Muscle Mail Gets a Facelift

Have you seen the all new Muscle Mail Safelist?

A few years ago Muscle Mail attempted to solve the problems of traditional safelists advertising. Rather than flood your inbox with thousands of emails members could simply log into the Muscle Mail site to view ads from other members. Members could earn credits by browings text and html emails from other members and then use those credits to post their own ads.

The old Muscle Mail Safelist was more like a traffic exchange than an actual safelist. The problem was that it didn’t have the same security features as a traffic exchange. It was too easy for members to blow through dozens of ads a minute without ever taking the time to read them. This made the credits you earned virtually useless since your ads were barely being seen.

Over the last year a new type of advertising program has been gaining in popularity. These sites are called text ad exchanges. The new text ad exchanges attempt to bridge the gap between safelists and traffic exchanges. Members can view ads on the site to earn credits but there are now better security features forcing members to view the advertisements for a set amount of time.

Text ad exchanges really excel in giving members the ability to spend their advertising credits on solo ads. These are ads that are emailed to members, much like a credit-based safelist, but they are usually limited to only a few emails a day. This creates a much higher response rate to your ads since your email isn’t being set out with hundreds of other ads each day.

Muscle Mail has recently upgraded their site to embrace the new text ad exchange system. You can still post your text and html emails on the site but they now offer many more ways for advertisers to get their ads seen.

Sign-up for a free Muscle Mail Advertising account by clicking the banner below.

Free Advertising is Good, Paid Advertising is Better

Happy August!

It’s the start of a new month and time for me to start some new advertising campaigns.

I have been holding off on doing any new advertising for a few weeks.  Last month I got a really good deal on about a dozen pro memberships on some of the top traffic exchanges.  It seems like every time I upgrade on a traffic exchange I ending surfing twice as much so I can feel like I am getting my money’s worth.  That’s where most of my time has been spent last month.

Today I decided it was time to dip into my PayPal account and spend some of the money I made last month.  Here’s what I got…

Advertising Know How: List Builder Mega Pack $60 – I started using AKH’s free list builder in June and have been very happy with it.  I’ve been hearing good things from people who have bought list builder credits so I thought I would give it a try.  Looking forward to seeing how many sign-ups I can get in the next 30 days.

HitsConnect: Partner Membership $12 – I have put off getting a HitsConnect membership for awhile since I have been using free link trackers for years.  However, HitsConnect has a few cool features I have been wanting like the ability to track sign-ups so I figured i’d give it a shot.  Looks good so far.  The fun part was changing my urls in 50+ traffic exchanges.  I better like it because I don’t feel like changing them all back if I decide to quit.  Maybe that’s why it is so popular.  Hmmm…

TE Blaster: Mega Blast $90 – My first advertising co-op!  Seems a little expensive to me but it’s all part of my master plan to get more traffic while doing less work.  I’ll be tracking the results with HitsConnect so i’ll know next month if it was worth the money.

TS25: Platinum Membership $25 – I have been neglecting TS25 for awhile.  I think it’s one of the best traffic exchanges around but I also think it’s only worth surfing if you surf it a lot.  The way I see it, if I am going to spend that much time on a traffic exchange, I might as well go with a premium membership.  Look for me on the leader board starting next week.

ebay: Pioneer DV-C503 $40 – Ok, this isn’t directly related to advertising.  My dvd player died 2 months ago and I’ve been watching movies with my ps2 since then which kinda sucks.  I found the exact same model of my old 5-disc player on ebay today for $40 shipped so I grabbed it.  Figured I deserved to spend a little money on something fun.

That’s it for today.  I still have some money left over to buy a bunch of solo ads.  I’ll worry about that next week.

Program Review – Downline Builder Direct

Less than 2 weeks into my professional blogging career and I am already having a hard time coming up with things to write about. Go figure.

That’s not really true. I actually have plenty of things to write about. The problem is that many of the people who are reading my blog at this point already know about those things. Why waste my time writing about something nobody wants to read about?

Since part of this blog is intended to write reviews of sites, software, and ebooks I decided to pick a fairly new site that I have seen advertised, join it, and write a review on it. To make it a little more interesting I picked a site that I probably wouldn’t normally join to hopefully force me to give a more objective opinion.

This site I picked is called “Downline Builder Direct“. It’s a free list-builder site that claims to be the quick and easy way to build an opt-in list of 100,000 subscribers. The way it works is that when you refer new members to the site they go into your downline and you can email them your ads. When those people refer new members those people also go into your downline and you can send emails to them as well. This continues down 20 levels. So if everybody refers just 2 or 3 people you can see your list grow exponentially without having to do a lot of work.

The problem with these types of programs is that the time you spend promoting them is probably better spent building your list the old fashioned way with your own squeeze pages and your own autoresponder. Yes, you can mail more people with a program like Downline Builder Direct but the majority of those people don’t know who you are. You haven’t built a relationship with them through your own promotional efforts so really they just see you as somebody sending them advertisements. You are also limited by how often you can send your emails to these people and if the site ever closes, well there goes all your work.

I knew all this going in but decided to check it out anyways.

Turns out that the number of people you can email with Downline Builder Direct is not limited by the number of people you refer. In fact, as soon as you join you have the option to email 200 random members or your downline (whichever is larger) for free. You can then email 200 random members every month without spending a dime or referring a single member. Not too shabby.

Downline Builder Direct also offers a few upgraded membership options that lets you email more random members more often. There is even a one time offer at sign-up that gives you a lifetime “Diamond” membership which lets you email 20,000 random members every two days. Of course when I joined tonight there were only about 7,000 members but the next highest membership level under “Diamond” only lets you email 2,000 members every three days… and that costs $19.97/mo. That means with the lifetime “Diamond” membership you can pretty much email the entire membership every two days for as long as you want without having to worry about monthly fees. Not really a bad deal if you think about it.

Downline Builder Direct isn’t stingy with their referral commissions either. All members, regardless of membership levels, earn 50% commissions on all purchases made by their direct referrals. That means even free members can make some decent money promoting the site.

Overall I guess I am pretty impressed with Downline Builder Direct. I am not expecting to grow my downline to 100,000 members anytime soon but I will take advantage of the ability to send my ads to random members and depending on the response will probably try one of the upgraded memberships.

To get your own Downline Builder Direct membership please click the banner below.