purchase a few credit packages and had plenty of residual traffic coming from my downlines and from credits I had left over from previous months.  Still, here’s my top traffic exchanges:

1. Dragon Surf – 8
2. Traffic Splash – 6
3. ILoveHits – 3

Not real impressive, is it?  Don’t worry.  As soon as I get caught up with some other things I am working on I plan to spend the rest of the month surfing my butt off.  Hopefully I will have some better number for you at the end of January.  In the mean time, see how the top 20 traffic exchanges are ranked over at Affiliate Funnel.

Safelists
I did mange to keep up with my safelist advertising in December but I decided to switch gears a little bit and promote my top money making program (OBA) instead so that I would have some extra money this month to spend on advertising.  I earned an extra $100 just from safelists but since I was promoting an affiliate site I didn’t track where all the sales were coming from.  Sorry.

If you want to know which safelists I get the best results from check out the links on the side of my blog.

Text Ad Exchanges
Ok, it’s offical.  Text ad exchanges are dead!  Well, maybe not all of them but over the last few months I have seen my conversions in text ad exchanges skyrocket and now plummet back to the earth like a sack of potatoes.  The problem is that there are now so many new text ad exchanges opening up that nobody is bothering to stick around long enough to actually use them.

For example, earlier today I counted over 300 text ad exchanges that are giving away promo codes for new members.  These promo codes can be exchanged for solo ads, banner ads, or text ads on the exchanges.  The problem is who is going to stick around long enough to actually read your ads for credits when there are that many exchanges giving away ads for free?

And the quality of the exchanges have dropped considerably too.  I saw a site offering to sell people their own text ad exchange for less than $10/month.  That means over the next few months you are going to start seeing hundreds of new cookie cutter text ad exchanges running on servers that make my old trs-80 look like a speed demon.

I just finished putting almost all of my text ad exchange accounts on “vacation mode” to stop receiving emails from them.  Still, there are a few that are worth keeping.  Mainly because they continue to produce good results or I know the owners are working hard to build their exchanges.  Here’s what’s left:

Traffic Swarm
Maximum Profits
Traffic Station
AdExchangers
Muscle Mail

If you want to recommend some to me that are worth joining please post a comment and I will test them out.

JV Giveaway Events
JV Giveaways were once again my top source for getting sign-ups in December mainly because they take so little effort to promote.  The “Merry Christmas” giveaway got me 28 new referrals and so far this month’s “New Year” giveaway has gotten me 57 new sign-ups.

Unfortunately JV giveaways events can be a little tricky when determining which ones to join.  If you want to know which giveaways to join your best bet is to sign-up on my email list at the top of the page (check the free ebook) and I will email you when a good event is launching.

That’s all for now.  If you have any comments or want to recommend other sources of advertising please feel free to leave a comment.

Click Here to Track Your Ads with HitsConnect

With the recent release of Instant Banner Creator by John Merrick & Soren Jordansen I thought I would say a few words about how to take advatange of banner ads to advertise your websites.

To read my recent review of Instant Banner Creator and see some of the banners I made click here.

Banner advertising has been around since the mid 90s and provided the economic foundation for Internet marketing during the late 90s.  Today, many people see banner ads as an annoyance and are often ignored making it difficult to generate decent traffic from them.  However the real value of banner advertising comes when they are used for the purpose of branding.

Banner advertising is cheap.  For a few dollars a day you can buy thousands of impressions to get your banner seen across the Internet.  Even though you won’t be getting much direct traffic from these ads when you promote banner ads that include your picture or company logo you are creating a brand awareness that over time people will begin to recognize.

When people see a commercial on TV they don’t generally jump off the couch and run out to buy the product being advertised.  However the next time they are in the store and they see that product they might be more compelled to buy it.

With Instant Banner Creator it is very simple to create a banner that allows you to brand yourself or your company.

Before doing any banner advertising I would suggest signing up for a free banner rotator like the one offered by IntelliBanners.  Even if you only plan to promote one banner I would highly suggest you use Instant Banner Creator to make a few extra banners that you can test against one another.  With IntelliBanners you can track how many people are clicking each of your banners.  You can then determine which banners get the most clicks and delete the ones that don’t work.  You can then make more banners and continue testing them against each other to find out which ones are the more effective.

IntelliBanners will also help you determine the best sites to advertise your banner ads.

Here’s my IntelliBanners list of the top 10 sites showing my banner ads:

It’s easy to see here that Traffic Splash and  StartXchange.com brought me the most impressions but Dragon Surf and ILoveHits by far have the best click through rates.

I get a lot of my traffic from traffic exchanges because it is extreamly cheap and it fits into my niche.  If you don’t have time to surf for credits you can also use the IntelliBanners advertising co-op to show your banners for you.

Click Here to Join IntelliBanners

This past week one of my most favorite websites (Affiliate Funnel) did a relaunch of sorts unveiling a brand new system for ranking the top traffic exchange sites.

Affiliate Funnel has ranked the top traffic exchange for awhile but they are now getting a little more scientific by basing there rankings on a variety of factors including user opinions, number of new members, and total number of hits. The results, which are tracked every week, present a fascinating window into how different exchanges stack up against one another.

Affiliate Funnel ranks the top traffic exchanges every Friday based on the results of the previous week. Being about 4:20 on Friday morning I am now getting a peek at which traffic exchanges ranked in the top 10 from this first week of testing. Very cool stuff.

Check out this week’s top 10 traffic exchanges now… CLICK HERE

Of course, the best way to figure out which exchanges will work best for you is to test them yourself and track the results. Just because an exchange performs well for some people does not mean that it will work just as well for what you are promoting. Still, with hundreds of traffic exchanges to choose from the top 10 traffic exchanges from Affiliate Funnel make a great starting point.