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.

Goldmine Ad Exchange

I have to admit straight off the bat that I am personally prejudiced for Goldmine Ad Exchange because Larry and I own it! But while it may be new, we have great plans for the future and if you join now, you can get some GREAT freebies!

Advertising that is fair for the advertisers and the members!

We have a slightly different philosophy in how we treat our customers and look at things from a slightly different angle. For everyone involved to truly be successful, all forms of website traffic need people placing ads and people looking at the ads. So for Goldmine Ad Exchange, we intended from the start to build things a little differently than what you may be use to.

Things have to remain balanced because if you don’t have enough of either one, everyone suffers and things will fail soon thereafter. Too often this results in admin who are forced to make change after change to their program in order to attract more of one side or the other. I personally believe the middle road is always the best road and I try to keep things running in a way that is fair for everyone involved.

For instance, almost all traffic exchanges whether they be surfing programs or safelists, need advertisers and the more advertiser there are, the better. So why is virtually every exchange on the market set up so people are attracted to only a few types of the advertising being offered. Surely it was not their intention to do this, yet that is exactly what happens when you make traffic links worth a tiny 25 to 50 credits and offer specific types of solo emails that pay 3000 credits in the same exchange.

Most people are going to ignore the text, traffic and hotlinks in favor of the much larger number of credits. So anyone that made the mistake of purchasing the cheaper forms of ads rarely gets a good value for their money because they end up with so few clicks.

The way we handle it at Goldmine Ad Exchange is all types of clicks pay the same amount, based on the type of membership you have. Even prices are much more in line with each other, with only a few exceptions where there are differences in the number of views you are paying for. This means the member that takes the time to look at all types of ads can earn much more than those that only look at solo emails.

For the advertiser it means that their text links or all types should pull much better traffic than at other ad exchanges, making all those freebie links we’ve been giving away much more valuable.

Cash Prizes and More!

We also offer all of our members the opportunity to win great prizes and as the membership grows, the prizes will grow also. At any time you could be simply clicking your way through that days emails or on site links and suddenly see a message for us announcing you have won a prize, so make sure you keep your eyes open while doing your clicks cause their will be plenty of $10 clicks when we have the membership to support it.