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First wave gone! new price $15! till 10am GMT

I have uploaded a password protected post, in that post is an interesting article on getting hold of very niche specific email addresses for marketing purposes. It does not “hack” systems but could be considered a little greyhat when you combine it with some of the ideas in the article. The article also contains over 4000 Dutch email addresses and 400 Email addresses for working mums.

If you’re interested in this article and the other content then you can get it right now!

The price

• For the first 5 hours till 1am GMT 28th of March the price for this information will be - $10 a measly sum indeed
• For 5 to 15 hours (10am GMT 28/03) into the sale the price is - $15
• After that it’s $20

If you have missed out on the first discount prices don’t worry you can still get access to the post at the regular price.

Oh I’m also going to throw in a few useful additional goodies, because I’m such a nice guy!

To claim your access to this content simply make a Paypal payment to t.nash @ venture-skills.co.uk but remember to check the time if your close to one of the Firesale marks, when I receive payment I will send you the password to your Paypal address, if you don’t want the password sent to this address use the notes field when sending payment to provide an alternative.

Any questions or if you’re worried I might miss your Paypal content then feel free to email me, please use the subject let me in So I can respond quickly!

Not only that for those of you on the Mac Book Pro Challenge I will be doing a post after the sale on how to legitimately use your email addresses.

What are you waiting for, people are already staking their claim can you afford not to?

Don’t forget if you don’t manage to get access during the Firesale you can still get access at the regular price of $20.

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We so need to kick start the blog again, and how better then by helping you guys get a Mac Book Pro Each!

Why do you need a laptop?

When asked what is the single most important change in my life on the Internet I always answer my first laptop purchase with a wireless connection. Suddenly the world changes, now you can remain online in your own cocoon environment where ever you are in the world. I do not leave the house without a laptop, my laptop has gone with me to festivals, conferences, Hackdays, clients locations and even the shops!

If you don’t have a laptop then now is the chance to grab one, if you do have a laptop is it a Mac Book Pro? It is? ok well then you can just play for the cash!

The Challenge

So here is the challenge find 25 people and get them to join a site where they to can win a laptop each person to sign up needs to complete a single offer. When all 24 have completed 1 offer you receive a free Laptop or Cash!
Simple huh

Don’t panic it’s coming!

I bet most of you are chomping at the bit for the website address but I want you to hold on just 2 seconds more.
Before you sign up we want you to know we are here for you! over the next few weeks we are going to discuss not only the various offers, but ways to get people to sign up. In other words we are going to hold your hands through the whole thing!

One final thing before the address

One last thing before you sign up, it won’t cost you a penny! please, please make sure you read the small prints of offers but for everyone their is a free option so you do not have to part with money to take part* don’t be pressured into parting with cash on an offer unless you want to!

Let’s get started

Remember to successfully complete the challenge you will need to sign up 24 people, for Notebooks4free and have each person complete an offer.

Legal bits

We are not responsible for your earning potential, and while we will help as much as we can we can’t do the work for you. This is not a pyramid scheme it is a single tier affiliate program, we are using an affiliate link but any affiliates you recruit do not count towards our total. Please please please read the small print on the Notebook4free website. Only one entry per household etc. Finally not all countries can receive laptops in such cases the cash alternative is offered via Paypal.
Remember with free trials and offers always cancel them if you do not want them to continue!

*If in doubt sign up for Notebooks4free and stay tuned for ways to complete free offers even if you don’t have a credit card.

So who is ready to take on the challenge and join us on this simple but effective challenge? It doesn’t matter if your an affiliate marketing newbie or guru this is a great way to get a laptop or cash and what could be simpler then getting 24 friends together?

Taking the challenge to the next level!

• Goal driven challenges
• Creating your sales person

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I have held off talking about about Entrecard until I had tried it for a couple of weeks but the results are in.

What is Entrecard

Put simply its a 125×125 banner exchange but you banner is displayed only once per day per site, you pay a certain number of credits to have your banner displayed on a specific site. Credits are gained based on people dropping cards on you and you dropping cards on other sites.

Stats according to Entrecard

Specific stats

Card Drops

Advert Clicks

Organic Clicks - Those coming from Entrecard

Is it worth it?

Well we have had some pretty targeted traffic from Entrecard but its also a lot of work chasing after credits, its very much a case of the big sites get bigger and the smaller sites have to work harder. But it doesn’t have the flaws of a scheme like BlogRush, and no money swaps hand, overall I think its not a bad system but I suspect at the end of the month we will remove the badge depending on how it goes. My Font site has had very little traffic so its currently very much geared towards money making blogs.

Want to try it without working hard?

We have a few credits to give away for those who want to try it, so for your chance to win simply tell us your thoughts either in a comment or trackback to this post or one of the follow up posts marked with win logo!

• First price - 150 credits
• 3 Runners Up - enough credits to advertise here

small print; what I say goes, credits given only for valid comments or trackback if your comment doesn’t get published you will not win, winners will be selected at random from valid entries and contacted via email for comments, or via the sites contact form if trackback. hey you get the idea! Good luck
Closing date oh shall we say a weeks time which would be Christmas day! 25/12/2007

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We recently discussed a simple way to get highly targeted traffic through Stumbleupon based on stumble ads, well Stumbleupon is not the only Social Media site offering this level of targeting Facebook is also offering targeted advertising.

Walled Gardens

At first glance Facebook is offering just another PPC service for advertisers and while the rates are currently cheap they will no doubt rise quickly. So why is advertising on Facebook a good idea for affiliate marketers?

Facebook is a huge walled garden full of unsuspecting people easy pickings for a marketer at least it is at the moment, Facebook Ads launched yesterday and since then 100,000 ‘ad pages’ have been created an ad page is the free part of Facebook ads, its the second part we are interested in. However this says that we are not alone in seeing the pickings in the garden and to get maximum benefit you will need to work fast.

Getting your Mini Site ready

Lets take a simple example site (please note unlike the Stumbleupon post I’m still testing and have no accurate figures) same principle as before, aim it at British males in there late teens early 20s with the same style submit and site. For more information on the case study see the previous post.

If your lucky you already have several of these style sites ready to go and maybe you were testing Stumbleupon ads. If not get going I know I spent some money but even with $50 or less you can get up a half decent site.

Setting up a campaign

So lets get going, Like the Stumbleupon ads we want to geo-target as our Email submit is also geo-targeted. We also want to define a gender and age range, though we are less worried about picking subject matter this time as we will be writing an actual ad.
Getting an ad up is a 4 stage affair

1) Provide a URL of the site or page to send users to, notice you can also choose to target Facebook pages as.

2) Target users, selecting location, gender, etc notice you can also define right down to if they are in college and year shame its very Americanised so is not really helpful for us

3) Create an advert, if you have ever done any PPC you will know the deal, the important difference is Social actions, by clicking this you can create handles which have the potential to bring indirect traffic also notice you can attach an image, hmm I wonder what we will use?

4) Select if you want to run a PPC or impression campaign, again this should be familiar to anyone who has used any PPC before, bidding is currently very low but expect it to shoot up.

Start the campaign off, job done your bringing in highly targeted traffic I would at least while the prices low pay purely for PPC. Facebook has opened a huge door and no doubt the price will shoot up very quickly if you can be an early adopter then this is a huge opportunity.

What’s been your experience with Facebook ads, have you previously used Facebook flyers? which converts better for you?

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One of the biggest problems with harnessing social media for your sites is it tends to have a rather adverse effect on your monetising strategy this is mainly down to people still relying on Adsense for revenue. Today I would like to introduce a simple case study on how to effectively monetise traffic from StumbleUpon in a way traditional affiliate marketers can cope with.

Zip and Email Submits

I wrote a piece recently on zip and email submits so will not go into to much details except to say that they can be an effective tool but only when you have the traffic to leverage them, also this traffic must be geographically targeted as most email and zip submits are country specific.

Using StumbleUpon Advertising

A couple of days ago I wrote a piece on The Venture Skills Blog covering the basics on setting up and running a StumbleUpon sponsored stumbles campaign but briefly

StumbleUpon allows people to pay for traffic to their site it arrives in the same way stumbleupon normally sends traffic but with a guaranteed number of minimum visitors. The cost is very cheap for targeted traffic at $0.05 per visitor.

This equates to 200 people for $10 which means I will need a relatively low conversion rate below 10% to make a profit depending on the submit.

Pretty Girls make all the difference

Stumbleupon advertising not only allows us to select several categories from which it will send interesting stumblers it also allows us to specify a location, gender and age range. I therefore selected a suitable Email submit with a prize of a digital camera each submit was worth $1.90 the submit was only eligible to people in the UK.

Next I created a small mini site, buying a very cheap set of 3 photos from a stock photo site of a pretty young lady, nothing to smutty here but certainly attractive I also hired a copywriter to write 3 short pages on coping with university life, and finished it off with 3 flash bear drinking games. The central point of the site was the email submit which would be paying for the site.

So far the budget has been:

• $40 for the photos and a quick email to the photographer and the photos were removed from the stock photo site
• $20 Copywriter
• $5 for the flash games
• $6 for domain name

Probably another hours work tying it all together, and creating 3 variations of the ???landing page??�

Sample testing stumblers

The next stage was to spend $30 on sending 3 lots of 200 visitors to each of my landing pages to see which converted best, remember each submit was worth $1.90 The results page 1 2% , page 2 7% page 3 5%, Or put more simply Page 1 resulted in a loss $2.40 Page 2, a healthy profit of $16.60 and page 3 a more modest $9

This basic testing of small samples showed the second landing page performed well and therefore was used a daily limit was set up of 400 visitors and a sizable chunk from my paypal account was deposited.
I ran this for nearly 2 weeks, the site also received some small organic traffic and even a few inbound links.

The results

The final conversion rate was closer to 5 then 7% but still a healthy profit was made I spent just over $400 in total, so you see with a little bit of thinking it does pay to use StumbleUpon.

Cautionary tale

The above is of course a success story meant to inspire you so now I want to throw some water over you, the above happened as accounted but a word of warning when I stopped paying for stumbles I perhaps naively thought that I would still get hits from StumbleUpon just like blogs do I was wrong, the reason is obvious once the paid for stumbles were over all that nice targeted traffic vanished and while I initially did get some additional traffic it was not all male, and in the age range I had been aiming for, consequently a few negative thumbs down appeared. The result was I have never been able to start an organic stumble on that domain since even for decent content. So if you are using very targeted traffic on StumbleUpon make sure its on a domain which does not normally receive StumbleUpon traffic. Also make sure you check the terms and conditions of both StumbleUpon and your Affiliate company, finally remember that spam is spam ad heavy MFA sites will not work regardless of targeting it doesn???t cost much to make a half decent site and the returns are far greater.

Have you had success driving traffic with stumbleupon?