The Country Club & BizBuzz

I love this product. And the company tries to communicate with everyone. But I only just found out yesterday that the sign-up page has been disabled while they add payment options for the global market. That's great-- could they have TOLD US?

I sent a complaint email to support, but I doubt anyone will actually read it.

So far their only fault as a company is their rather myopic -- not to mention short sighted -- attitude that the only way they need to communicate with their distributors is through conference calls. Hah! That is beyond ridiculous since at least 50% of the distributors CANNOT attend them and, if you do, it is a matter of so much background noise and cross talk, it's nearly un-intelligible. TCC does seem to have a rather corporate posture (and anyone who knows me knows how I feel about corporate anything) about it-- if you're interested you'll call.

Humph!

Their lack of communication could be their downfall.

But the real issue now is that the sign-up pages have been disabled. They were supposed to be up by Monday (2/13-- last Monday) but I just checked again and found they are still off. So, if you've tried to sign up and wonder why it isn't working. . . join the club (no pun intended). From the frantic emails I've received, they will probably be up next week. These emails are the only reason I found out the page was disabled.

I WILL put a post up when it's up again. Thanks for your patience.

You CAN also join the famous conference calls -- there's a Q&A one scheduled for 1:00 EST today-- to join it:

Dial 641-297-8000, then enter the pin code 663671# to join the calls.

Also, there's a 3 minute pre-recorded call, if you'd like to hear that: Dial 800-213-9592.

Optimizing Ad Blasters

Ad blasters -- programs that send out ads automatically to all the FFAs and safe lists -- are one of those little advertising tools that, if not used properly, will show little or no return. For some reason, too, the promoters of these programs never bother to instruct their buyers on what to do-- they'll create a splash page that's a mile long saying things like, "you'll triple your traffic", but not put one word in about HOW to do that with their program.

For this reason, these little gems are not as highly thought of as they should be.

Now, I admit, I haven't spent much time at FFAs since my very first weeks in internet marketing. And, even then, it was mostly to PLACE ads, more than look at them. But I do know there are people who watch them regularly. I know because, once I realized how I could OPTIMIZE my ad blaster, I really did see both an increase in traffic to my site AND sales.

UNDERSTANDING FFAs/SAFELISTS/SITE SUBMISSIONS
FFAs (Free-For-All Ads-- which means it really should be FFAAs), for those who have never seen one, are areas that allow anyone and everyone to submit a short ad and link to the site. The reason they do this is to increase their own site traffic which, in turn, increases their rankings and, theoretically, puts them higher on the search engines for other pages.

BTW, this is a big reason why so many things are offered for FREE on the internet-- many sites use something like this, on a page that, while is on their site is also totally unconnected to the rest of their business. Because an entire site's traffic is calculated when ranking it-- not just each page -- their other pages will also receive the high ranking that something like an FFA gives them. So, by having this high-traffic page, their overall site gets a higher ranking, even if their real business is selling sprockets or erasers.

But I digress. The point is, a couple of years ago FFAs became a popular way to increase traffic on your site. They also became an open forum for advertisers with small budgets. The internet is littered with thousands of them. But I DO think they really work because I HAVE seen my site traffic increase. And, once I started optimizing it, it increased even more. But now I'm getting ahead of myself.

Once FFAs became popular (not to mention prolific), it was inevitable that some progammer out there would come up with a program to automatically submit to all these sites. And there are several on the market, some better than others. I use Instant Booster, which not only submits to the FFAs, but to the search engines and to safelists, as well.

Now IF you do visit an FFA, you'll see that they run sort of like a vertical ticker tape, in that, each time a new ad is placed, it goes on top of a list. As other ads join it, it is pushed down until it drops off the page. So when you run your ad blaster, it submits to thousands of these sites within about 20 minutes. That's great. But in about 1-2 hours (because everyone at this point is using an ad blaster) your ad will drop off the page. So, if all you do is run your ad blaster once or twice a day, it won't do much good.

I did that for some time before I really thought about it. Then I realized there were a couple of things I could do to optimize it.

1) First of all, you can program as many ads into an ad blaster as you want. So you can set it up to send the same ad multiple times, assuring that it will remain on the page for a much longer period of time. Do this by simply copying the ad using different names. . . such as AD1, AD2, AD3, etc.

2) Second of all, when using these regularly, I've found that by refreshing the ad's content at least once a week, I increase my traffic. This is particularly important. So I just go in, re-word or re-phrase the same basic message and save it.

3) Be SURE to get a secondary email address (because you'll get a ton of junk mail) and clean it out regularly.

The programs usually have a one-time cost of $30 or so. Not bad, for something you can use endlessly. And, by doing using these tips and the ad blaster at least 2-3 times a day, you can greatly increase your site traffic and sales.--mo