There’s a new traffic exchange in town. No, I’m not going to link it here. My list comes first.

Huh? Say what?

My marketing ethos is always a work in progress, and I’m currently testing a new tenet — a “nugget” in Timtech parlance, if it turns out to be right.

Those of us who build lists and use those lists to do affiliate referral stuff (like building traffic exchange downlines) hope that our list subscribers will read our mail and act on it.

But why should they? What have we done for them lately, except fill their inboxes up with emails begging them to build our businesses for us?

Starting this week, I’ve been taking a more pointed “reward action-takers” approach. Early entrants into my latest monthly prize drawing contest got surprise, unannounced prizes. Nothing revolutionary about that.

Starting today, though, I’m going a little bit further and withdrawing from the “early referral” wars for new programs, where everyone gets up a new splash page ASAP and puts as many credits as they can find behind it, hoping to grab that first “low-hanging fruit.”

Instead, my list comes first, and its action-takers get rewarded. I’m offering a pretty nice prize drawing entry to my first days’ referrals to this new exchange (and perhaps some smaller unannounced prizes) … and my list subscribers are the only ones getting that referral link.

The point being, I shouldn’t expect my subscribers to be there for me unless I’m there for them.

The nature of affiliate referrals is that they can get what I’m offering them anywhere … so I need to add some value that they can only get from me. To sweeten that pot, I’m now offering value that only they – not everyone who sees one of 10,000 splashes I place, but just them — can get from me. I’ll let you know how it works out.

… you move on to the next plan. But not before thinking about what went wrong.

I confess, I was expecting big results from my Pizza Plan video/squeeze campaign. By “big results,” I meant that I hoped for double-digit list signups and one or two “rebrand” program affiliate commissions.

24+ hours into the campaign, I’ve seen, well, bupkis. No list signups. No ebook downloads. No affiliate commissions.

Why?

The knee-jerk reaction is to blame the program you’re promoting, but I don’t see that that’s the issue. The Pizza Plan is a well-done e-book with a catchy premise. It’s been an Internet Marketing staple over the years, but at the same time I haven’t seen it promoted a lot lately, and thousands of people flood into the traffic exchanges, etc. each week. And finally, I boosted out the program itself with a big badge promoting a very cool prize drawing. All else being equal, it should have moved a few copies, given an effective promotion.

So, the promotion wasn’t effective. That could be for any number of reasons:

Technical: Maybe the splash/video didn’t load properly for many viewers. But I’ve talked to several viewers, and haven’t heard that from any of them. So I don’t think it’s that.

Venue: If I  only promoted it in one place, that might make sense. For example, if I only promoted it at Sweeva, and Sweeva’s crowd had recently been thoroughly exposed to it, etc. But I’ve been promoting it across a wide range of traffic exchanges — the Timtech sites, yes, but also a number of independent TEs and at least one Kinder-Rash site — and to tens of thousands of safelist email readers.

Creative: Folks, I think we have a winner. For whatever reason, the video squeeze just didn’t make people want to give me their email information in return for a free e-book download and entry in a prize drawing. Maybe my video just, um, sucked. Maybe I didn’t put a strong enough “take action” prompt in there, so people didn’t take action. Maybe the colors I chose just didn’t tie things together.

So, back to the old drawing board … but you won’t see the results for a few days.

When I do a promotion, it’s the kind of thing that can’t just stop on a dime. The majority of those thousands of safelist emails still haven’t been opened yet. Most never will be (that’s the nature of safelist advertising), but I need to give them another 24 hours or so, just in case.

And since I have to give them another 24 hours or so, I can’t change my list’s welcome message text and download links, which means I either keep promoting the same thing on the TEs, or stop promoting my list altogether.

So, there’s still time for this failure to turn out to have been a success, although I’m not expecting that. While I’m waiting it out, I’ll be putting the next thing together, trying to apply lessons learned with this one.

Update, 08/15: OK, that’s a wrap. Rough stats: 4,500 impressions. No list signups. One click, one referral — but not to the target program (The Pizza Plan); rather to Traffic Ad Bar, which is one of the add-ons I ran this thing through.

Speaking of running ad campaigns through various services, one technical point I’m beginning to appreciate is that the more sources you draw from, the more opportunities the thing has to fail at the network/load level.

This campaign was a YouTube video running on an AdKreator squeeze page, which was plugged into an Affiliate Toolbox tracker and piped through Traffic Ad Bar. Oh — for the purpose of getting people to submit a TrafficWave lead capture form. All five of these are great services which I highly recommend. None of them are perfect … and any one of those five sites being down or slow at any given moment could derail me in my advertising purpose.

How big was the technical angle in this campaign’s failure? In my view, very small. I did see one mention of non-loading/slow-loading, so the angle was there, but I also saw lots of comments that indicated people saw the ad, liked the video … and didn’t take action. And that, I think, was a result of my failure to give them a real push to do so.

Back to the drawing board …

I love giving away other people’s stuff, especially when doing so builds my list, my business, and my bottom line!

Yes, you can build your list and bulk up your bank account using other people’s stuff. Some people do nothing but affiliate marketing and make good money at it. Other people use affiliate marketing to enhance and promote their own products and programs.

So, while I work on the next KN@PPSTER dot biz ”special report” and don’t have the next e-book done yet, I’m filling in the gap with a simple affiliate marketing / list-building project.

Jon Olson’s The Pizza Plan is an “evergreen” product — the program details internal to the book might change or get updated, but the e-book itself will always be a great story and it will always offer a solid plan that a new Internet Marketer can put into action to start succeeding. It’s the kind of product I can give away, and enroll affiliates for, in full confidence that I’m doing a favor to everyone involved while helping myself out too.

Heck, I even made a video about it:

And, of course, hooked the video into a squeeze page now playing at traffic exchanges everywhere.

Don’t be afraid to think outside the (standard affiliate page) box. Use your affiliate programs to build your list and brand yourself — but make sure you’re using good programs, since the branding will follow you.

If you’ve heard it once, you’ve heard it a million times: “The money is in the list.”

It’s true — if you’ve got a large, responsive list of email subscribers, you’ve got a real leg up in marketing. You can be the first to reach those subscribers with a new opportunity, before they happen across it or hear about it from someone else.

The two key words, of course, are “large” and “responsive.”

Large, I guess, is mostly a matter of time and grinding away at it. I’m starting to get better at that. My previous list grew to a whopping grand total of 13 subscribers in two months. The reboot is now in mid double digits after less than a month, and seems to be picking up steam.

That list also seems to be getting more and more responsive, which is of course the most important thing. A list of five people, all of whom take you up on your offers is a better list than a list of a million people, none of whom read your email or act on it.

Obviously I’m far from a guru at the moment, but here are two lessons I’ve gleaned:

1. Don’t constantly fill your subscribers’ inboxes up with crap. If they get three messages a day from you, each of them a hard-sell pitch with an affiliate link, they’ll stop reading.
2. Try to include something of value in each message that the reader can benefit from immediately and without buying anything. Make them want to open your messages, even if they’re not sure they’re interested in whatever you might want to show them that day.