Welcome back!

The calendar on my wall says it is February but the thermometer is making it feel more like May.  Regardless of what the weather may feel like outside it’s time for another fun filled blog post revealing my top safelists and viral list builders.

I didn’t spot any major new launches last month but I am happy to report that Email-Hog is back up and running!  I held off on sending an email about the relaunch until I could verify that everything was up and working again.  Hopefully we will see them ranking well again next month.  If you were a member before the site went down a few months ago you may still be able to retrieve your old account data by filling out the form on this page: http://email-hog.com/recover.php

That’s it for the news.   Let’s get to the stats!

Every day I promote a number of squeeze pages using safelists and viral list builders which give away free copies of my ebook Safelist Marketing Tactics. I use a free link tracker to determine how much traffic my mailings generate as well as how many new subscribers I receive.  I then compile all of that data and share the results here on my blog each month to show you which safelists and viral list builders are bringing me the best results.

I always like to point out that I do have upgraded memberships at most of these sites which usually allows me to send my ads more often.  My ads are also very targeted to other safelist members which does help to increase the response rate.  Your results my vary.

Here we go…

Total January sign-ups from all mailers (including those not listed here): 142

Congrats to Viral List Builder Plus for making it to the top of the list!

A big thank you to List Hoopla for recommending Your EZ List to me.  It’s not the sexiest list builder out there.  In fact it’s about as bare bones as it gets.  But so far the results have been excellent.

Looking at the stats I also want to mention that I recently let my upgrade at List Joe expire.  It’s always been a relatively expensive upgrade which was well worth the price about a year ago but with all the new viral list builders it’s effectiveness had been going down.  Oddly, now that I am a free member again my results have been going back up.  If this keeps up I may have to spring for another upgrade.

That’s it for this month.  Keep in mind that these stats are the result of my own marketing efforts and your results may vary.  These stats are only provided as a guide to show you what is currently working best for me.  What works best for you might be something entirely different but you will never know unless you are tracking your ads.  You can get the same free link tracker that I use when you join TE Toolbox.

Click here to receive a free copy of Safelist Marketing Tactics

One aspect of Internet marketing that I suspect most newbie marketers tend to neglect is the importance of participating in online Internet marketing forums.

Why are Internet marketing forums so important?

There is no better way to learn how to make money online than by interacting with the people who are actually doing it.  Internet marketing forums are filled with people who are more than happy to answer your questions or help you out with a problem you are having.  In most cases all you need to do is ask.

There is also the networking aspect of participating in Internet marketing forums.  It always helps to get to know who the big players in any industry are but it’s even more important that they get to know who you are.  Internet marketing forums are a great way to socialize and interact with these people get to get to know them on a more personal level.

And of course there is the traffic!

While you usually can’t openly promote your affiliate links on Internet marketing forums you can often add them to your signature which appears beneath all of your posts.  The more posts you add to the forum the more likely your signature will be noticed by other forum members.  If you’re lucky the thread you are posting in might even get picked up by some of the major search engines giving you even more valuable traffic to your links.

But no spamming is allowed!

You can’t join an Internet marketing forum with the goal of getting your links into as many threads as possible.  Most members can spot someone doing this right away.  I can guarantee you won’t last long if you approach Internet marketing forums this way.

When joining a new Internet marketing forum it’s a good idea to just read the new posts for a few days to get a feel for the conversations there and to see who are the most active members.

Before you start posting it’s always a good idea to introduce yourself to the other members.  There is usually a specific part of the forum dedicated to new user introductions.  Just tell everyone a little bit about yourself so they will be more likely to recognize you when you start adding to the conversations later.

Of course make sure you read and understand any forum rules before you start posting.

Once you have a feel for the forum and you’ve introduced yourself you can start adding to the conversations.  Just be yourself and try to add relative content to the conversations.  Try to avoid adding one line responses like “I agree”.

It can take some time to start seeing results from participating in Internet marketing forums.  That’s why it is important to try and stay active and visit your forums at least once every few days.  It might take awhile but the information learned from forums and the relationships built from them can become invaluable to you in the future.

And just for fun… here’s a little video I found from the 1950′s with a less than serious way of explaining how to get started with posting in forums.  Enjoy!

Here is the list of JV giveaway events for October 10, 2010.

JV Giveaway Events

October 15 – IM Gift Vault Giveaway
Contributors: 154  Gifts: 118

October 15 – Spook-Nite Giveaway
Contributors: 148  Gifts: 102

October 15 – The Golden Treasure Giveaway
Contributors: 100  Gifts: 67

October 15 – Traffic Breakout Giveaway
Contributors: 143  Gifts: 108

October 17 – Creepy Autumn Giveaway
Contributors: 128  Gifts: 95

October 18 – List Building Event Giveaway
Contributors: 103  Gifts: 70

October 22 – Spook Nite Giveaway
Contributors: 91  Gifts: 68

October 31 – Thanks for Giving Giveaway
Contributors: 120  Gifts: 67

You can find a complete listing of upcoming giveaways on the events calendar at: http://www.GiveawayTactics.com

Happy Monday!

I’m back! Since I received so much positive feedback I have decided to keep the updates coming though they might not be as frequent as they once were.

I’ll continue to highlight the events that I think are worth joining and include the others as a reference.

So without further ado…

Here is the list of JV giveaway events for September 20, 2010.

JV Giveaway Events

September 24 – Inner Circle Giveaway
Contributors: 106 Gifts: 100

*September 24 – Massive Guru Event
Contributors: 1632 Gifts: 238

September 30 – Newbies Gear Giveaway
Contributors: 175 Gifts: 118

October 1 – The Last Chance Giveaway
Contributors: 135 Gifts: 83

October 2 – Fall Fest Giveaway
Contributors: 90 Gifts: 74

October 15 – Traffic Breakout Giveaway
Contributors: 78 Gifts: 66

*Recommended

You can find a complete listing of upcoming giveaways on the events calendar at: http://www.GiveawayTactics.com

Happy Monday!

Here is the list of upcoming JV giveaway events for June 28, 2010.

JV Giveaway Events

July 1 – Create Income Giveaway
Contributors: 67  Gifts: 48

July 1 – Opportunity One Giveaway
Contributors: 126  Gifts: 114

July 1 – Traffic Blaster Giveaway
Contributors: 123  Gifts: 80

July 2 – 4th of July Extravaganza
Contributors: 194  Gifts: 103

July 2 – Original Products Giveaway
Contributors: 366  Gifts: 180

July 9 – Market Place JV Giveaway
Contributors: 134  Gifts: 95

You can always find the latest giveaway announcements at:
http://www.GiveawayTactics.com

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.

This past weekend I had the opportunity to sit down and read a new ebook that is getting released today from Sean Supplee called “Take Action List Building“.

Take Action List Building does a great job of explaining the entire process of building a list including how to setup your autoresponder, how to make a squeeze page, how to get traffic to your page, and how to write follow-up  emails that make you money.

It’s a quick and easy read but this book is jam packed full of useful resources and  helpful tips!

Sean even added some really nice bonuses to the site including some  personalized squeeze pages and a 5-day email series that you can load right into your autoresponder.

And best of all… Take Action List Building is free!

Click the image below to get your free copy.

Click Here to Download
“Take Action List Building”

btw, if you are a TE user you are going to totally flip out when you see the offer Sean has put together for his new members.  Make sure you don’t miss it when you login because it’s the only time you’re ever gonna see it.

Now this is cool!

Last night while hanging out at TE Live I had the fortune of witnessing the birth of a brand new concept in downline building.  It’s a new program that is being called “TE Teams“.

TE Teams was created from scratch over the last week by Tim Linden, John Guanzon, Austin Hallock, and Jon Olson.  The idea is to build your downlines in a variety of programs using teams instead of trying to do it alone.

The new site is very slick and is designed to build your downlines in TrafficWave, TEToolbox, Thumbvu, StartXchange, I Love Hits, Traffic Splash, and Dragon Surf.

Since I was there for the unveiling I was lucky enough to snag a position of “team leader” for my own team called… (drum roll)…  EXCELSIOR!

So far, i’m loving it!  In the few hours since I have been a team leader we have rocketed to the top of the teams list and we have even generated a few referrals for our members.

TE Teams is totally free to join.  There are no OTOs or upgrade offers.

If you are interested in building your downlines in the above programs and you feel that you would like to contribute to Team Excelsior we would love to have to on board.  Simply click the link below to join for free.

Click Here to Join “Team Excelsior“

Welcome to part 2 of my exclusive money making series.

Today I want to start talking about my favorite subject… List building!

There  is is actually a lot more to this subject than I can cram into one blog posting but i’ll try and go over the basics to start with as much as I can.

If you are reading this chances are you have already tried promoting some kind of online business or affiliate program.  I am guessing you probably figured out  how to get some traffic but for some reason you aren’t getting many sales… if any.

Not as easy as you expected, is it?

Well, you are not alone.  Even people who are promoting free affiliate sites can have a hard time getting sign-ups.  That’s because most people don’t know them or trust them enough to join.

Trust is very important!

Here’s one of my favorite quotes:

“All things being equal people would rather buy from someone they know and trust.  All things NOT being equal… people would STILL rather buy from someone they know and trust”.

So how do you build trust?  Well, it does take some time…  and it usually takes a lot longer than the time it takes for someone to read your site.

In fact, here’s what usually happens.  Someone visits your website, they read your offer and think “sounds interesting, but i’m not ready to commit to this right now”. So what happens?  They leave and probably never come back.  The time and energy you spent getting them to your site was wasted.

That’s where the autoresponder comes in.

Your autoresponder is the single most important weapon in any Internet
marketer’s arsenal because it let’s you follow-up with your prospect days
and even months after they leave your website site.

The way it works is that you offer something of value to the people coming to your website in exchange for their email address.  Your offer can be a free ebook, a newsletter, software, or almost any other “digital” product.

When your visitor fills out the form on your site their info is sent to your autoresponder which then begins sending out a series of pre-written emails to them.  These emails can be used to tell your subscribers more about yourself and your business while providing them with more free information that they can use which compliments the free product you first sent them.

Hopefully over time your readers will get to know you and even look forward to the emails they receive from you.  Once they begin to trust you it makes it much easier for you to recommend paid products and services that you can earn commissions from later on.

Another great thing about autoresponders is that once you have your emails series setup you can practically set it and forget it.  If you wanted to you could set it to send an email a week for the next 5 years and it would do it for you.

Compare that to sending someone directly to your website where you only have one chance to get a sale.

Unfortunately good autoresponders are not free.  That’s one of the few things that you are just going to have to bite the bullet on if you want to succeed in this business.  Expect to pay about $20/month for a good autoresponder.

I recommend using either Aweber or TrafficWave.  Aweber is considered to be one of the best and includes a lot of advanced features.  TrafficWave is a more affordable alternative that will definitely get the job done.

Both autoresponders offer 30-day trial memberships so there is no reason not to try them both and decide which one you like the most.

Ok, I think that’s enough one day.

I’ll be posting my JV giveaway events listing tomorrow and Ryan Hogan is about to launch a new product so look for my next post in this series early next week.

Subscribe to this blog at the top of the page and be notified any time this blog is updated.

Here is the list of upcoming JV giveaway events for February 8, 2010.

JV Giveaway Events

Feb 8 – The Seven Dollar Giveaway
Contributors: 238  Gifts: 228

Feb 9 – Happy Birthday Box of Gifts Giveaway
Contributors: 278  Gifts: 224

*Feb 13 – New JV Talent Valentine’s Giveaway
Contributors: 431  Gifts: 341

Feb 15 – Traffic Tsunami Gifts
Contributors: 227  Gifts: 150

Feb 15 – Members Only Giveaway 2
Contributors: 207  Gifts: 134

Feb 19 – Internet Marketing Giveaway
Contributors: 140  Gifts: 92

Feb 22 – 2010 Prosperity Giveaway
Contributors: 112  Gifts: 93

Feb 28 – St. Patricks Day Giveaway
Contributors: 155  Gifts: 87

March 1 – Luck of the Irish Giveaway
Contributors: 157  Gifts: 97

*Recommended

You can always find the latest giveaway announcements at:
http://www.GiveawayTactics.com