For anyone who reads my e-letter religiously you’ll have noticed I’m always banging on about the power of viral marketing campaigns. Viral marketing is essentially a way to spread your sales message around the internet like wildfire. There’s a number of different ways to do this, too many to mention here. Today I want to talk to you about “tell a friend” software scripts.
A viral marketing campaign example: ‘Tell a friend’ software scripts – good or bad?
Here’s the dealio. Someone visits your site, and somewhere along the lines they see an offer where if they tell a set amount of friends about your offer they get some sort of reward, say a report or something of value. It’s a clever way to increase subscriptions, sales and revenue. However, and this is what concerns me, many of these scripts have one fatal flaw. Spam issues.
For those of you who don’t know sending out email to people who haven’t “opted in” (willingly given you their email address) is called spam. Now I’m not talking about sending a joint venture proposal for example or asking someone a question. I’m talking about someone trying to sell you a Russian bride or such like. These software scripts look great on the surface, but in reality they are nothing but another form of spam. If someone “refers” three friends, these friends haven’t asked for information to be sent to their email address. Therefore no matter what spin people put on things this is junk.
I really do love the concept though so I’m currently looking into one tell a friend software script that may actually be good enough to avoid all the spam problems. It’s Viral Friend Generator by the marketer Mike Filsaime of Butterfly Marketing, another great viral marketing strategy (read past e-letter issues for my review on this).
Tips for advertising in ezines
Recently I’ve been having great success with ezine advertising. Advertising in ezines/eletters (email newsletters) related to your product is a vastly underused marketing technique that online entrepreneurs seem to overlook. If you want targeted traffic they’re definitely worth a look.
There are a few problems with advertising in ezines related to your niche market:
1) How do you know for certain if your ad really is getting sent out to the amount of people the list owner says it will be?
2) How do you know the results will be any good?
3) How do you know the ezine owner is not yet another idiot out to earn some cash by conning people?
Well unfortunately the answers to the above three are you don’t. You don’t know for 100% sure that the adverts you place are going to do any good because you don’t know for certain how trustworthy the ezine owner is. However there are a few things you can do to avoid “damage limitation”.
Firstly don’t spend money you can’t afford to lose. That’s an obvious one. If you spend money online that is “worry money” you’re going to end up being stressed and the enjoyable experience of e-commerce can become one that becomes a chore.
Secondly sign up the ezine owner’s list. If they send out regular and quality content people will be much more likely to religiously read their emails and therefore much more likely to read your ad. If they only ever send out advertisements you can be sure their list is small and no responsive.
Finally check to see if they’ve got testimonials from other genuine ezine advertisers. If there are testimonials from other site owners visit that site and email them and ask them if it’s a genuine ezine with genuine advertising opportunities.
Finally, and this is a bit of a long shot but it’s worked for me before, track the ad. By this I mean use a service like http://www.ad-alyzer.com, which enables you to track how many people click on the link in your ad. Often if people are out to con you they’ll refuse your ad if they see you know what you’re doing and will be able to tell if no one clicks on your link (ie no one is getting the advertisement in the first place).
Don’t let me put you off ezine advertising. I’ve generated as much as 5K from one sixty-dollar ad. They can be a huge opportunity if approached properly.
You can find ezines by going to google and typing in “(niche) ezine” (so if you had a nice product on massage you’d type in “massage ezine”). Or you can use www.directoryofezines.com.
Product review – Click Ad Equalizer.
I get a lot of emails from people who are stuck for finding an affiliate product to promote. I couldn’t really recommend any course out there in particular that went into great detail on that. That was until by perfect chance I stumbled across Click Ad Equalizer.
Now I won’t go into this in a big way because there’s a video on the site that shows you exactly what the software does. Let me just say that it really is a cracking tool and could be the difference between you making a decent income as an affiliate, or a very good income as a super affiliate. It really is as good as it looks, and apart from a quite frankly pants layout it’s research capabilities are second to none and make finding a great market to enter extremely easy.
Please note I don’t advise you try and promote things like MP3 players as in the demo. Look for specialist niche ebook markets they’ll be the easiest to enter.
Now I don’t advise you get this if you haven’t got Day Job Killer, because things will be way over your head. If you did take the plunge though take a look at Click Ad Equalizer. Test it out, and if you find it’s not getting you anywhere ask for a refund. The software costs around fifty five pounds.
http://www.clickadequalizer.com/
The all new Digital Upstart
I’ve got some really cool news for you about this eletter. Long time subscribers may remember that last year we tested a HTML version of the Digital Upstart. I got a lot of great feedback from people who found it easier to read, nicer to look at and generally just preferred the format to plain text.
Well after a long wait picking the best service for quality HTML newsletters we’ve found one and your weekly dose of my reviews and tips will soon be in that format permanently.
In order to receive my emails please whitelist the new address or save it to your address book: detective@canonburypublishing.emv1.com
In order to do that visit this link for more information:
http://www.canonburypublishing.com/whitelistiid
Please do take a minute to do this… I don’t want you to miss out!
And finally…
Flying penguins
They all come out at April Fools don’t they?
I was rudely awoken this morning by my friend Reiss who told me that I had to look out of my living room window quickly. There were penguins flying over the harbour. Tons of the buggers he said.
In somewhat of a daze, and as naked as the day I was born, I staggered through to my living room window (thankfully for anyone who may have been watching I’d put a towel on) to look out for this amazing phenomenon.
After three minutes on the phone to the moron with me saying “I can’t see them” and him saying “they’ve just flown over mine they’ll be with you any moment now”, it suddenly dawned on me that penguins don’t fly.
It was too late. Reiss was now bellowing down the phone at me saying things like “internet boy doesn’t know what a penguin is” and such like.
So please, if you see a flying penguin, take a photo and send it to me. My revenge on him will be sweet.
Don’t forget to whitelist me ready for the all new IID: http://www.canonburypublishing.com/whitelistiid
Have a lovely week