Saturday, August 8, 2009

Free Traffic and Safelists - Worth the Effort?

Hi there,

I am absolutely thrilled today - oh but I am getting ahead of myself. You remember that in my last post I was so upset by an Internet Marketer who went from mentor to salesperson in 2 seconds flat and how I had posted a long post about it on Warrior Forum. Well one chap on the WF pointed out to me that I wasn't being strictly honest with things myself on my Real Work Real Money site because all I really had on there was an affiliate offer for somebody else's product. If you have been reading my posts a while you will also know that I was really pleased with that page because it was actually converting into small sales for myself.

But my mate on WF had a point - and I spent the next couple of days thinking about what I can do to offer something unique in the internet marketing field and make money. So I completely revamped my RWRM site and have changed the focus of it completely which you can see for yourself if you pop along - let me know what you think. I am still offering affiliate offers (clearly marked as such) on my thank you page (which is free to get to), but the actual focus of the site it something completely different.

What I am thrilled about is that I did do all of that site myself (does it show :)). I wrote the copy, the reports and everything all over two days and I am really pleased with the results. Of course only time will tell if I actually get anywhere with it, but we will see - I will keep you posted.

Anyway an extension of this has been my research into more traffic methods - preferably free. I had used free traffic sites and safelists back eight years ago and more and all I ended up with was a chock-a-block inbox every day. I think the inbox issue is still evident because the sites I signed up for today all recommended I set a seperate gmail account to deal with all of the offers. Which led me to think that if everybody else was doing the same, then were any emails being read at all?

I know in the past week I have been clicking ads like crazy for YourEzAds.com, TheListAuction.com and Business Mailers.com. I signed up for free accounts for all three of these places to see if I could drive some traffic to my RWRM site and this blog. But my traffic stats have been very slow - I am getting rougly 10 - 20 visitors per day to each of my three sites (including the Ghost Site) and according to the Hostgator Stats virtually none of them have come from these three sources.

So this evening I decided to try three differnt opt in safelists - again joined up for free - I have outlined the different points for each of them below.

Target-Safelist.com: Ok these people allow you to send one ad per 24 hours to the number of members you can cover with your credits. There are only just under 3,000 people on the list at this point so I read 10 Mega solo ads on the site to get an additional 4000 credits - if you read 10 ads for 300 credits each you get 1000 bonus credits. I got an email about ten minutes after I had finished with the site so I will check my traffic stats tomorrow.

GlobalSafelist.com - this site was running so slow I wanted to get out and walk - they were the same as Target Safelist above in that you could read ads on their sites to get the same sort of bonuses. I have placed one advert with them but if the site is still as slow tomorrow I will be flagging this one completely - I haven't got that much patience.

Safelistpro.com is the last one I signed up for. they have the same deal as Target Safelist in that you can read ads on the site but they only offer 80 credits per super click through although you can get a 1000 credit if you read ten ads. They also only allow free members to send out an email once every three days.

I will monitor the traffic stats over the next few days and if I do see a surge of interest in my sites then I might test out the effectiveness of the paid options for the safelists and free traffic sites. But at the moment I have not seen anything in my traffic stats (or results) to suggest this is worth it just yet.

While I think of it too I wanted to mention that the traffic stats is one of the reason I do all my hosting through HostGator - they show details of every single hit I get, what page the person went to, where the person clicked from to get to my pages and the countries and everything else. I don't know if other hosting sites have the same sort of analytics but if your host doesn't do this you might want to consider changing.

For myself I have finally clicked on what a lot of Internet Marketers have said about tweaking and testing and things like that. If you know where each person who visits your site comes from then you can tell if you are getting a return on your marketing dollars.

Anyway we are running a 23 hour telethon here in NZ this weekend to help raise money for the kids in our schools that can't afford lunch or a pair of shoes, or a coat. In New Zealand Telethons are a big thing - we are such a little country that the whole country does get behind the deal - we haven't had one for 15 years!! So I am off to watch some of that.

Remember comments please - it is a lot easier to write something with feedback :)
Lisa

P.S. I signed up for another one of those phone calls - the guys states clearly in the email that there is no selling involved - am I mad or just really optimistic - I will keep you posted.

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