Free Traffic Blog

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.

Here we are, several months after the controversial BlogRush launch.

Nobody can stir up attention like John Reese. Blog widgets are a hot trend now and BlogRush was the first one I ever cared to try out. Initially, the widget did a so-so job. People whined and cried that it conflicted with Google’s Adsense policies. Others cried that it didn’t actually bring any traffic. Still others griped about the widget’s color scheme.

Phase two of BlogRush included changes to address a lot of these problems. First, all BlogRush blogs were submitted to a human review, which ended the spam blogs. Second, better tracking procedures were put in place to keep out cheaters, artificial blog impressions to generate syndication credits. More and better categories were added to keep niches tighter knit and so that blogs didn’t get syndicated on unrelated blogs. BlogRush even went so far as to create more sizes and colors of the widget, and now dishes out bonus credits like crazy.

After all of these changes, what do I think about BlogRush?

I think it’s awesome, and I’ll give you three reasons why:

1) Free targeted traffic. My blog is syndicated only on blogs with related categories and topics, and since all blogs are reviewed, it only appears on good blogs and no spam blogs.

2) The only incentive to click and visit is to read the post. There is no reward for attracting more clicks to your widget like there is with Google’s Adsense, so I know that every visitor BlogRush brings is a highly interested visitor.

3) The fact that blogs have to be approved gives each blog that displays the BlogRush widget a stamp of quality. I submitted another blog to BlogRush just to see how it would do. It was an old, slow blog that only posted content that was already syndicated somewhere else. It got shot down - rejected.

So if you have a real blog and want to bring more free targeted traffic, I highly recommend you simply add the BlogRush widget to your blog.

Click Here to Sign Up Free to BlogRush

In this article: Google Offers Reprieve From Google Hell a really terrible time in SEO has come to an end. The changes in Google’s SERPs to include Google’s LSI (latent search index) means that there are no more duplicate content penalties that will make pages of your site vanish from the search index because of content that Google judged “too similar” to be real.

What did that hurt? It hurt all forms of content syndication. Articles were denied exposure and template sites got deindexed without any warning.

What did it help? Well it gave birth to the concept that “unique content is king” which still has some value but is on it’s way down. A site with a few pages of unique content almost always cannot complete with a site that has 1000 pages of scraped content, when it comes to traffic.

Good move Google, I applaud you. The LSI hurt a lot more than it helped.

Instant Buzz is well known among internet marketers as the free ad tool bar that runs in your browser. Every time you go to a new page, a new ad appears. You in turn, generate credits for your own ads to appear across the exchange network. You can also purchase ad impressions in bulk.

What is my honest opinion of Instant Buzz?

In all honesty, I don’t think it’s a worthwhile program as a free member. The plain blue text ads are completely ignored by the other instant buzz members because they get used to having them appear constantly.

Paid membership is the only way to go. You can make attention getting ads with html codes to highlight your ad’s background with ’span’ tags, you can bold your text, and change the color. Those options are really your only chance for success.

Never buy the ad impressions. I’ve done it several times and the return is never good enough to justify the price.

Is Instant Buzz worth the one time fee of $150? That’s really up to you. It was for me. Instant Buzz really only becomes powerful to users once they build a large downline of active referrals so their ads will always be all over the network whether the user continues to use the bar itself or not.

Paid membership with Instant Buzz is RECOMMENDED.

Free membership with Instant Buzz is NOT RECOMMENDED.

So how do I make money online?  Lots of people are asking that, and all of them seem to have the same illusion that somehow all of us webmasters are like a mafia that makes bank by surfing the net and they all want in on it.  Is there an online mafia?  Sort of, they’re called “gurus” and are both worshipped and hated all over the world. Hated by the jealous, worshipped by the newbies, and understood by the experienced.

What do I mean by “understood” ?  I mean that the gurus don’t really have some top secret thing that they are actually going to sell you.  What they sell are different versions of basically the same business model that goes something like this: find a niche, get traffic from that niche, build a list of people in that niche, offer products to your list.

There’s no secret to the basic model.  People offer different tactics but most of them all look to that same strategy.  Sometimes the product is to get you to click on an Adsense ad, sometimes it’s to fill out a form for a CPA offer, and sometimes it’s to fork out your credit card and pay for something you didn’t know you needed until now.

What pays the best though?  I don’t have an ecommerce stores, but I’ve seen lots of those fail miserably.  Lots of them them boom though, so there’s potential there.  Can you make huge money with affiliate marketing? Yes, you can. But you gotta pretty much have your system already established, and NOT blab about it to anybody.  What about services? I like services.  The only real cost is getting customers.  The pay is assured and you know you’re getting paid for your time.

The drawback is time.  I would definitely prefer to have an automated dropshipping store online, but that’s not my style.  Doing SEO work under contract is what I enjoy, it’s tough to say I’d rather be selling digital cameras and ipods on autopilot than researching, tweaking, and working the way I do.

For now, I make money online for all of my time. The goal for 2008 is to make a lot more of it, and invest the profits into building the automated systems that bring in the big dough.

So I wasted about two minutes of my life away reading an article entitled “SEO is Dead” by Julian Adams.  The article had no basis for its claims and was more of a rant than any actual analysis or prediction. The author called all SEOs keyword spammers and claimed that all tactics were deceptive and said that everybody would be better off if there was no SEO.  As I read it I thought, “nobody is going to respect this author, because all this article does is whine, bitch, and complain.”

I’m calling you out Julian.

Here are a few reasons why SEO is great.

1) Ethical SEO practices enable new businesses to reach people who are searching for their services or products.  I SEO for a family business that is extremely profitable now, but hardly made any money before the company website had any SEO.

2) SEO is like a check and balance on the “power” of the search engines.  If we let the search engine companies have all the power is ranking, personal bias leaks through. It is impossible to be 100% objective when making judgement calls because everybody has bias. The ability to work to deserve a higher ranking displaces the authority of search engine companies.

3) The author accused SEOs of allowing companies to just “buy their way to the top”.  Um…all search engines do that anyway with paid search listings.  People who are interested in meeting their target market without “buying” their way to the top use SEO, even though there are costs for SEO services.  Natural search rankings can either be given by chance or by design. SEO services allow it to happen by design.

Anyway, SEO services are great and do a lot of good for both customers and companies.  Like all things in life, the system can be abused, but whining about it and concluding that “everybody would be better off if SEO was dead” doesn’t solve that problem and only makes you look like a little kid who cries because he’s too little to play on the high school football team. “Everybody would be better off if the football team was dead!”  I can hear that little boy crying now, exploding with jealousy of those who are able to run plays on the gridiron while all he can do is watch.

So my web site rocks one day and sucks the next, then rocks again. It really is tough to know whether this free traffic website has Google’s “divine” approval or not. I understand full and well how a site should be optimized to become more Google friendly, but it really pisses me off when this site bounces between the top 20 site for the phrase “free traffic” one day then the next ranks #857 for the same phrase.

In this situation, Google is a lot like a neurotic girlfriend. Did you ever have one of those? (or boyfriend…) It’s like today they love you and tomorrow they don’t give a damn about you. It’s a tough situation to be in because you’re a imprisoned in the relationship. You want in, but you don’t know if you qualify. You’re stuck in limbo, watching, andwaiting. It’s more irritating than the chirping birds that eat the box elder bugs in the tree in my back yard (one day I’m going to shoot them all…)

So what is a guy to do? Well, I update, I build links, I re-examine my site’s structure and content. It’s like in the cruddy relationship where you do all kinds of cross-examining of yourself trying to find the defect that’s messing things up.

But I think, in this case, just as in a neurotic dating relationship, the fault is with Google and not with my site. My site is playing clean ball, no cloaking, no automated content generation, no doorway pages, nothing that should give Google a reason to distrust my site. The relationship brings so many benefits, however, that it’s worth hanging in there a while longer. I can always try to seduce a little Yahoo or MSN love, but in the end, not even the both of them combined give the benefits of being Google’s favorite.

So for now, Google, we’re still together. Thanks for all you do for me, but let’s try to open up a little communication or something babe.