Free Traffic Blog

Well I’m moving my blog so something a little more personal and professional as well. I’m also going to take my blogging more seriously. For the rebirth, go to evpstud.com

See you there.

As a full-time internet marketer - use of time can get complicated if you don’t manage yourself.  Since there’s no boss to provide oversight, I have to be my own taskmaster.  One of the ways I keep myself efficient is outsourcing things that take a lot of time to do well that I don’t have to do myself. Here’s my list of the top four things a full-time internet marketer should never have time for.

1. I don’t think a full-time internet marketer should waste time trying to create lots of blogs by hand.  I think you should have 1000 blogs but imagine trying to make all that by hand. I have over 1000 blogs and I can create more and post to all of them with a few clicks of a mouse. The tool for that is Blogger Generator.

2. Writing articles.  I don’t have time to write ten great articles for every website I promote, plus writing fresh ones each month for the same sites.  Content creation is great to outsource because there are fantastic writers in emerging economies that can write them for you.  There are lots of freelancing sites but I prefer to use RentACoder.

3. Submitting articles.  If you paid attention to #2, you’ll recognize that I deal with a crapload of articles constantly. It’s not efficient to spend all week submitting one article to 5,000 directories, which is why I outsource my submissions to the ever popular and totally powerful Article Marketer.

4. Directory submissions.  Directories are still great for building keyword-rich backlinks to your site to rank well on Google.  I outsource lately to a guy who goes by the name of Kulwinder at the Digital Point forum, but there are lots of other sources for this kind of work. I’ve yet to find a program that completely automates submissions. A lot automate the form filling, but if anybody knows of a program that will complete the submissions all by itself let me know.

I totally took the day off to go to a huge park with my wife and son today. I didn’t do any marketing work I just checked my email before I left at about 8 am. So I get home late this afternoon and I found that I made $500.

I wasn’t expecting that. I do pretty well in this business but not every day is a $500.

Makes me want to stop working completely! Work less somehow equals make more money???

For the “how I did it”, I have my own product but didn’t make any sales today..however, I made $200 on the back-end from directing people to other helpful products and programs I affiliate with. The other $300 is pretty normal which comes from basic sales of products.

Just thought I’d share so that everybody who’s new to this can understand that it is very possible to make money without having to trade hours for dollars!

I recently joined Wealthy Affiliate University and although I’d heard a lot of good things about it, I was always pretty skeptical about it. I’ve joined numerous membership websites that promised big and delivered little. Here’s my list of 10 things I love about it right off the bat.

1. Professional, functional, unique membership script. This ain’t no cookie-cutter website. I’ve never seen anything like the programming behind the website, which shows that a lot of time and money was invested into the design.

2. WA Spaces. I hate Myspace and I rarely look at Facebook. I’ve tried Yuwie and orkut and all that but you can’t seem to do business on those sites without “spamming”. WA spaces is the social interaction between internet business professionals that I’ve been looking for.

3. Free Web Hosting. It’s not just any old membership website that will give you free space to host a website, and it’s good hosting too. No Geocities or Angelfire type hosting. That adds a lot of value to the monthly package since you can expect to spend at least $10 a month for decent hosting.

4. The membership has a GOOD affiliate program. A lot of membership websites pay a tiny percentage and some only pay a one time acquisition. The WA affiliate program pays $14 per month per referral like clockwork. This is with the current price of $30 per month which is about to climb. That payout will likely climb with the price hike for membership that goes into effect on May 6th.

5. The WA Jobs Marketplace. There is a great community for trading money and services between affiliates and webmasters who know what they’re doing. A lot of good forums have poor marketplaces, but WA has both.

6. Top Notch Tools. The site rubix tool is state of the art and the keyword research is a fantastic resource. People are SELLING crummier tools for more money…

7. The WA My-Linker. The My-Linker is a tool that you put all of your links through to create new ones that call home to your WA account so you can track your campaigns. There are a lot of expensive scripts that do that but it’s included with WA membership.

8. The Panic Button. The panic button inside WA links to a page full of reminders that bring us back down to earth and calm us down. A lot of people feel overwhelmed in this business and need to be reminded of many things and they’re listed on the page the Panic button links to. A charming and creative aspect of the site.

9. The WA forum. The forum is crawling with ads like so many other webmaster forums I’ve seen. It’s not my favorite layout or anything, but there is a lot of high quality information shared by marketing experts that all internet affiliates should read.

10. 8 Week Action Plan. This is a good way to keep new people involved in the membership. There is a lot of information and good things to do, especially for beginners. An old horse like me doesn’t need an entire week to do what’s included, but I like it because it’s a way of maintaining your referrals excited and involved in the site - this is probably the secret to WA’s history of success.

There are many other things included that didn’t make my top ten list. To see what they are, try out Wealthy Affiliate University.

So I’ve found my Video Epidemic training guide being shared twice on Rapid share now. It’s kind of flattering that people would like your work well enough to share it with others (pirate it).

I’m all for the sharing of information freely. Whoever obtained a copy freely, I hope they benefit from it. I didn’t invent anything I wrote about, I just organized and compiled it. That’s all a digital training guide can be.

Here’s how to proceed on Rapid Share when your stuff gets shared:

"If you believe that your intellectual property rights have been infringed upon by one of our users, please contact us by sending an e-mail to abuse@rapidshare.com .

Please note that we will only process complaints that meet the following requirements:

• Please provide us with your name, address and telephone number.
• Please describe the copyrighted work that is affected.
• Describe the exact location of the infringing file by providing us with the exact RapidShare link (example: http://rapidshare.com/files/123456/example.jpg).
• Add the web address under which the link has been published.

If your request applies to more than one RapidShare link please make sure that all links are complete.
Do not send attachments. Include the illegal file links directly in your message.

Please make sure you can receive messages on the e-mail address from which you contact us.

Anonymous or incomplete messages will not be processed. Thank you for your understanding."

I’ve contacted them twice now. They responded well, I’m sure they’re used to this sort of thing.

We all want traffic and for that we all need links.

Blog commenting is a popular way to do it. I use it and there is software that speeds things up for it.

If you just spam though, you’ll get some short term benefit and could lose your efforts.

If you’re interested in blog commenting for link-building and traffic for long lasting results…PAY ATTENTION!

The best way to ensure the success of your comments is to link to another blog - NOT a direct affiliate link. So stop that right away. Everybody should be using blogs as middle-man websites anyway since they are perceived as non-commercial and harmless.

Here’s the Golden Search String to get TWO links to your blog per post without spamming…

“Enable CommentLuv” +”PUT YOUR KEYWORD(S) HERE”

This will bring up the blogs that have the WP Plugin “Comment Luv” enabled. What it does is when you put your URL into the form for the comment, it will find your RSS feed and show your latest blog post.

Two links for the price of one since you still get to put your regular keyword link in by using your keywords as your “name”

I’ve tested this and I can tell you from experience that this works.

So double your results!

Here is somebody I’d like to introduce you to. He is a successful person in many ways and there is a lot to learn from him.

1. The Rich Jerk

He still is and possibly always will be, the best internet marketer. As a friend on the rich jerk forum recently wrote:

“There is a reason RJ will likely be the #1 affiliate for yet another monstrous product launch, namely, Mass Control.

I can’t say for certain, but I am willing to bet anything that he gets the highest conversions by a landslide.

Here’s why:

1.) Copy - Bar none, the greatest, most entertaining emails you’ll read

2.) He only promotes the really BIG stuff.

3.) His Bonuses: If I understand correctly, he’s going to be giving away a copy of his soon to be released software to those that buy Mass Control from his link? Ok, right now I’m telling you that if I buy Mass Control, I’m buying it from him. (and I don’t even know what the software does yet)

4.) He’s RJ

5.) His followers are faithful. You either love him, or you hate him. Most atleast admire his marketing. So, we generally trust what he promotes.

6.) Half of everyone in the IM world got started with the Rich Jerk’s guide to making money on the internet. For some reason, we tend to stick with those that originally got us started, and there’s no doubt RJ is in many respects a pioneer.

So, I’m not trying to brown nose, I’m just pointing out that RJ’s the man, and will be for a long time.”

I recently found out about an affiliate network that has HUGE payouts. When I heard about commissions of $160 each, $300 each, I was skeptical. So I signed up to MoreNiche.com and I was immediately impressed with a lot of things.

First of all, the big commission payouts are for real. The programs really do offer commissions for hundreds of dollars per sale. That’s a lot better than making a $7 commission for selling an ebook don’t you think?

What also really impressed me about MoreNiche.com was the webmaster community within the site. There is a ton of good marketing training and tools to get you going. There are professional pre-made websites, PLR articles, strategies taught that get sold for $17 at the Warrior Forum, a forum just for the affiliates of the network, and a very select few products to promote. Clickbank has thousands of products to pick from, so many that it’s tough to find a good one to promote. MoreNiche.com has fewer than 20 affiliate programs to promote, which makes life a lot easier.

Another cool thing about MoreNiche.com is that you can make money on the network the same day you sign up you can make $45 without even selling any of the products. All you have to do is:

1- Join The Program Here for an instant $15 bonus

2- Make 50 posts in the MoreNiche forum for $10

3- Upload your site (provided by MoreNiche) for another $10

4- Generate some visitors to that site for another $10

You get cash up front just for getting going with the network, which is a lot different from any other affiliate network I’ve ever seen. So go ahead and sign up to MoreNiche.com since it’s free and you’ve got nothing to lose but $45 to easily gain.

I got quite a response from my last post talking about how I liked StatCounter better than HitTail. Right now I’m giving props to Mike Levin, creator of Hit Tail for taking the time to contact me personally. Here is the content of the email he sent me:

With all due respect, the $10/mo covers up to 125 sites. In fact, the
fully free (pricing link on my name) product supports up to 5 sites
per registration.

Regarding it not collecting data, did you contact us? We are usually
very responsive–right to the point of monitoring customer satisfaction
on the Internet at large, so we can step in and help users who are
having difficulty.

Regards,

Mike Levin
Creator of HitTail

What’s not to admire about a guy that cares enough about customer satisfaction to contact a small blog owner to try and satisfy him with his service? The answer: nothing.

Am I going to go back to try to use HitTail again? Not right now, I’m still a bit of a “stubborn old jackass” when it comes to changing my system. I’m all set up with StatCounter again and I don’t REALLY want to go back through my sites again and change stuff up. But where will I look first when I want to change? HitTail.

I was introduced to Statcounter last year as an impressive solution to website visitor tracking for free. I was slow to incorporate it but it turned into an invaluable tool. I could see which keywords through which people were coming to my website, giving me the clues of what to optimize for. I discover new keyword phrases and got an accurate image of how many daily visitors were coming, how long they stayed and what they did on my site.

Just this month of January I heard about Hit Tail and since there was a paid service upgrade, I thought it should be better. I subscribed to the upgrade and what did I discover? The upgrade is PER SITE. That means that I’d have to pay $10 per month, per site. For guys like me that have a lot of sites, that’s a lot of cash. I thought to myself, “well if it’s really good tracking software, that $10 a month could be worth it if it helps me make more…”

So I gave Hit Tail the benefit of the the doubt. One week later and the damn thing doesn’t have any results to display. What a piece of garbage. At least I didn’t get anxious and excited so I only lost $10 instead of closer to $100 for some of my other sites to be included.

I’m happy to say I’ve gone back to an old love, Statcounter. She’s free, and I can use her on lots of sites. Sure, her log is limited, but I can always just restart the project when I want a new log.

Here’s a secret for getting more out of Statcounter: Create a different project for each element of your site, not just the same code on all pages. For example, I split my site into having a home page project, and having a blog project since all my active sites have blogs. This doubles my log size. Also be sure to enable the blocking cookie against yourself so your own visits don’t get logged and eat up your log space.