I read an interesting article today by Daniel Scocco at Daily Blog Tips where he makes the case that Alexa is Becoming Completely Worthless. I’ve never been a big fan of Alexa rankings. The numbers they report have always seemed off to me and I really don’t see Alexa rankings as much more than an opportunity to chest thump on digital graph paper. But if you’re unsure what to believe because someone you trust told they were doing well on Alexa, then give this article a read and judge for yourself.

Daniel includes a compelling argument with plenty of numbers and comparative charts to back up his findings. If you read closely you’ll see that he’s also showing you how to use Google Trends and Compete.com to compare traffic trends between domains. And if nothing else, that worth the read.

Passing on a good thing,

Charles McKeever
OpenSourceMarketer.com

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Twitter spam is officially a thing. Today I was followed on Twitter by “signupnow” which links to bux.to, a site that promotes getting paid to look at ads. This is the second bogus follower I received in a week.

According to the follower’s website, “At Bux.to, you get paid to click on ads and visit websites. The process is easy! You simply click a link and view a website for 30 seconds to earn money.”

I don’t know anything about the site, but it smell funny to me and I’d stay away from it unless you can confirm if they are legit. My guess is NO.

This is the start of Twitter spam and it’s a sign that Twitter is coming of age. Age more people use it and people learn to exploit it, Twitter will see more and more spam followings.

Signupnow already is following over 2,000 people and if all of them click through to see what it’s about then that’s a good bit of traffic generated. The conversion rate is another story, but for now my guess is it’s an effective way to get attention.

One blog I read said this about the problem.

“I haven’t seen an issue with this yet, but as we shift from primarily early adopters to more and more mainstreaming, I expect it will happen. Especially since Google is ranking tweets and twitterers quite well- the black hat SEO people will soon notice and try to exploit” - Brian Carter

For now the best way to combat Twitter spam is to remove the bogus Twitter followers to minimize their reach. But a long term defense will have to come from the developers at Twitter. They will have to implement a solution that requires you to approve followers before they can show up in your list, or they will have to implement a timed follow limit that will prevent people from following more than five people in a twenty minute period. That way it would be a pain for would be Twitter spammers to follow people by the thousands.

How would you fight Twitter spam?

Charles McKeever
OpenSourceMarketer.com

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Would anyone visit your website if they could see it first? There are widgets today that will let you see a site before you visit them. But, they don’t easily let you compare sites side by side in full view.

Well, there is a new visual search engine on the horizon that lets you pick through thousands of websites without actually visiting any of them and it does it in an iTunes album over sort of way. I came across the search engine a few days ago and I signed up for their beta program.

They just opened up the beta program tonight to the public and accounts are going fast. As I type this 100 accounts have already been claimed. If you’re interested in trying it out you should go there now before all the accounts are gone.

I have mine and I plan to do a series of videos on the service in the coming days. It’s totally awesome and I already have a few ideas of how you can use it in beta. I’m off to WordCamp for the weekend so it will be next week before I can create them.

In the meantime you can play with the tool.

Have fun,

Charles McKeever
OpenSourceMarketer.com

P.S. I’m going to WordCamp in Frisco Texas this weekend and I’ll be posting updates
to the Open Source Marketer Community, so be sure to look for those.

- C

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Recently, while I was buying a Private Labels Rights (PLR) package from one of my favorite freelance writers, I had a self-proclaimed creative idea for advertising online businesses.

I originally posted the idea in the Open Source Marketer Community Forum, but I thought it was worth posting on the blog as well. Basically, the idea is to put your product offer or advertisement at the end of someone’s autoresponder signup process.

If your not familiar with the autoresponder signup process, let me explain. A professional autoresponder service provides the ability to create mailing list signup forms that can be copied onto blogs, webpages and the like.

The form is often used in combination with a free offer to entice visitors to join a mailing list. When someone enters their name and email address into the form, they are presented with a webpage telling them to check their email for a confirmation link.

The visitor checks their email, clicks the confirmation link, and they are presented with another webpage that confirms that they have completed the opt-in process.

This is what’s known as a double opt-in signup because it requires the interested visitor to hand over their name and email address (opt-in number one) and then click a link in their email to confirm they want to receive email from the list owner (opt-in number two).

When you sign up for a newsletter or mailing list you usually see these standard set of notices. After completing the signup form, you see a page that tells you to check your email, and you get a page that confirms your opt-in status when you click the confirmation link in your email. It happens like clock work.

However, most new marketers (heck even experienced ones) leave money on the table by not customizing these notification pages. They just use the default pages that are provided by the autoresponder service and they miss out on opportunities to further promote their own or related products and services.

What they should be doing is putting a one time offer on that final confirmation page to capture a sale from someone who was interested enough to double opt-in to their mailing list.

Here’s where you come in. Since that list owner is not fully using their autoresponder series to it’s fullest potentional, why not contact that list owner and ask to put your custom offer or message on that confirmation page?

Then your message will be seen by every person who double opts in to their list. Depending on the offer and the message you provide you might be able to get in front of a lot of people and not directly complete with the list owner.

If the list owner is interested in affiliate marketing, then you could offer them a percentage of sale. Or you might do well to negotiate a flat monthly fee or a per visitor fee. The right mix will depend on their past opt-in numbers and the conversion rate on your product or service.

This is just an idea and worth a think about, considering how many people don’t use that space today. Who knows, you might be able to get advertising space that is cheaper per visitor than Pay Per Click advertising.

Looking for an edge,

Charles McKeever
OpenSourceMarketer.com

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Recently, a member of my blog monetization BlogCatalog group mentioned using a Stumble Upon Exchange to get website traffic and it peaked my curiosity.

In the past I’ve seen somewhat positive results from stumbling my own posts, so I decided to do a little experiment to see if using a stumble exchange could help compound the stumble effect and generate even more visitor traffic for a blog.

The actual value of Stumble Upon traffic is an interesting topic to me and something we might discuss in another article, but given that a page view is a page view, I decided to try out the exchange site from the simple perspective of raw numbers. I wasn’t looking to measure the quality of the traffic, just the quantity.

Specifically, I wanted to know these five things:

1. How much traffic can an exchange generate?
2. Can I find truly valuable sites in the exchange list?
3. How much time is required to participation in the exchange?
4. Could I be penalized for being a part of the exchange?
5. Do I have to continually participate to get traffic?

So I created a free account. It took less than thirty seconds to complete the signup and email based account activation.

Once my account was activated and I was logged in, I was prompted to complete my profile which included some basic information like my stumble upon username, a contact email address, a short pitch about me, and a url of the website I wanted stumbled.

It only took a minute to complete the form and I was on my way to looking for other sites to stumble.

It’s worth noting that it’s possible to add more than one website to be stumbled, but for the initial testing I decided to use only one domain. If there was going to be a penalty for being in the exchange I didn’t want it to affect more than one website.

With a free account and about three separate ten minute sessions of hand picking sites that I wanted to stumble, I decided to sit back and see what would happen.

Stumble Upon Traffic Increase

Over the next twenty four hours I saw a definite increase in the raw traffic. The test site, which had previously been getting between two hundred and six hundred unique visitors a day, saw and increase by an additional twenty five hundred visitors. The total unique visits for the day was 3,287 and the total page views were 5,025. This is compared to the previous day’s numbers of 696 unique visitors and 1,204 page views.

Over the next six days the visitor numbers averaged out to be 2,595 unique visitors per day and 4,114 page views per day and the numbers are still strong as I am writing this article.

So, as a broad generalization I think it is safe to say that the exchange generated traffic beyond what was average for the site previously. Of course there are other off page factors that are mixed in like efforts to increase external linking from other sites, but given the over night change I will assume that a large portion of the increase was from the exchange activity.

Stumble Exchange Quality

As for finding valuable sites in the exchange, I did actually find several websites that I bookmarked with my del.icio.us account.

The other sites I stumbled because I either saw value in where they were going or I enjoyed the content of the site. But overall there was a good mix of creative sites and spam sites.

In general, I tried to stumble the websites I thought were of good quality so that I would add value to my Stumble Upon account. I try to consider that when making stumble choices because I like to think that a valuable stumble account carries more weight than a junk one and if the point is to be seen then you have to consider both sides of the equation to make sure everything balances out.

Time Requirements

Like I said in the beginning, it took very little time to get started and to gain the traffic. Given the free cost of the activity and the positive result involved I would say that this is definitely a productive activity provided you stay focused while you are doing it. It is also the perfect task to outsource to a high school kid in your area because it’s simple to do and the criteria is simple to define for someone else.

Possible Penalties

One of the remaining questions was, could I be penalized for using the exchange. I’ve put a lot of thought into this question and to this point I have to say I haven’t seen any backlash.

That doesn’t mean that someone couldn’t go too far and get slapped, but in my case I’m taking it slow and easy with the exchange and I’m stumbling sites outside of the exchange as well.

I have noticed a few of the exchange site listings that say they think their site has been banned, but at this point I don’t have a confirmation on those sites. I haven’t even tried to find out. Honestly, I think it might be to difficult to tell if they were banned for using the exchange or just because of some other activity that they were engaged in outside of the exchange. So, for now I’m just going to use a conservative approach to the process and see what happens.

Continued Participation

And lastly, I wanted to know if I would have to continually participate in the exchange to see a sustained benefit.

To answer that I must confess that other than my three, ten minutes sessions, I have only been back to the site one other time to award points and answer messages from other members.

In general I am continuing to see traffic from Stumble Upon on a regular basis. It might be that if left long enough this traffic would die out, but I have to imagine that the initial rush of exposure leads to more exposure as people stumble through to the site and therefore stumble it themselves.

If this is the case, then a good healthy push from the stumble exchange could spark a reasonable chain of traffic that could continue for some time. I will have to update this writing over time to let you know what the actual results are.

So, what’s my conclusion?

Well, as with anything, a little goes a long way and I wouldn’t recommend a stumble exchange as your silver bullet of traffic tools. But as another technique for getting visitors to your website, I would recommend it.

Of course, there is the disclaimer that you should only expose yourself to as much risk as you are willing to bare, but if you take a conservative approach and don’t try to abuse the system, then using a stumble exchange seems to be a good option.

What’s been your experience with Stumble Upon?

Stumbling here and there,

Charles McKeever
OpenSourceMarketer.com

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