I went on to check my mail and I found a note inside my box from the Manager, Lindsay Whitlow.  I read the note and it said that I had received an item addressed to a business name and that if I wanted to use a business mailbox it is an additional $20 monthly.  Already being the highest priced box rental in the area, I thought an additional fee for this was a bit silly since the service itself wasn’t any different, just the name above the address.  Again, this is something I sort of shrugged off, I thought this is a terrible deal, but I obviously have no choice if I want to get my package so I will just go for it. Only to find out Lindsay had returned all the mail I had received that were addressed to my post office box with my business name on them.

Lindsay had an opportunity to do right.  She saw the mail come in with my address on them, and she made a decision at that point to return it, as opposed to keeping it for me.  It is these decisions that define us as business people and give us an opportunity to shape the way we perform it.  Lindsay could have easily held my mail until I made the upgrade to a business box.

Lindsay had an opportunity to exceed customer expectations by delivering my mail to my box which it was addressed, along with the note saying that in the future I would need to upgrade.

Lindsay instead decided to do put the needs of her customer aside, in exchange for a potential increase of profits by forcing this upgrade.  She instead make the conscious decision to return all the mail I had received to their senders and tell me that I need to upgrade before she will accept any mail addressed to my address box with a business name on them.

These sort of decisions make or break a business.  You can choose to give your customer the benefit of the doubt, you can also choose to enforce your policy, but in a way that still accommodates your customer.  I did not feel the extra $20 monthly charge was fair, but was still going to pay it in order to access my mail.  Or you can choose to enforce your policies with complete disregard of customers needs.

Brian Rooney was kind enough to send me a sample of his gourmet coffee, I thought that was very generous of him and was looking forward to receiving it.  However I went to pick it up, and Lindsay had returned the package like discussed above.  Her decision has impacted my business in that now I have spent $70 for a mailbox that I can not use without paying an additional $140, despite already being at $70 priced well beyond the competition.  Her decision has gone beyond that though and now also impacted Brian’s business, he was generous enough to pay for shipping to send me a product sample, but the product was delivered and then returned wasting the money he had put into shipping it to me.

Lindsay’s split-second business decision has created a very negative impression of the business.  She could have easily made a decision to do the right thing, but instead she chose to return the package creating a chain of consequences, one of which being a loss of business.  I’m sure I’m not the only one, how many customers has The UPS Store lost because of Lindsay and like minded individuals making decisions without considering the needs of the customer?  I was willing to pay the increased fee to receive my package, had she kept it.

Keep this in mind when you receive a customer email, skype message, or support ticket.  It’s too easy to make these split second decisions without thinking of the impact on your customer.  Her action was done with the intention of enforcing policy while potentially increasing sales, but instead it cost her business.  Always consider your customers needs when making choices that impact them, a little bit of respect can go along way.  What was to her likely a simple small decision has impacted my business, has impacted Brian’s business, and ultimately impacted their business.  What do your customer service decisions say about you and your business?

No related posts.

You can View Don’s Original Blog Post here.

To Don and others with similar concerns:

I appreciate your feedback and would love an opportunity to clarify some of the points you tried to make here. I have been programming features for Traffic Exchanges for several years now and have seen every attempt to cheat the system in the book, and I assure you that there is no conventional means to cheat this system to gain extra credits, and I continuously monitor it all day to ensure that remains the case.

Also I wanted to clarify that all sites actually ARE manually verified, not automatically approved. If you are an upgraded member (which you are as you clearly saw the value in this site as many do), there is a preliminary check, if it passes this check it goes into rotation, but is still manually verified at a later time. If you are a free member your site will be manually verified before it goes into rotation, ensuring that it is safe for a variety of viewers.

The reason you notice some TE’s that you deem as ‘bad traffic’ in the first place is because I have designed a site that is 100% transparent, unlike other co-ops, I show you where every hit you get comes from, and even allow you to opt out of any source you do not want your site shown on. Viewing this data you will also see that this ‘bad traffic’ issue is non existant. If people were cheating this sytem it would be apparent when you view this data as your traffic sources.

A Co-Op, by definition, is member controlled.  I would argue that traditional traffic Co-Op’s are not actual Co-Ops at all because they are controlled by an owner and that’s it.  Explosive Traffic is controlled by it’s members, they all share the workload, the results, and choose where it is shown.  If members get consistantly poor results, sites will be automatically blocked from the system, as you can see on your ‘My Sources’ page.

A member joining the site can simply add their site, and rest assured that poor traffic sites are constantly being monitored and removed as necessary.  Those of us who like to get our hands dirty and dig around will be pleased to see that autosurf and ptc sites make up less than 1% of traffic combined, most are blocked automatically by the system before they have even reached 0.01% of traffic delivered.

I invite you and your viewers to revisit Explosive Traffic, I think you will be pleased to see the results, add credits to your sites and see where the hits are coming from. You will quickly notice that it is not plagued with bad traffic sources as some would lead you to believe, but that in fact you are getting high quality traffic and results from all corners of TE land.

I take all feedback very seriously and have been pleased to see an overwhelming amount of that is positive but if you have any suggestions or concerns please contact me so I can address them, I am always available and I feel like if you were slightly more informed on the way the system works you would be 100% confident in recommending it to your friends (which it appears you did anyway since there is a referral link).

You not only get traffic from hundreds of different traffic sources, but I spend hundreds of dollars each week on the top performing traffic exchanges to ensure that in addition to the variety of traffic, you are also getting guaranteed hits to the top traffic exchanges.

Again I’d invite you to give Explosive Traffic a second look and more closely monitor your stats and results, I think you will find the issues you describe in this post are essentially non-existent, and that the price and variety of traffic can not be beat by any of our competitors. If after some time using the site you still have concerns or issues, please contact me any time and I would love to address your feedback and take any necessary action, as I always do with all of my projects.

Explosive Traffic can be found here.

No related posts.

One of the endeavors I went on before finding the career that I really wanted to do was booking.  I would find bands both locally and nationally and connect them with venues.  It was pretty fun I got to connect with a lot of new people from other parts of the country as well as those from right here in my hometown, I got to listen to some great music, and I got to make some decent money.  In plain English, I would find a bar or concert hall and find people to play there, make it happen, and take a % off the top.  Working with some of the bars and venues were awesome, and some were not.  Some would take a larger percentage of the profit from the show than others, and sometimes they would just be not really in it, little to no advertising, poor staffing, etc.  Likewise some of the bands were excellent, out there every day, some even had street teams that would promote their shows, and others would just meerly show up, no promotion on their own or advertising in anyway.  When these two things met it was a nightmare.  Since my sole income from doing this was simply a percentage of sales from tickets, I quickly discovered that I can have some influence over the outcome of these shows by my own advertising efforts, when what I get paid depends on how much money is made, which depends on how many people show up – I definitely want to get people in that place.  This was when facebook was first beginning to ramp up popularity, and you were now able to create events.  So I would go on Facebook and create an event, invite all my friends, then go to the University and put up posters and hand out fliers.  Now at first this was very effective, I started to have all kinds of extra people come in, then the place would be packed which of course drew in foot traffic, it was great, it was the answer to all my solutions.  So week after week, event after event, like clockwork I would create events, and hang up posters at the University.  I’m sure none of you will be that surprised by what happened, but attendance started to go down, after a while people weren’t even responding to the event invites on facebook and just walking past the posters as though they didn’t even see them.

In marketing we can compare this fall off as a natural part of the product life cycle.  The product life cycle is a fairly basic economic principle of the stages of a products life - development, introduction, growth, maturity, and decline.  The big problem that may be overlooked by people reading this though, is really – reach.

At the start the results were phenomenal, attendance was up higher and higher every show.  Why was this? It was because I had reached a new audience by marketing it on Facebook and with Posters on the University, people were not exposed to the content so they realistically did not even know it existed, or did briefly but forgot when they saw their dream car drive pass them.  This audience was very responsive, I kept changing the styles and types of fliers, which did keep things fresh and kept people’s attention on it, but I always used the same 2 places to advertise.  My product life cycle ended when I no longer had attention to this audience – but what if I had put fliers up on another street, or got some friends together to help me put new fliers up all over town, maybe those friends knew of places to put them that I didn’t even know existed.  I would be able to reach a much larger and fresher audience.  Now this audience hadn’t seen the fliers in places they go regularly so they didn’t know these events existed, it is, to them, a new fresh product.  So does Reach Matter? Absolutely.

This same concept can so easily be applied to online marketing with Traffic Exchanges.  The growth of popularity in the Traffic Exchange industry to include Interactivity and even full-blown social networking features has done a lot to build relationships in the traffic exchange industry.  Their are several communities who tend to follow the same flow of surfing habits.  This is awesome, don’t get me wrong, I absolutely love the communities that myself and other traffic exchanges have not only built, but also other communities we are part of.  It’s a beautiful thing to see us all be able to come together, but can it hurt business?  Do we tend to surf certain traffic exchanges more than others based simply because of a certain person or group of people or organization?  I love surfing at Traffic Swirl because I know the community there, and I would consider many of them my friends.  For this exact reason, I will surf there for hours a day and talk to everyone, check out their ads, and they are there so I can ask questions about their products, which is really the strongest sales tool you can have.  This is a very powerful experience, but looking at it from a business perspective, what about the dozens of other Traffic Exchanges where my ads have been sitting for months without being in rotation.

So I obviously love surfing at a couple of Traffic Exchanges and at the same time know I need to get my ads viewed at dozens more. What would be a real-world solution to increasing my advertising reach without going insane trying to keep up with surfing, or broke buying credits everywhere?

Well the obvious solution is a Co-Op.  A TE Co-Op is essentially you will buy credits at the co-op of choice and then those credits will get ads to your site, not just one TE but usually several. But If you know anything about me, then you know It can never be enough.  The Co-Op is usually run by a person or company and they are probably getting deals from a few TE’s, and although it is an increase in your reach, it’s not significant.  I own a tracking service as many of you know, and the members on that site have literally tracked Traffic from 113,620 different sources (at the time of writing this).  Now I know a lot of those are random 1 hit sites, so I won’t count them ALL, but over 19,000 of them have produced at least 100 trackable hits.  There is not enough time in the day or money in the universe to get hits at all these TE’s.

Ok so the Co-Op that shows your site on 10, 15, even 20 TE’s (I’m being generous here). There’s no way that will work for me.. that doesn’t even cover 1% of Traffic Exchanges, even on a good day, and yet they still charge high premium rates, many don’t even tell me where my traffic is coming from.

So how do you get your site visitors from those 19,251 sources?  Easy, you find surfers who use them all. I laid there thinking about how this would turn Traffic Exchange business model on it’s head. I thought  of an innovative new product that would get your sites viewed on – literally – thousands of traffic exchanges.  That all seemed somewhat complicated then I realized I could make it easy.  Two step easy.  You would just Add Your Sites to the Co-Op then you add your unique Co-Op URL into rotation at your favorite traffic exchange.  Could that be all you would have to do to get your Ads seen on Hundreds and even Thousands of different Traffic Exchanges?

I thought it sounded pretty cool personally, but it didn’t feel like it was enough.

What if I could take this to the next level with real time stats and content prioritization.  What if there was a way I could personally create a technology behind the power that would get your site seen on tons of traffic exchanges. What if I then created the technology that takes it a step further in putting your real time stats at your fingertips. What if you could watch as the Co-Op received tons of hits from a huge variety of Traffic Exchanges.  What if  you could have the power to Take Control of your Co-Op Advertising by seeing where your hits were coming from, and allowing you to see how many total and unique hits each of your sites had received, as well as where every single hit came from.  What if you had power to decide where your sites are shown giving you a complete list of every source and letting you literally choose where your traffic comes from, allowing you to actually create the value of the traffic you receive.

I thought it sounded like an excellent idea.

So I Did It.

Introducing Explosive Traffic.

No related posts.

That’s all there is to it!  It couldn’t get easier, and there is a winner picked every 10 minutes!  Login today and claim your rapid win spots to win at http://trafficswirl.com

No related posts.

A new year brings brand new opportunities.  It’s a time to reflect on your past and prepare for your future.  As a business owner it is my favorite time because I get to wipe the slate, clean the books, and plan a whole new year of events, ideas, and celebrate methods of new growth.  I get an opportunity to reflect upon my past, and use the lessons taught in 2011 to take me into 2012.  It’s a great feeling to start new and fresh, and new year is just that.  It’s time to not only prepare, but create our futures.  We as people decide to change our lives this day every year, we all pick a goal that we hope to take with us in to the new year to better our own lives and our own persons.

It’s important for us as people to make sure we are on a constant path of self enrichment and betterment.  It is up to ourselves to change our lives, we can’t sit and wait for someone else to do it for us, and this goal setting that New Years brings with it is one of the most profound parts of our existence.  Reflecting and taking action and responsibility.

Why?

Why do we feel the need to wait?

You are in control of your destiny, you are the only one who is empowered to make changes to your life.  Why wait?

A couple of quotes come to mind, both from music because I live every minute of my life with music, it is a deep passion of mine.

“You’ve got no one to blame for your unhappiness” – Wilson Phillips

Ok so the song is cheesy, but this line really sticks out.  You control your life and how you live it, if you wish something on yourself, then do something to make it happen! You can’t wait for someone or something to come and do it for you.

“You don’t have to wait until tomorrow, to resolve for change today” – Nate York

This is of great significance for me and basically sums up what I am trying to convey here.  I really should have made a blog post with just that one line.

If there is something you want, something you want to change, something you have been wanting to do.

Do it.  don’t wait for New Years day to plan to better yourself, why wait? Make resolutions, work towards bettering your life on New Years Day, and every day that follows.

Related posts:

1. How to Foolproof your Mind – Top 10 Thinking Traps
2. Revenge of the Zombies: Palin, Beck, Limbaugh and the Return of Dark Times
3. Back up your Data!!!

If you own a network of 15 sites, with over 100k members, sure, maybe you don’t need a JV, maybe your circle of influence is big enough that you can pull enough people on your own.. even if you got a terrible response rate of only 1% to your promotional emails, that’s still 10k people, which is a huge beginning.

The rest of us, however, do.  We don’t have giant advertising budgets where we can blow the money, we don’t have gigantic memberships or lists with hundreds of thousands of people we can contact, we have to stand up and admit that we need help!  Build relationships! Help Eachother!  That’s what JV’s are!

A ‘JV’ is simply an exchange, it stands for ‘Joint Venture’ in that you help me, I help you.  There’s nothing wrong with that.  If you have a list of 100 people, and you’ve built a relationship with someone who’s morals and ideals are in tune with yours, and they also have a list of 100 people. It’s pretty obvious where I am going with this, Help each other!  If you are getting that same 1% response rate (I certainly hope it will be higher!) that is 1 person, well now you also have that other persons 1%, now you’ve doubled your response!

So what’s the problem with that?  Why is it given this evil connotation?  JV Relationships are a great way to help each other grow. Don’t abuse your relationships with your subscribers by emailing them all the time about all of your friends things, but provide them value!  Is this something that will help your members, subscribers, and friends build their business? Does the owners message coincide with yours?  Then what is the problem? What’s so bad awful and evil and ‘Guru’ about helping each other?

Sorry if this all sounds a bit ranty, but saying, especially to new people in our industry that are struggling to build their business, that JV Relationships aren’t needed, is a bit under handed.

The natural progression of serious affiliate marketers is to go from promoting other people’s products, to eventually creating their own, whether it just be an ebook, or a membership site.  The Relationships you build now, today, will help you be ready when you take that step.  If you do not have a solid launch where you can build that membership community, you will struggle with your membership site.  If you can get some help with your friends with whom you’ve already built a solid relationship with, it would be crazy not to.

If you are building a house, and you are building the foundation of it, one block at a time, slowly over a long period of time, you will never even get the foundation done to be able to build the house, if you can call up your friends and have them help you lay that foundation, you will have a solid platform to build that house on.

If you’ve boughten in to the flashy hype that JV Relationships are no longer necessary, or that they are unimportant, try and launch a product completely on your own, as a new owner with little or no advertising income, and see how far you can get.  JV Relationships are absolutely essential to building the foundation of your product from which it can grow.  How many trees can you plant in an hour?  How many trees can you and 5 of your closest friends plant in an hour?

If you would like to build a JV Partnership with Insidmal Design LLC, here is the form to do so: http://insidmaldesign.com/jv.php Let’s help each other grow.

No related posts.

We’re doing things a little bit different this year.  ID Passport is the new hub for ALL Deals from Insidmal Design, We are kicking it off this weekend with our special Thanksgiving Weekend deals, but we will continue to feature new deals there for you every couple of weeks. Don’t worry though, unlike some other deal sites, you will still earn commission on any deals purchased.

The Following Deals Are Available NOW on ID Passport

3X Passport Points on ALL Purchases!

Traffic Swirl
10,000 Credits for $15 (Regular Price: $40)
3 Month Pro Upgrade for $15 (Regular Price: $29)

Fast Cash and Traffic
5,000 Credits for $20 (Regular Price: $60)
3 Month Gold Upgrade for $5 (Regular Price: $11.85)

Viral List Builder Plus
10,000 Credits for $15 (Regular Price: $41.95)
3 Month Plus Upgrade for $30 (Regular Price: $89.95)

Affiliate Toolbox
3 Month Gold Upgrade for $12 (Regular Price: $29.85)

Visit http://idpassport.me to take advantage of these deals!

But there is more!

We’ve also teamed up with IM Loop to offer you a special daily deal on Black Friday and Cyber Monday!

The Following Deals are Available on IM Loop

Traffic Swirl
5,000 Credits for $7 (Regular Price: $25) Avaiable for 24 Hours on Black Friday ONLY!

Viral List Builder Plus
10,000 Credits for $15 (Regular Price: $41.95) Available for 24 Hours on Cyber Monday ONLY!

Visit http://imloop.com Today and Monday to Take Advantage of These Offers!

I know you see the value in these offers and invite you to take advantage of this special saving, you will not see savings like this again!

To Your Success,

John Bell

Related posts:

1. Martin Luther King Jr Day
2. Using Traffic Swirl to Increase your Twitter Following
3. Heaps of new features at Traffic Swirl!

Below is an outline of what will be happening, all changes will become effective on Monday, November 28th 2011

- Free members will now receive a 2:1 ratio as well as an increased 20% Commission!

- Standard Upgrade price will be reduced from $7.95 a month to $5.95 a month.

- Elite Upgrade price will be reduced from $17.95 a month to $14.95 a month.

- Super Surfer (Earned) Upgrade will be increased to match the Standard Upgrade, instead of Basic.

- Basic Upgrade will no longer be available.

Since the free membership level is increasing to benefits that almost match the Basic Level, it is no longer necessary.  We will be ending our Basic Upgrade beginning November 28th, and decreasing the price of the Standard Upgrade, and Elite Upgrade, to coincide with increased benefits of the other levels.

If you currently have a Basic Upgrade, you may keep your current upgrade for the life of your upgrade subscription, however once you cancel that upgrade, it will no longer be available for purchase any longer.

For Clarification, the New Membership Table is posted below, this wordpress theme wouldn’t show my changes with border and background color to make it easier to read so I tried to highlight rows and columns using bold and italics to make it easier to follow, so hopefully that helped keep it from being overly confusing.

So as you can see we are doing a lot to increase the value by giving our free members even more and reducing upgrade costs to make our quality advertising more affordable.

The credits are in ranges because you can earn up to double your initial credit ratio with our surf events, achievement reward points, and levels.

Related posts:

1. Heaps of new features at Traffic Swirl!
2. Let me promote your Traffic Swirl link!
3. Using Traffic Swirl to Increase your Twitter Following

Last Week I told you about a brand new Viral List Builder I created, Viral List Builder Plus

I promised a large set of unique features that would help boost open rates.

I wanted to follow up with you and share these results with you.

We are delivering the industries highest open rates, with Plus members receiving over 20% Click Through’s on their email marketing ads.

Even free members are experiencing click through rates over 16%

A host of branding features and unique features and tools to help you maximize your open rates will help you see rates as high as 25%.  Some members have even shown results skyrocketing over 30%

We are revolutionizing the Viral List Building Industry.

Be part of the future of Viral List Building and join Viral List Builder Plus today.

No related posts.

If you know me at all, you will know that I believe branding to be one of the most important aspects of your business.  I have worked on over 50 of the top Traffic Generation Systems and time and time again members and owners are requesting more branding opportunities.  I’ll admit I’m fairly new to the Viral List Building world, only having started fully taking advantage of them for the last year or so, but branding is something I have not yet seen really put to good use in the Viral List Builder Industry.  I have put an end to this.  Anonymous email marketing is dead.  Branding your messages like never before, the open link frame contains your branding image, name, and even social network links to take engagement to the next level.  No longer will you lose sales because of anonymity or a lack of engagement, Viral List Builder Plus gives your audience a brand new way to connect and build relationships in ways the List Builder world has not yet seen.

You no longer have to set your alarm to run to your computer to send your Credit Emails out at peak times.  I know I only seem to remember to send them at 1 AM on a Saturday Night, and while that time may be perfect for targetting my Croatian audience, it is a dead time for our much larger market on the Western Hemisphere.  Put yourself back in control of your email marketing, you can now schedule emails all the way up to a year in advance.  Work on your own time, submit your emails at times that work best for you, while still always reaching your target audience at just the right time.

Viral List Builder Plus is taking Open Rates to a realm the market has not seen before.  Our Reward Point system encourages members to open mails, earning reward points that they can exchange for more credits, impressions, upgrades, and even referrals.  Our in-house network exponentially expands your reach, weather you send to 100 members or 10,000, every member has access to your ad on our in-house network, upgraded members have our entire community ready to read their emails.

Although our upgrade rates are affordable for various price points, we haven’t forgotten our valuable free members.  As a free member you get 250 credits, not just for joining, but free forever for each and every month you remain a member as well as our incredibly low credit purchase prices and generous credit rate for opening emails.  Where most sites charge you to save your messages or track your results, and even when you do pay only give you a small number of results – I have expanded this feature to our free members.  Not only do free members (As well as upgraded) get to view tracking results, but you also get to edit and resend their previous 25 email messages.

These features paired with our generous upgrade rates and aggressive affiliate compensation plan will shake the Viral List Building world and take it to a level of activity and engagement that they have never seen.

Be part of the future of Viral List Building and join Viral List Builder Plus today.

Related posts:

1. Do you ACT? – Attracting visitors to your websites.
2. Using Traffic Swirl to Increase your Twitter Following
3. How To: Use Fast Cash and Traffic to Build Your Funnel