Today’s post is going to be one of those “do as I say, not as I do” sort of posts.

You see, I messed up, and I’ve been wasting a lot of advertising.

I was messing around my back office over at StartXchange and realized I have over 280,000 (yes, that’s two hundred and eighty thousand) banner credits sitting around doing absolutely nothing for me.

Oops! If you can reach through your computer screen and slap me upside the head, I’d appreciate it.

While I’m generally very good at staying on top of this, I clearly got sidetracked amongst the traffic exchange redesigns, splash pages, and banners I’ve been working on, and haven’t assigned credits for awhile.

In traffic exchanges, banner and text links are greatly underutilized as most people focus solely on assigning credits to their URL’s. In text ad exchanges, the majority of people focus on sending solo ads and often forget about the vast array of additional advertising available to them which can include banners, text links, hot links, log-in ads, mini button ads, and more! My point is simple this:

Make use of ALL the advertising available to you!

In most traffic exchanges, you’ll earn banner and text impressions from prize pages, so you don’t have to pay extra for this advertising. In text ad exchanges, take advantage of promo codes that usually give you a ton of free advertising when you join as a new member.

As my good friend, Tony Tezak, has always said, advertising credits don’t work like a bank. They don’t earn any interest just sitting in your account.

If you don’t think it’s worth your time and effort, give those credits a monetary value. What if your banner and text ad credits brought just one new subscriber onto your list each day? That’s 30 subscribers per month. If, on an average list, one subscriber is equal to $1 per month, then that’s at least $30 per month you’re throwing away simply by not using the advertising you have available to you. It’s actually a lot more than that considering someone who joins your list one month could be a regular buyer each month after that.

When you point all your banner and text ads to a lead capture page to build your list, those credits become very, very valuable!

There are some instances where you may want to save credits. For example, you may want to save some credits if you’re preparing to promote a new launch or if you’re releasing your own site or product and you want a big surge of visitors all at once to get the word out quickly. You may also wish to store some credits so you always have some on hand just in case you get busy and don’t have the time to earn additional credits some days. This can help you have a more consistent flow of traffic rather than a huge surge one day and nothing the next.

If you’re not storing credits for some specific reason, then make sure to assign and use all those credits. They can’t help you just sitting in your account. Yes, it can sometimes be a pain to try and assign all your credits and set up all your different types of advertising if you belong to a lot of different sites, but remember this:

If it’s a pain, then your competition isn’t doing it! Take advantage!

Out with a splash,
Derek

Today I was looking through my Aweber reports at some statistics and thought many of you might like to know where I promote and the places that are producing the best results for me. Many of my subscribers are new and may be wondering where good places to promote are, so I thought this list might help.

However, always keep in mind that you should always track YOUR OWN results at the places you promote. If you promote lead capture splash pages (which you should be), then you can easily track your results at each place you promote by simply making duplicates of the page and changing the tracking code in the form you place on the page.

For example, if you use Aweber as your autoresponder, your form code will have a line in it that looks something like the following:

<*input type="hidden" name="meta_adtracking" value="studentinsomnia"*>

It won’t have the *’s in it, but I just put those so you could see the code in this blog post.

My tracking code in this case is “studentinsomnia”. I track my pages by using an identifier that first denotes which splash page I’m promoting. In this case, it’s a splash page called “student”. Then the last part of the identifier denotes where I’m promoting it. In this case, “insomnia” to tell me it’s being promoted at List Insomnia. If I want to promote the page somewhere else, I simply make a duplicate of it, and change the adtracking code to something else. For example, I might change it to “studentviralads” to denote I’m promoting it in Viral Ad Store.

There’s actually lots of different ways to track things, so it’s all about finding something you’re comfortable with that tells you the information you want to know.

Depending on what you promote, your results could be totally different from mine. An advertising site that works great for me might not work great for you. There’s a lot of different factors that can come into play, so it’s vitally important for you to track your own results so you know what’s working and what’s not working in your own campaigns.

Use this post simply as a reference for places you might like to try and/or experiment with to see if they work for you. I will be creating a permanent link on my blog that I will update from time to time as my top 10 sites change. Ultimately over time, I’m looking for consistent advertising sites I can count on regularly, rather than those that are just hit or miss.

Many people won’t divulge this type of information to their lists. They want to keep their top sites secret. To be honest, I don’t have any “secret sites”. Most of my advertising is focused on free advertising sites, the largest portion of which are traffic exchanges and text ad exchanges. There aren’t secret sites out there that people are using to rake in huge downlines under the radar to the rest of us.

It’s all about CONSISTENT ACTION. It’s about advertising daily. It’s about surfing traffic exchanges daily. It’s about posting to text ad exchanges daily. It’s about being willing to post that one extra ad that your competition isn’t willing to post. It’s about being there and getting your site out in front of people every single day no matter what. It’s about staying in front of people. It’s about staying focused on doing just ONE THING, promoting and building YOUR list, and then funneling people into your other programs on the backend.

That’s where the results come from.

As you take a look at the following list, keep in mind the following points:

• What do I promote? I promote splash pages directing people to sign up for this blog, so I can teach them all about splash page advertising and how they can use splash pages to bring referrals into their own businesses on a daily basis.
• These are the advertising sites that have produced the best for me over about the last month or so.
• Use the following list only as a guide to find places you might like to test with your own promotions. It’s not gospel, and these may or may not be the same sites that work for you. I try new sites all the time, test my results, keep the ones that work for me, and get rid of the ones that don’t.

So without further ado, here is my current list of top performing advertising sites for bringing new signups into my blog.

Out with a splash,
Derek