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Gallactic Blaster Review

There’s a product making the rounds right now called Gallactic Blaster (apparently the misspelling is intentional).

The ad copy states that you can send your safelist ad to 37,221,932 people. That’s a curiously specific number, but the point is that you can send the ad to a lot of people. No more trolling individual safelists, instead send to lots of them through a single interface.

What’s even better is that you get lifetime access for a single $10 payment!

And this is the point at which I’m supposed to tell you how great the product turned out to be, and encourage you to buy it. Mostly because I get the full $10 payment, and the product owner tries to sell you things on the back end.

The truth is, you don’t get a single interface. Instead you have three separate interfaces, two of them available for free anyway. The one you actually pay $10 for lifetime access to accounts for only 5% of the people you can send ads to.

And in a test mailing to that 5%, I didn’t get a single view of my credit page.

There may very well be products out there that take a NicheBot like approach to safelists, which would be great. But this product isn’t it.

You’d be better off spending your money on a couple months of web hosting.

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The Secret Project Revealed

I’ve been working lately on a Secret Project.

In fact, it’s so secret I managed to not let anything slip about it in my posts lately. It was close, though…I ranted recently about “systems” that fail to empower their members. I almost let slip in that one that I had a “system” in development that would strive to educate and empower, at the same time as it made money for participants.

I’ll start advertising this to the general public next week on traffic exchanges and safelists, but I wanted to share a sneak peak with all of you. The “system” is a couple of email courses. One called Traffic Exchange Secrets, and the other called Safelist Secrets.

Both courses cover what you should and shouldn’t do with each method of advertising in order to get the most out of them. The courses are nearly identical, since many of the same principles hold true for advertising, whether you’re using traffic exchanges or safelists. The focus in the courses is to provide helpful advice, and links to the tools you need to act on that advice.

I’m particularly pleased that all of the tools linked to in the courses are free, except for one.

That one is an MLM that provides critical Internet marketing tools. It breaks even when you have recruited three people. To help people break even as fast as possible, when someone joins the program through the email course they’ll send me their referral link. I’ll put those referral links back into the email courses, so that future subscribers who sign up for the MLM program will sign up under earlier subscribers. Once a member has their three referrals needed to break even, I switch the email courses to the next member’s referral link.

I think I’ve succeeded in my goal of providing education and empowerment, along with helping those who decide to take the step into the MLM program to break even as soon as possible. The MLM program provides critical Internet marketing tools that can be used to market other programs.

Who knows? It all may flop horribly, but I’m pretty pleased with how it’s setup.

Wish me luck!

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Niche Blogging

A past post of mine talks about how to pick a blogging niche. When I first started this blog, I thought I was starting a niche blog.

After all, it’s about how to make money online, right? It isn’t a personal blog, so it must be a niche blog.

Months later, I find that my chosen niche is far too large.

For example, I write about affiliate marketing, internet marketing, MLM programs, and ways to get more traffic to your blog. After all, without traffic you won’t make money. Those various categories are loosely tied together by the idea of making money online. But someone interested in SEO might not be interested in the other topics. Someone interested in MLM might not care less about general affiliate marketing.

Part of being successful in a niche blog is to have a niche that is very focused.

A good niche will have its categories tightly tied together, such that a reader who lands on a post in one category will be interested in posts in other categories, because they’re all part of the same niche.

A niche blog can monetize in ways specific to that niche. For example, a blog about restoring a specific sort of car can link to online sources for parts for that particular car. The readership might be low, but they’re ultra-targeted for that product. A blog about restoring old cars in general has much more diluted monetization efforts, because they’re trying to serve an audience with wider interests.

So if your purpose starting a niche blog is to make money, make your niche as tightly focused as possible. If you have a related topic you find you want to write about, start another niche blog in the new niche and link to its posts from the other blog.

Laser focusing your niches should result in better conversion rates however you monetize your blog.

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POAD Team Removing Inactive Members

The POAD Team Exchange is now automatically removing members from the database who haven’t surfed in the last 30 days.

Presumably this applies to pro members, too, so if you have a membership at the exchange it’d be a good idea to stop in and surf now and then to keep your account active.

I’m not entirely sure of the reasoning behind this automatic pruning, since inactive referrals do no harm other than taking up space in the database. Removing them seems to eliminate any possibility that they’ll return and be active later…who would want to rejoin a program that has removed them without even so much as a warning?

Likely this is another of the growing pains that new programs go through. I’m getting decent results with the exchange, now that I’ve switched to advertising a program that isn’t being advertised by everyone else.

If you’d been signed up with POAD and had your account removed lately, you can click here to signup again if you want to give it another try.

My apologies for the shortness of posts the past couple of days. I’m hopeful that the flu will be gone next week and I’ll be able to devote more energy to the blog.

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Avoiding Spam Filters

It’s hard to do business online with people who have certain email addresses, due to the strict spam filtering used.

Yahoo, Hotmail, and AOL are some of the strictest. The main problem is that subscribers might not even see the email in some systems, making it critically important to avoid triggering the spam filter to start.

You’ll see all sorts of different techniques used to avoid triggering spam filters. One is to use punctuation inside of suspect words, such as using “fr*ee” instead of “free”. Personally, I think that gives emails an extremely unprofessional look. And, as a programmer, I could update a spam filter to find those punctuated words in about half an hour.

What I do is run my emails through a spam filter that tells me what it found before sending them out. Here’s the one I’ve used most recently.

What will happen is that you’ll copy the body of your email into the submission form on the page, and also fill in the from and the subject. When you click the button, it’ll run the email through a spam filter and give you the results. They say anything below a 4 or so is fine. With Hotmail getting ever more strict, I’d say to try and stick below 3 if possible.

If the word “free” comes up as a trigger, use some common phrases that mean the same thing, such as “no cost”. Try to avoid repeating the same word or phrase over and over, again substitute some of them with synonyms.

Cleaning up your emails before you send them will help to ensure they actually arrive.

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Blog Rush Update

Just a quick update on Blog Rush.

My traffic stats show that yesterday I received 6 visitors from other sites running the widget. Those visitors show as being referred from “widget.blogrush.com”.

That was the first day I’d received traffic. Presumably it took a day for me to build up enough credits from showing the widget to get enough exposure for my own posts to show. I’ll let you know how the traffic changes in the next few days, but 6 visitors on the first day of traffic is better than I’ve seen with most of these sorts of programs.

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DealDotCom Preview

Betshopboy turned me on to DealDotCom.

The site itself is still in prelaunch, until tomorrow. What will it be when it launches?

Basically, DealDotCom is setting itself up to be an outlet for Internet Marketing guides and tools. Have an ebook you want to get out to a larger audience? Sell it there. Have a terrific service that you think would help someone running an online business? Sell it there.

The catch is that you only get 24 hours for your product or service to sell, and you have to give DealDotCom buyers a huge discount over your regular pricing. Think in terms of making DealDotCom a JV partner in your business. Oh, and you can only sell a limited quantity at that price.

The possibilities are good, since the members are primed to want Internet marketing materials, and good prices. The 24 hour window and limited quantity provides time pressure for people to want to buy quickly if they’re at all interested in your product. They’ll know that the price is likely to be the lowest they’ll get it at anywhere.

When you sign up for DealDotCom you also become an affiliate. They have a two-tier program, so you earn from your referrals’ purchases (35%) and from their referrals’ purchases (15%). Once you get someone to sign up under you, you earn on any purchases they ever make at the site.

The only way to join DealDotCom right now is through an invite from an existing member, so click here to join.

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Blog Rush Added

I’ve added the Blog Rush widget to the far right sidebar.

Blog Rush is, basically, a traffic exchange for blogs. We’d talked in the comments on a previous post about there being a market for something like this. You show the Blog Rush widget somewhere on your blog. Every time it shows, you get credits toward your posts appearing in the widget on someone else’s blog.

When you join Blog Rush, you specify a category for your blog. There are thirty some categories to choose from, and that category controls the blog posts that appear in your widget. So you’re earning credits from and showing your posts in blog that have similar topics. That’s a nice feature, since it means your gardening blog posts won’t be showing up on an automotive blog.

Unfortunately, there’s no “make money online” category. I tried Computers & Internet, Marketing, Career & Jobs, and Business. Business seemed to get the least irrelevant posts, so that’s what I ended up choosing. You can change your blog’s category in Blog Rush and then refresh your blog to see headlines in the new category.

Picking the right category is important. That way you’re more likely to attract interest from the people seeing your headlines, since they’re already reading a blog on a similar topic.

Blog Rush has just launched this weekend, so it’s a good time to get involved to start building up credits. There’s also a referral program of some sort, although the site is low on documentation right now. The rumor is that it’s a ten level referral tree, so you’ll earn credits from ten levels below you. Quite a lot of bloggers will be involved in this, so getting the widget on your blog early increases your chances of getting referrals to it through the widget.

What I like most about this is the set and forget nature of it. You don’t need to surf a traffic exchange, instead your normal blog visitors generate credits for you. You run the risk of losing some traffic to the widget, but that’s offset by the increased exposure you have on other people’s sites.

They do need to expand the category list a bit, to allow more highly targeted traffic, but that will no doubt come in time.

Click here to get started with Blog Rush.

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Project Payday Pays You To Join

I’ve been digging more into the Project Payday website.

They have a section titled “Free Offers” in the member’s area. There’s a mention in there about shipping and handling fees in the offers that reads like this:

On this page you’ll find various free offers and resources that are all highly recommended by the staff here at Project Payday. Some of these can help you make even more money online, and some are just great free offers.

Many are 100% free, but some do charge a small S&H fee since they’ll be sending you valuable free stuff in the mail. If you get some of these just let us know – we have special arrangements with them and we can rebate you DOUBLE the fee.

So you sign up for an offer that requires a $2 shipping and handling fee, and Project Payday pays you $4 for doing so.

My big question was, does this apply to the offer you need to do when you activate your membership? So I contacted their customer support, and the answer was “Yes”.

The effect is that Project Payday is a site that actually pays you to join it. You join, complete an offer to activate your account, and get double the shipping and handling back once you join.

You do have to use the contact form in the members’ area (look in the “Free Offers” section) to request your rebate. It isn’t an automatic process.

Also, note that the “Free Offers” section shows other offers you can do to receive a rebate.

Don’t do them!

Some of those offers are the same ones that people looking for referrals at free item sites will need you to perform, and they’ll pay you far more than you’ll get back from Project Payday as a rebate.

So, to summarize:

1) Join Project Payday.

2) Complete an offer to join, and pay the required shipping and handling fee. Pick one with the highest shipping and handling fee.

3) Once you’re into the members’ area, go to the “Free Offers” area and click the “Contact Us” link to request your rebate.

You’ve now gotten paid to get access to a site that will tell you how to make even more money completing offers for other people. And Project Payday received a commission from you completing the activation offer.

It’s nice to find a site that truly does have a win/win offer these days.

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How To Not Pick A Program To Promote

I’d done my post about How To Make Your First $30 At Inbox Dollars as an experiment.

I picked Inbox Dollars because it was the first GPT site I’d come across, so in my mind it was the GPT site. I wanted to see if a nuts and bolts explanation of how the program worked ended up converting more visitors into referrals than a simple review.

And it did. I currently have 55 referrals at Inbox Dollars, many of those people who came to the post through Yahoo Answers, others who found it through Google searches.

The experiment was a success, but ultimately the program turned out to not be the best choice.

Oh, you can make money at Inbox Dollars, no doubt about it. But their referral program isn’t that great. You make money from your referrals in two ways at Inbox Dollars.

First, when they get paid for reading an email, you get a percentage of it. They don’t say how much you get, but my referrals have read over 740 emails and I’ve made $1.13 from it. So clearly the percentage is not high, since they make around $0.03 per email they read.

Second, when each referral is mailed their first payout check, you get $5 credited to your account. At a $30 payout, that’s about 16% going to the sponsor. That doesn’t sound bad, except that apparently very few people actually follow through and get the payout. Out of my 55 referrals, only 1 has received a check. If they’d all followed the instructions in the post and immediately requested a payout, the number should be closer to 20 by now (checks take about 45 days to be mailed).

So my total income from the experiment so far is $6.13.

On this side of it all, I realize that I should have picked the program based on the referral benefits. Cash Crate would have been a far better choice, where you earn 20% of what your referrals earn, regardless of whether they ever make payout or not. Although, with payouts being a low $10, the chances of anyone not making payout are slim. But you continue to earn from your referrals there, unlike at Inbox Dollars.

I’ll probably rerun the experiment with a post targeted at how to earn a payout at Cash Crate, just to see if the results can be duplicated in an environment that is a bit more earnings friendly.

The moral is, don’t promote the first program you come across. Look for similar programs that might provide better benefits for getting referrals.