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It’s been quite a while since anything in Traffic Exchange Land has excited me, hence the “long pause” between posts. But this past week has been packed full of changes, huge announcements and more excitement than the year combined I think. If you’ve had your nose to the grindstone, and your ear NOT to the ground… you’ve missed a lot this week. Have no fear! I’m wrapping up all the big announcements in a nice little bow for ya. Ready?… Here we go!

Traffic Exchange Updates

Team surfing at Traffic Taxis

Ok, so a couple of days ago, David Foley unleashed a brand new feature at Traffic Taxis… Team Surfing. Team surfing is all the rage now, and I can promise you, you have not seen Team Surfing like this. It’s like Team Surfing on steroids…. way cool! The good news is, teams are still forming, so you have the perfect opportunity to jump in now and get your team together. If you like Team Surfing at ALL, do this. You’re gonna be amazed at how the popular feature works at Taxis. This is NOT your grandma’s Team Surfing folks. I sound sort of like an infomercial right now, but trust me, keep your eye on this one. It’s gonna be huge.

James Holmes takes over SWAT Traffic

Yes, you heard me right! James Holmes is now the owner of the beloved SWAT Traffic! A huge congrats to James first off… he’s been looking to get into TE ownership for almost a year now, and I can’t think of a better place for him to let his ideas flow. SWAT has been one of my favorite places to advertise for a long, long time, and I couldn’t be happier to know some really awesome changes are coming. James Holmes hosts a popular radio show and always has his feelers out in the industry. He has some super exciting changes in mind that I think will really skyrocket SWAT’s activity and membership! If you’re not already a member of SWAT Traffic, now is the time to get in there. If you are… keep your eyes peeled because you won’t want to miss what James has in store for us.

Sweeva introduces The SOTD

As if Sweeva could get any cooler right? Well now you can purchase a Site Of The Day slot! Sweevers earn 100 experience points daily for viewing the SOTD, which means… everyone is viewing it. It’s a full 30 second view, so plenty of time to get feedback, sign ups, subscribers, etc from your page view. This is a bit like a Start Page BUT even people that don’t surf Sweeva daily are logging in to get their 100XP daily for viewing the SOTD, so you’re reaching a wider range of people with that slot. Jon & Tim are even considering sending out a daily mail to Sweevers introducing the SOTD, so you could be directly in the spotlight, in everyone’s inbox… can we all say awesome?!

Start Xchange modifies Team Surfing, Get’s Into The Fall Spirit

Start Xchange has had their Team Surfing feature for a long time now. Tim made it even better this week with the introduction of some really cool new actions Team Leaders can take. There are new team competitions, team leaders can now appoint someone else as leader, disband the team, and more. If you haven’t tried Team Surfing at SXC, now is the time to spread your wings and do so.

Tim also put up his new Fall Surfing Icons, which isn’t huge news… but it is fun and festive no? I’m so ready for fall! Beautiful leaves, chilly nights, sweatshirts, hot chocolate, pumpkins, Halloween… oh yeah bring it on!

Must Have Tools Updates

If you haven’t heard by now, TE Toolbox is now owned 100% by Jon Olson & Tim Linden, and Affiliate Funnel is owned 100% by Paul Kinder & the KRM Team. No beef, no scandal or gossip to go along with this split. It was a business decision that allowed them to focus on these 2 programs that we know and love, and I couldn’t be more excited about it. Great move guys, huge huge thumbs up!

TE Toolbox goes Unlimited, Slashes Prices & Dumbs Down

TE Toolbox is one of my absolute favorite helpers! I am a stats junkie lol I can’t get enough of them, and pure stats have saved me countless wasted hours and advertising money. I’d be lost without them! I track EVERYTHING. I track my splash/squeeze pages in every TE, Safelist, I track clicks on my blog. Yes, if you click here, I know it… I see you

I was super excited to hear about the changes happening in TET right now. They now have an Unlimited Plan option (umm yes of course I have it being the junkie I am), which means you can have unlimited sites in your rotators AND create unlimited trackers. The Unlimited Plan is surprisingly cheap so if you’re a tracker junkie like me… gotta have it! The other upgrade plan prices have been lowered too. They were already extremely affordable so I was surprised about the drop in price, but who doesn’t love to save more?

TET can be a bit confusing to use too, even for me. The great news is, Tim is working on simplifying TE Toolbox overall, 3 cheers for simple! The advanced features will still be there for the more techie folks out there, but for us that have no clue what to do with all that, our lives will be made much easier. If you’re not tracking your ads, you’re wasting money pure and simple. There’s never been a better time to take the plunge and start keeping stats!

Affiliate Funnel, bringing back the Magic Sauce

Affiliate Funnel is my other must must must have tool. I have learned so much there that I’ve been able to give Google Search a much needed break from me. Paul Kinder even attended this Saturday’s AF conference, and oh how we missed him! William Brant does a fantabulous job of hosting AF’s weekly seminars, but for a while now the magic has just been lingering under the surface. The good thing is, they’re aware of this, and they’re working super hard to bring back what we all love and miss.

AF is even sending out surveys to ask us what we love most, what we miss, what we think needs to be improved. If you missed the mailing with the survey link, just click below to take the survey and give your input! You even get a couple of really nice bonuses for submitting your ideas… so you’ll want those. You need to be a member to take part in the survey of course, and if you’re not a member yet, you can join by clicking this link here.

Click Here to participate in the Affiliate Funnel Survey

I am super psyched knowing that Affiliate Funnel will be back in full force and back the program I know and love so much. You will learn more in their AF conferences than you will from any ebook available to us… trust me… save your cash, hop in a conference!

Holy Cow that’s a lot of updates!

Whewwwwwwww I think I covered them all! Just when there was so much talk about the industry being dead, someone shakes the snow globe and we’re right back on track! There’s been so many announcements this week, it was a bit hard to keep up. I hope having them all here in one place is easier to digest, and gets you as pumped up as I am for the future. I’m literally on the edge of my seat (more like office chair), waiting to see what happens next. Things are heating up here, and we all benefit from that! Finally… some much needed change and progress. Kudo’s to all the Change Makers out there in TE Land!

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Recently, I published a post about some amazing things I learned from Jerry Iannucci’s guest appearance at the Affiliate Funnel Conference. For those of you that don’t know, Jerry is the man when it comes to Safelist Marketing, and wrote a widely popular book called “Safelist Marketing Tactics.” If you still haven’t read the book, you can download it directly by clicking this link. Something you won’t find in the book, but that Jerry recommended highly at the conference, is a newer safelist, State-of-the-Art-Mailer. I have fallen head-over-heels in love with this safelist over the past couple of weeks! I want to share what I find are the coolest features SOTAM has to offer, and just how innovative Brad Webb and Jaye Pause (the creators) are. Other safelists will clearly have to bring way more to the table, or learn to be comfortable in SOTAM’s shadow.

What’s so special about SOTAM?

So there’s the super short version of what’s unique about SOTAM. Let me explain just how groundbreaking these features are.

Profit Sharing:

How many website owners do you know that are willing to share their profits with members? Not many! I’m not talking about commissions here folks, I’m talking about sharing the website’s profit with all active members! Do you find it hard to get referrals? How about getting those referrals to upgrade or buy ads? It can be as difficult as pulling teeth… from someone that has their mouth wired shut. With SOTAM, you do NOT have to referrals or be upgraded to earn a little money. You just have to be active in the safelist… that’s it! If you read 75% of the email ads you receive in that period (a month), you earn a share of the profits for that period. You won’t make a million dollars from profit sharing, but you can surely earn enough to cover an upgrade, if you choose to do so (which is a bigtime “worth it”). It’s super easy to check your activity level right from your member’s area, and the stats are always live. Here are my live stats from this morning (see screenshot below). SOTAM emails expire 6 days after being sent, so this Profit Sharing System keeps the members extremely active… brilliant!

Live Click Rate Stats:

You want to talk about transparency in a business? It doesn’t get any more see through than displaying your website’s real time, live advertising statistics. How many safelists do you know that are so comfortable and proud with their performance to display live, real time stats of how many of the emails are actually opened? Again… not many! The stats are even broken down to each Button Level so you can see exactly how each level is performing, and ultimately which is the best Button Level to advertise to. These stats are real time, they aren’t some fluffed up stats from 5 months ago. They show exactly how the safelist is performing today, right now, this moment! You can even see just how much activity has increased since SOTAM opened… killer stats to say the least. AND you can even click the handy dandy help question mark to see how to improve your Click Rates if they are falling below the average… love it!

Button Escalation System:

At first, this system is a tiny bit confusing. It was to me, but luckily Brad and Jaye created a video tutorial that explains exactly what it is and how it works. Because they explain it so well, I won’t go into some long detailed explanation here. As you click, you earn credits that build up and move you into a new Button Level. As you move up, you’re able to advertise to more members, and at a better performing level. I don’t like to click tons of mails, so I upgraded to a higher button level (which Profit Sharing can help me maintain). Now I can earn even more credits when I read mails, and it pushes me into an even higher level, thus improving my advertising efforts. This is another feature that keeps SOTAM so insanely active and effective. Huge thumbs up to Jaye and Brad for this unique feature!

Video Tutorials:

Safelists can be a little overwhelming at first, and with the amazing features built into SOTAM, it can be hard to grasp how to take advantage of them right away. SOTAM has short video tutorials for just about everything in the site. They’re not complicated either. I watch them once, I know what I’m doing… so simple. And it’s not a hard thing to do, make videos, but this goes to show you just how important it is to Jaye and Brad for you to succeed with SOTAM. Another huge thumbs up from me!

These are just a few of the features I really love at SOTAM. This post has quickly become a book, so I’ll let you discover all the other aspects that really just make this the safelist way above the norm. If you’re smarter than me, you’ll take notice of the upgrade offer when joining. It’s easy to make your upgrade payment back from the Profit Sharing, so take that into consideration… and if you can, take advantage of that offer. I promise you (from personal experience) you really won’t see it again lol. Feel free to join SOTAM below and quickly step up your safelist game.

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Affiliate Funnel’s Saturday Conference continues to be my #1 resource for learning how and where to market online, so whenever humanly possible I just do not miss it. Friday, during TE Live, Jerry Iannucci mentioned that he would be speaking at Saturday’s AF Conference, the topic being Safelists. This was right up my alley because (like many of you I’m sure) I have tried to use safelists many times with little to no success.  Now Jerry is the man when it comes to safelists, so I knew there was no way I could walk away from that conference and not know how to use safelists properly… and I was right!

This post is a couple of days overdue, but for good reason! I wanted to put some of the things I learned from Jerry into practice, test them out, then share how successful or unsuccessful those attempts were for me. Affiliate Funnel usually has some sort of prize giveaway, trivia type of deal and this Saturday… I won! The prize??? An upgrade to Jerry Iannucci’s Safelist Marketing Tactics woot! Now this is a site I joined a long time ago, had already been jaded a bit by my attempts to market in safelists, and never even downloaded the book…. dumb right? Yes! But the upgrade and the knowledge I gained from Jerry in the seminar gave me new inspiration to try my hand once again in safelists… and I’m so glad I did!

One thing I learned… I’m going about marketing in safelists ALL wrong. Normally, I’d copy and paste an email ad from whatever program was launching, including the headline they provide, send it off into the world and be angry when I get absolutely no signups. A) In no way am I promoting myself or building my own list, B) everyone else is coping and pasting those same emails and sending them off on launch day just like me. How did I ever expect to get great results?

I also took the time to read Jerry’s Safelist Marketing Tactics ebook cover to cover. Wow.. is all I can say. I learned SO much, and Jerry really explains it in the simplest way possible. He even covers how to use filters in your email client to organize the safelist emails, how to track your results, how to tweak your ads…. I mean everything! So my Sunday was spent getting myself organized… *gasp* organization is not my strong suit for sure! But it was so easy, and now I’m all organized and ready to go. If Jerry can get me organized, he can get anyone organized, so a huge thank you to Jerry Iannucci!

I’m so excited about everything I learned from this book, that I uploaded it to my own server so that you can grab a copy of it below, for free, no signup required… just click and download. Grab the book, and please do yourself a favor, don’t do what I did…. leave it on your computer unread for 6 months.

DOWNLOAD YOUR FREE COPY OF SAFELIST MARKETING TACTICS HERE

What’s even cooler about this whole deal… Affiliate Funnel is creating a new splash page to rotate that shows the winner (me) and what I won/who gave it away (Jerry, Safelist Marketing Tactics)! So I we get promoted directly at Affiliate Funnel, me just for winning and him for giving away a prize. How much cooler does free advertising get!

Be sure to grab Jerry’s book, read it, and I can promise you… you’ll be ready to give safelist marketing another try. I’m psyched and can’t wait to share my improved results here in a later blog post.

Tips of the day:

DOWNLOAD YOUR FREE COPY OF SAFELIST MARKETING TACTICS HERE

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No, no… not that kind! Get your minds out of the gutter. A hot topic anywhere I go lately seems to be the importance of building relationships with people, instead of just focusing on the sale, the lead, the signup. If you’ve been around the Internet Marketing world for long, you know that the focus has been on how to get those clicks, get those sales, signups, whatever it is you’re trying to gain from your advertising efforts. It’s been interesting for me to watch Social Networking grow and become part of our everyday life. Slowly, but surely the trend is moving towards the importance of relationships and just how much of an impact social networking can have on your internet business.

If you know me at all, you know I love to chat and network. When I first started, it was purely to get my name seen… that’s it. As I got more into it, I realized it’s partially about that, but that’s not the point of social networking. The point is to build real relationships. Sure I can add a ton of people on Facebook, Twitter, MySpace, whatever… and I can shove my referral links down their throats the first chance I get. What’s the point?

If you add me as a friend on Facebook, and the very first thing you do is send me a default copy and paste email saying “Hi I’m so and so, I make tons of money with (insert any program here). Join under me and make tons of money too!”… you know what I do? I remove you just as quickly as I accepted your friend request. Nothing pisses me off more… how obnoxious and annoying can you get?! If I wanted to be bombarded by advertisements, I’d be watching TV or I’d be surfing… I wouldn’t be on Facebook and Twitter. I love new Twitter and Facebook friends, but let’s at least get to know each other before you tell me to join something. That’s all I’m saying.

In the last Affiliate Funnel Seminar, Jon Olson shared a story about attending an offline marketing event. I found it hilarious because apparently it was full of younger business professionals wanting to know what the ROI (Return On Investment) was for Social Networking. How do you calculate the ROI of building relationships with people? How do you put a value on a developing relationship. That, to me, shows the blatant lack of human connection in the Internet Marketing world. You don’t begin a relationship with the mindset of “What do I get out of it?” You begin a relationship with the purpose of getting to know another human being, connecting on a personal level, building a bond from shared interests and values.

These relationships are so important, even on a just a human level. We all crave companionship, even the “loners.” For me, it’s about knowing I have people in my corner, having people I can chat with, bounce ideas off of, give me feedback on whatever it is I’m doing. I love it! Here is a perfect example of just how important it is to focus on building the relationship for the sake of building the relationship…

The lovely Lynn M.

Yesterday I officially posted to my blog for the first time and sent it out into the world. A good friend of mine, Lynn McCutcheon of Lynn M Dot Net (and a wonderful blogger if I do say so myself) actually included a little blurb about me and my new blog in her own blog! I am subscribed to her blog via email, and yes I read it every time… because it’s just a great blog, and hilarious. I was surprised to see that she took the time to include me, even made me a quick little banner to link to my blog. How sweet right?! <3 THIS is what networking is about. The link and blurb of course… awesome, but the real value to me was that she thought about me. She supported what I’m doing without me even asking. Lynn is in my corner, and it means a lot. You can’t buy that kind of support, you can’t put a value or ROI on that type of relationship. This to me, is exactly what Social Networking is about. Building friendships and finding great people to have in your corner, behind you every step of the way. You can spend $1,000 on advertising, advertise on 100 different websites, and you still will never be able to replace that type of personal relationship.

So it’s been established I’m somewhat of a Social Networking junkie… it’s ok, not a bad vice to have.  A new site came out today called IM Faceplate. I actually wasn’t going to join, but then I found out that it’s all about social networking, so I folded lol  That’s ok too! It’s a free service, and it has some really cool tools on the inside. It’s essentially a mashup of the best parts of other social sites, but condensed into one place. You can follow people, they can follow you, you can post articles, integrate your optin lead capture form, your RSS feed, your website links, photo… pretty much everything. So if you’re a fellow junkie, check it out by clicking the banner below, and be sure to follow me! I do follow back

Cheers to Social Networking! Get involved, get to know people, and by all means, please, PLEASE keep the link harassment to a bare minimum. Take a chance, just say hello!

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