Love

ThumbVu Raises the Bar on Personal Branding

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I do love me some personal branding.

Why?

This is a very competitive business.  Anything you can do to give yourself an advantage and make your sites get noticed will make a big difference.  One of the easiest ways to do this is to personalize your business with your own unique brand.

Your unique personal brand can be your own picture.

It doesn’t get any more unique than that.

The guys at TimTech know this and have been championing the idea of personal branding for years.  Now they have taken personal branding to a new level with the relaunch of their ThumbVu traffic exchange.

The new ThumbVu design is clean and fresh and it offers a new concept in traffic exchange surfing.  Instead of viewing random websites for hours on end ThumbVu members are now presented with a list of other members giving you the option of choosing who’s website you want to view next.

This is a great opportunity to connect your personal brand with whatever you are promoting.

Members also have the ability to leave feedback on your pages.

ThumbVu Feedback

Do you think having this kind of feedback displayed every time your site is shown will help you get more sign-ups?

You bet it will.

Lots of people will be flocking to ThumbVu this week to check out all of the new changes.  If you are already a member now would be the perfect time to login and assign some credits to your sites (and to your personal brand).

If you’re not already a member of ThumbVu… what are you waiting for?

Click the banner below to join.

free manual traffic exchange
Click Here to Join ThumbVu

New Time-Bonus Ads at SOTAM

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Happy Fifth of July!

I am a few days late with this but over the weekend State of the Art Mailer quietly unveiled a new feature on their site that has been long in the works.  I am talking about their new “Time-Bonus Ads” which I will show you below.

If you are not familiar with State of the Art Mailer they are a unique viral list building site which is one of the most responsive advertising sites that I use.

One of the features that makes State of the Art Mailer so unique is that they offer their members the ability to participate in a profit-sharing pool where they share some of the money the site earns with their members as a reward for being active on the site.  Being active really just means reading the emails that other members send which is something most of us are doing anyways but offer this extra incentive means that State of the Art Mailer will typically bring you more traffic than any other mailer.

The new time-bonus ads work in a similar way.  By being active and reading emails you can now earn “time” credit that can be used to display a banner ad on their site and on the sites of other members participating in the program over a period of time.

You can also earn more time by displaying their widgets on your own pages.

Here’s a sample widget:


By displaying these widgets on your splash pages or blog you not only earn time credits but you can also get ranked on their page showing the top participating sites. If you click the click the number of “networked sites” under the banner you will see what I mean. Having your site listed on this page is also a good way to create back links to your site which of course the search engines love.

The time-bonus ads feature was supposed to be released at the time State of the Art Mailer launched but due to some programming complexity it has taken until now for it to be released.

So far this looks like an excellent way to earn some extra hands-free traffic to your sites. The banner I added has been running for about 2.5 hours and has already received 622 views with 2 click-thurs so it is definitely working.

It’s good to see that the owners of State of the Are Mailer are not taking a relaxed stance to their mailer but are actively trying to make it even better. This is the kind of stuff I like to see and I admit that I don’t see it enough in the safelist industry.

If you are not already a member of State of the Are Mailer definitely give this one a try. You won’t be disappointed.

Click the banner below to join…

Click Five Links, Gain A Mailer!
Click Here to Join State of the Art Mailer

My Favorite WordPress Plugins

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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 Plugin Alternatives – 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.

Hell Froze Over at I Love Hits

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Happy Saturday!

I usually don’t promote individual traffic exchanges.  Especially ones that have been around for as long as I Love Hits.  But big things are going on at ILH and if you advertise with TEs you need to know about this.

First, there is the new addition of bracket surfing at I Love Hits. I’m proud to say I had a small hand in this when the idea came up one day in TELive.  The way it works is every day you are paired up against another surfer and you compete head-to-head to rack up the most clicks in one day.

It’s very fun and very addictive.  Jon is even giving away a Sony Flip HD to the top surfer this week.

Check it out:
http://www.ilovehits.com/?rid=24492

Second, if you are already a member of ILH you should know that Jon has reset the one-time-offers.  This means you have one last chance to pick up Jon’s insane “Lifetime Upgrade” before he raises the price tomorrow.

I grabbed the lifetime upgrade yesterday.

It’s worth every penny!

http://www.ilovehits.com/?rid=24492

Finally, for years ILH has had the reputation of being the only traffic exchange that doesn’t pay out commissions.  No more!  ILH members can now earn commissions from referring new members to the site.

So if you are already a member of ILH make sure you login to the site today for your last chance at the amazing lifetime upgrade!

If you are NOT a member of I Love Hits… what are you waiting for?

ilovehitsClick Here to Join I Love Hits

List Effects – New Viral List Builder and Giveaway

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Happy Tuesday!

A new site is launching today that I am very excited about…

It’s a brand new viral list builder from my friends Jon Atwood and Frank Salinas called “List Effects“.

Why is this such a big deal?

Basically, Jon Atwood is sorta the king when it comes to credit based safelists and nobody knows more about text ad exchanges than Frank Salinas.  These
guys joining forces to create a new viral list builder means magic.

But it’s not JUST a viral list builder!

These guys came up with the crazy idea to also make their site an on going jv giveaway event.

Hello!  I LOVE giveaway events!

So not only are you building your list on the site (10 levels deep!) but you can also add your squeeze pages to send members directly to your own autoresponder.

Neat!

Jon asked me to help him out with the launch and since the site is now open I would like to personally invite you to join for free.

Click the link below to sign-up!


Click Here to Join List Effects