In commencing work over the past month or so to revitalise this blog and the AdMastery.biz group of sites in general I’ve been developing a plan.  It wasn’t totally coherent to start with but gradually came into something like an intelligible shape.

Yesterday I came across an excellent blog post by Lynn Terry describing her approach to planning the future development of her main blog.  She’s much further advanced with it all than myself, but her approach fits so well with the way my mind works that I was delighted to discover that she’d also put it into pdf format for downloading. I could print it out and scribble all over it.

I was even more delighted when I found that not only was she was giving it away free but was allowing others to give it away as well.  So here it is – completely free, with none of  my affiliate links in it, and without even asking for an email address – a gift to my readers.  Enjoy it and use it. If you’re like me you’ll find it well worth the time and thought.

Download it here: Lynn Terry’s BlogBoost2010.

I’ve been working today to revive some of the AdMastery.biz sites.  Some of them have been sadly neglected during my recent long period of weak health, and as I worked away it dawned on me suddenly that I’d never updated the name of this blog.

This has been done today and the banner above now reads, “The AdMastery Blog“. Several of my other related advertising sites are shortly to be brought consistently under the AdMastery banner. There are other developments planned for the coming months also – including things that according to previous plans should have been launched earlier this year, if only I had not been forced to take time off.

I’m intending to add posts here several times a week and to expand the coverage to assist small-scale internet marketing businesses much more comprehensively than in the past. In summary this blog will now be designed both to support users of the AdMastery.biz advertising services, and also to provide helpful content and references for people developing their knowhow in home-based internet marketing – including email advertising, various type of ad exchange, traffic exchanges and safelists, to mention just a few of the topics to come.

You may notice that traffic exchanges are mentioned there. Because the AdMastery.biz portfolio does not include a click exchange (as traffic exchanges are sometimes called) and at present it is not intended to launch one, I’ve never paid much attention to them here.  However, on recent reconsideration of their potential I’ve returned to using them considerably more myself and will therefore be referring to them periodically.  For example, you’ll find in yesterday’s post a brief note on my initial impressions of HitSilo, the new traffic exchange from Logiscape Technologies.

Also, given that this site is itself a blog, I’ll also include material on blogging and you can look forward to some changes in The AdMastery Blog itself. I’m hoping shortly to include a review of Alex Sysoef’s training programme for bloggers, “Expert Wordpress“, once I’ve been through the materials myself.

Wishing you success,

- David Murray -

If you have used Traffic Exchanges in your promotional work you will probably have faced the following problem.

On some exchanges you’ll have assigned credits to display one of your sites,and then waited for days or even weeks for them to be used.

On others you’ll have looked at the exchange stats after two minutes and found they’ve already gone, in a flash.

Well, I suppose I’d rather have the second problem than the first, but if I’m allocating a lot of hits to a particular promotional campaign I’d like some degree of control over how quickly they’re used up.

For some years several exchanges have allowed their users to specify a maximum number of of hits per day. I can, for example, allocate 700 credits and say they must be used over the next seven days at the rate of 100 per day.

That’s certainly an improvement, but Tony Tezak’s new exchange goes further.  He allows you to specify not only hits per day, but within the day how many per hour – and so to spread them around the clock.

Take a close look at Tezak Traffic Power and see how it might fit into your promotional portfolio.

Wishing you success,

- David Murray -

I’m not myself a great enthusiast for PPC, preferring free advertising to paid.  I subscribe to very few ad services.  Yes, I do pay monthly to a small handful of credit-based safelists but for the most part these were set up under special deals for cheap subs or even a free or cheap “lifetime” membership.  I learned a long time ago that a less than careful accumulation of monthly subscriptions can quickly leak away one’s PayPal balance.

However, I’m not going to deny that some people have made a lot of money out of both their own and affiliate products and services through promoting them by PPC services such as Google Adwords.  And as someone who likes to watch his Adsense balance building up it would be rather inconsistent of me to deride those sturdy Adwords customers who, at the end of the day, are the people who pay me for showing their ads.

Having said that I do believe that it is necessary to take some care over launching into Adwords campaigns.  PPC can look deceptively simple, but if you don’t know what you’re doing you can pour a lot of money down a big hole.  So today I was pleased to see that Kenneth Koh has put a new article on his blog dealing with this important theme of Pay Per Click Marketing.

(If you’re interested in more comprehensive PPC training take a look at this from Perry Marshall).

I was researching today for some up to date content on email marketing when it occurred to me to check what are the latest books on the subject.

Having done that it then occurred to me that it might be helpful to my blog readers to see some of what I found, so here first is a collection from Amazon.com, and then for the benefit of UK-based readers there’s a similar listing from Amazon.co.uk.

To those who have been around in the Internet marketing field for some time the name Marlon Sanders means long experience, solid advice, demonstrable success, and business longevity to mention just a few of the positive words that come to mind.

Marlon is no fly-by-night self-proclaimed guru.  He’s a genuine guru of the gurus.  As one guru ranking site recently wrote: “Marlon Sanders should need no introduction, he’s one of the pioneers of marketing online.”

All of this make this post especially important because it’s to let you know that you can benefit from the accumulated marketing wisdom of this outstanding business performer … and you can do so for free!  He has put together a great volume of his writings from past years into a single place, a large ebook that really is worth reading.

This is not one of your typical free ebooks full of  badly written half-baked nonsense.  This is the real thing from a real expert.

Make sure you download “The Best Of Marlon Sanders” for FREE today and incorporate its advice into your Internet marketing programmes for 2009.

This morning I came across a blog post which, although drawing some different conclusions from mine, reflected some of the concerns about the development of ad exchanges which have been floating around in my mind for many months.

Some may wonder what the owner of a very new exchange can yet have to say on this subject, but I comment less from the standpoint of an owner than from that of a user.  Given that these small exchanges have only existed in their present form for less than two years, and most have sprung up in the past six months, I reckon that as someone using them since late-2007 I can be classified as something of a veteran.

In the early text ad exchange sites it did not take long to use up a hundred views at a traffic link; now it can sometimes take months as very few people read them.  As the variety of advertising options on the sites increases (sometimes confusingly so) the attention given to any one specific component of the service will be lessened.  That is understandable, but from the point of view of both owners and advertisers it is important to have people coming back regularly both to place and to view ads.

The daily reinsertion of text/html ads is an important factor in that regularity, but it must be structured in such a way that members feel it to be a worthwile use of their time.  Also, while there on the site, these members need some encouragement to view the ads of other members.  After all, this is an “exchange”.

The points (credits) structure, both earning and spending, has a great deal to do with this; when referring to points one has to consider how many of these are needed to buy another advertisement.  In an “exchange” what matters is how many ads have to be clicked in order to earn the right to send another oneself.  The mental arithmetic has to be done site by site; a number of ‘points’ as such means nothing.

In launching the ad exchange at AdMastery.biz I decided to make little difference between points earned for clicking on solo emails and traffic links.  I didn’t go to full equality, but went a long way toward it.  Similarly, the points for clicking text and html ads are much higher than I’ve been accustomed to receiving as a user elsewhere over the past months.  Hopefully this will attract people to view ads on-site as well as at their email boxes.

Having the mix of traffic links which remain in place and text/html ads which require daily reinsertion is in my view a useful feature, provided there are sufficient other incentives to draw people back to the site both to carry out that renewal and while they’re there to view some other links.

The technology has developed during 2008, with a wide range of innovations appearing.  In many of the early exchanges, for example, there was no facility to save a text ad.  This was quickly corrected but still many exchanges do not have the ability to save html ads, making it necessary to enter the details in full every day.  Personally I don’t now use html ads on sites which lack this time-saving functionality.  There simply are not the hours available to spend re-entering everything day after day.  On the positive side the availablility of this efficiency aid does take me back repeatedly to many sites which have it.

Sadly, though, many sites seem to be becoming little more than solo email exchanges – or even solo give-aways – with little visiting of the site apart from entering new emails.  I suppose there’s nothing wrong with that in principle, but is that what the owners really visualise as the future of their sites?  I suspect not, and it could be dangerous for the future of this advertising niche as a whole; or it could lead to the emergence (I suspect fleetingly) of a separate sub-niche of solo-exchanges destined to go the way of the old ‘regular’ safelists.

I’m tempted to carry on and discuss the quality of advertising – both the quality of what is advertised and the quality of its presentation.  That, however, can wait for another day.  Meanwhile, thanks to the good people at the Ad Factory blog for triggering me to put pen to paper (sorry, fingers to keyboard!).

I’m in a reflective mood today. Maybe it’s the impact of the election in the land of my American cousins. (Yes, I do have ten of them, spread from Illinois to Florida – quite apart from the more general historical trans-Atlantic “cousinship” of Britain and America).

Whatever the cause, I’ve been thinking about freedom. There are so many places in the world where still there is little or no freedom. Slavery is still not totally conquered. Freedom of conscience is constantly under threat. Freedom of religion is a distant hope for hundreds of millions around the globe. And yet in the United States and my own country, Britain, we have so much freedom that we tend to take it for granted … and run the risk of allowing it to be eroded because we’ve become accustomed to its existence.

But what about freedom for business. The Internet now gives us an enormous freedom to present our various commercial offerings before a global public, but it was not always so. My mind goes back to the early nineties, before the Web. I was then an enthusiast for Compuserve forums, but “crass commercialism” was not on the whole welcomed. And outside the electronic world, on the ground in many countries, freedom to operate any kind of business was a novel experience.

I spent much of my time then in countries of Eastern and Central Europe which only two or three years earlier had been under the control of centralised communist bureaucracies. My role as an adviser was to work with groups of aspiring business people encouraging them to develop businesses with high standards of ethical conduct and to resist the corruption which surrounded them. Initially the biggest challenge was to convince people that this was possible. Freedom was increasingly interpreted as license to cheat, steal and deceive.

Looking to those parts of the world today there are still many challenges ahead, but thankfully there are now many home-grown examples of business with integrity. Freedom with responsibility is more widely understood. Sadly, though, there are too many examples of the opposite in countries which have long been privileged with liberty.

What has this to do with Internet marketing? A great deal, it seems to me. We have tremendous freedom. We need to use it responsibly. Business ethics is not merely a subject for glossy promotional brochures and bureaucratised compliance programs in the corporate world.  It is something for the daily life of every online marketer.