SO, do you care if I post about photography? I have a passion for photography, and I really enjoy it more and more every day. The thing I like MOST about photography is that it’s LEAST like internet marketing. It’s a great way for me to clear my brain!

Essentially what happens with myself, and I know others too, is that I work work work on the computer and then I get burnt out. The end result is largely unproductivity and laziness. I find that after I go out and take some photos, when I come back I’ve got more energy and get more work done.

But, do you even care to hear about photography? Do you want to see photos? There are 3 things I could do, and I want you to reply with your thoughts. If you could, comment with your preference.. #1, #2, or #3 (include the #) so I can easily scan and tally up the “votes”. Yes I’ll read the comments too but I don’t feel like installing a poll plugin for this LOL

1. I could just start posting about photography, because, maybe you enjoy it too! Same setup, same one email per day thing. I could post the photo posts after the business posts so when you get the email it has the title of the business post and that first, and photo stuff second.
2. I could re-categorize the blog and only have emails go out to you subscribers from the business end, and setup a separate list for the photography end. The blog itself would have both, so if you went to the home page you’d see both, but you’d only get emails about the ones you care about.
3. I could create a totally separate blog for photography. This I like less personally because I originally envisioned the blog being about me and I don’t really feel like starting another blog from scratch.

So what do you think? #2 sounds the best, but if you want to subscribe to multiple categories it could get hairy with how Aweber is setup. I’d rather not have to pay for each subscribe counted multiple times because they are on multiple categories, and it wouldn’t properly put them together and keep the 1 email per day thing.

Anyone know of a plugin or service that lets subscribers choose the categories to receive? If one doesn’t exist, maybe I’ll create one, at least for myself.

Basically you can now pick themes for your Gmail account, which is pretty cool. Here you can see mine with the oldschool “Terminal” theme. Now I’ll change it to something I can actually read, but I thought it was fun that they’d have it. Even the logo was changed to ASCII art.

Besides the cool new themes, here are a few reasons you should be using Gmail (or Google Apps if you own your own domain):

• virtually unlimited space - it’s always going up, and it’s hard to fill up 7GB unless you use a program that uses your Gmail as file storage (they do exist)
• great spam filtering - Legitimate mail comes in, spam doesn’t. And they have the spam folder where *all* email goes. They don’t just ignore your messages if they think you are a spammer (which is good if your emails look like spam but aren’t)
• filters - you can create an unlimited number of filters to do things like auto archive, mark as read, star, label, forward, delete it, and the newer “never send to spam” (aka a whitelist). These filters use very powerful search criteria, so the possabilities are endless. And since it’s done on their side, it’s not slow for you to get incoming email like say Outlook would be.
• labels - some people hate that Gmail doesn’t have folders. Well, essentially labels are folders but each message can have more than one label. That’s the key difference. It can take some getting used to at first, but in the end it’s very usefull if you need to label something twice.
• custom - If you sign up for Google Apps, you can get it for your own domain. Then you can have your very own docs, start page, email, calendar, etc for your domain. I have a couple - timlinden.com and riphoto.com. It’s great because then it’s YOUR email, but with the POWER of Gmail. (And not the silly forwarding mess that essentially relies on your host to forward the emails to Gmail)

So there you go. I could keep going on about it, but I figure by now if you aren’t ready to try it or already have it, your loss! =p

Well, in 2005 StartXchange was held hostage by Godaddy. Someone sent out what lookes like a newsletter to their members, and it included a link to StartXchange. A member then reported that email as spam to Godaddy.

Godaddy then told me that I needed to provide proof that the person was opt in, or pay a $199 “clean up” fee. I could also transfer to another registrar after paying a different fee.

What really got me upset, was not only did I have nothing to do with the email sent out, but that they kept referencing a “Abuse Enforcement Program” that was not defined anywhere in any of the agreement documents on their website. It was basically their word against mine if anything came up again.

I’m not exactly sure what happened to it, because it was a few years ago. I was on the phone a bunch too, but I have all my emails in place. The last email I sent was asking about the “AEP” and why it wasn’t in their terms of service, and no replies from them.

I did manage to transfer my domains out eventually, and I know I sent emails to the President of Godaddy (who knows if he actually got it) and ICANN and what not, so I don’t know if that did it or if I actually paid the fee. Either way, the whole experience was extremely stressfull and I would recommend you stay far away if you are doing internet marketing.

So that was my experience..  Not sure how often it happens now, but I’ll never go back to Godaddy. Too bad because I spent thousands with them, but I like NameCheap wayyy better so in the long run I win!

So what does this mean exactly? Well I’ve been using CloudFront for about a month or so to host my video advertisements on the traffic exchanges. What this does is ensures my videos load quickly for viewers, which is crucial for traffic exchanges. If you’ve only got 10 seconds to view the ad, and it can’t load quick, well it’s pointless!

This past week I’ve also switched from CDNLayer (SoftLayer CDN) to Amazon’s CloudFront on much of the static content on StartXchange. And I’ll be moving over more content as time allows. I started noticing, and getting complaints, from surfers that CDNLayer was actually slowing surfing down for them. So far switching to CloudFront has been much better performance.

The main reason I’m excited about this is because it’s Amazon. They are truely innovators in this whole cloud computing thing, and they are doing it all with very good pricing. It is a bit more complicated having to get the files to Amazon, but once you figure that out it’s 100% off your server so you don’t have to worry about the disk space or resources or anything!

I know, this sounds like such a nonsense mistake right? It’s old, they won’t come back, right? wrong. Jon Olson has been preaching this for years, but as stubborn as I am I thought it was just a nonsense way to inflate your numbers. Boy was I wrong.

Google Analytics Shows Increase In New Members

Accidentally this started happening the past few weeks. I couldn’t figure out why the membership numbers were stalling out. Google was showing an increase in new members per day, yet my total member count wasn’t even moving. I was really confused.

But the member count wasnt!?

Then today I received an PM from a member who told me it was crazy that I’d delete his wife’s account for inactivity. He said that him and his wife stopped surfing for 3 months for various reasons, and they are back to surf but his account was there and hers wasn’t. It mysteriously disapeared.

That’s when the light bulb went on..  Oh no! The script to deactivate accounts was deleting accounts! Yikes! That’s why we’ve been getting all these support tickets asking where their account went. I really thought everyone was clicking the new delete account link in the newsletter because I added that at the same time this started to happen!

Now is that my biggest mistake? Actually, no. My biggest mistake was that I used to have the policy to delete inactive users. You see I was very strict, I thought if they didn’t keep surfing then there’s no point in slowing the database down with useless information.

What I didn’t realize is that a good chunk of people do come back, and some even upgrade! If they can simply log back in and start surfing, they’re very greatful. If they can’t, many get frustrated and simply don’t bother signing up again.

At one point I remember purging thousands of member accounts from the database. That was back in the day when I didn’t know anything about optimizing MySQL. In my mind the only way to make it faster was to purge the old stuff. I didn’t realize it was designed to handle millions of rows.

So I’ll never know how much this mistake has actually cost me. I can estimate. And I don’t know how much this recent mistake has cost me either. But what I do know is that I’ll never go back to the policy of deleting old accounts just for the sake of cleaning up the database. And yes, I did find the problem, fixed it, and heavily rewarded the person who helped me figure out the problem!

I’ll try my best to read them all, and check out as many links as I can. To make it more worthwhile though, I’m going to require something of you before you can introduce yourself to the rest of us…

The Rules:

1. You MUST be subscribed to the blog. (It’s not too late to subscribe now, top right of blog!)
2. You MUST reply to one other person’s introduction before you can introduce yourself. (click the reply link under their comment, and it’ll nest the comments correctly)
3. You MUST put your link as the URL in your comment. (You can put more in the text but note that it’s likely you’ll get caught in the spam filter if you do and have to wait for me to manually review the comment which would mean less people viewing your intro)

Pretty simple right? If there are no comments showing when you come to the blog, then you can reply to another person’s introduction after yours. Anyone who comments without following the rules will most likely get their comment sent to the spam bin ;-) I added in a topic for those who need it.

Topic: What are you promoting, and Why?

So you’ve got a blog, and you want people to subscribe to it. You stick it in a traffic exchange, you get a bunch of comments, but no subscribers. What went wrong!?

What ends up happening (and this is how I tried it before my current method, shame shame..) is your readers are temporary. They’ll only come back if you assign enough credits and it happens to randomly pick them to view your page again.

On top of that there really only is room for one action. What happens after a surfer looks at the content? They might leave a comment, great! Or is it? After they leave that comment they’ll most likely see the counter is down and click to view the next page. Gone forever.

Really, what you should be doing is making a lead capture page. Make that one action them entering their name and email address into an opt in form to subscribe to your newsletter. I use Aweber for mine, because you get complete flexibility. If you are on a budget you can use Feedburner (free but very limited features).

Now you might not get as many subscribers as you did comments sticking your full post into rotation, but those subscribers are yours. They’ll be way more loyal and worth it in the long run. (I know it’s more fun when you get comments, but loyalty brings long term commentators you’ll get to know).

#1 Some people don’t like affiliate links, and so the thought is if you change the link they won’t notice in their browser that it’s an affiliate link and will click it. This has no affect on traffic exchanges because you are sending them directly to your page so they won’t see the URL anyways. To combat this, people usually make a page like /recommends/affiliatefunnel.html or what not. I’m not convinced this fixes the problem or that the problem is even worth worrying about for this reason. However having “recommends” in the URL may change the thought from “eww affiliate link” to “oh, a recommendation!”.

#2 Other people steal affiliate links, taking your commission. This is more of a reason than any, because people who have a clickbank account might notice your recommending a clickbank product and just slip in their username rather than yours to get the commission. Again this wouldn’t affect you inside traffic exchanges, but it is a credible problem and the same method above will most likely get the job done.

#3 Spyware and Malware steal affiliate links. This is the scary one, because there is only so much you can do. There are some programs out there that filter pages you goto, and replace common affiliate links with their own. Same clickbank idea, but undetectable to the end user. Simply making a special URL that redirects doesn’t cut it.

#4 It’s easier to remember a personalized/cloaked URL than all your referral links. This one makes more sense to me, because I do forget easily. This would affect you inside traffic exchanges potentially.

#5 When sending links in emails, some affiliate links might trigger spam filters causing your email not to be received properly.

So what should you be doing? Well the thing that works right now is making your cloak link a frameset, and having the frame url encoded. This seems to get past the spyware for now, but it’s only a matter of time before they’ll figure that one out.

Since my blog is more targeted to traffic exchange users, the best answer is no. You shouldn’t be cloaking affiliate URLs because you shouldn’t be promoting affiliate URLs. Remember, you should be building a list.

When you send affiliate links to your list then I’d say you should cloak with your own domain name. Not only is it classy to have yourname.com/recommends/product/, it makes it a snap to put into your emails and fixes the problems mentioned. Just make sure you are using the frameset method and encoding it.

Example: http://www.timlinden.com/recommends/affiliatefunnel/
Just remember to rank StartXchange a 10 out of 10 while you go there, and view the source of the frame to see the encoded URL.

The truth to the matter is, it will take money. I did a post about How To Make It As A Traffic Exchange Owner, where I didn’t mention money at all. This is basically the follow up to that where it’ll talk only about the money and the whole idea of what a traffic exchange is.

People start traffic exchanges for different reason. The most common is to make money online. They think if only they had a traffic exchange, they’d be golden. Others start a manual exchange to provide traffic for the rest of their empire, or to build a list, and finally others start one because they want to have their own site and don’t know what alternatives there are.

The reason you are starting an exchange completely determines the way you should start it. If it’s just a hobby and for fun, please ignore the rest of this post. If you are here to make money, build a list, funnel traffic to your core business, keep reading.

“It takes money to make money” is often quoted, and it applies in business. You can argue all you want but do you really want years of struggling? If you don’t have the money to start a business, don’t! Your best bet is to build a list and learn how to make a profit selling other people’s products and services.

Having cash available to start your business is crucial because the business has requirements. If your surfbar is too slow people will stop surfing and go somewhere else. So it requires a proper server. If your site looks poorly made it’ll get poorly promoted (if at all). It requires a proper design. I could go on and on.

This is a business, and so you have to stop looking at it like it’s a person. It doesn’t matter what’s on the inside to 99% of the people online. Looks matter, speed matters, script matters, support matters. If you want to make a profit, you have to cater to what actually works and not what you think works in a perfect world.

Remember that list of 70 or so traffic exchanges? Do you really think everyone has the time or even desire to surf all 70? If you were in a mall surrounded by 70 other stores, would you have your store just thrown together or would you make it look like the best store in the mall to get people to walk in? It’s the same concept!

Everyone has this idea that if you build it, they will come. They may, but you won’t be making any money, and all that time you did spend on it is wasted and can never be taken back. It still cost you something, time.

If you are thinking about starting a traffic exchange, check out TELaunchFormula.com. If you can’t afford that, then do yourself a favor and don’t try to start a traffic exchange. Don’t fall for the cheap scripts or cheap hosting. If you can’t afford to take the risk you need to really build a business, then you shouldn’t be trying to start a business.

If you’ve never heard of a manual traffic exchange before, it can sound confusing. But basically the premise is you are manually exchanging traffic with other webmasters. You yourself are viewing websites in return for other people viewing yours.

The biggest difference with a manual traffic exchange and link exchanges or banner exchanges is that the traffic you have to generate, whereas the others generate traffic from the visitors already going to your website. This is why so many people think it’s a brilliant idea to go to an auto traffic exchange.

Auto traffic exchanges have one flaw, and it’s a big one..  Pretty much everyone using them has that same brilliant idea, to find a way automatically generate traffic, forgetting that pretty much nobody is looking.

So with the disadvantage of having to view the websites yourself, what could the advantage be? Well the people viewing your website are actually viewing it. With a banner exchange that banner could be at the bottom of the page and the viewer is looking only at the top.

Of course not everyone will always look straight at your ad and read it over carefully and sign up to your offer or buy your product or whatever the first time. But the same thing goes for TV ads, and yet they still work.

That’s where branding comes in. On average they say it takes 7 views of an ad before it’ll work, well lucky for you with a manual traffic exchange it’s easy to do.