Archives for November 2007

Using TNX.net: Results

November 30, 2007 by

It’s been a little over a month now that I’ve been testing out TNX.net. So far, I’m finding it to be a valuable tool. I’ve added two of my sites as link hosts. This and one other. Between the two of them, I’ve sold thousands of links for 10s of thousands of TNX points.

The market of TNX and the exchange rate for points makes it almost entirely pointless to try and make money by selling your points you’ve earned. You’ll never get rich that way! So, we have to devise a better way of using those points to get richer. And here’s how: use them!

By using the points I’ve earned from my fully developed and established site, I can buy links for some of my lesser sites. I can amass several hundred links over a matter of days. You’ve got to be careful to not amass them too fast or Google will kick you right out and into the sandbox. We don’t want that. I get around this (and it appears to work) by periodically freezing the campaign and then re-activating it a few days later. It takes 3-4 days for a link to be activated and by doing this, I get a pretty steady flow of links over several days and weeks rather than hundreds of links in one day and then nothing. It looks more natural. Remember to follow the tips that TNX gives and vary the anchor text and the page linked to so that they look that much more natural.

The other trick I use is to not buy the big PR links. I’m not buying links for pagerank, but for the sake of indexing and links. So, with this site, I’m able to sell several links on PR3 and PR4 pages and buy 100 PR0 links with each one. Using a mix of PR0 and PR1 links, I’ve managed about a 3:10 ratio of links sold to links purchased.

That’s all well and good, but does it work? Yes. Within a week of using this method to sell links and buy links for smaller websites, I noticed a marked increase in traffic from the search engines. You don’t need to be a genius to figure out that increased traffic from search engines can translate into more affiliate sales, more newsletter signups, and more income.

One downside to all this is that you’re only selling or buying links for one month’s time. If you delete a campaign, the links go away. In the end, you’ll want to spend some time building more permanent links elsewhere, but TNX gives a great boost while you’re doing that building. It only takes a few minutes to set up a campaign and once set up, there is little to no maintenance. I’ll be continuing to play around with TNX and honing my methods as I go. It’s a pretty good tool to have in your portfolio, I think.

Filed Under: General News Tagged With: , , , , ,

Holiday Season Starts Online Monday

November 24, 2007 by

Many people look to the mass hysteria of yesterday (black Friday) as the official start of the holiday/Christmas season.  And if you’re a brick and mortar company, it really is.  I noticed that even a few of the online shops like Amazon are trying to horn in on it as well.  What really starts things off for the online sector is a day called Cyber Monday.  It’s the Monday after Thanksgiving.  Like Black Friday, Cyber Monday is a day of mass shopping, just online instead of in stores.

I haven’t seen any deals like what you’ll see on Black Friday, but I wouldn’t be surprised if online vendors start doing some pretty decent deals.  For those of us that don’t have a store, we have to horn our way in some other way.  Of course, the most obvious way would be to use search advertising to pull in sales for your affiliate companies.  If there are more shoppers online than any other time of the year, you can bet that they will be searching for lots more items than normal, looking for a deal.

If you’re more of a affiliate site person, you’d have to had your work done a bit earlier in the year, but with any luck, it’ll be paying off over the next month or so.  All those links you’ve added will start paying dividends as people start showing up to your site in larger numbers and your conversion rates go up.

The truth of it is that you’d have to be trying to not make some amount of money in the next month.  If you don’t make anything normally, you’ll likely make a few sales soon.  And if you normally make a lot of sales?  It could be a good month.  But you knew that, didn’t you.

Filed Under: General News Tagged With: , , ,

Top 5 Referrers for October

November 12, 2007 by

I’m trying to continue the work I started last month by listing the top 5 referrers for the month of October.  I appreciate those that send a little traffic my way, and this is my way of saying thanks to those that do the most.

Again, in order from lowest to highest:

  1. 45n5.com
  2. osworld.biz
  3. buildingmyempire.com
  4. johncow.com
  5. grandforkslife.blogspot.com (fellow North Dakota blogger!)

A couple of quick post scripts.  bloggingexperiments.com was actually the highest referrer among blogs, but since I paid for that link, I didn’t feel that it should be included.  The same goes for Shoemoney.com, who would have made the list.  I donated a couple of ad spots to his rss contest last month.

Thanks to everyone that made the list!  There are also a couple of blogs that were very close to making the the list, but missed by a couple of visits.  Other interesting note, the traffic from johncow.com was strictly from commenting on that blog.

Can you make the list next month?

Filed Under: General News Tagged With: ,

Do You Have a Marketing Team?

November 11, 2007 by

Maki at DoshDosh had a very interesting article. He entitled it “The Blogger’s Guide to Team Marketing: Working Together for Traffic and Exposure.” At first, I have to admit that I thought he was describing what a lot of bloggers already do. We publicize our blogging friends. It’s a bit of a unwritten code. You scratch my back, I scratch yours. But then I read it a little fuller. And he may be on to something. It’s still rather informal, but it’s a tad more formal than the scratching bit.

It’s basic bones are to form a small “marketing team” of like minded bloggers in your niche.  That team then is available to others on the team to bounce ideas off of, guest posting, as well as helping with pushing each other’s content.  It’s an interesting idea.  It’s slightly more formal than the informal system that exists in the ethereal smoke of the blogosphere.  Would it work?  I’m not sure.  I think it could, but there are a couple of important factors.  The team would have to consist of equally minded bloggers.  Those bloggers would also need to be in roughly the same skill level.  A beginning blogger isn’t going to produce the same amount or quality of content as many of the veterans.  Most importantly, the team would need to have some set rules.  Rules that lay down how certain issues would be handled.  Removing or adding a new blogger to the team for instance.  There would also have to be limits of some sort as to which posts and how many posts can be submitted to the team for pushing.  Nobody wants to be spammed by the team with every post they write.  Maki suggests that each team member gets one post per week that can be pushed.

Would it be worthwhile?  Perhaps.  There are some issues (see above) as well as some locality issues (hard to push Iced Tea recipes if it’s winter) and also some issues with equality.  In the end, I think what you would end up with is a smaller version of the current scheme or an elitist group that would be blind to the forest for their trees.

There’s not much room for error and it would be a delicate balance.  Do you have a marketing team like this?  The only public examples that I can really point to would be a blog network like b5media, but that isn’t really the same.  Maybe I’m missing something and this is already a popular tool for bloggers?

Filed Under: General News Tagged With: , ,
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