Google has announced the addition of new mobile ad formats that will have location and enhanced contextual relevance in your Google AdWords campaigns.

This new service uses Google’s click-to-call function, which lets the advertiser target ads based upon the user’s location.  This will allow ads to rank higher for businesses that are closest to the phone.  Telephone numbers can be displayed to allow for one-click dialing.

Of course privacy advocates are starting to complain about the implications of location based ads.  However, Google users are required to agree to its terms (including sharing their phone number and current location) in order to use this service which promises to offer many benefits in the future as this technology advances.

Advertisers pay when surfers click to call or click to visit the website.  There is no fee when users check the map or get directions.  The cost is the same whether the user clicks to call or clicks to visit the website.

 
Einstein Calls It “The Most Powerful Force In The Universe”

  Traffic building is one of the most important and fundamental skills needed, no required, to build a successful website or online presence.  Without traffic, your website might as well be an advertisement in a newspaper with a circulation of zero.

If you’ve looked at any traffic strategies as of late, you have probably seen many that claim exponential traffic growth.  While many strategies might be good at growing website traffic, is it really exponential growth?  Almost every time, it’s not, it’s simply linear growth.

So what is Exponential Growth?

Simply put, exponential growth is compounding.  You take the traffic you have (even if it’s small), then multiply its growth by a small percentage, like a compound interest savings account.  However, unlike a savings account with only 2% growth per year, many webmasters are building traffic at several percentage points per week.

Albert Einstein called Exponential Growth The 8th Wonder of the World! “Compounding is the most powerful force in the universe.”               ~ Albert Einstein (1879 – 1955)

The principles of compounding work in everyday life with finances, decision making, chemistry, physics and even web site traffic.  As an example, if the day you were born, your parents put only $2,000 into an IRA that compounded at 1% per month, then you would have over a million dollars by the time you were 53 and almost five million dollars by the time you reached retirement age of  65… without adding any additional money.

Now of course you don’t want to wait 65 years for results, but remember, we are talking internet years here… turn those years into weeks or days and it’s possible to substantially grow your traffic every week at amazing rates for true exponential growth.

Over time, exponential growth will beat out linear growth everytime as shown in the graph below.

In this chart, let’s start the year off with a new website that gets 2 visitors it’s first day.

The red line shows what happens if you add two more visitors the second day, then two more it’s third day.  That’s linear growth.  That’s the type of growth that comes from article marketing, search engine optimization, etc.  At the end of the year you will have 730 visitors per day.

The green line show what will happen if you grow the website’s traffic by two percent per day.  Two percent per day may sound like a lot but it’s really less than one visitor per day for the first 8 months.  After the compound traffic building system is in place, then momentum carries the growth rate so at the end of the year you will have over 2,700 visitors per day.

Compounding works slowly at first but then reaches critical mass and really takes off paying big dividends.

Exponential traffic building is the only way to truly dominate the traffic in a large niche.  You are only limited by the size of your target market.

As an example, there are strains of bacteria that grow at exponential rates.  When laboratories grow these bacterias, they use containers called Petri dishes.  The bacteria can grow only to the size of the container.

Exponential traffic building is not used much in mainstream internet marketing niches which leaves it wide open for forward thinking marketers. However adult industry niche sites use compound traffic building extensively.  Almost all the sites getting over a million visitors per day, that’s right… one million visitors per day… use software to automatically handle their exponential traffic building.  And you can do the same.

Putting Exponential Web Traffic Growth On Steroids!

The true power of an exponential traffic growth system comes when you mix in a linear growth system.  Let’s take the example from the chart above.  If you started out with 2 visitors per day on day one and let it grow exponentially, you would be bringing in 2,755 visitors per day after one year.

Now imagine that you combined it with a linear system where you added only 2 extra surfers a day using SEO, blogging, article marketing, and other methods.  An extra two visitors a day is nothing and can be done in your sleep, however when combined with an exponential strategy, you will wind up with a daily traffic count of a whopping 140,369 visitors per day.  And remember, you only started the year out with 2 visitors per day.

Now of course 140,369 visitors per day might be out of the market size for your niche, but even if your market size is only 17,000 visitors per day, that’s still worth going after and easier to obtain.

For more information on exponential website traffic growth, please check out Scott Stamper’s website www.TrafficFromScratch.com .  It’s the only traffic strategy developed for the mainstream internet marketer.

With problems in the economy, job losses, and just plain old fear of the future, I’ve seen more and more people try their hand at making money on the internet.

In previous years, most “newbies” seemed to be people that either had a love of computers or business. They had jobs and worked part time on the internet until they began making enough online to quit their day job. Some people could do it weeks, others took months… while others never could make the leap.

Although newbies were new at marketing on the internet, they (for the most part) were willing to dive in head first and learn the ropes, and in some cases blaze their own paths. I remember just a few years back with there was newbie called Mike Filsaime.

Today, there’s a new breed of newbies. Many of them are frantic, some of them have just lost their job, many of them are scared of losing their homes. While the old newbies wanted to make a living online, the new newbies need to make a living online and are this additional pressure is frustrating many that are entering our industry.

Many of the new newbies are business owners and professionals that are looking towards the internet to boost their businesses.

I’ve seen business owners pop up static brochure looking web sites, then a week later blame Google for not flooding their site with traffic.

Professionals like chiropractors and lawyers are now bidding on AdWords PPC traffic like crazy with little to no knowledge about how PPC systems work.

For instance…

Hal K. Levitte, a Boston Lawyer, is suing Google because he didn’t like the traffic he was getting. According to court documents, he claims that some of his traffic came from parked sites and from error pages.

All I can say is – “Welcome to Google AdWords Mr. Levitte”. I lost money too on my first AdWords campaign, and my second, and my third. It took me a long time to figure out the system.

I’m looking at the official complaint filed with the court and it states that he received 668 visitors and had zero conversions to his opt-in page. This is just my opinion, but to me that indicates that he had a bad opt-in page as opposed to bad traffic.

I run a lot of AdSense campaigns so I’m getting traffic from the same pool and I’ve never had that bad of an opt-in rate. I wonder if he was split testing… which is a free service offered by Google to AdWords customers.

The main issue of the complaint seems to be centered around traffic from parked domains and error pages. He claims that from those pages he received 1,009 impressions, 25 visitors and no conversions. Are you kidding me?!?! They got 25 visitors and no conversions so he’s suing? There’s not enough there to be statistically significant. I have plenty of times that my opt-in page that gets an 80% opt-in rate will go for a stretch where 25 visitors in a row do not opt-in.

In section 33 of the complaint he claims that Google buried the opt-out buttons four clicks deep in the interface. That’s true, but then the AdWords system is a vast system, you often have go layers deep to find what you want. He claims fraud; I just say it’s the nature of the beast.

To sum it up, a lawyer new to internet marketing is turning 25 clicks from Google, into a class-action lawsuit.

Here’s the Good News….

The good news is that on the horizon there is a whole new market out there of new newbies like lawyers, dentist, chiropractors, hair shops, massage therapist, and other untapped alcoves of people that will need help with their internet marketing.

So despite the economic future for everyone else, it looks bright for internet marketers that are prepared to coach and train this upcoming wave of new newbies.

Link to court filed complaint:
http://docs.justia.com/cases/federal/district-courts/california/candce/5:2008cv03369/205116/1/0.pdf

I was reading the local county paper today and came across an article titled "E-mail release causes unease".

Turns out, one of our local county commissioners figured out a way to build his email list by getting it from the county…. legally (or so he claims).

Here’s the short version… Commissioner Joe Lee Thompson had a friend file a request under the Freedom of Information Act to get an opt-in email list of over 3,000 addresses compiled by the local police website. Then he used it for his re-election campaign.  The list was an opt-in list designed to keep the community informed about community issues.

After reading this article, I began thinking… What other list are available?

There’s an IRS Newsletter, that has to be giant list…. maybe millions.

The Small Business Administration has a huge list of budding entrepreneurs.

Just doing a quick search, I found over 80 opt-in newsletters offered by the Federal Government alone ranging from women’s health issues to stock market trading.  Sounds like some nice targeted lists.

Now I’m thinking… what’s to stop some smart marketer from using the Freedom of Information Act and scooping up all these email addresses from all these newsletters?  Oh Yeah…  that little thing called the Federal CAN-SPAM Act!

So maybe Mr. Thompson could "legally" get the list, but I’m wondering how he used it without violating the spam laws?  Since the list was not mailed to using the auto-responder there is no way he could have even included a proper opt-out link.

The opt-in list he got his hands on is managed by the autoresponder service ConstantContact.  As I look at the police website, the text under the opt-in box says "Privacy by SafeSubscribe", and the privacy policy on the website says that the information will not be shared with outside parties.

It seems to me that just because the government is in possession of private information, does not mean it’s automatically pubic information.  I just paid a traffic ticket online with a credit card, but that doesn’t mean that I can file a request for the list of everyone’s credit numbers on file…. Hmmm, or could I?

- I’ve scanned the article for anyone interested in reading it -

          
(Click Image Above To Enlarge)

Earlier this month, I received an email from a friend of mine that I hadn’t heard from in months.  It wasn’t a personal email, instead it was an email blast to his entire Outlook contact list with a link to a YouTube video.

Like most people I get a lot of these type emails and normally delete them, but since it came from a friend that doesn’t normally send me emails, I decided to check it out.  The email was a forward of a forward of a forward, so in my mind I thought… "Hmmm… this thing is going viral".

The original email was from National Geographic and was titled "The Most Amazing Nature Video Ever Seen ?".  I guess the marketers at National Geographic put the question mark in at the end to increase the click-thru-rate (which statistically it does).

I clicked on the link and wound up watching the 8 minute video.  It was AMAZNING!  It was amature vacation video from a safari in South Africa.   The video captured a battle between a pride of lions, a pack of water buffalo and a crocodile all fighting over a live baby water buffalo.

I was so blown away by the video, that I too did an email blast out to family and friends… and later I heard that many of them forwarded the email also.  If you haven’t already seen the video… here it is:

YouTube Video of "The Battle at Kruger"

As I watched the YouTube video, I noticed that it promoted a show called "Caught On Safari: Battle At Kruger", where experts deconstruct the battle and show the entire video.  I grabbed my calendar and marked down May 11th, 9:00pm, and sure enough I wound up watching the show with my 5-year old son.

The Marketing Campaign’s "Hook"

What I find amazing about the National Georgraphic’s marketing campaign, is that in their press releases, they didn’t market the television show, instead they focused on the YouTube video.  Because their video had millions of views (over 33 million at the time of this post), they were able to use the video viewership as a "hook" for their press releases.

View Count of the Video… Over 30 million!

Their press release marketing resulted in hundreds of articles in newspages like the New York Times and the Washington Post, and a spot on almost every major news show.

Because of this, the readers and viewers were driven to the YouTube video which was very effective in gaining viewers for their television show, plus it added to the YouTube video’s view count which in turn boosted it’s viewership.

I’m sure we will start seeing this more and more in the future where companies and markerters promote their video instead of their product.

Media Coverage of Battle at Kruger YouTube Video:
The New York Times
The Washington Post
ABC News

If you belong to a lot of affiliate and CPA programs, or run your own affiliate program, then you know how time consuming it can be to check you stats even on just a daily basis.

A large majority of my time used to be spent just checking my stats, but now I’ve found a Windows desktop tool, StatsRemote, that automatically consolidates all my stats into one real-time console.

StatsRemote, available at www.statsremote.com is setup to automatically work with almost all affiliate programs and CPA networks (including adult and gambling programs) as well as PPC networks.  It does cost about $30 per month, but it’s well worth a dollar a day not to have to log into 30 different programs.

Below is a screen capture of StatsRemote that is on my screen right now with my stats.  It doesn’t have all the programs I belong to since it doesn’t include PayPal or my merchant account.  Also, I haven’t loaded in all my ClickBank accounts and all my AdWord accounts.  But it will give you the basic idea of the information that it can provide.

*Note:  For privacy reasons, I have blocked out the names of many of the affiliate programs and products since they are in highly competitive non-IM niches.  Also, some of the programs prohibit revealing payout information.

The console will let you view a single day, a week or a month.  So yo will instantly know how much money you made today, this week, or this month.  It also creates a database of historical data so you can do things like compare this month to last month, etc.

It’s a reminder of your mistakes!

A few years ago I created an eBook, that went viral, and made the mistake of placing a direct link to an affiliate program that I had never tested.  That affiliate program now gets thousands and thousands of visitors from the eBook, but it converts horribly.   As you can see in item 29 above, the last 8,461 visitors didn’t generate a single sale.   You’ve often heard people say "I couldn’t top the traffic even if I wanted to… well, in this case it’s true.  So it’s a daily reminder to always create a redirect link through my own website.

StatsRemote is a tool that I use everyday.  It doesn’t have an affiliate program, so you can visit the site directly at www.StatsRemote.com

If you have ever heard Matt Bacak speak at any numerous internet marketing events, chances are you’ve heard him mention his favorite drink… an Irish Car-Bomb.

I’ve wondered what an Irish Car bomb was, and at Armand Morin’s Big Seminar 11 I found out. 

It was late Saturday evening at the hotel bar when Matt starting buying everyone rounds of this concoction.   I have to say, it’s an interesting drink… taste like chocolate milk.

 
Matt Bacak and an Irish Car Bomb

What’s in an Irish Car bomb?

A car bomb is a boilermaker made with Guinness beer, Baileys, and Irish whiskey.  You pour a glass of beer, then drop in a shot glass filled with Baileys and whiskey.  Here’s the interesting part… Since Bailey’s is a diary product, it will curdle in beer, so you have to drink it very fast.

How to make an Irish Car Bomb

Instead of trying to explain how to make one, just watch this video:

Tonight I had dinner with Willie Crawford at Scallias, a little Italian restaurant in Atlanta.

Willie told me how a friend of his had recently told him that a product download page of his was listed on Alexa, which meant that a secret URL was made public.

I wasn’t surprised. I told him that when I was on WordTracker, I had ran a search on the term “ClickBank” and found out that the number one search phrase was “ClickBank Thankyou Download”. This search term is obviously used by thieves looking for unprotected downloaded pages on ClickBank sites.

Scott Stamper and Willie Crawford

Preventing Google, and other search engines, from displaying your download pages in search engine results is easy. The easiest way is to simply put a “no index” meta tag into your download page.

Here is an example of a “no index” meta tag:<META NAME="ROBOTS" CONTENT="NOINDEX">

Another way is to create an ASCII text file named robots.txt and add it to the root directory of your web server telling search engine spiders which pages and folders not to index. To create this file, simply open up notepad and add the following text code, then save the file as “robots.txt” (all lower case). You will need to rename the download_directory to your actual directory.
Disallow: /download_directory/

This won’t stop all thieves, but it’s a good start. For more ways to protect your ClickBank download pages and to dramatically boost your ClickBank sales, check out ClickBank Stampede. Just Click Here Now.

It’s been announced…

Traffic Secrets 2.0 will launch in May. I have a "Spy Photo" of the ALL NEW package. It’s a nice design that will fit nicely on the shelf, so it won’t be just a box of loose disks like other products.

 

John Reese’s Traffic Secrets 2.0

Version 2.0 of Traffic Secrets course is ALL NEW and contains 12 interactive CD-Roms. This is super-cool stuff and will become the benchmark for information products. This new interactive learning platform will help users use and consume the information in a way that’s never been done before allowing you to quickly and immediatly put strategies into action. This means you will see results and traffic right away.

Here’s How You Can Get Extra Traffic and Bonuses!

When this home study course is launched, I will give you some very expensive products as a bonus items if you order from this website. I’m putting together an amazing package. I can’t say what it will be just yet… but it will be worth thousands of dollars… several times more than the cost of the Traffic Secrets 2. If you want to be notified of the launch and be eligiable for these exclusive bonuses, just fill in the form below.

One thing that I love about working on the internet is the lack of paperwork.

Oh sure, I have magazine articles that I’ve clipped, invoices in the mail, and everything else… but most everything else is email and eFaxes.

For the papers that do come in, I simply scan them into PaperMaster Pro where I can easily retrive them for viewing on my monitor or even re-print them if I need to.   Papermaster lets me file all my papers into a virtual file cabinet which allows me to browse through the file cabinet drawers or use it’s nifty little search engine.
Vist PaperMaster at: www.papermaster.net

For faxes I now use eFax almost exclusively.  With eFax, all my faxes come to my email box as Adobe PDF files, then I import them into PaperMaster Pro.  The upside to using the two together is that PaperMaster Pro comes free with a subscription to eFax.
Visit eFax at: www.efax.com

Of course if you want to save all your paperwork as PDF documents you can simply scan them and save them to your harddrive using Adobe Acrobat Pro or another PDF creation software package.