Tyson-Faulkner.com
Online Marketing Training

Online forums are a great place to spend a few minutes every day hanging out with people that have the same interests you do. You can share stories, ask questions, and help others with their problems. Plus by putting a link back to your site in your signature you can generate new visitors/prospects/customers.

Forums are also a great place to establish your presence. Whether you know it or not people will be watching you and seeing if you provide value and are worth following. Once people know you are looking out for their interests they will trust you and likely buy products from you or take your recommendations.

There are forums on literally every topic out there, so no matter what niche you're in you should be able to find a couple to participate in. Since I'm in the "marketing" niche, I hang out at the Warrior Forum a lot.

I also just found a new work at home forum that's a little smaller but is growing fast. Paul Lynch created it and he's actively involved helping the community out with their marketing. Go check it out!

Like everything though the key is consistency. If you show up once a month and make 5 posts no one will know who you are. If you just hang out for a few minutes a day and post a few times though you will build a presence.

Also don't forget to sign up for the free List Building Masters teleseminar series I have running. You can learn from 12 top marketing experts to build your list the right way from the start.

Most of us on the internet don't have anyone watching over our shoulders making sure we get things done. This can lead to terrible procrastination and work ethic, at least it has for me at times, what about you? To get the results you're after (more traffic, leads, and sales in most cases) you'll have to get out there and do what no one wants to do.

You need to spend more time creating actionable content that you put out to the world away from your websites. If you spend most of your time on your own sites and blogs, there's no way for people to find you on the net.

I listened to a Brian Tracy interview recently where he stated that most businesses spend 11% of their time and marketing. Marketing is the activity that brings in more customers, which are the lifeblood of our businesses, yet most of us spend around 11% of our time on it? No wonder we aren't getting the results we're after!

Instead, we should follow the 80/20 rule…80% of our time spent on marketing, and 20% of the time spent on our own sites. While a blog post may be considered marketing by some, it's still ON YOUR SITE. So no one can find and read it until they find your site somehow. I'd say blog posts and emails should be stuck in the 20%.

So if you have 5 hours to work on your business, spend 4 hours purely on marketing efforts. Start creating excellent, actionable content (content that tells people what to do) and putting it out there on the world of the internet for people to find.

If someone sees your video and likes it, they'll come to your site. If someone reads and article your wrote and wants to learn more, they'll clickthrough. But without that content "net" out there in the internet your potential customers will never be able to find you and you won't be able to help them.

So join me and commit to doing MORE of the activities that will actually produce the results we're looking for in our businesses. What do ya say?

So far I've tested my three crappy traffic methods for roughly 30 days, so it's time to wrap it up and post my final results. I've been testing traffic exchanges, list builder sites, and safelists to see if they are a viable means to grow my business.

Here's the total results after 4 weeks of crappy traffic:

Safelists:

Safelists have been my least effective form of traffic, averaging only 4-5 visits per day over the course of the month. They also converted extremely low, at 2.2% for a free giveaway.

I personally think safelists are for the most part dead because of all the automation and software that has come out to manage email accounts. For example, even though I was a member of all four of these sites for a whole month, the only emails I personally saw were the ones from the admin. The rest went out to email accounts that I hardly ever check or are automatically cleaned every day.

I suspected that it'd be hard to get anyone's attention using these things, and that seems to be the case. I don't believe that I will be pursuing safelist advertising any further in my business.

Traffic Exchanges:

Traffic exchanges are by far the biggest source of traffic that I've gotten from any of the 3 sources. The conversion rate of the traffic, however, is a different story. An overall .08% conversion rate on a free offer. Traffic exchanges were also my biggest time sink as well. I upgraded in 3 of the exchanges, which got me more visits, but as you can see it didn't do too much in the way of results.

On most days, I was spending an hour surfing 6-8 of these at a time, which I can now put to better use. But I think this is the main reason why these just don't work anymore (if they used to, I dunno). Today, with tabbed browsing available in most all browsers, I could have one window open and just plow through sites without even glancing at them. I can only assume the other people surfing these sites are doing the same thing.

List Builder Sites:

I would have to say that these list builder sites were the best out of the 3 traffic sources. They brought a little traffic, but it definitely converted the best. The only problem was the steep price to pay to be able to send emails out to their lists. And even then, the traffic and conversions were pretty poor.

One of the reasons these sites didn't convert real well for me could have been my offer. I'm not sure about ViralURL but ListJoe is comprised mostly of new marketers, and my ebook about squeeze pages could have been a little advanced for them. 

I would venture a guess to say that these type of sites might bring some decent traffic and opt-ins if they are kept up to date well and you have a great product for newbies to giveaway.

The Wrap Up

Well there you have it, the results from 30 days of testing 3 different crappy traffic sources. It was certainly a learning experience for me, as I now have a greater knowledge of what will and won't work for my business. From here on out, I won't be using any of these 3 traffic sources to build my business further.

Here's my biggest problem with these types of traffic methods: They aren't adding anything of value to the internet. It's just people moving back and forth exchanging pageviews and emails. So instead of spending my time surfing and trading views, I'm going to focus on content marketing from here onward.

This means that I'll be spending much more time writing and creating videos than thinking up clever email subjects that will draw people's attention and surfing the web. I think it will help my blog grow, as well as draw in new readers that are looking for information about building an online business.

I hope you enjoyed the case study, have a great weekend!

Tyson

May 12 – May 18

This post will be the results of Week 4 of my Crappy Traffic Case Study – A quest to see if I could get results from "crappy traffic." I set out this case study with high hopes that something could be gleaned from these traffic sources, but truthfully after looking at my results, they do seem just a little…crappy.

Let's dive right in and see if anything changed with the different traffic sources I was using. First up, safelists.

Safelists

This whole week I did pretty good sending out my email blasts every day to the various safelists that I am signed up to. Let's see how they did:

As you can see, again I didn't even get 1 subscriber, and out of all 4 safelists I got a whopping 33 visits to my squeeze page. This could be that my whole marketing process isn't tuned perfectly, but my squeeze page usually converts at 40%. So who's to say? Let's keep going…

Traffic Exchanges

While this traffic method has spiked my traffic stats, they haven't done much for my conversions or conversion rates for that matter. I think I got 4 or 5 good surfing days in this week, so it wasn't every day, but close enough. Let's see how my traffic and conversions were this week.

Well…for me anyway, this last week definitely sealed the deal. Traffic exchanges are NOT a method that I will use in my business. Almost 3000 visits to my splash pages and not 1 new subscriber. This final week seems to be gearing up to be my worst yet =P I think the list builder sites are the only method that gave me some results this week, let's see…

List Builders

As a quick reminder, I previously signed up with 2 different list builder sites, List Joe and Viral URL. I took the one time offer upgrade on each so I could email 3000 people every 3 days at each site. This week I got 2 mailings out, so technically I sent 12,000 emails this week. Here are the results:

Visits were down quite a bit at List Joe this week, while visits were up at ViralURL. Listjoe of course is set up to give people credits when they click your link, so that is the reason for the 0% conversion rate. Those people who clicked my link likely just wanted to get credits, not see my site.

Viral URL, however, seems to convert fairly well, at 33% this week. The only problem is…it is extremely unresponsive. If I sent an email to 6000 people I would be very concerned if I only got 15 to clickthrough on my link. But at least they are real people who show interest.

Wrap up

Well as you can see this final week was the one that showed the least results out of my whole case study.

Tomorrow I plan on posting a final review that shares the total visits, subscribers, and conversion rates from all the traffic methods I used over the case study month. I'll also share my opinion of these traffic sources and where I plan on heading next with my business.

See you then!

For the week of May 5 to May 11, 2010

If you've been following this case study then you know what I'm up to. If not, here's my plan…

I am testing out 3 different sources of traffic that have gotten the reputation of "crappy traffic." These are traffic exchanges, safelists, and list builder sites. My goal has been to test these pretty thoroughly for 4 whole weeks to test and see if there's any results to be had from them. I've always been somewhat skeptical, so I decided to test it out for myself and quit listening to everyone else.

The first 3 weeks have come and gone already, and this will be the update for week 3 to see my results. To see the previous weeks, follow these links: Case Study Start, Week 1, Week 2.

One more week then I will conclude my test and give my opinion on each source and the final results of the test.

Let's dive in and see how week 3 went!

Safelists

During week 3 I did pretty good with my safelist submitting, I think I only missed 1 day. I've been testing different headlines to see if they pull results better than others, but the traffic has been so low that there's nothing really to go off of. As you can see below, I only got 26 visitors all week from the 4 safelists…and 0 subscribers.

So far safelists have been my lowest performing group of the 3 traffic sources.

Last week I had 34 visits total, but still 0 subscribers so I wouldn't consider this week much of a change. Though I did get a whopping 3 visits from I Post Ad, up from 0 last week =P

Traffic Sources

These, as expected, have been my highest source of traffic. Conversions however are a different story. My alexa ranking has shot up because of this, but that's about it.

I missed quite a few days of surfing for an hour last week, as it's been hard to force myself to do this 'busy work' with the results I've been getting. For the 4th week of my study, I'm going to hit it hard so I can end my test with a bang.

Let's check the stats:

If you recall from last week I changed out Traffic Taxis for Traffic Punk to get the extra bonus from the three exchanges that I'm upgraded with. As you can see those are the ones that have been sending me the bulk of my traffic. This is a good reminder to me too that I need to assign credits to my sites to be sure that they actually get visits =)

Despite the fact that I didn't get around to surfing the free exchanges so much I only had 400 less visits. But I also went down from 5 subscribers to 3. Again these conversion numbers are so low that it's making it really hard to test anything and get worthwhile results. This week I'm making it a goal to surf a little more so we'll see if that helps.

List Builder Sites

I believe this weeks stats from my list mailings are from 2 mailings to each of the sites lists. That means I emailed 12,000 with my offer, so let's see what happened.

So even though I had one less mailing this week it seems the end result stayed about the same. I got a little less traffic from Viral URL from the week before, and a little more from List Joe. As you can see Viral URL's conversion rate is much higher, but that's mostly because List Joe gives an incentive to click their links. 

I believe I get my next mailing on friday, then monday, so again I'll only have 2 mailings to show results for in the next update.

Total Subscribers this week: 9 down from 11 last week.

Next week's update will be the last in this case study series, then I'll be posting my review of these traffic source and give you my opinion of them. I'll also be sharing the next route that I'm going to take with my business.

Have a great day!

Tyson

Well another week has gone by and it's time to update the progress I'm having with the 3 'crappy' traffic sources: safelists, traffic exchanges, and list builder sites. This is the second update after 2 weeks of using these traffic sources. So 2 more weeks to go before I tally up all the results and see how they did for me. If you want to read the initial case study post, check it out here: Crappy Traffic Case Study.

So I left off last week with less than stellar results, so let's see if anything has improved with my testing different pages. Here's the scoop:

Traffic Source #1: Safelists

I've got to admit that I'm not really into the whole safelist marketing thing. I can't really figure out why it's hard for me to keep consistent, but I find that I have a hard time logging in and sending my ad out every day.

So I'm making it a goal this week to login and send out my ad EVERY DAY for the following week, to see if diligence will get me some better results.

So over the last week I got 3 less visits than the previous week, and 0 subscribers compared to 3 last week. Again, these safelists are free to join (with the exception of Ipostad, which ironically has the least results) so the only thing I'm really losing is time. So if I can get these to work for me, it's free advertising.

Traffic Source#2: Traffic Exchanges

The traffic exchanges are definitely bringing in the bulk of my traffic. But as expected they don't have the best conversion rates. However, since the traffic is so cheap and easily generated, any results at all are worth noting. You'll also notice that I added in a new exchange called Traffic Taxis. I did that on monday in order to get extra credits for surfing the 'top 5.'

Let's take a look at how we did this week:

This week my visits from traffic exchanges were up by 579 and I got 5 new subscribers as opposed to 3 during week 1. So my results actually went up by 66%! If I could manage this every week it'd definitely be worth it, but we'll see about that…

I got some banner ads created yesterday, so we'll see if they bring some extra traffic and subscribers too.

Traffic Source #3: List Builder Sites

This week I have 3 mailings to show results for, though one went out last night so it will probably bring some more visits today and tomorrow. Anyway, technically I was able to send an email to 18,000 people this week through these two sites, lets see how they did:

This week my visits were down slightly, but my results doubled. I'm going to keep trying different subject lines and body copy to see if I can find a winning combination. Since these emailings are somewhat like safelists, the email subject matters immensely.

I've been doing my best to employ the Zeigarnik Effect in my emails, which may be the reason for the slight increase in response. I'm fully convinced that mixing curiosity with an unanswered question will pull the best results, but it's just a matter of me doing it right.

Total Subscribers this week: 11 up 22% from last week.

Stay tuned to see if I can keep increasing my response rates! Feel free to grab the RSS feed if you haven't already.

Have a great day,
Tyson
 

Wow, a week has gone by already! Let's see how my results have been with my crappy traffic sources.

To recap, I'm testing 3 different sources of traffic, safelists, traffic exchanges, and listbuilders. Some free, some I paid for. To see my whole plan in it's entirety check out my original Crappy Traffic Casestudy post.

The following stats are from April 20 to April 26.

#1 Safelist Results

I have to admit that I've been a little lazy with my safelist submissions. I've sent out pretty much the same email over the last week, changing the subject one time. So it's time to change it up and test some different ones.

With that in mind, here are my results from safelists:

Not extremely impressive. Though I must admit my email copy could use some work. Over the next 3 weeks I'm going to be testing different subjects and email body's to see if my results change.

#2 Traffic Exchange Results

The traffic exchanges have given me by far the most traffic, though it converts terribly. I've changed up my splash pages a little bit to test two different approaches. Now I'm just trying to get surfers to click on the link to go to my squeeze page, instead of going for the opt-in on my splash page. To see what I'm talkin about check em out here:

1. http://tyson-faulkner.com/splash.html
2. http://tyson-faulkner.com/splash1.html

So far it looks like splash1 is winning. Shorter, bigger text with a clear call to action is best with traffic exchanges it seems.

I've also decided to drop trafficwitch.com from my surfing group. It seemed to load a bit slow, and it is no longer part of the 5 that offer a bonus if surfed together, so it's outta here!

So after the first week, here's the stats for traffic exchanges:

As you can see, if it's traffic you're after, then these things will definitely deliver that. Conversions, however, have been less than stellar. I'll keep testing different splash page copy and we'll see if the results improve.

There's also two additional aspects of traffic exchanges that I haven't used yet, which are the banner ad and text link credits they give you. So after I get some ads created for those they may bring a little extra traffic.

#3 List Builder Results

Like I said last week, I upgraded at both List Joe and Viral URL. Which each allow me to send an email ad to 3000 people every 3 days (so 6,000 total). I've had the chance to send out twice so far, here's the stats:

Again on these my email copy is probably lacking a bit, but as expected the results so far are less than extraordinary. This week I'm going to do some active testing and should be able to report 3 emailings of these two sites and we'll see if my stats improve. I think the email subjects are crucial on these, so it will take me some time to get some good ones that actually pull some results.

So in total I've had a whole bunch of visits and added a whopping 9 subscribers to my email list. But the only direction to go from now is up! Testing different ads will ultimately determine how effective these traffic sources are for me.

The next update will come in the next few days, so stay tuned!

If you haven't yet, subscribe to my RSS feed and you'll be automatically informed when a new post comes out.

Cheers!
Tyson

Ever wondered if there's any money to be made with all the so-called "crappy" traffic there is out there?

I'm talking about safelists, traffic exchanges, list builder sites, FFA sites, etc

I know many marketers stray away from this kind of traffic because it's seen as worthless and not worth devoting any time to. In large part, I've taken this same stance, but now I'm going to put it to the test.

Over the next 30 days, I'm going to test the heck out of all these "crappy" traffic sources. And I would challenge you to come along for the ride!

Here's my plan:

I'm going to be testing 3 main sources of "crappy" traffic.

1. Safelists – These are double opt-in email lists where you get to blast out tons of emails to thousands or millions of inboxes. Does anyone ever read these things? Let's find out.
2. Traffic Exchanges – This is where you view other sites to get your site seen by others. The catch is that your visitors are just viewing your site to get their site shown, they aren't really interested in what you have to offer. So it's my job to catch their attention and grab the opt-in.
3. List builder sites – You've heard about them before, ListJoe, Listdotcom, ListBandit, ViralUrl, etc. You sign up for a free account and build your list by referring others to the sites.

I'll be updating my blog with the results I get roughly once every few days or week.

Now I know that these types of advertising get put down a lot. But think about this…Who is using these types of traffic generation methods? Mostly newer marketers trying to get started right? What better prospects can you target?

They aren't experienced marketers who know everything, and they aren't just discovering the internet and know nothing either. The people that use these things are the perfect target market, it's just a matter of getting their attention.

So here's the gameplan:

THE OFFER

My whole goal with this case study is to build my list. To get the opt-in, I am giving away my ebook, "13 Profit-Killing Squeeze Page Blunders" as seen in the sidebar of my blog.

Since the people that use these types of advertising are looking to get traffic or to get more out of their current traffic, I think this is a pretty good fit.

I've got a simple squeeze page that I'm sending traffic to. For the traffic exchanges I am using a combination of squeeze/splash pages since they need to get attention quick.

After opting-in to my list, new subscribers are taken to a one-time-offer where they can buy a huge package of MRR and PLR products at a super-discounted price. This is where initial costs will be made up.

THE TRAFFIC PLAN

Source #1 – Safelists:

So far I've joined 3 safelists for free:

1. Your Ad Blaster
   
2. Bulk List
   
3. Ad Tactics
   

And paid to join one safelist submitter: I Post Ad

I'm using these every day to blast out an email to their lists. To join Ipostad it's only $12.95/ month so 1 sale will more than make up for it.

Source #2 – Traffic Exchanges:

Traffic exchanges are a little more involved than safelists. To get the most out of them you really need to spend some time everyday to earn credits and get your ad shown.

This is the controversial part…is it worth spending the time surfing these things to get the traffic from them? Well that's what I plan to find out…

I've found 8 traffic exchanges that have a high member count and compliment each other pretty well. In fact, by surfing some of them at the same time you can get bonuses across all of them. So this seems to be the best way to earn credits fast.

Here's the list that I joined:

• I Love Hits
  
• Traffic Splash
  
• Dragon Surf
  
• StartXChange
  
• Traffic Punk
  
• Traffic Witch
  
• Hit 2 Hit
  
• Easy Hits 4 U
  

I've found that I can surf all of these at the same time and keep up with the timers fairly well.

I upgraded my account with the one time offers at I Love Hits, Traffic Splash, and StartXChange. These had the best deals and will give me instant credits to get my site shown, as well as banners and text links (which I will be testing down the road). Plus they make my surfing time much more effective.

My plan is to surf these 8 exchanges every day for about an hour or so. This should provide a constant stream of visitors to my splash pages.

Right now I'm testing two different splash pages, one with an opt-in box, and one with a link to my squeeze page. We'll see which one performs better. Check em out below.

1. Page with link: http://tyson-faulkner.com/splash.html
2. Page with opt-in box: http://tyson-faulkner.com/splash1.html

Source #3 – List Builder Sites

These sites work a little differently, and are basically a glorified safelist. The members of these sites get much less email from the sites so they are more targeted and more likely to perform better. The only problem with these sites is that if you join for free you can't really email anyone because you haven't built a downline yet.

To get around this little problem, I did a little research and found two sites that are very popular, and decided to take the one time offer upgrade in each of them.

The two list sites I joined are:

• List Joe
  
• Viral URL
  

By upgrading my account, I am allowed to send out an email to 3000 of their members (each) every three days, so in one month I will be able to reach 60,000 people between the two sites.

I think the biggest key to using these types of traffic is testing everything. And that's exactly what I plan to do so I can cut the losers and work on the winners.

So that's the plan!

I'll be testing different emails, subject lines, landing pages, throughout the month, and explaining the results I get here on my blog. So keep updated and we'll see how it goes!

If you have any questions or comments feel free to leave a comment and let me know.

-Tyson