JR's Marketing Insights

Before I get to what I want to talk about today, just a quick update. I have added a bunch of new giveaways to the Giveaway Events page, so check those out when you have a chance.

I have been rather quiet on my blog recently, and I apologize for that, but I’m working on a number of things both here and my “day job” that have kept me rather busy. I’m also flying up to NY tomorrow for my sister’s wedding (my daughter is also a flower girl!) so preparations for that have taken up a bit of my time as well. I’ll try to be more consistent with my posting schedule in the future.

Today I want to cover adswaps. For those of you who are not aware, an adswap is when you and another marketer agree to send an email to each of your lists advertising something for the other person. It’s a simple form of a Joint Venture partnership. In most cases, the ad is for something free or low cost, with the primary motivation being list building.

You are basically paying for another marketer to advertise for you with your own subscriber list, so it only works if you have a comparably sized list, or some other way to compensate for the difference in list size, such as money, multiple mailings, cross-promoting on Twitter, etc.

Where do you find people to swap with? The best way is to look to fellow marketers in your niche that you already have a relationship with. Another great resource is the website IMAdSwaps.com. It’s a forum where you can post your ad swap request or respond to others.

If you don’t have a list to start with, then you are not going to be able to convince anyone to swap with you. Sorry, but that’s just the way these things work. That’s not to say you need a huge list; this is a way to get to that point, after all. My suggestion would be to start with the Giveaway Events, which is why I mentioned them at the beginning of this post. That can be an efficient way to build from zero to several hundred subscribers fairly quickly. Once you reach about 200 subscribers, you can start looking for ad swap partners.

I hope this has been helpful to you. Let me know if you agree with me that ad swaps are the way to go, or if you have a better list building method when you are just starting out.

OK, it’s been over a month since I last wrote about my progress, and I think it’s a good time for an update.

I feel I’m continuing to make good progress, although perhaps a little slower than I was hoping for. There are a number of things I am happy about, but there are certainly things I can be doing better.

I have built my mailing list to 321 people

The majority of this growth has been from giveaway sites, which I have continued to participate in. I have also put all of my free products on a page in this blog, which has generated some sign-ups, and my Twitter messages have also sent a decent amount of traffic. I have participated in one Ad Swap so far, with my fellow Alex Jeffreys student David Walker. That appears to have been a great success, as I had at least double the number of sign-ups on the day of the ad swap over the usual daily numbers.

Incidentally, the email that I sent to my list for David was to promote his ebook, Stop Slogging Start Blogging. The unintended consequence of promoting his product to my list is that I read his ebook in order to write the email copy, and I learned a few things myself! This isn’t part of any ad swap, but I highly recommend everyone check out his ebook here: http://www.stopsloggingstartblogging.com/.

I have 5,943 Twitter Followers
This is in large part thanks to the Tweet Elite Pro software that I reviewed here. I have had a great time interacting with everyone on Twitter, and there is a noticeable surge of traffic every time I tweet about a page on my blog or one of my free products. I think I’m only just getting started on Twitter, and I hope to use it a great deal more in the coming months.

I have built this blog to an average of 20 visitors/day

Again, not a particularly impressive stat, but it’s double the number of visitors I had a month ago. If I can keep up that kind of growth, I think I can get to a respectable number of visitors fairly quickly.

I finished my first product

I’m particularly proud of this one. Productivity Power Plan has been released! I’m getting tons of great feedback about the book, and I have been encouraged to expand upon it into some additional great productivity materials. I’ll have more about this in a few weeks, but I hope I can continue to provide valuable productivity advice. If you haven’t downloaded it yet, there is a link on the right-hand side of the page at the top, or under the Free Products link.

I haven’t made any money yet
I have made $51.84 this month!

I have made two sales from the One Time Offer behind my free Twitter ebook, which is for a product I have Master Resale Rights to that I’m selling for $27. After PayPal fees that works out to $25.92 per sale. Again, I’m not quite ready to retire, but considering I’ve never made a cent from Internet Marketing prior to this, I think it’s a great start!

I’m getting more comments on my blog posts

I’m assuming this is due to increased traffic, but I’m seeing a few more comments on each of my blog posts. It’s still not quite where I’d like to be, but progress is a good thing.

The thing I feel I need to improve on is the frequency of my blog posts. For the first month, I was posting just about every day. Now I’ve dropped down to once or twice a week. I’m not looking to inundate you with a ridiculous amount of blog posts, and I’d rather have a few quality posts rather than a ton of junk. I do feel I can probably post closer to three times per week and still maintain the quality.

The other area I want to increase my efforts is in my videos. I have only created two so far, one a tutorial and the other a product review. I would like to do many more of each of these. I’m going to focus mostly on the tutorials because I have received more positive feedback on them, so I think they are what you want to see. Let me know in the comments if you feel differently.

Overall, I think things are going well. It’s slow going, which can be frustrating at times, but at least I’m moving in the right direction finally!

I created this video review of Tweet Elite Pro, because I think it’s an interesting tool that many people may find very useful. If you’d like to pick up a copy, please order it through my link: http://www.jrbiasi.com/recommends/TweetElitePro/

Again, you can order it here:

http://www.jrbiasi.com/recommends/TweetElitePro/