There are so many different advertising programs available online these days and most all of them have their own unique set of pros and cons. As an internet marketer, you have to decide what features suit your style of marketing the best then look for programs that give you what you want while still providing enough members to make it worth your while to use that program.

When we find a program that fits us, we upgrade because the old saying, time is money is really true. We don’t have the time to click thousands upon thousands of email links each day and by upgrading we can drastically reduce the amount of time it takes to click enough links to make a program worthwhile to be in.

You have to try out a program before you know if it is going to suit your particular style of marketing and that often means send more than 1 email or place more than 1 ad to test results before making a decision to actually spend money on the program.

One of the first things I look at when checking out a site for the first time is the number of clicks needed for a solo. If this number is too low, the site stays bogged down with emails and people rarely click and of them. If the number is too high, free member are not going to work the program because there are too many sites offering free ads that draw them away from a site that has to be actually worked.

If seen sites with click needed as low as 10 and I’ve seen some that expect members to click on over 1000 solos to get a single free solo. Neither of those will last long. AdzQuik has a reasonable number of clicks needed for both the free and upgraded members. This is probably one of the reasons the click rate is doing so well for this program.

They offer everyone that joins 2 free solos so you can try them out before you upgrade. I’m not sure how long it will last but they have a offer right now where you can buy a super solo, 12 solos plus a bunch of other ads for just $12. It is a really great deal considering how high the click thru rate is for this site.

If you are really serious about building your business online, you simply can not get too much traffic and you ALWAYS need to look for the highest quality traffic you can find. Ads Quik is a winner in that regard!

Running the Numbers – Email Marketing

Almost everything we do in internet marketing can be broke down in average numbers which gives us the ability to see if an offer is worth the time or money it takes to use the offer. This also helps us to determine the quality of the advertising source we are using.

In today’s technique lesson we are going to look at email marketing and how understanding the numbers can help you be successful.

First you need to understand that there are many many factors involved in any type of marketing. For instance if you are brand new to internet marketing and no one has ever heard of you, you will get a lower response rate than someone who has been around for years and is well known in the industry.

The individual program you are promoting can have a lot to do with your success. If you are marketing a program ran by someone who has been known to scam in the past, there is a good chance they will do it again and those who have been in the industry for a longer period of time will ignore your marketing efforts because of the program you are sending.

Of course the quality of your advertisement will also make a difference in the results you are getting. If you are sending prospective clients to a website that appears to have been designed by a 10 year old, you will not get as good of results as a site professionally prepared will get.

There are of course many other things that can and will affect your results, which makes it impossible to choose any one “magic number” as the goal you are reaching for. Yet there is a sort of “unwritten” average within the email marketing industry that gives you a good starting point for determining the success or lack thereof of any individual mailing.

In general for every 1000 email you have sent out to a completely cold list, (people who do not know you) you can on average expect about 30 of those 1000 people to actually open the email.

So if purchase a solo email to 5000 people and only get 10 clicks on your link, there is a good chance the site you are working with has padded their numbers in so fashion because you should expect approximately 150 clicks out of a mailing to 5000 members.

Of course the opposite is true also, if you send a solo email to 5000 and receive 500 clicks, there is a possibility it is a very good list. At the same time however, there is also a possibility the site is forging the numbers to make them look better, so do not allow this one test to be your entire reason for choosing a site, you always need to look a little deeper.

Converting to Sales/Joining

The next step to gauge is the number of actual sales you get from the advertising. Again the numbers can vary greatly depending on many different factors, but on average you can expect 1 person out of every 100 who actually look at your site to purchase something or join the program you are promoting.  When we convert those numbers out, it means that on average you can expect approximately 1 sale/signup our of every solo 3333 emails sent.

Were most people make a mistake in their numbers is when they mail a set number of emails and don’t immediately get the set number of sales to correspond they move on to the next site. A single mailing however, will never be a good test of the effectiveness of the site. It is entire possible to mail to 10000 members and not get a single sale, yet mail to only 1000 in the next mailing and get 5 from that single mailing. You can not average numbers over a single set of trials, it is only by repeated trials that you can determine the effectiveness of an advertising source.

Cost & Time Effectiveness

To make this section a little easy to understand I am going to use a real life program I am a member of.

ListQuik is one of the larger mailing lists and currently has about 11500 members. As a free member, you can mail to 200 members every 3 days or you can upgrade at a cost of just $8.91 a month and mail to 1000 members every 3 days. Lets use our averages shown above and apply them to these numbers and see what happens.

Mail to 200 every 3 days.

Since the average is 30 people physically looking at your site for every 1000 emails sent, if you can only mail to 200 at a time, you would have to make 5 mailings to get a full 1000 piece mailing or about 30 views.

Since it takes about 3333 emails to convert to 1 sale, you would have to mail 5 x  3.3 times or approximately 17 times to get 1 sale. You can only mail once every 3 days so to mail 17 times would take 51 days for a single sale.

To put it plainly, that just is not worth my time to make it happen. I would rather pay for a solo that wait 2 months between sales for this one site.

It all changes at the $8.97 a month level.

At that level you can mail to 1000 members every 3 days x 3.3 equals approximately 1 sale every 10 days. So over the course of a month, if you mail every 3 days like you are allowed you could expect to make approximately 3 sales during that time at a cost of only $8.97, making your cost per sale only $2.99.

That is less than the price many places charge for a single solo and well worth it in my book. List Quik at the $8.97 a month level offers a good value for your money.

Can we compare the actual costs of the two options? Of course we can. Lets assume it take approximately 10 minutes to place a single solo ad. In order to make 3 sales as a free member, you will need to place 17 x 3 = 51 ads, versus 10 ads placed as a paid member.

That means 51 x 10 = 510 / 60 = 8.5 hours of your time placing ads as a free member.

10 x 10 = 100 / 60 = 1.6 hours of your time placing ads as a paid member to get the same number of sales.

Figuring your time is worth a lousy little $10 an hour, your total cost to produce 3 sales as a free member would be $85.00 (8.5 hours x $10).

As a paid member is would cost 1.6 hours x $10 = $16.00 + $8.97 = $24.97 to produce the same 3 sales.

So not spending money could be costing you more than actually spending a few bucks. You simply have to run the numbers to find out where the true costs are at.

TE Profits – A Marketers Best Friend

If you are marketing on the internet, the one thing you absolutely must have for your business to be successful is traffic to your site(s). Without traffic, you will never make a dime in this business and the more traffic you get, the more sales you will make. Those are the plain and simple facts and are the main reasons you will always here me advise new internet marketers to start working to build their traffic first, then worry about building the huge incomes.

TE Profits provides you will a complete system to get you started earning a profit and building a huge, never ending stream of traffic to your sites. There are plenty of absolutely free videos and articles to teach you step by step what to do to build your business. Please don’t get me wrong, they are not offering you instant overnight success or a million dollars in the next 6 weeks. It is a logical and methodical system you can choose to work to ensure you long term success.

I have seen thousands upon thousands of people get into internet marketing and walk away 6 months to a year later with a bad taste in their mouths and their pockets empty because they did not take the time to learn what they were doing before they started joining programs. There truly is a right way and a wrong way to make money in this business and if you do not concentrate on building traffic first, you are going about it the wrong way.

Within TE Profits is a cash building section too, that is very affordable and can help provide you with the income you need to be able to join higher paying programs. By making a single $6.95 advertising purchase, you can make $3200 and if you choose to spend some of that money along the way, you can build a never ending stream of cash that can fund all of your internet marketing efforts.

TE Profits is literally the first step of a quickly expanding group of programs all working together building each other and feeding back and forth into each other that is creating a literally machine that helps you build the traffic you need for whatever program you are building and each the money to build it all at the same time.

Do yourself a favor and join TE Profits in my group. Once you join, be sure to join our Goldmine Ad Exchange. Send us a message via the support system inside Goldmine giving us your username at TE Profits and we will give you a NICE big advertising package to help you promote your business with. This package will be added manually once we verify you are in our downline in TE Profits, so please allow up to 48 hours for the package to be posted to your Goldmine account.

Of course, if you have any questions you can always send us a support ticket from inside Goldmine. We answer all tickets as quickly as possible.

Use Positive Thinking to

Increase Your Income

When we talk casually with friends and family, we want them to be proud of us, to think only good things about us and to hold us in high regard. So when things are not working the way we would prefer them to, whether it is dealing with a regular 9 to 5 job or our work from home opportunities, we tend to look for circumstances we can blame our lack of success on.

For instance, how often have you been speaking with someone and said something along the lines of: “I had such great hopes for xyz program, BUT it turned out to be a con”. “I have everything set to start the money flowing BUT the program folded on me”.

There are many different ways you can say it and there are many different excuses you can use as to why things did not go the way you were expecting them to, yet in almost every case you can think of, there is one word you will see pop up over and over again, BUT.

The word BUT is a highly negative word and we use it to attempt to put blame for a specific set of circumstances off onto someone or something beyond our control. In reality however, we are 100% in control of our lives, yet there are times when we overlook things that allow things to go differently than what we expected.

To overcome this, we need to take responsibility for our actions by simply accepting the fact that we do make mistakes and we can overlook things that allow things to happen to us. For instance, in another article on this site I talk about List Joe being on my Do Not Join list. I take full responsibility for what happened because I did not take the time to research them, to ask others what their experience was like. The main reason I did not bother was because I saw the program as nothing more than an advertising source, not as a program for me to build a downline in.

Had I done my homework, I probably would not have bothered to purchase the credits from them, but I personally made the decision to spend the small amount of money rather than taking the time to do proper research and the result was, I got ripped off.

So rather than playing the pass the blame game, it is in your best interest to either choose to not speak of an incident, or to turn the situation into something you can learn from. A chance to grow not just your business but also your knowledge in your business.

You might say something like: “I am not making as much money as I thought I would, because I still have a lot to learn, and I am working hard to learn as much as I can right now.”

Don’t beat yourself up over your mistakes, learn from them. Seek out things you could have done to prevent it from happening and you will end up a stronger and smarter marketer because of it.

List Joe – Do Not Join

Rarely will I issue a do not join advisory. Most programs whether they be for advertising or income opportunities can help you earn money if you understand the program and how to make it work for you. Occasionally however, I have an experience that leaves me with no choice but to advise others to stay away from the program and sadly List Joe is one of them.

I joined List Joe near the first of December. I did not want to build yet another downline and was only looking for a place I could purchase advertising, not work a program. I purchased 30,000 credits and almost immediately did a 10,000 credit mailing which should have gone out to 10,000 people.

As usual, I had my tracking codes on it and awoke the next morning to find there were ZERO clicks to my link. Not a single person out of 10,000, which is obviously not worth bothering with. However since I still had 20,000 credits left over, I decided to wait till Saturday and do another mailing and see how well it did.

To my surprise when I tried to mail again on Saturday, I was told I did not qualify to mail again and would have to either pay for some token that would allow me to mail, or purchase even more credits.

My problem with all of this is:

1. No one should ever ask a paying customer to pay even more simply to use what they have already paid for.
2. No one should ever ask a paying customer to purchase even more credits so that they will qualify to use the credits they already have.

Had that been the only problem, I probably would not have bothered to write this  denouncement of them. They hit their 3rd strike however when they decided to simply ignore my request for an explanation as to why they expected me to pay even more to be able to use the credits I had already purchased, especially after I did not receive a single click out of a 10,000 piece mailing.

It has been 5 days since I submitted a request to their so called customer service and no one has bothered to reply. When I add everything together, it totals up to what I can only assume is designed to rip people off and I therefore have to advise my readers to keep away, for fear they too will be ripped off.

Focusing for Profits

One of the biggest mistakes I see people make in this business is to jump from offer to offer, looking for the perfect opportunity to promote. Most of the time they pay to get into one program, promote it for a few days, then something that sounds better comes along and off they go onto the next project.

Sadly what ends up as the result is they rarely make any money. Those who are extra lucky might make the occasional sale, but they really can not be considered successful because they do no stay focused on any one project long enough to truly build and income.

The key to survival is to build lasting incomes in multiple profit centers. All that means is to find an opportunity that has staying power, build an income in it before you move on to something else and build a second income, (then 3rd, 4th, etc., etc.). By keeping diversified this way, when one opportunity dries up, and it will happen at some point in time, you will still have income flowing from all the other profit centers you have built to keep you going while you find another opportunity and build it.

To build multiple income centers requires focusing your efforts. It does not require you to promote only 1 opportunity at a time. In fact, it is fine to choose 4 or 5 opportunities to work as a group and put most of your efforts into. But stick with that group longer enough to actually start seeing profit from them.

This is one of the reasons I always suggest to complete noobs to start with building your list. Don’t worry about finding products to promote that are not about advertising. Use the advertising opportunities to build an income, traffic and your list all at the same time. After you have some money flowing and your list has started growing, then you can worry about finding other opportunities to start additional profit centers.

Break the Cycle

Program hopping can be hard to break away from. There is always a program that looks and/or sounds better than what we are already doing. Someone claims there is more earnings potential or in many cases, all but guarantees you will make money. If you are hurting for money, it can be very hard to overlook the hype and promises because lets face the facts, the job of advertising is to get you to buy and marketers know exactly what emotional buttons to push to get you to break out that charge card.

Learning what is your personal trigger and what trips it can help you learn how to move pass the latest and greatest hype and stay focused on your main goal.

It can also help to keep a list of programs you want to investigate once you get your first group working in your favor. Instead of telling yourself, no you can not join a program that is pushing one of your triggers, you simply add it to the list so you can revisit it once your first goal has been met. This allows you to retain contact with the opportunity without giving a definitive NO and can make allow the opportunity to sit for a while an easier choice to make.

Whether you meet your first goal of developing your advertising sources as income in a week, a month or a year keeping focused on that goal before branching off into anything else can mean the difference in making small change or becoming truly successful.

Balanced Advertising

If you have never heard of balanced advertising, don’t worry about it because it is a term I coined recently to describe what I am doing to fix something I see within the text exchange industry, that I believe is bad for everyone involved, except perhaps those operating the exchange.

Most ad exchanges offer multiple types of advertising. Click on a banner and you earn xx amount of credits. Click on a text link and you earn a different amount of credits, hot links, solos, header ads, footer ads and a huge arrangement of different types of solos from any one of a dozen or so networks. Every text ad exchange determines their own number of credits and or cash offered for each type of advertising and prices charged to the advertising customer is usually higher on ad types the give the clickers the most points.

All of that sounds perfectly normal and to be expected, but you only need to use a high quality tracker, that allows you to include sub ID’s and it is easy to see where the advertisers are taking a beating because of this type of system being in place in virtually all ad exchanges.

Over the past few weeks I have done extensive testing to see how well various types of advertising pull in ad exchanges and the results actually surprised me because two things stood out in glaring form.

First I noticed there are exceptionally few people that click on anything other than solos. Secondly, is that the network solos get clicked about 10 times as often as other types of solos.

From the advertisers stand point, it is obvious network solos are the way to go, at least on the surface, but on the other hand, it means almost all other types of advertising being offered is almost worthless. I watched banner after banner eat through 100′s and 1000′s of views with 1 or 2 clicks if I was lucky. The same held true with top and bottom solo ads, hot links and traffic links. PTC links got their 50 to 100 clicks they were due, but that is to be expected when people are getting paid to click.

The other things I noticed is that within the networks, there are way to many people that are in almost all of the programs using the network. I saw one ad get 2200 clicks in a network ad, but when I looked at the number of different people that were seeing the ad (based on ISP address), there was only 57 people that actual saw the ad. That is almost 39 times that each of those 57 people saw that ad.

I personally like people seeing my ad multiple times, but since I also know by my tracking that not  a single sale was made on that ad and it makes it obvious this is not a good thing.

The cause of the problem was obvious, the people seeing the ads are mainly clicking on the types of ads that give them the most credits. Considering it is common to see solos paying 3000 credits a click in the same exchange that only pay 20 credits per click on hot links and traffic links, it is easy to see why people ignore the lower paying clicks.

Knowing this it was easy for me to see what had to be done. All types of clicks have to pay the same amount or people are going to ignore the lower paying ones, basically making them worthless. That is exactly what we did with Goldmine Ad Exchange.

All clicks at the Goldmine pay 100, 300 or 500 credits per click depending on what level membership you have. It does not matter whether you are clicking a network solo, regular solo, text ad or traffic link, you earn exact the same when you click on them.

As our membership grows and all of our members learn they earn the same amount no matter what they click, we will see much higher click rates on all types of advertising.

One other major thing happens with this system. It greatly decreases the amount of credits you need to trade for ads because there are not huge differences in credits that have to be paid out. This alone should put an end to solos costing 2 Million credits.

I think you will begin seeing more and more exchanges starting to bring the credit value of the various types of clicks closer together because having all these various type of advertising choices available is worthless if no one is clicking on them. I will continue to run checks on how things are going and update you when there is more info available.

Mobster Hits

The first time I saw Mobster Hits, I fell in love with it. Probably has something to do with me thinking my ex hubby was a member of the mafia and this would give me a chance to try to figure out a way to get back at him, but that is another story for another day and we won’t go there. Seriously however, the site is beautiful and is actually fun to surf.

Very Generous Ratios

I quickly notices they have very generous ratios. I have not upgraded here because I never run out of credits as it is. While that seems good on the surface, it can have a negative affect is the admin don’t find some way to use up the excess credits.

For those who are not familiar with what happens when you run a traffic exchange, you have to look at the number of credits each member has as being inventory within your system. Your total inventory should stay fairly even over time and if it is constantly going up, IE you owe more credits than what members will use up in their surfing, it creates a system that slows down the number of hits each member can receive to their sites and eventually can end up choking traffic down to the point as to basically make the program worthless to serious marketers.

The only way you can test this is to surf till you build up a few hundred credits, put one site into rotation and and assign it a specific number of credits. Go through the approval process then let it site for 24 hours to see how many hits it gets in 24 hours. As of the day I am writing this, the numbers are not great but as usually, that may not be all bad.

Credit Excesses

Mobster Hits does not allow you to put the same page in multiple times. This is why it is VERY important to have your own domain where you can host splash pages galore. It is very easy, if you know just a little HTML, to make multiple pages with the exact same splash page code on it. Then you can list these multiple pages in exchanges where you have excess credits. The effect is the same as having a single page listed multiple times.

As an example, my 1 test page in Mobster hits was getting about 10 hits a day, by setting things up with duplicate splash pages, each with their own URL, I was able to dramatically increase my number of hits, giving me a traffic source that is fun to use and provides a reasonable amount of traffic, without having to upgrade.

If you use a url tracker that has a subid feature like Clixtrac Offers you only need to add a code digit to the end of the subid and can use the same link over and over again. Either way works just fine, I tend to use the Clixtrac one however because it is also building me yet another source of income as I build referrals in that program and you can never have too many sources of income.

Future Potential

For obvious reasons I can not know what the admin of Mobster Hits has planned in the future, but I would image with as much time and money was put into starting this site, they are probably going to try hard to make the site very profitable. So it seems logical that at some point in time, enough members are going to either quit and/or complain about the lack of hits per page, and they will make adjustments accordingly. But there is no guarantee that will happen.

I have placed this program on my list to surf regularly, because I do believe they will work the few minor problems out and the site will become one of the better exchanges in the industry. By then, I should have amassed many thousands of hits, without upgrading and be ready to have my sites seen time and time again for months to come.

Sotall is an acronym for Seeker of Treasures and Luxurious Living! After all, everyone is looking to make some extra money these days and some of us have been making a living from the work at home industry for most of our lives. To do that, you have to know how to find the treasures from among all of the flotsam that is floating around on the internet these days.

This site is dedicated to helping others find their way through to the treasures that lay around us on our path to the luxurious living we are all looking for! But don’t think for a moment this is just another work from home blog with the same old, same old information. I have always walked to the beat of a different drummer and have been doing it for so long I am too blasted old to start changing my ways now.

Most people see a money making opportunity and they get hung up on the hype and promises. The bigger the promises, the more apt they are to throw some money at it. I like to dig down and find both he pros and cons about every program I consider joining because I have found you can make money from the vast majority of the programs out there, if you know in advance what it is going to take to make that happen and you are willing to do whatever it takes to make it happen.

With that said, there are plenty of things my own moral code simply will not allow me to do and that has on occasion held me back, but as long as the bills are being paid and I can feed my hobbies, plus still be able to live with myself when all is said and done, then I am happy.

My name is Denise Freeman, aka Fern Owl. I started in the business back in the early 80′s when everything was handled via snail mail. I can honestly say I am a member of the $10,000 a month club and made that for many years until the company went under. That was when I learned my lesson and started making sure I did not keep all of my eggs in one basket. Stay diversified and if one income source goes under, you still have all the other sources to keep you going while you build another source.

To give you an idea of how powerful that concept is, I need to share a little personal story about me. On June 28th, 2007 I was rear ended by a big truck while stopped at a red light, by the time my van came to a stop it was over 70 feet down the road, my seat broke and I was thrown under the seat belt and into the back seat of the van. I suffered severe physical injuries complicated even more by a brain injury and PTSD.

Life as I knew it changed that day. I went from owning my own business to being unable to take care of daily tasks such as feeding myself. I don’t remember much of what happened the first 2 years after the accident, but when I finally started coming back into my own head, one thing I noticed is I was still getting checks in the mail on a regular basis. It had been 2 years since I had touched my business and there was still money coming in!

It took over 2 more years before I have finally reached the point of being ready to get back to work. Most everything I had been doing with the exception of my adsense sites is gone, the programs have closed down over the years, so in a way I am starting over, almost at scratch with the exception of Google.

I have already opened a text ad exchange and have several other irons in the fire already, plus I am starting this blog. So if you are tired of hearing nothing more than more hype about every new program that starts and want to learn some of the inside information on how various things work, why not sign up for my newsletter. I promise you will not receive a ton of emails every day. In fact I rarely mail more than once a week unless something earth rattling happens.

I also promise I will not give, share or sell your personal information to anyone. I hate it when people do that to me and you can rest assured I will never do it to anyone else.