Joe's Internet Business Blog

APSense

2010-12-17T21:30:00.004-05:00

This is probably my favorite business social network because it has so many great tools. You can create web pages called Rev Pages that you can use at APSense and anywhere else, these make some pretty nice informational pages that can lead to your primary business opportunity website. As you participate in viewing other members sites you accumulate points that you can use yourself to advertise at APSense. You can contact other members and send them messages. There is also a very generous commission system for those referrals you recruit that upgrade. So many tools and ways to get your message out there. I highly recommend checking it out:

http://www.apsense.com/invite/jsacco

Avalanche Clicks is Exploding

2010-11-26T10:15:00.003-05:00

Come join my traffic exchange Avalanche Clicks, and let me know you joined from my Blog and I will add 5,000 credits to your account. We offer the most awesome surf ratios and prizes when you surf. Why not spend your time wisely instead of grinding it out at some of those other traffic exchanges that you have to surf for hours just to get a few credits. It is FREE to join and if you are interested we have a lifetime Platinum upgrade (50 sites, 50 banners, 50 text links) for a one time fee of just $19.95

Join Here

The Social Network that Pays

2010-11-26T10:13:00.001-05:00

SWOM is simply the best internet marketing social network. It has a very active membership and upgrading is the norm. You can also get your marketing and business opportunities seen by thousands of other members. Join today and upgrade right away.

http://swom.com/?r=78778

ClixSense update

2010-02-20T18:47:00.001-05:00

This might be my favorite PTC, well it is the one that I use daily. You can upgrade to a Premium membership for only $10 a year, which is a really great deal. You should make that back pretty quickly. As a Premium member you always have ads to click on, and they all pay .01 (1 cent) each. A great referral program that is 8 levels deep with a 10% commission on your downline. You can set your own payout levels, and they have never disappointed me. You need to work a little in the beginning to build a decent size downline, but it is worth it. This PTC has been around for years and I expect that to continue. They also have a marketplace where you can advertise products, kind of a mini Ebay. Click here to sign-up

Avalanche Clicks

2010-01-16T09:13:00.003-05:00

Well I finally did it, bought my own Traffic Exchange. I would love to have you check it out; you can acquire lots of credits surfing there, and even free members can earn significant credits with all the bonuses available.

Here are a few facts about Avalanche Clicks:

500 credits when you join after surfing 50 sites
250 credits everytime you complete the Letter Hunt
Plenty of bonuses, lots of activity gets your site seen.
Bonuses are progressive, the more you surf the higher your surfing ratio
.50 credits per click for Free Members, advertise 5 sites
.75 credits per click for Gold Members, advertise 15 sites, and 250 credits per month
1.0 credits per click for Platinum Members, advertise 25 sites, and 500 credits per month
Compare us to the rest

Join today and get in on the ground floor

Click here to join

Text and Email Ads

2009-04-18T14:28:00.007-04:00

You've probably seen a lot of these text and solo advertising sites popping up all over the place. The premise here is that you read text, website, and solo email advertisements earning points, and then you can buy advertising that goes to the membership of the text ad site. Actually it is a pretty good idea and seems to be a little more effective than traffic exchanges, especially the solo email advertisements. The trick here is to join a site that has a decent sized membership, and because there are so many of them it can be tough to know which ones to join.

I've been using a few of them for a while now that produce results. One word of warning they do generate a fair amount of email from each text ad exchange you are a member of. Usually around 20 solo ads per day, so if you are a member of 5 of them expect about 100 solo email ads that you need to click on to view their advertisement, thus earning points for you to spend later.

Regardless of if the site calls itself a text ad site or an email site the basic principal is the same; read the ads and get cash or points to spend on advertising. The only really discernible difference is the text ad sites also let you click on ads on their site, much like a traffic exchange.

Here are my favorites:

ListJoe - This one produces results and will fill your inbox with advertisements, free members can build up 1000 points in about a week.

List Auction - A email program, that is very similar to ListJoe (Highly Recommended)

Solo Ads Only - Don't let the name fool you; they have text links and html ads in addition to solo email advertising. This is a very good program with nice promotional tools and lots of other useful stuff to help you advertise your business.

Adz Quik! - Very similar to Solo Ads Only, very cool and easy to build up points to send your own solo ads.

Cash Solos - Another really great text ad exchange, easy to build up a lot of points.

I use all 5 of these and a couple more, but again if you signup you need to read the emails to build up points and it will take some time, so don't go overboard unless you have the time to invest.

Real Traffic Generator

2009-03-21T10:35:00.005-04:00

I just joined Vampirella Hits a few days ago and already have well over 3,000 credits and over a dozen sites in rotation. Incredible bonuses, and an increasing credit ratio as you surf more. You can get a lifetime membership for $10 until they get to 1500 members. You can click or hover, banners and text links don't consume credits, and there are some great splash pages and banners to promote this traffic exchange. I don't usually get to excited about traffic exchanges, but this one is a bargain. Take advantage of the lifetime pro membership for only $10 and start earning some serious credits.

Link Exchanges

2009-03-03T17:25:00.004-05:00

You've heard about the power of linking your site to others and other people to yours. If you want a decent search engine placement you need to have many websites pointing to your site. One of the easiest ways of doing this is joining a link exchange. I'm not here to refer you to any of these sites, there is nothing in it for me, but I will let you know the ones I use and hopefully you find them useful.

Here are my favorites:

LinkMarket - http://www.linkmarket.com/
LinkAlizer - http://www.linkalizer.com/
http://www.linkslister.com/

Now I have others, but quite frankly I don't use them all because it takes work to check out their sites, decide which ones you want to trade with, and add them to your website. I almost exclusively use LinkMarket and LinkAlizer. They both provide plenty of opportunities to trade, and have a large installed base to choose from.

Online Business Resources
Your place for internet marketing tools and business opportunities

Super Bowl Sunday Post

2009-02-01T09:16:00.003-05:00

Cardinals or Steelers?

I'll take the underdog if you give me 14 points. Should be fun game, but instead of sitting around all day watching pre-game stuff, might I interest you in checking out my favorite PTC Clixsense.

Some of the reasons this is my favorite Paid to Click program:
1) 5 levels of referrals for your downline
2) Generous commissions when your referrals upgrade
3) Lots of advertisements everyday
4) Automatic payout - yes they actually send you a check

Join today and begin making money in 30 seconds.

http://www.clixsense.com/?2344096

New Traffic Exchanges

2009-01-31T10:54:00.003-05:00

Well fairly new to me anyways. I'm sure you have heard of hover surfing, but if you haven't it is basically where you hover over a graphic with your mouse pointer instead of clicking on it. Saves time and easier on the finger. Here are a few hover traffic exchanges that I really like. They are free to join and you can rack up a lot of credits using them:

Lords of Traffic http://lords-of-traffic.com/?rid=3746

Bella's Clicks Shack http://www.bellasclickshack.com/?rid=703

Horror Movie Hits http://horrormoviehits.com/?r=58095

Best of Luck!
http://joesacco.com

Incredible New Traffic Exchange

2008-07-20T11:35:00.001-04:00

I was just exposed to Gold Star, and I can tell you it went right up to the top of my list. In a few hours I had over 1000 credits, 500 banner impressions, and about 700 text links. The bonuses are incredible just about every other click you are awarded a bonus, and I also received a free 30 trial Pro membership. I'm not easily impressed, but this traffic exchange blew me away.

Check it out today!

Gold Star Traffic Exchange

Brought to you by your friends at Online Business Resources

Keys to Success

2008-07-20T09:30:00.001-04:00

My advice on how to succeed with your home based business

Devote time everyday to your business venture. Rome wasn't built in a day, but if you are not making a daily contribution you probably will not see very positive results.

Be patient and be willing to operate in the red for the first couple of years. Now I know that doesn't sound encouraging, but it takes time to build your marketing capacity.

Carefully choose the business opportunities and marketing tools you will be using. Hopefully this website will help by providing proven opportunities and tools; otherwise what happens is you waste a lot of time on ventures that never materialize.

Choose those business opportunities that appeal to you and that you believe in. It is tough to sell something you don't use yourself.

Remember the home based business opportunity is all about marketing. Don't get caught up in a whole bunch of administrative work; you need to focus on marketing, marketing, marketing!

Seek the advice of others. Get involved in blogging or contact other entrepreneurs and find out what they are doing. Forums or Business Social Networking sites are a great place to make contacts and educate yourself.

Believe in yourself and your dream. I see to many people signup for programs and do absolutely nothing. You must commit to a program and stick with it.

Don't quit a program before it becomes successful. Now I don't want you to be stupid and invest thousands of dollars in a program that doesn't work, but jumping around from one to another usually accomplishes nothing.

Be willing to work very hard. I haven't met too many people that are successful that don't work extremely hard at it. You need to be focused on being successful and that doesn't mean just wanting it you need to put in the time.

Have a plan. Decide what you need to do and put together a plan. You should have a target date associated with each task in your plan. You might also estimate how long or how much money should be budgeted for that task.

Brought to you by your friends at Online Business Resources

What is Viral Marketing?

2007-11-24T11:14:00.000-05:00

Recently you hear a lot about viral marketing, but how well is it understood? First of all I'm assuming it is not some kind of viral infection that we all seem to want to catch; please let me be infected with thousands of hits to my website. It's probably not like a computer virus that the folks at Symantec want to eradicate, but oddly viral marketing has attributes of both an infection and a computer virus. The definition of viral according to the American Heritage Dictionary is " Of, relating to, or caused by a virus". Well, maybe we internet marketing folks are taking liberties when it comes to defining our marketing methodologies, but it wouldn't sound nearly as cool if I called viral marketing something like "multiple methods of complementary marketing". So I'm willing to live with the term "Viral Marketing" if you are.

If we can agree that viral marketing like an infection or a computer virus can get stronger, thus expanding over time then the rest of this article will focus on marketing techniques that have those attributes. The reason most of got into this type of business is that we believed that getting paid by the hour or a salary was pretty limiting, and that our internet business had the potential to grow virally. Now there are a lot of internet money making opportunities out there that I would not consider to be viral marketing including things like paid to take surveys, paid to read, paid to click, and whatever other methods where you get paid directly for the time you put into it. Now your back to working for someone else and all the limitations associated with getting paid by the hour.

So what types of business opportunities or marketing techniques qualify as truly viral. Let's start with different types of businesses:

Multi Level Marketing (MLM) companies - companies like Shaklee, Amway, Usana, and the list goes on and on. They are viral in that everyone you recruit has the ability to recruit many people under them, and you share in the profits of the whole team. Great concept, but doesn't always pan out if your downline isn't very active.

Affiliate Business Opportunities - Now probably everyone will disagree with me, but many of the affiliate business opportunities share the same characteristics of an MLM. Usually you profit from multiple levels of downlines, those that you refer and their own referrals. There are literally thousands of affiliate business opportunities out there like the Free Store Club, DealDotCom, or MyPowerMall, just to name a few.

Well it doesn't do much good to have a viral business without some kind of viral marketing tools that also expand their capacity to generate traffic and ultimately income over time. The rest of this article will focus on my favorite viral marketing tools. Here are some that I use:

List builders - We are talking about email marketing here, where the intent is to build your list of people that you can solicit or advertise too. A couple that I use include YourLuckyList and ListJoe; these two are slightly different, but the idea is that your recruiting efforts are focused on building a list of people that you can email on a periodic basis. Of course you can build your own list without one of these programs. As your list grows you are reaching out to an ever expanding audience, and some of these programs offer multiple levels of referrals that make them really viral.

Writing Articles - One of the great things about writing articles is that they have a long half life, meaning they can help you get traffic to your website for years, and they get picked up by the search engines creating back links to your website, improving your search engine rankings. It is clear that writing articles is a true viral marketing method and it is free.

Downline Builders - I wrote an article on downline builders recently because they are a truly viral marketing technique because they can expand your presence exponentially. As people sign-up for the downline builder they will often become part of your downline. Advertise one good downline builder and you have the potential to get hundreds of referrals in multiple programs. This is much more efficient that promoting each marketing tool on an individual basis. My primary downline builder is Vital Viral and I have referrals 4 levels deep. So instead of promoting traffic exchanges, list builders, and other marketing tools with separate advertisements, consider using a downline builder for its viral marketing characteristics.

Without getting into a lot of detail I want to mention a few other marketing tools that have those viral characteristics that have been discussed:

Portals like LinkScout
Website Directories
Web Forums
Traffic Exchanges
Viral sites like Free Viral
Networking groups like LinkReferral or Reality Networkers

In my opinion for you to experience the real benefits of viral marketing you need to begin utilizing multiple marketing channels, and not get caught up in programs that focus on getting paid by the hour, but instead focus on those programs that can expand as you refer others. Ultimately this results in more traffic, better search engine placement because your site is referenced many times, and ultimately more cash in your pocket.

Visit Online Business Resources for more information.

Update on Internet Forums

2007-11-13T19:45:00.000-05:00

In my last post on Internet Forums I mentioned a forum called Conquer Your Niche, which I still feel is one of the best forums on the net. I would like to mention a few others for your benefit:

These are not affiliate links, I'm just sending you to their homepage where you can signup. I like to visit these forums every couple of days, read topics, post your opportunities. If you are fairly diligent you can generate some traffic to your websites; not only that but you will learn a lot.

Visit Online Business Resources for more information.

Downline Builders

2007-10-27T16:14:00.000-04:00

One of the great ways to build referals in other traffic exchanges and programs is through the use of downline builders. A downline builder really advertises multiple programs and as people signup with the downline builder they are placed under you in all the programs they join. The great thing about downline builders is that you can focus on promoting the downline builder and watch your referals grow.

I recently joined a downline builder called Vital Viral, which was a very good decision. In the first 2 months of promoting Vital Viral I signed up 60 direct referrals and have 281 in my downline. The way Vital Viral works is that you enter your userids for the various programs, and join those that you are not already a member. Most of these programs that you join are traffic exchanges, but there are others like YourLuckyList, ListJoe, InstantBuzz, etc. that fit in the non traffic exchange category. The whole idea is to use at least 50% of your marketing to promote the Vital Viral downline builder. I personally think it is worth it because what you are doing is adding to your marketing capacity before trying to promote your money making opportunities.

Visit Online Business Resources for more information.

Internet Forums

2007-10-13T15:46:00.000-04:00

I don't claim to be an expert on internet forums, but I'm starting to be convinced regarding their effectiveness. I recently joined a forum called Conquer Your Niche Marketing and in just a few hours generated 4000+ views of my advertisement on the forum just for reading, posting, and replying to posts. If you've never participated in a forum you are missing out. Conquer Your Niche Marketing has a lot of members who provide great information on how to increase traffic to your websites and you also become aware of a lot of other business opportunities and how effective they are. As I was reading through the different posts on the forum I found out that there are dozens of other good forums out there to participate in, and just about everyone of them lets you use a signature that advertises your website(s). I'm getting pretty excited about this method of networking and marketing to the point that I am spending about 50% of my time using the forums as a means of marketing my various business opportunities. One other thing, unlike a lot of other marketing tools the forums are absolutely FREE!. Check out Conquer Your Niche Marketing as a great place to get started.

Visit Online Business Resources for more information.

Email Marketing

2007-10-12T12:39:00.000-04:00

In my last post I talked a little about traffic exchanges, but it would not be good to spend all your time surfing the traffic exchanges when there are many other ways to market your business. Email marketing has been around for a long time, orginally starting with people buying targeted leads and often sending them out on their own. More recently things have changed with products like YourLuckyList and ListJoe as just a couple of examples. These new email marketing tools are list builders and supply leads more randomly, so your not mailing the same people over and over again. For instance ListJoe sends you an email, which you read and then click on a link to view a website and earn credits, almost like a traffic exchange except that you get between 5 and 20 credits for each website you view. These credits convert into email leads, so it is not difficult by clicking on 10 -15 emails a day to build up 500-1500 credits that you can use to email your advertisement. Pretty cool and it is free! Another tool that I've found useful is YourLuckyList, which also allows you to email prospects on a weekly basis, but it generates a matrix of leads, based on how many people you have recruited, and if you are a free or premium member.

Generally I find these new email list builders more effective than bulk mailers, probably because the membership is more active and involved. These emails also are less likely to be caught by SPAM filters, because the membership actually wants to see them. Any way you look at it adding a few select email marketing tools to your arsenal is a good thing.

My recommendation would be ListJoe, which has provided my best response. In fact I am upgrading my membership this week because I have been so pleased with the program, already earning commissions for people who have upgraded in my downline.

Visit Online Business Resources for more information.

Manual Traffic Exchanges

2007-10-08T20:10:00.000-04:00

A manual traffic exchange is a way of exchanging credits that you earn by surfing and viewing other websites, and then these credits can be used to display your website or business opportunity to others. In addition to earning credits (pageviews) from surfing you can purchase additional credits, or buy a premium membership which will typically add credits to your balance each month. Also with a premium membership you will often get an improved surfing ratio. Many traffic exchanges also offer the ability to make money when other members upgrade or purchase advertising. Most manual traffic exchanges offer multiple ways to promote your website include page views, banner advertising, and emailing their memberships.

Surfing ratios are usually expressed as 2:1 - meaning for every 2 sites you surf you get 1 credit in return, or 1:1 - for every 1 site you surf you get 1 credit in return. Give the manual traffic exchange a try, but remember there is an investment in your time surfing to earn credits. I like to be a premium member in a few select manual traffic exchanges, and occasionally surf others. If you would like more information click here .

Visit Online Business Resources for more information.

Help with internet marketing

2007-10-07T11:58:00.000-04:00

I've spent several years building up my internet business, and finally developed a website that puts together a lot of things that I learned over the past few years. Basically the site Online Business Resources outlines a number of marketing methods, mostly free including manual traffic exchanges, autosurf traffic exchanges, email list builders, downline builders, networking sites, classified ad sites, and a few select business opportunities. In future posts I will discuss each traffic generation method in some level of detail. Until then - take care!

About me

2007-08-07T15:33:00.001-04:00

Just a little about myself. I am an IT Manager/Project Manager living in the Midwest United States. I have been in the IT field for 25+ years, so computers or the internet are not anything new. I have a small web based business I started a couple years ago. If you are interested you can check it out at http://www.joesacco.com/

I wouldn't consider myself a geek, but I probably spend an inordinate amount of time on my computer at work and at home. I have a wireless network at home with 3 PC's connected, 3 children, 2 cats, and one pretty nice wife. More about my not so fascinating life later.....

Just getting started

2007-08-07T14:20:00.001-04:00

Hey, I can't believe it I finally created my own blog, must have been living in the dark ages using email, buidling my own websites with conventional tools. Blogging is pretty new to me, although with all the typing I do everyday it shouldn't be to much of a stretch.