When it comes to building an income online, marketing and promotion are huge components of your business-building strategy – even more so than brick-and-mortar store fronts. At least with a store on the street, the very fact you have a sign over your door is passive marketing right there. People walk or drive past, see your sign, stop and come in. The Internet back in the 90’s and early 2000’s was very similar. The adage “build it and they will come” was very true. Some of the marketing aids available today hark back to those early days. AdlandPro by Frank Bauer is one of them. He was an early promoter of email safelist marketing and classified ad marketing as you’ll see on the linked page, and AdlandPro continues to be a going concern. When I first signed up to this service back then, I had no clue how to organize myself so that my inbox wasn’t flooded in safelist emails. It got so bad that I eventually stopped using the service. I just couldn’t figure out how to stay on top of it. Decades later, I find myself disillusioned with social media marketing avenues and both re-discovering and revisiting former methods. Now however, I’ve developed better organization methods, better time management skills, and thus can make better use of such services as a safelist marketing.
No matter what marketing or promotional service, method, or system you choose, you won’t know if it’s benefitting your end goals if you don’t set down some metrics for yourself. Basic metrics you want to pay attention to are:
1) How many hits your site is getting.
2) Where those hits are coming from.
3) Conversions or stickiness because of those hits.
If you use a wordpress site, jetpack’s sitestats give you a fair bit of this information already. You get stats on how many hits from various sources visited what pages or posts on your site from what countries using what devices with what operating systems and browsers in use. Some of these stats you can get from within your wordpress dashboard, others you get from connecting jetpack to your wordpress.com account and clicking through the jetpack sitestats to view the more comprehensive information.
How many hits came from where is VERY important information to have when deciding how best to utilize your time with free marketing efforts. In general, free marketing efforts involve you trading your time for the results you are after. You are still invested in the process, you’ve simply chosen time as your currency instead of cash.
To this end, it was helpful for me to observe trends taking place as I used InfinityTrafficBoost to promote my primary link listed there as a free member. I’ve also begun using a webring service and safelists again. The webring traffic and signups has picked up in the last few months from the time stamp of this blog post, but was quiet for some time. Safelist marketing is something I’m starting to watch a little more closely because those that provide me with “email open” stats are generally showing maybe a 1 – 3% click rate. This means if I send to 100 people on a site that only gives me 10 credits per email read (that’s 10 emails per safelist) I might see a max of 10 people actually bothering to open my emails.
The second safelist stat comes from my wordpress sitestats instead. This is the number of clicks my promoted link got within those emails. Some of my stats are currently skewed because of lack of time in my day over the past while to regularly stay on top of the safelists I have (over 15 at last count), but because of that skewing, I am looking at my stats asking myself where to spend my time. You can find the full list of safelists I use on my “where I promote” page in the top menu bar here. I’ve already axed a couple sites where the email to marketing ratio was only 2:1 or 5:1. Now the only sites up on the list are at least 10:1 where I get 10 credits for every 1 email I view. Each credit is a person I can send a mailing to as a free member.
So far the click-through response rate has Freeadvertisingforyou.com on top followed by bigmailer and US Largest Safelist. 1ProfitWebring is sending me traffic now regularly as is 1TAE which is both an ad bar and a traffic exchange. The webring and ad bar are both passive ways to get email and/or visit credits simply by having their code on the pages I am promoting. So they piggy-back on my landing pages, sending me credits. 1ProfitWebring lets me send out emails every 7 days so it is also a dual-duty free service.
Some of the safelists have surprised me with how little I get in responses. Others have surprised me with how responsive they actually are. Bigmailer doesn’t just claim to have a responsive mailing list, my stats show an actual active readership.
I am testing out another traffic exchange that lets me add multiple website links as a free member, and I’ve recently begun testing a new bitcoin mailer, sister site to InfinityTrafficBoost. So far that one takes a fair bit of time to do the 100 sites per day but the daily earnings are pretty good right now! 100 sites earned me 44100 satoshi in one 2hr session as a free member! I did a test email send yesterday to see how that would go. However, if this turns out to be one of those “surf every day, send every two or three days”, it might become a solid way to get paid while promoting my sites!
Unless you are actively promoting a mailer’s paid advertising packages, most of the time you won’t earn anything. The idea of being paid to read emails is fairly new and I think only one other site is doing anything similar, but on the “read to earn” scale, not the “read to earn and read to send” end of things.
Interestingly enough, both InfinityTrafficBoost and now its sister-site, “InfinityMailerBoost” are co-owned/created by Frank Bauer! I feel as if I’ve run smack back into an old acquantance as a result!
Using InfinityMailerBoost as a free member means only marketing URL’s that you have created a tracking code for, so that you can visit your own stats will show how well your emails are doing. The link I used in my test email did not have a tracking code, so that’s my mistake, not theirs. Members who buy one of 11 ad packs designed very closely after what I am used to seeing on ITB, do get open and click stats. So the testing continues over at this new mailer to see how it will perform. In the meantime, I get to earn satoshi while I’m at it, so that’s a good thing.
That’s two sites now that pay you to promote your own link!
