Ad HustlerConfessions Of A Serial Internet Entrepreneur

I saw a tweet yesterday from Barman of PPC.bz to a top 10 list of email marketing services.  Since people always want to know which email marketing services to use, here are 10 you may or may not have heard of.

Topica Inc

http://www.topica.com

StreamSend

http://www.streamsend.com

ExactTarget

http://email.exacttarget.com

My Emma

http://myemma.com

VerticalResponse

http://www.verticalresponse.com

Email Labs

http://www.lyris.com/solutions/lyris-hq/email-marketing/

Mailworkz

http://www.mailworkz.com

Double Click

http://www.doubleclick.com

iContact

http://www.icontact.com

Constant Contact

http://www.constantcontact.com

I’ll add these 2 which i’ve used personally and like:

Aweber

http://www.aweber.com

Mailchimp

http://www.mailchimp.com

Do you have any to add to the list?

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I will preface this post by saying I DO NOT consider myself a list building or email marketing expert.  It’s actually one of my weakest skillsets (but i’m working on it).

One thing I find about going into campaigns where my goal is to build a list, is that my lists end up costing too much per email address to be profitable.  I have a concept that i’ve been working on that I figured i’d share with you guys.  Most affiliates have the mindset of “I want to build a {Dating|Fitness|Education|etc} email list.”  The mindset makes sense because they want to push those type of offers to the list.  What i’ve been testing lately is finding a traffic source that i KNOW has really cheap traffic and then building an email list/landing page laser-targeted to that traffic source.

For instance:  Let’s say you had access to some really cheap traffic revolving around the niche of fishing.  There obviously aren’t a ton of fishing offers in the CPA world.  However if the traffic is heavily fishing related and your email list collection landing page/list is targeted right to that demographic then chances are you are going to get some ridiculously cheap email addresses.  The next goal would be to make some money off of them.  Using this same niche of fishing, you may have to think outside the box on monetization.  Although CPA networks aren’t going to have many offers to cater to this niche, the sales based networks like CJ, Linkshare & Shareasale will.  You can even twist CPA offers using targeted call to actions like “Stop fishing alone – find a girl who loves to fish.”

The point here is to think outside the box.  Rather then always building a list based around a niche you want to promote to, try finding a cheap traffic source and build a list laser targeted around that traffic source.

Have you tried this?  How were the results?

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I made a really stupid mistake with one of my datafeed sites that i’d like to share with you in hopes that you don’t make the same mistake.

I’m using wordpress for the site and downloaded the datafeed from Shareasale.  The datafeed has about 2,000 records in it.  When I made the site I cleaned up the file, got rid of columns I didn’t need and then went ahead and used a datafeed importer to set the site up.  The mistake I made was that I used the image URL’s supplied in the datafeed.  Recently I went to the site and noticed there were no pictures.  After some investigation I realized that the merchant changed all of their URLs which broke all of my images.  Unfortunately, I can’t think of an easy way to fix this but a lesson learned is that I should actually figure out a way to host all of the images locally so that a change to their URLs doesn’t screw up my entire site.

I may just add a button to each of the posts saying click here for pictures.  That should garner more clicks to the affiliate links and solve the issue of the listings not having any pictures.

Take a mental note and don’t make this mistake yourself.

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If your like me, you have affiliate managers hitting you up all the time to run this offer or that offer.  My favored affiliate managers know that I like weird niches.  I really don’t care to copy what other affiliates are doing.  I find a certain pleasure in turning an offer that has no volume into a monster.  The problem with this method of promotion is you can waste a lot of time putting in the work to make an offer blow up only to find the offer is gone in a week because they are out of budget.

ALWAYS ASK ABOUT THE BUDGET OR CAP ON AN OFFER BEFORE PROMOTING IT!

It’s completely pointless to put work & money into an offer that is only looking to take 100 leads.  Affiliate marketing is about scale.  If you can’t scale you are sinking effort into a loser campaign even if it makes some short term money.  You need to know if the affiliate network has a good relationship with the advertiser and what that advertisers intentions are. ASK!

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There are eleventy-billion-and-one affiliate networks.

It’s rare that your allowed to just blatantly promote your affiliate network on anyone’s blog but here’s your chance.

In 1 sentence describe what what makes your affiliate network different… (EDIT: I guess you can go more then 1 sentence since everyone else did )

Ad Hustler readers will then judge your responses…

OK…Go…

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