I’ve been promoting a new site for the last week, and because it’s in a very broad area, I thought I’d once again experiment with traffic exchanges and purchased traffic.

And again, I’ve found that traffic from sites like TrafficSwarm convert poorly, traffic from purchased packages that come from expired domains and popups convert dismally (which is two steps downhill from poorly), and traffic from InstantBuzz, while harder to get, converts a little better than both put together.

And once again, traffic from signature files in forums has all those other methods beat by a mile, or ten, or more.

Forums are great. As long as what you post is helpful, and as long as your sig link looks interesting, you’ve gone half the distance to getting a lead or a customer as soon as they click.

And as a result, the new site is off to a great start.

Now, if someone wanted to start a service, offering a forum posting service where they researched answers to particular questions and responded intelligently to posts with their customer’s link in the sig line would be a neat thing to try.

I’ve been hearing a lot of marketers wail and moan about one thing or another lately.

“Google’s new AdWords rules are going to put me out of business!”

or

“Microsoft’s new office suite will make my PDF software obsolete!”

and all manner of other complaints and predictions of doom.

I read in an old newspaper once an anecdote about a town that passed an ordinance stating that if the home owner had a sign stating “No Solicitors”, that  door to door salesmen would be fined if they disregarded it.

The next day, a large group of salesmen met and bemoaned their fate.

All except one. He was loading his truck with merchandise he planned to sell that day.

His compatriots asked him, “Didn’t you hear about the  new law?”

“You bet,” he said as he held up a no solicitation sign with a price tag dangling down.

He was going to make a killing that day.

Mark H. McCormack, in his book What They Don’t Teach You At Harvard Business School wrote:

It is still amazing to me  how the simple passing of time can totally alter a situation, solve problems, render other problems meaningless, cool down confrontations, and add a whole new perspective….

Part of being opportunistic is waiting, like a cat in a forest, for an opportunity to come along…. in our twenty-odd years in business, 90 percent of our successes have involved in some way the need for patience, and 90 percent of our failures have been caused in part by lack of it.

I guess what I’m getting at is that things are rarely as catastrophic  as they seem. If you’re overwhelmed by the new rules Google’s  put in place, cut down on your spending and stick to lower cost keywords for a while as you feel your way around the new landscape.  Watch what other people are doing too, because what is bad news to one is opportunity to the person who can see the different angles.

I’ve spent the last few days experimenting with John Reel’s new product, GoTryThis. I’m playing with the BlackHat version, which is stunningly easy to use, and works great, and which isn’t so blackhat that white hat marketers won’t want to use its features.

I have to admit I’ve never used link cloaking software before, so I wasn’t sure how it would work, but I am very, very impressed at this point.

First of all, the install was just plain cool. It’s a php script that is installed on your server, but rather than giving you a script to download and leaving you stuck with the task of trying to install and configure it yourself, GoTryThis can install itself on your server with a few bits of information about your FTP and Database logins. Very slick, and very easy for technophobes to deal with.

Once the program is installed, you can head straight to your own site and log in to start creating links. You’ve got a number of choices:

If you just fill out the first two lines, you get a basic cloaked link from YOURSITE.COM/DIR that redirects to your affiliate URL.

If you add a Title, Keywords and Description, you’ll get a cloaked link that puts the affiliate url in a Frame. If you’ve checked the Viral checkbox, that frame will have an icon and ad text for GoTryThis that includes your affiliate URL, so you can earn commission from either your affiliate link OR from GoTryThis if you so choose.

And, if you want to link to pages other than the main affiliate page, there’s an option to embed cookies from the affiliate link while redirecting to a different page.

You can track your links in even more detail by adding a suffix to your tracking link when you paste it into your website or newsletter. So, if you create a link from yoursite.com/test you can test the response from your mailing list and your website simply by adding something like -web or -mail at the end of that url, so in your newsletter your affiliate link would be yoursite.com/test-mail/ and your website link would be yoursite.com/test-web and GoTryThis will track each differently.

The last cool feature that GoTryThis has when creating cloaked links is more for organization than anything else. If the affiliate program you’re linking to has a login for the stats, you can add the login url, username and password to the link, which will give you one-click access to your affiliate stats while checking your GoTryThis stats.

From the link managment area, you can see stats on your link referrers and number of clicks for each link, and from the Stats menu, you can see general statistics for all your cloaked links to see which are performing best and total clicks on all your links.

The graphs are live, generated by Flash, so you don’t need any special PHP modules to see them, and your stats can be exported to Excel format with a click of a button.

As I said, I’ve never used a link cloaker before, so I can’t compare features with other packages on the market, but based on my experience, the ease of installation, ease of use, and great functionality of this software makes it something I know I will get much use out of, and something I won’t hesitate to recommend.

You can check it out at GoTryThis.com

PS. I’m bumping this up today because GoTryThis is now available for purchase. I’ve been using it more and I still heartily recommend it. If you can afford it, get the Black Hat version, but if you’re strapped for cash, the White Hat version is extremely affordable and well priced for all the functionality it will give you. There’s a limited number being sold, so don’t miss out!

When I had one of these as a kid, I had a hard time doing anything with it. I certainly couldn’t draw anything recognizable.

But you gotta see this!

http://www.gvetchedintime.com

This guy is amazing with an etch-a-sketch.

And you can get your own, customized sketch from him starting at 7,500

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