Traffic Tactics – How It Works

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Opening message at Traffic tactics.com

I have received a number of emails from Carlos and Lupe Garcia this week. Who are [tag]Carlos and Lupe Garcia[/tag]? They are [tag]internet marketing[/tag] millionaires. But they weren’t always living in the lap of luxury. Read more from their pitch page about their journey from rags to riches. Why the flurry of new emails? They are selling a $10,000 traffic creation mentoring program. Part of their [tag]Traffic Tactics[/tag] program. (There are no affiliate links in this post.)

Full disclosure: Carlos and Lupe have been involved in questionable business opportunities in the past, questionable from a moral and ethical stand point. They sold [tag]cable box descramblers[/tag] and [tag]diet patches[/tag]. I have read on other blogs the [tag]FTC[/tag] shut their diet patch business down, but I can not confirm this report.

The high level details are as follows:

How do they get their traffic?
They buy bulk traffic using credit from Yahoo, MSN and other sources. They claim to have a number of tactics they use during negotiations which allow them to buy traffic on credit and limit the risk if the campaigns are not successful. I assume pre-negotiating favorable out clauses.

Does it work?
Yes and no. Yes it works for products with large demand and mass appeal. Your conversions and creative should be optimized before you even think about trying their methods.

No, it won’t work for small niche products and non tested products. You can lose your shirt if you have not optimized your campaigns and have an unproven product. Conversions should be tested, test again and tested again…

What are they pitching?
$10,000 coaching program

Should I pay $10,000 to learn how to buy banner traffic?
That depends on several factors. Do you have the right product for this type of advertising? Do you have an extra $10,000 to risk on this venture?

Every business opportunity has risks and rewards. In the case of Traffic Tactics you can read the “pro” side of the story on their pitch page. They also have a video they use to sell their mentor program. For the flip side read this blog post to get the other side.

I personally would not sign up for this program.

Future Posting In WordPress (Video)

This is a simple how to video on future posting in [tag]WordPress[/tag]. Why would you want to [tag]future post[/tag]? There are several reasons. You may work a full time job where blogging is not an option. Therefore, you write several posts on your off time and “future post” them through out the week. Maybe you are going on vacation and want your readers to have fresh content even when you are miles away from a computer, sipping a Corona, getting a tan on some white sandy beach in [tag]Mexico[/tag]. In any case, future posting is simple in the WordPress interface.

Here are the steps:
1. First write your post like normal
2. Before you publish set the date and time you want the post to appear.
3. Publish the post
4. The post will not appear until the date and time you designated

Missing Traffic Credits

images.jpg First thing this morning I logged into my Blog Rush Bash account, checked the dashboard, and saw I had earned 165 credits from my traffic and 608 from my referral network today. About 30 minutes later my stats now say I have 155 credits from my traffic and 597 from my network. My traffic dropped 10 credits and my network dropped 11 credits. Why are they subtracting numbers? This is strange.

After writing this post, I looked around to see if other bloggers were seeing the same issues with credits. No luck. However, I did read a very good post from problogger, about Blog Rush and the realistic expectations of this new service.

The Art of money has another view. Blog Rush will suck traffic from smaller blogs and consolidate the traffic with much larger and established blogs.

For now, I will with hold judgment. Only time will tell how this will play out.

Is Blog Rush Too Successful?

Update***
They have since fixed this issue.

The Blog Rush widget is no longer showing on my site. See the message in its place.

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Many bloggers have announced explosive growth 10 levels deep. There is a lot of buzz about Blog Rush so it would not surprise me if the shear volume of traffic is taking a toll on their servers.

Stats are still showing on my Dashboard, which is a good sign. John’s crew was quick to fix the stats issue at launch, so I am sure they are working as fast as possible to fix this issue.

Avoid Three Common Blogging Errors

The Web Professor hands out three great tips on making your [tag]blog[/tag] more successful.

1. Use images in your post. It engages the reader. I agree 100% I am guilty of not posting pictures sometimes, but I try. If I do not use an image, I will often post youtube videos that are relevant to the post. On this blog, I post original youtube videos. On the other blogs I manage, we generally use other people’s videos. Again, as long as they are relevant to the topic, we will use them in a post.

2. Post on a regular basis. This is the core of your success or failure. If you post randomly every couple of days or weeks, your blog will not grow. Period. Look at all the successful [tag]bloggers[/tag], they are posting engaging original content, usually daily. Some bloggers post several times a day, every day!

3. Publish your full [tag]RSS feed[/tag]. Stop making your readers click! I agree. It is very annoying when people do not publish their full feed. (Unless it’s a paid content site.) I have hundreds of blogs I subscribe to and read on a daily basis, using my browser feed reader. I use flock to aggregate all my blog feeds into one central source. If a site requires me to click out to read the full post, I rarely will. It really comes down to time. I am trying to get through a large volume of data and if asked to take an extra step, it slows the whole process down.

Think of the Visa commercials where everyone is paying for their lunch with their debt card and everything is running like a well-oiled machine. Then some one pays cash and the whole process comes to a grinding stop. I feel this way when sites don’t publish the full feed.

[youtube]http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=9hXmyD9a4zg[/youtube]

Case in point, I came across the site copywriting.com and thought it was an awesome site full of excellent resources and advice. I liked it so much I added it to my daily feeds I read. Only to find out later they only publish a partial feed. The result is I rarely read his posts and almost never click out to his blog. It’s a shame because I really enjoyed his site. It’s nothing personal, it’s just a matter of time and effort for me.

I prune my feeds once a month and blogs that only post excerpts are short lived.