Hey guys.

Last month I relaunched my Safelist Marketing Tactics site.  As part of this promotion I decided to purchase a few safelist solo ads to help spread the word.  Since I always track my ads I thought you might be interested in checking out some of my stats.

I should point out that these stats probably aren’t as reliable as my monthly safelist reports.  Usually my stats are based on a full month of daily mailings.  These solo ad stats are 1-time mailings all sent within a few days of each other.  I probably would have gotten better results if I had spaced them out over a period of time so take that into consideration.

“Clicks” is how many people viewed my splash page.  “Action” is how many people clicked the link on my splash page to go to the main site.  “Sales” is how many people joined my site.  CTA and CTS are “clicks to action” and “clicks to sale”.  “Cost” is how much I paid for the solo ads and CPS is the “cost per sale”.

Not the greatest results.  Especially since I usually try to shoot for $1.00 per sign-up.

European Safelist ended up being the best deal.  I actually sent that solo ad for free as part of my monthly upgraded membership which costs $7.00.  I usually get 7-10 sign-ups from my monthly European Safelist solo ad which is what makes me think all theses results are a little bit weaker than they could have been.

Adsolutionline ended up being a pretty good deal.  It’s a little more expensive than the other solo ads but Adsolutionline has always been a responsive safelist for me.

I’m pretty disappointed in the viral list builders.  I normally get great results from these sites but it appears the solo ads weren’t really worth it this time.  List Joe brought me a lot of sign-ups but if you are going to spend $100 on advertising you’re probably better off with the monthly upgrade.

Just as with my monthly safelist stats please keep in mind that these stats are the results of my own marketing methods.  Your results may vary.  The only way to know for sure what works best for you is to track your results!  You can get a free link tracker from from TE Toolbox.

As I mentioned a few days ago I want to start doing more reviews of individual safelists, viral list builders, and whatever other programs I have been using lately.

The first site I want to review is “A State of the Art Mailing System“.  State of the Art Mailer is a relatively new safelist created by Jay Pause and Brad Webb which launched a few months ago.

A State of the Art Mailer System appears to be using a unique mailer script.  I would say it’s more of a safelist than a viral list builder but there are number of unique features that makes State of the Art Mailer stand out from other sites.

One of the things you will notice is that when you join you are first asked to look at 5 websites belonging to other members before continuing.  I guess this is the “viral” aspect of the program because when you refer people your ad gets displayed in the 2nd position for your downline members to view and when they refer people your ad appears in the 3rd position.  Upgraded members can also have their ads randomly displayed in the other positions.  This is supposed to generate hands free traffic to your pages.  I’ve never been crazy about these kinds of systems but whatever.  I have referred 2 people and my pages have so far gotten 8 hits.

You only have to do this when you first join.  Otherwise you get presented with a login offer from Jay and Brad along with an advertiser’s full-page ad.  You can earn credits if you view the full-page ad for 20 seconds or you can skip it and go right into the site.

The members area first appears a little confusing with 20 different menu options being presented to you.   The most important items are right at the start though with “Mail Now” being the very first.

So what makes State of the Art Mailer special?

SOTAM uses a unique mailing method called the “Button Escalation System” which rewards active members with the ability to send their ads to more members.  It’s a little confusing but there’s a really good video on the site which explains it:

Basically when you start out as a free member you can email 500 members every 7 days.  However if you are active and read enough credit emails from other members you can get bumped up to higher level buttons which let you reach more members.

You can also upgrade your membership which gives you automatic access to the higher buttons as well as the ability to email every 3 days instead of 7.  I purchased the 5000 button upgrade when I joined and so far have had no trouble reaching the 7500 button which allows me to email almost the entire membership every 3 days.

It’s been about 2 months since I joined and so far the results have been excellent. They even post live mailing stats in the members area so that you can see exactly how well the system is working.

According to my own personal stats from last month I received 3,430 visitors to my splash pages which resulted in 13 new sign-ups to my program.  That’s a pretty decent conversion rate but the fact that a site this new is producing numbers like this is very impressive.

There’s a bunch of other unique features such as the “profit sharing pool” for active members (I earned a whopping $2.09 last month) as well as an “instant recruiting” system which apparently is still being worked on and hasn’t been added to the site yet.

Overall I am very impressed with the State of the Art Mailer.  The site isn’t real pretty but the results are what counts.  I think Jay and Brad have created something really unique here and I am looking forward to what they have planned for the future.

To join A State of the Art Mailing System for free click the image below.

Click Here to Join A State of the Art Mailing System

Would you believe this blog is almost 2 years old?

I do find that hard to believe.  I thought for sure I would get bored and forget about it after the first 3 months.  But sure enough, I checked the archives over on the right side of the screen and it says my first post was July 2008.

I thought it was interesting that in all of my years of blogging (ok, next month I can officially say “years”) I haven’t really written anything for other bloggers to help them get started with their own blogs.  I guess it’s because I still don’t consider myself a real “blogger” but after 2 years and lots of positive feedback I guess I must be doing something right.

A few days ago someone emailed me looking for help setting up a new blog.  They bought a domain, installed WordPress, and picked out a theme.  Now the adventure begins as they try to figure out what to with their blog.

I thought I would share some of the suggestions I am making to him by posting them here on my blog so everyone can benefit from them.

So, first up… plugins!  I love plugins.  They are what makes WordPress so awesome.  Here are the list of plugin I have installed on my blog:

Akismet – Essential spam blocker.  Akismet checks your comments against the Akismet web service to see if they look like spam or not.

All in One Adsense and YPN – Inserts Adsense or YPN code in to your blog posts.

All in One SEO Pack – Out-of-the-box SEO for your WordPress blog.

Google XML Sitemaps – This plugin will generate a special XML sitemap which will help search engines like Google, Yahoo, Bing and Ask.com to better index your blog.

RSS Power Plus – This plugin will, when a new post is published, submit the rss feed for this post only (not the entire domains feed) to the configured RSS Aggregators websites, including where applicable the tags used in the post.

SEO Friendly Images – Automatically adds alt and title attributes to all your images. Improves traffic from search results and makes them W3C/xHTML valid as well.

ShareThis – Let your visitors share a post/page with others. Supports e-mail and posting to social bookmarking sites.

Smart 404 – Rescue your viewers from site errors! When content cannot be found, Smart 404 will use the current URL to attempt to find matching content, and redirect to it automatically. Smart 404 also supplies template tags which provide a list of suggestions, for use on a 404.php template page if matching content can’t be immediately discovered.

Sociable – Automatically add links on your posts, pages and RSS feed to your favorite social bookmarking sites.

TweetMyBlog! – Updates your twitter account with each new post to your blog.

Tweet This – Adds a “Tweet This Post” link to every post and page. Shortens URLs. Can automatically tweet new and scheduled blog posts. Highly customizable.

Ultimate Google Analytics – Enable Google Analytics on your blog. Has options to also track external links, mailto links and links to downloads on your own site.

WordPress.com Stats – Tracks views, post/page views, referrers, and clicks.

WP Auto Tagger – Automatically finds tags based on your post content.

Got any other suggestions?  Feel free to post them in the comments.

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.

Welcome back to part 3 of my money making series.

A few days ago we started talking about list building as a way for you to make money working from home on the Internet.  For myself and many others this has been the key to our Internet marketing success.

Today I want to share with you the step-by-step system that I use to make money with my list every day.  However, instead of trying to explain it all in this blog post I am going to refer you to an ebook instead.

Sorry.  No sense in me trying to reinvent the wheel when all this information is already out there readily available.

If you are looking for a step-by-step system to building a profitable opt-in mailing list there is no better place to start than Soren Jordansen’s “Internet Marketing Success Formula”.

You download a free copy here:
http://getrichwithjerry.com/downloads/imsf.htm

Save it to your computer and then take some time today to read the whole thing.

Don’t just skim… read it!

You will be glad you did.

Next time I won’t take the easy way out and i’ll show you some techniques you can use to create your own mouth watering freebies that can be given away to build your list.  Look for it in a few days.

I’ve said many times before that a professional autoresponder is one of the most powerful weapons in any successful Internet marketer’s arsenal. Over the past few years Aweber has become accepted as the king of autoresponders based on their features and more importantly their excellent delivery rate. Until now Aweber was the only autoresponder I would personally recommend but it looks like now I will be making the switch to Traffic Wave.

I actually joined Traffic Wave once about 6 years ago. At the time I think it was an FFA site with an autoresponder feature and some kind of income opportunity that I didn’t really understand. I joined because I thought I could make money from it and of course I didn’t so I quit.

Over the years I have seen various programs pushing Traffic Wave as a way to make money.  Because of this I always assumed that’s what it was… an income opportunity with an autoresponder tacked on to make it appear legit. I even expressed this opinion at NMF a few months ago and was surprised when the owner of Traffic Wave, Brian Rooney, showed up to dispel this myth and prove that Traffic Wave is a real autoresponder with delivery rates that could compete with the best autoresponders out there.

I kinda forgot about it until a few weeks ago when Jerry Reeder and I got into a discussion about Aweber’s new form builder and the possibility of switching to Traffic Wave to offer a simpler solution for our readers. When Jon Olson decided to make the switch to Traffic Wave live on TrafficExchangeLive last week we both took the plunge with him.

I’ve spent the last few days playing with Traffic Wave and I am happy to say that it has improved from where it was 6 years ago.  Improved a lot!  Traffic Wave is the real deal.  From what I can see Traffic Wave offers all the features as Aweber along with a very accessible owner who understands the needs of Internet marketers like myself.

The price is a big factor too.  When I joined Aweber I must have locked in a monthly subscription price which is roughly the same as Traffic Wave.  At some point Aweber changed their pricing based on the size of your list.  I guess as a long-time member I was exempt from the price change because based on the size of my list I should be paying an extra $50/month at Aweber.  Traffic Wave on the other hand has a flat monthly fee no matter how big your list gets.

What makes my decision to switch to Traffic Wave really interesting is that Traffic Wave is also an mlm complete with a forced matrix and fast track bonuses.  A few years ago I stated that I was done promoting these kinds of programs because instead of trying to sell good products you always end up pushing the opportunity.  When people fail to make money with the opportunity they quit and the whole thing falls apart.

Traffic Wave on the other hand is a real competitive autoresponder service that I am happy to use and recommend with or without the income opportunity.  The fact that I can make a lot more money with it is just an added bonus.

I don’t personally have any problems with Aweber.  I still think it’s a great autoresponder.  But when it comes time to recommend an autoresponder based on price and features I will have to go with Traffic Wave now.

I haven’t started promoting Traffic Wave yet.  I’ll probably start by updating the links in some of my ebooks and adding it my downline builders.  Once I get a few referrals then i’ll probably start pushing it a little harder.

If you have been on the fence about getting an autoresponder now would be a good time to join Traffic Wave.  I can’t promise that you will make thousands of dollars a month just from being in my downline but if you choose to use Traffic Wave to build your list you can feel confident that you are getting a professional autoresponder service that will become the backbone of your business for years to come.

Sign up now to get a free 30-day trial.

Click here to visit Traffic Wave

Hello and welcome to my safelist stats.

Are we really one month away from 2010?  I still haven’t figured out what this decade is called.  The Oh’s?  Oh well.

After the dismal results I had last month I decided to make a new splash page for my Safelist Marketing Tactics site.  I went with a “video splash page” because everybody keeps telling me how effective they are.  I wasn’t real crazy about the idea of sitting in front of the camera doing a boring pitch so I decided to something a little different.  Here’s what I came up with:  http://www.safelisttactics.com/splash/index.htm

That’s the general one.  I made some specific pages for each of the safelists I use as well as for a few traffic exchanges.  They seem to be working great so far.

No big industry news to report, so let’s get on with the stats…

“Clicks” is how many people views the splash page.  “Action” is how many people click the link on my splash page to go to the main site.  “Sales” is how many people joined my site.  CTA and CTS are I think “clicks to action” and “clicks to sale” or something like that.

Happy to see a nice jump in my number of sign-ups compared to last month.  The rankings are about the same as usual except Got Safelist seems to be working better again.  Yay!

As usual the viral list builders dominate the list.  Maybe I shoulda wrote a book about them instead.  Or maybe I will?  Hmm…

Speaking of viral list builders… a new site launched today which automates all of your mailings on the top viral list builder sites.  I’ve been playing with it for the last few days and it’s really cool.  It will actually login to all of your accounts, tell you how many credits you have left, tell you when your next mailing is, and let you send an email all with one click.

It’s free to join.  Check it out here: http://trafficzipper.com/index.php?af=457

That’s all for now.  I’ll probably try out a few more viral list builders this month so hopefully I will have some more numbers for you next month.  As always, my stats may be different than yours so make sure you are tracking all of your ads so you can know what works best for YOU.

For those of you who are still not tracking your ads (shame on you) I am going to recommend a new tracker for you this month.  It’s called TE Toolbox.  It was created for the traffic exchange industry but works perfectly fine for safelists, viral list builders, and any other traffic sites you want to use.  It’s free to join and it’s got a ton of killer features beyond just a link tracker.  Click the image below to join.