just a quick note to say I’ve found a neat free tool that allows you to quickly and easily add videos to your website or blog as some extra content.
You can target the videos to your chosen keywords to keep it highly relevant for your visitors as well, to help keep visitors on your site longer.
I’ve made a quick video showing how it works: -
and you can grab the software for it here: -
Popularity: 11% [?]
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I’ve been using video submitted to the top video sites to drive traffic to a number of my blogs and sites for a few months now and the results have been very good, to say the least.
As an example, at the time of writing, if you do a search in google for optimised ping list there are around 1,850,000 results and the 1st position is one of my videos on Revver that shows how to use the best optimised ping list.
here’s a screen shot in case the position has changed by the time you read this post, although I’m hoping it doesn’t anytime soon. 
the only “potential” down side with this method of getting traffic to your blogs and websites is that manually submitting your videos to a wholebunch of video sites can take a LONG while, fortunatly there is a simple and unexpensive solution.
Marketers will always be happy to tell you that “the money is in the list” and I whole heartedly agree with that sentiment, but it can be a lot more difficult to find simple and effective ways of building your list.
I have mostly built my subscriber lists with article marketing, Joint Ventures, Blogging and some PPC, which does work, but I’m always looking for good ways to add even more subscribers to my lists, so a while back I decided it was time to test out two new methods which I’d heard of, but not tried: -
Giveaway Events & “Ad Swaps”
I have to say that I was so pleased with the results that I have not only added giveaways as part of my regular list building tactics, I also took the time to set up a forum and facebook group specifically for doing adswaps! [details of both are below]
With my house move and divorce finally out of the way, I can get back to doing some product tests again, the only problem now is I’ve got a pretty big backlog of stuff to test out, so I thought I’d start with an RSS submission tool that will submit your rss feed to 20 of the best rss sites to get more backlinks and visitors.
You can check out the tool itself here:
It’s from a guy called Peter Drew who has an excellent reputation for providing top notch tools that do some pretty cool stuff.
It’s also a real easy tool to use, although it does take a few minutes to get the accounts you need set up, but then it’s just a case of popping in your rss feed url and a “keyword/phrase” and hitting go.
I added Peelaway Ads to quite a few of my blogs a couple of months ago to test them out and see how well the perform.
Today I’ve started removing them from all my blogs…
Over the test period of 2+ months the ads have resulted in exactly 2 sales, which is pretty poor considering the amount of traffic that the blogs they were on get in total, but that’s not actually the main reason for removing them.
I’ve had several emails that the peelaway would get “stuck” and not peel back, and it seems there’s also some incompatibility issues with the FireFox browser where the peel away ad can stop the “Recent Posts” and other links from working.
Not making many sales is something that I could potentially address with different product offers and new graphics to “catch the eye” of visitors, but causing problem for visitors to my blogs, resulting in them leaving the blog, is simply unacceptable, so I’m dumping them.
As I’ve just done a video to show how to add the RealTraffic exchange ads to your blog for my BlogTactics.com readers, I also had the chance to check my stats for RealTraffic Exchange and I’m very pleased with the results..
On most of my blogs I’m getting a CTR of over 1%, showing that the ads are relevant.
Now you may be thinking that this is not good, as it means people are clicking on those adverts and leaving my blog, well that’s true, but I look at it on the basis that those people would probably have left my blog anyway, so if I can provide them with something useful to go look at, then I’m helping them out and creating “good will”.
so “WIIFM” (what’s in it for me)?
I’ve been running another test for StumbleUpon Ads to try and work out the value of the visitors it brings in.
For this test I was simply interested in seing how long each visitor spent on the blog to try and judge the “visitor value”, again I was sending the visitors to my “internet marketing” and “Blogging” related blogs.
The sample was over 2,000 visitors and on average each visitor only spent 29.4 seconds on the site before leaving, and less than on in each 10 visitors would leave the site via an “affiliate link” of some sort.
Compare this with recent visitors I’ve been getting from two other Web 2 social bookmarking sites and you can see there’s quite a difference:
Sphinn - each visitor spends on average 1 min and 36 seconds on the site and almost 6% click on a “montezied” link to leave.
If you’ve visited before you’ll probably have noticed I’ve got a new theme installed.
Now as this is my “testing things” blog it shouldn’t come as too much of a surprise to find out that it’s my own new theme that I’m testing out…
When I say “my own”, I’m not going to claim to have coded it myself, I’ve got a RaC coder called Andre to thank for it (as wel as pay), and I’m pretty pleased with the results, we’re just trying to iron out the few last wrinkles, which always seems to take the longest..
When it is finished it will be available as a free download from my BlogTactics.com blog, which hopefully will be within the next few days, although it may take me a bit longer to get al the tutorial videos for it done and uploaded.
I’ve only just got my hands on this sweet new tool from Neil Shearing, so I’ve got no results to post yet, but I wanted to make a post about it as it goes on sale tomorrow and there’s a 50% discount for the first 278 buyers..
that may seem like a lot of people, but I’ve spoken to Neil andI know that there are over 432 people already signed up for the “early bird” notification list to get in an hour early, so those 278 discounts will go VERY quickly!
So what does the tool do?
It’s a wordpress datafeed plugin.
If you don’t know what a datafeed is it’s basically free content provided by big suppliers through some affiliate programs (like link share and CJ). The content is lots of info about their full line of products and can have your affiliate code embedded.
I’ve been testing out using blogcarnival’s for getting new links and traffic to my main “blogging” blog, BlogTactics and it’s working so well that I’ve started using it for a couple of other blogs, including this one.
The Technorati backlinks count for BlogTactics has jumped by 30+ links in the last couple of weeks from this simple tactic, so I figured it was time to make a post here about it.
BlogCarnival’s are simply blog posts on other blogs where the owners of those blogs post links and comments to a bunch of other blogs that are related.
The better the quality of the posts on your blog, the more likely you are to be included in any specific carnival, although it’s still entirely up to the blog owner which blogs they will include in the carnival, so make sure you post some good stuff before doing a carnival submission.
