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There’s a lesson here for program creators that turn features on by default…yes Mozilla, I’m referring to you!!

Yesterday Firefox could have been responsible for a serious disaster on one of my sites. Anyone that uses PhpMyAdmin in Firefox should take heed.

I have (had) a table of over 5 million records representing nearly 2 years of data. The data represents daily use of VitalViralPro and I wanted to consolidate it into monthly data for an upcoming new feature.

I had tried different algorithms for doing the consolidation and being cautious, none of the algorithms was ever deleting the source data, just flagging it as processed so I could delete it later. That way I could unflag the data and try a different strategy (because some strategies we’re just going to take too long to process the data – it’s moderately complex).

After trying a few different strategies I thought I knew why my previous attempts were so slow and decided I needed to delete the data as I processed it, not just flag it.

Lucky for me I didn’t take shortcuts; I made a copy of the table with 5 million+ records and changed my algorithm to use that table for testing. The algorithm worked much better; it was still going to take several hours to create the new processed table.

Like anyone, when I’m working on the database I’ll typically have anything from 3-10 tabs open, all with different views or queries in so that I don’t have to keep retyping them. One of these was the one that empties the table being created before I try a new algorithm.

So, being sure this algorithm was the one (but still working on the backup source table), I emptied my destination table and started the script running. Knowing it would take a few hours, I closed firefox down and went and did something different for a while.

I came back a few hours later to check on it. I clicked on my Firefox shortcut and all my previous tabs came back – I remember thinking cool, that’ll save me some seconds. Until I looked at my data!!

My source table had less than a million records left (remember this strategy was deleting the already processed source data) but my destination table only had 100 or so records in (it should have had around 150,000).

Had I been working on the live data, this would have been a true disaster but I was calm and I almost instantly realised what had happened.

One of the tabs that Firefox thoughtfully restored was the one I used to empty my target table and so that MySQL query got executed again when I opened Firefox – doh!!

The annoying thing about this is that I didn’t set the option that makes Firefox restore my last tabs when I open it – the recent FF 5 upgrade seems to have done that (at least I’m 97+% sure I didn’t do it myself). Like many, I’ve appreciated the feature when it does it after a crash or a forced restart but I use Workspaces – and I just have a blank page as my start up page.

In the end the only disaster was that I wasted a few hours because I had to start again. Had this happened on the live data and I had to go to the site backup, I would not have been fun to be around!!

Note this might affect other browsers that are presumptious enough to set your defaults for you.

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If you’re a Gmail user or someone considering using it, you might find this article I wrote useful.

It describes how I use Gmail in a way that works for me – some of the ideas may help you if you don’t already use them.

And if you have anything to add or a different way that works for you, please add comments here.

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It’s amazing how many people won’t look twice at an honest email that says you have to look at this as a 3 year plan of consistent activity. Yet show them a glitzy sales pages that says they can be earning thousands of dollars hands free in next to no time and they’re in!

And all this against a background that unless they do something different to what they’ve been doing for the last x years, they’re going to still be in that 9-5 till retirement age – whatever that age is by the time they reach it.

There are three ingredients (at least) to becoming financially independent:

• time
• money
• effort

All three can be traded against each other depending on your circumstances but if you put enough of those 3 ingredients, in whatever proportion suits you, you stand a chance of being successful.

Notice I only said a chance.

You also need the right plan. I’ve done it myself and I’ve seen it hundreds of times already in my time as an ‘entrepeneur’ – both online and off: someone puts all their eggs in one basket, invests various amounts of those 3 ingredients, only for the opportunity to fizzle out or go bust or just disappear. And what are most people left with? Maybe some experience and a new lesson learned (or not).

If someone says you need to get in quick, they’re lying or it’s a crap opportunity. Investigate the business by all means but run a mile from that ‘sponsor’. To be fair, they’re probably just telling you what their sponsor told them.

Here’s a tongue in cheek hierarchy of businesses for making you wealthy:

• Create the next facebook
• Run a paid membership site
• Have your own mailing list
• Promote a solid MLM business
• Create a website selling things
• Promote someone elses single level business
• Promote any old crap
• Chat on social networks all day but never use the relationships you build

Note in the top 3, you own the main asset, not someone else! The business may not last for ever but at least it’s you, not someone else that determines your fate. Don’t fall for the security blanket trap of feeling safer promoting someone else’s business because “they must know what they’re doing better than I would”

If you’re devoting all your effort to promoting even the best online business, how sure are you that they will be around till at least when you retire? Or even if they’re around, that most of your downline won’t go chasing after the next new thing in a years time?

Promoting someone elses business may be many peoples rite of passage in internet marketing – it’s often a necessary part of the learning curve on the way to being financially independent. But don’t get complacent – get into a rhythm, a daily routine, automate as much as you can and then use your income and freed up time to start considering and executing your next plan.

Because while your only asset is an income from someone else’s business, you’re can never hand on heart say you’re financially free.

For example, if you’ve joined an online MLM business (I love MLM businesses but you have to know the ones to pick) then chances are you’ll start out by sending traffic to them directly. And if you do enough of that, your downline will grow, your income will grow. But there’s no security. If they disappear tomorrow, you have nothing to show for your investment (unless you were banking 25% of your income in case of that eventuality).

Knowing that your income is in the hands of the Gods should scare you into rectifying that as early as possible. Start TODAY – it’s never too soon.

If you’re new then it’s fine to get started by earning or paying for traffic and sending it to your chosen business. Get into a daily routine doing that until it’s semi-automatic. Now use the time to learn about list building.

Now, instead of directing traffic to your business, you direct it to you first – on to YOUR LIST. You can promote the business to the members of your list and keep a good relationship with the people on your list.

And if the unthinkable (inevitable?) happens, you still have one very valuable asset that will mean you can hit the ground running.

And because you can get leverage from a list, it becomes viable, practical and desirable to build more than one online business.

In my next post I’m going to talk about what makes a very very solid way to grow an online business

And no, I’m not pitching any particular program – I’m pitching a principle.

Here’s to success for all

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When you’ve read the post, giving it a ‘like’ will reveal a random free gift.

I’ve spent a lot of time recently (in bursts) trying to move away from using a desktop mail client (Outlook) to Gmail. I love Outlook and I have years of emails in there but the advantages of having my mail online, accessible from anywhere is too great to resist now.

So bit by bit, I was changing newsletter and program emails over to gmail. However, I kept most of my mailers pointed to Outlook. At first glance, that seems surprising because of the volume. But I was able to whizz through credit emails much faster from Outlook than doing it in Gmail (click on a mail, find the link, click, click back to inbox).

sidenote: Jackie O’Connor-Hagood pointed me in the direction of a Google Labs add-in that gets rid of this problem – Google Auto-advance.

Before Jackie told me about that add-in, I joined ViralInbox – it seemed the ideal solution. It has so many great features and I really love the program.

What scuppers it is that so many mailers don’t have separate contact and list addresses grrrrr. Perhaps they think it’s clever and people will have to look through the credit mails to make sure they don’t miss a system/notification/owner mail. But it frustrates me big time.

I want to use ViralInbox for my list address for mailers – I don’t really want all those mails coming into my gmail account, with all the filters I have to set up. But a stronger motivation is that I want commission/referral notifications and important messages to go to gmail because I would only have ViralInbox open when I was wanting to earn credits. Gmail is open all the time of course.

So that’s part 1 of the rant – mailer owners, you are hampering my flexibility.

Part 2 is that many programs won’t accept an email of the format name+topic@gmail.com. I know not everyone is familiar with this format but it’s incredibly useful. I could have name+personal@gmail.com and name+business@gmail.com and then it’s much easier to set up the filters in Gmail.

But mailer after mailer won’t let me use that format of address. If I have to send all mail to my main name@gmail.com, the filtering is that much messier.

But I persevered. The mailers with separate contact and list addresses were easy of course (especially if they allowed name+contact@gmail.com) – I set the contact address to gmail and the list address to my ViralInbox address.

The mailers with only a single email address I had to direct to gmail and then set up forwarding filters to send (forward) just the credit mails to ViralInbox – so far so good.

That’s when I had a mini private rant at Google because only after I’d invested considerable time in setting all this up, did I spot a note on a Google help page that informed me I could have as many forwarding addresses as I wanted but I could only have 20 forwarding filters.

So, Mailer owners – I don’t think having a single address helps you and it certainly doesn’t help us – we’re very likely to miss any important message and even your marketing emails. And please get with the times and accept name+topic@gmail.com addresses.

And Gmail – why this seemingly pointless limitation?

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Introduction

Whatever your marketing funnel, you don’t want it to have leaks. If you pour a litre of oil into a funnel while topping up your engine, you want to know that a litre of oil makes it into the engine, not half a litre.

Judging by many funnels I see, people are content to get just 1 drop in the engine from a litre bottle!!

In this post I’m going to show you a couple of free or low cost tools that you can use to plug leaks in a couple of typical scenarios.

Leaks

Every time you do something that directs a visitor to a page, you need to be thinking about leaks. If I send traffic to an affiliate page, most of that traffic will leak. In fact if I send 1000 visitors and 10 buy from the page, that’s pretty good – isn’t it? Well it’s not bad, but what about the 990 that leaked never to be seen again?

The only surefire way to have zero leaks is to only promote affiliate products from your list. That way if they go take a look, they may not buy but they’re still on your list so you can try something else in the future.

However, you’re going to be doing lots of other activities than just promoting products to your list – this is where you want to plug as many leaks as you can.

So how can you do that?

Well the first thing is that it very much depends on context so the pointers I give here should be taken away and adapted to your own funnels or pipelines.Much of this isn’t rocket science and much of what I’ll be saying is just pointing out something that may not be obvious to you right now (because you just haven’t though about it). But once it’s pointed out, you’ll slap your forehead, say doh! and never make the same mistake again.

Some Background

Just think of the number of different strategies for sending someone to a sales page to try to make a commission:

• You can email your list and ask them to visit the page
• You can send paid traffic directly to the page
• You can send traffic to a pre-sales page and from there on to the page
• You can send them via a forced opt-in
• You can send them via an optional opt-in
• You can have a passive optin on the page*
• You can create an SEO page that directs them to the sales page

And many more possibilities.

If you’re sending visitors that are not on your list then there’s the potential, no the certainty, that you’re going to lose most of those visitors. So let’s look first at two attempts to plug some leaks – the forced opt-in.

Forced Opt-In

Of course there’s no such thing – you don’t have a gun to their head. But a forced opt-in means the vistor either signs up to your list (and then gets to see the intended page) or they don’t see the intended page at all.

At one time, this was all the rage. But you’ll find now that it’s becoming increasingly unpopular with visitors. Visitors are on enough lists, they don’t want to opt-in or have to register just to see a sales page. After all, from their perspective if they don’t buy, they’ve just added themselves to another list for nothing.

However, done right it still works and can be done without annoying your visitors. For example, in the link or advert they click, explain why they should opt-in. A good example would be an advert that says ‘join my newsletter for a $20 discount on the RRP”. Now the visitor won’t get so annoyed.

It’s also reasonable and expected that someone should exchange their name and email in return for a free report. So forced opt-in has it’s place, just don’t use it unless you’re offering something in return. Don’t use it just to restrict access to the sales page.

Optional Opt-In

This is more visitor-friendly. Just ask them if they wouldn’t mind opting on to your list. Of course, the more you offer in return, the more likely they are to comply.

Optional opt-ins could be a gateway page (a page you send them to before the main sales page) that has an opt-in form and a ‘no thanks, take me to the sales page’ link.

It can also be an opt-in form on the sales page itself. This is a passive opt-in. They are totally at liberty to opt-in or not. To get good opt-in rates depends on having an opt-in form that catches their attention and a compelling reason to do something that is optional. Free gifts are the norm, be it newsletters, reports, ebooks, discounts etc.

The point is that you want to capture people that don’t buy before they’re gone forever.

Exit pop ups

Another popular optional opt-in method is to have an exit pop-up. This is a special form that appears if they attempt to leave the sales page. Sometimes these pop ups require a mouse click to dismiss them, sometimes not. Sometimes there is a fake live agent that might offer a discount. These work on newbies but not on anyone that’s been online two days or more.

Done the wrong way, these are becoming quite unpopular with visitors. If they click away from the page, they don’t always want to see another offer and it can simply antagonise them. However, if the offer is genuine and worthwhile and, most importantly, closely related to the original advert (or link and description) that got them to the sales page in the first place, this works moderately well; “ok, you don’t want to buy this gizmo, how about you grab my free ebook on how to care for your gizmo – just give me your details and I’ll send it to you.”

Hedging Your Bets

Another way to capture more of your visitors is to have a related offer on the page. This can be done in a wide variety of ways. The idea is that if one product doesn’t appeal, the other might.

However, this can be counter-productive; it really depends on a lot of factors.

Peel away ads are a very good example of this. They are so eye-catching that they can get a good response rate. The theory is that if someone is interested in the sales page, they’ll ignore the peel away ad. But if they aren’t interested, they might just peek at the peel away ad before they leave for ever. And the peel away adcould be an opt-in or lead to an opt-in.

Doing It Right

There isn’t really one right way, though a few ways would certainly be considered definitely wrong. As mentioned, don’t force them to opt-in to see a sales page without giving something in return – you opt-ins will be negligible and so will your sales.

Done right then hypothetically your sales page should do no worse than it would have done originally but of the 990 visitors that previously would have just disappeared into the ether, you’ll get another 20 opt-ins to your list.

The Tools To Achieve It

Firstly, you do need an autoresponder to plug leaks. I recommend Aweber or TrafficWave.

Secondly you need to implement your chosen method of leak-plugging, i.e. opt-in strategy.

If you own the sales page then you could consider designing an opt-in form into the page. Just grab the form code from your autoresponder and design it in.

However, there are a couple of specific scenarios I’d like to show you because they’re very powerful…

A WordPress Blog

Do a search for “wordpress optin plugin” or “wordpress autoresponder plugin” and you’ll find many possibilities, many of them free. I haven’t reviewed extensively because I already have two that I found that work well for me. Neither are free but considering the potential value of plugging your leaks, they’re very worthwhile. However, once you grasp the principle then you may be able to find free alternatives.

The first one is Digi List Builder. I really like this and it’s really easy to add to any WordPress blog.

You can actually see this in action on this blog – the opt-in form at the bottom is one aspect but there’s more. You may also have by now seen a timed pop-up. This is part of the same plugin.

The second works differently in that if someone moves their mouse out of the area of the page (like to hit back or click on a toolbar bookmark), a visitor friendly opt-in appears. I say visitor friendly because they’re not forced to click anything to carry on. You may also see this one in action if you try to move away from the page.

It’s called wpLapDance but please don’t be put off or offended by the name – it is a seriously good product. At the moment I run both because they plug leaks in complementary ways and if I had to recommend just one or the other I’d find it a tough call right now.

Pages You Don’t Own

This is something that gets me really excited because it is so easy to implement.

Suppose you really want to tweet an affiliate link. You do know you shouldn’t do that, right? It’s rarely very effective. Well the following technique can be used to plug a leak on an affiliate sales page but works best if you create your own gateway page, like a review page.

The two tools I recommend can both do what’s needed (and a whole lot more besides).

Take a look at this link to an article I wrote on the IMfaceplate site. Now ordinarily I would send a visitor to the article with an IM Faceplate URL – in fact it’s this link here. But what would they do if they like my article? If I’m lucky they’ll browse around IMFP and maybe join under me or find my twitter follow link.

But by using the first link where I use my BZ9 tools to create the opt-in bar at the bottom I’ve given the visitor an easy and clear way to sign up to my list if they like the article.

Another similar set of tools I highly recommend is Widget Quik

Both of these tools can do so much more than just this. My preferred tool right now is BZ9, particularly for  the opt-in form at the bottom of a page. But you can use either of these tools to create exit pages that can capture the visitors details and a host of other things. I’ll be creating an article in the future on each of these tools. Both tools have great demo pages so you can see what they’re capable of.

Conclusion

Most people have a leak the size of a dinner plate in their marketing funnels. Use the tools on this page to significantly plug those leaks and stop throwing so much traffic down the drain.

Things posted online are frequently not facts. But if they’re stated often enough by enough people, and particularly if people go on record as agreeing with it, they get promoted to ‘fact’ status by many. What we have to remember is that most things posted online are simply opinions. The ratio of opinions to facts online is huge – that’s my opinion, not necessarily a fact

It’s worth remembering that when you read anything online, be it a blog post, a sales page, even the news – it is potentially biased by opinion and may not be indisputably factual. Saying it’s so doesn’t make it so.

Something grabbed my attention yesterday – it was a post about a certain traffic exchange not practising what they preach and about the performance of that traffic exchange being poor.

I’m not going to link to it or even hint who wrote the post or the traffic exchange it was about because that would be singling this person out for a crime that many are guilty of – incitement!

What’s interesting about it is that I daresay anyone that read the post and the resulting comments now fully believes that the traffic exchange in question is useless. That is of course, unless they are one of the few that actually tests for themselves.

What’s also interesting is the sheer number of people that were quick to jump on the bandwagon and agree that said traffic exchange was useless. Ok, to be fair, most of them stated that their results had been poor.

But I wonder how many of those people had really tested? How many had taken the time to prepare a page that was likely to convert. How many people had considered the demographics of those surfers.

I promote quite a lot on that traffic exchange. Often I’m in a rush and I don’t fully practice what I preach – I just want to quickly send a few thousand hits to the latest affiliate program I’m considering promoting. Sometimes I get results, sometimes I may as well not have bothered. But I wouldn’t dream of judging the traffic exchange to be the major factor in my results when I do that.

But I have a campaign that I run regularly on that traffic exchange that signs people up to one of my lists. It’s been tested, tweaked and it does put into practice what I preach. It’s tracked and it works!

That’s part of the story. The other part is that if anyone is ever debating the merits of a particular traffic exchange, I’m in a better position than most to investigate – I own VitalViralPro and that tracks conversions on many campaigns on hundreds of traffic exchanges – without me having to lift a finger.

So when those stats say that this particular traffic exchange is certainly in the top 20 for conversions, I realise that I don’t give a monkeys what anyone says about the traffic exchange, I know it works and it’s far from being as bad as the post and the sheeple commenting make out.

My issue is this: would the people commenting be prepared to go on record and show us what they promoted and the tracking results they got?

Most wouldn’t and here’s why: many people say they track but they don’t. They preach that you should because they know that. But tracking takes effort and the reality is, many people don’t practice what they preach. Secondly, many people promote things that don’t stand a chance of converting well.

How do I know this? In the case of the people responding to the blog post, I don’t. I’m wagering with no evidence whatsoever and I’m extrapolating from my experience with the things I see promoted on traffic exchanges.

But the only facts someone could state are along the lines of “I promoted this page for 10,000 hits and I got 3 signups” – that’s a fact.

If a cross section of such pages were presented as facts, they were reasonable pages and they all got poor results, then it starts to look like there may be a problem with that traffic exchange.

But the evidence presented was (in my opinion) pure hearsay – at least that’s how I have to read it because there was not one single piece of hard evidence.

Nevertheless, in the minds of all those people reading the post, the traffic exchange is worthless. All it took was one vague post, a load of sheeple to say they agree and it’s suddenly a fact – the exchange is worthless.

I have some news that may shock some of you, certainly surprise you I’m sure…

But before I completely spill the beans, there are a few things I’d like to say…

It’s been great knowing you all, I’ll miss you all…sob sob sob

Oops, wrong piece of paper – that was from my goodbye speech when I gave up my day job 2 and a half years ago to dedicate my time to VitalViralPro. And I’m happy to say, I never looked back!!

Everyone that knows me well knows that I’m passionate about what I do and passionate about helping people succeed. And I’m deeply passionate about VitalViralPro.

I’ve reared it from birth, it’s had bad times, sad times, it’s gone through big changes and it’s survived it all and is now bigger and better than ever before and thriving!! And apart from my bit, that’s all down to YOU – my loyal members – and I thank you for hugely for helping make VitalViralPro what it’s become today.

So what’s the news?

VitalViralPro is joining forces with another site and I am *SO* excited about it, I just can’t wait to get down to business and start working on all the things we plan to do together…

It opens up a huge window of opportunity and I believe it to be definitely one of those situations where 1 + 1 = 5.

The site I’ve partnered with could be seen as a competitor – we already do some very similar things (we also do some very different things and cater to slightly different markets).

Most importantly, we (the other owner and I) both have the same philosophies: we both care passionately about our members above anything else and about helping those members succeed. It’s what makes both of us tick and it’s what led to this being an easy and natural decision for us to take.

So while we might have been friendly ‘competitors’ before, by joining like this we just become bigger and better, still with the same passions and ideals as we had separately but with a much greater ability to do things that benefit you !!!!

This is not a merging into one situation – both sites will keep their identity and their differences. But we’ll be able to combine in key areas to bring something far more powerful than
either site could alone.

The site I’ve been holding back is Affiliate Funnel. Some of you may have seen that recently Jon Olson and Paul Kinder effectively did a kind of swap between a couple of businesses they owned such that Paul became the exclusive owner of Affiliate Funnel.

Well this latest deal means that Affiliate Funnel gets my programming and tracking skills and VitalViralPro gets Pauls marketing skills and the value of his huge circle of influence
and between us, we make both programs stronger than they ever could be alone and as competitors.

Our plans are not finalized yet – we’re still reeling from even a first ‘meeting of the minds’ to share all the ideas we each had individually before we partnered up – and boy are there some ideas!!

You’ll be hearing a lot more about all of that soon…

In the meantime, it’ll be business as usual at both sites for a few days but login regularly ’cause there’s gonna be stuff happening regularly !!

We have a few things we both want to get in place quickly and then there’ll be a steady succession of smaller jumps as we add in our plans over the next 12 months and beyond.

Watch this space.

People often ask me for advice on ‘how to succeed’…

I was asked just a little while ago and I don’t have stock answers generally but this time I started thinking about how you could boil success down into a paragraph or two. I know plenty of people do this online, I must have seen zillions myself over the years. So I thought I’d do mine without ‘cheating’ and using any search engines or other peoples’ words generally.

And so, as with many other things you find online, there is no claimed originality or unique insight. Just that sometimes one can hear something from a particular person, said in a particular way and it just clicks where hearing (or reading) it countless times from others, it didn’t. Maybe we just weren’t ready to hear it before.

So here goes. Let’s hope my particular way of saying the same as many others will have said before me, will somehow help you!!

Take action early. Don’t worry about understanding everything before you start. Provided you use common sense, you’re unlikely to do much harm. But action is the best teacher, and learning by watching is second best. Reading or hearing about something is not generally a great way to learn unless you follow what you’re reading and do it alongside.

‘Master’ one skill at a time. I don’t mean don’t move on until you’re perfect. But if you’re learning about submitting articles, practice until you know all the steps and could write and submit an article any time you needed to. If you don’t do that and you go off learning something else, there’s a high chance you’ll have to start right at the beginning again when you come to submit your next article.

Aim to fail as quickly as possible. We learn from mistakes very well. I’m not saying make them deliberately but the point once again is rather than worry about getting 100% prepared before you start (and then find something still goes wrong!), do something as soon as you think you’re close. Chances are that doing it will reveal bigger ‘holes’ than the ones you were fretting over before you did it so you can now sort those out.

If something works and it’s a useful skill, make sure you do it regularly enough that you don’t need to start over if you need to do it again. And if something didn’t work as well as you hoped, don’t give up right away but don’t blindly do it again. At the very least review what happened and if you think it was just unlucky, by all means try again. But don’t do something over and over that doesn’t work over and over!

Make notes and think about what other people you come across are doing. Try to understand their ‘business model’. If you sign up for something for example, make a note of all the steps you go through. If you’ve got reason to believe they’re successful then…

copy copy copy copy copy

Copy what successful people are doing. Learn from successful people.

I don’t mind being asked how to be successful, even though it’s a bit vague. But don’t expect to be handed the answer – there isn’t one.

Soak up information but don’t overdo it. Get a feeling for what you want to do, the skills you’ll need and focus on those and try not to get distracted into learning things that won’t help you right now. But devote 10% of your time perhaps to ‘keeping an eye on’ what’s going on in the world.

Making money online is easy. Anyone can do it. Making money consistently and in sufficient quantity to be worthwhile is much harder and don’t believe a single website that says it will be quick or it won’t need effort on your part.

Build a list. This is the most ignored piece of advice online and must have cost hundreds of thousands of wannabe marketers, millions of dollars.

The only other ways to build a consistent income without a list are to run a membership site and get subscription type incomes or to find a good program with a worthwhile product and a good multi-level pay plan and promote it almost to the exclusion of everything else until you’re making the money you want.

Now why are those last couple of items as close to a guarantee of success as you’ll get?

Because they’re all incremental.

If you have a list, all your effort will grow your list, you don’t start each day with an empty list, you start from where you got to the previous day

If you have a membership site, all your effort will get you more members (generally) and that means more paying members and more income.

If you have a good multilevel business with a product people need and want, each time you refer a new member to your team, you’re growing.

Do you see the pattern and the similarity there? Compare that with trying to make affiliate sales without having a list. Or promoting on traffic exchanges without building a list. Or selling things on ebay. Or..Or..Or..

So that’s my advice for what it’s worth. Take action, ‘master’ core skills and do things that are incremental and learn what residual income is all about.

I posted an interesting article on the VitalViralPro blog about how small improvements in a chain of processes can create a significant and surprising difference…

What are you doing online?

Do you know? Do you have a plan? Have you broken that plan down into steps so that every day you wake up, you know pretty well what you need to do next to move closer to your goals?

Stephen Covey, a writer I highly recommend says (in so many words):

if you’re going to climb a ladder, make sure it’s leaning against the right wall !

If that isn’t good, simple advice, I don’t know what is! Just because we keep ‘doing things’ doesn’t mean we’re getting any closer to our goal. We need to be doing the right things – our ladder needs to be against the right wall.

As well as being against the right wall, it needs to be on solid ground. So to keep the analogy going, let’s say you’ve found the right wall but the ground is like a swamp, no way can you put a ladder down there and begin to climb.

No-one can really advise you what the right wall is – they can only make suggestions for you to explore. But What I can do, through the experience of having helped many people do the same, is help you build a solid base on which you can put your ladder.

And this solid base is portable. If you start using it to climb one wall and that wall falls down or you just decide it’s not the right wall, you can move your base to a new wall !!

If you take all that on board and trust me to help you build the base, you’ll have a much better chance of climbing the right wall once you find it.

You probably would be right to expect to have to put your ladder against several different walls before you find the one that’s right for you. If you have to build a new base each time you try a different wall, that’s going to slow you down considerably.

But if you’ve built a solid base, one that you can move from wall to wall, you can start climbing any given wall far quicker – and discover whether or not it’s the right wall much quicker.

So What Is This Base?

The base is a steady supply of eyeballs – traffic and readers – simple as that.

What I can show you is how to have traffic and readers on tap. If I found a business today that looked interesting, I could send 10,000 hits to it in a matter of hours as a test. And if it looked promising, I could then send 100,000 hits in the next 24 hours – all without dipping into my pocket to buy traffic.

I can do this because I’ve built a high quality, solid and portable base which I can put against any wall and begin to climb immediately!! And I will show you how to do the same, if you’ll give me enough attention.

The difference between traffic and readers

Traffic to your page (I’m just going to use page to refer to your offer) can come from many sources – traffic exchanges, pay-per-click adverts, backlinks to identify but a few. And that traffic can be highly targeted to poorly targeted. Of course, ideally we want targeted traffic – the more targeted, the more people will be interested in our offer. But traffic often has limited time, limited attention span and once they’ve moved on, they’ve gone. You have no means of follow up.

Readers are the people that you can mail now and then. They are people that have signed up to be on one or more of your lists. Readers can be highly or poorly targeted or anywhere in between too but they tend to have a longer attention span and you can follow them up in the future – if the time wasn’t right now, maybe it will be next month, or in 3 months or a year. You have that option.

If you have a mailing list, it’s easy to see that you have readers on tap. Provided the offer is relevant to your readers, you can email them at any time and instantly show your message, your opportunity, your product to all those people in an hour. But building a list takes time and patience and not everyone wants to do that – often because they’re not confident that they could regularly find interesting things to mail about – remember that you need to send at least three times as many information only mails as mails that try to ‘sell’ something to keep credibility with your readers.

If you want traffic on tap (without having to pay for it) then that’s more of a challenge but traffic exchanges provide a pretty good way to achieve it. You can earn credits yourself and hold them on account for when you need them. But that’s not the real power…

You see, surfing to earn credits is like paid work – you surf, you earn credits. If you want more credits, you have to surf.

The real power comes when you get referrals in the traffic exchanges because then you start to get free credits!!

How? Well most traffic exchanges reward you for getting referrals and the way they reward you is to give you a bonus of typically 10% of the credits your direct referrals earn in a given month.

Now you are getting residual credits – just like residual income: credits each month that you don’t have to surf for!!

And this is getting closer to the message I’m trying to get across. The starting point for building your base is getting residual credits, residual traffic. Once you start to do that, you can have traffic on tap for anything you want to promote.

How To Build Referrals

So hopefully you understand that the key to this is getting traffic exchange referrals. But how do you do that. Well hopefully you already know that – you get leverage by using a downline builder. Using traffic exchanges without using a downline builder is madness.

But which of the many downline builders?

The one that gives you the most leverage of course!

Until relatively recently there were three downline builders and you could have used any one of them and got similar results. They each had features the others didn’t and it would be personal preference which one you used. In addition, there are a myriad of programs (including virtually every traffic exchange) with downline builders attached – don’t even consider using these as your primary downline builder, you will get very, very poor results!

And the owners of any of those 3 would probably give you the same advice:

1. Pick one as your master downline builder and promote it to the exclusion of others – I’ll come on to why that is so important
2. Use your master one to join programs through – all other downline builders are secondary – that is you fill in your IDs in all of them but you get your ID by joining through your master downline builder and you must encourage your downline to do the same for maximum results – again, I’ll explain why shortly
3. Spend at least 10% of your advertising budget promoting your master downline builder

However, VitalViralPro now has a totally unique advantage (as well as some other unique features) and while it would be good for me to make this unbiased, I can’t because I would be doing you a disservice to ignore this huge advantage.

Generally, downline builders give you leverage for two main reasons:

• You promote one program and thereby your referrals are presented with your referral links for multiple programs – you’ve promoted e.g. 20 programs for the cost of promoting just one.
• ID flow through – this means if one of your referrals in the downline builder doesn’t join one of the programs, his or her next referral to the DLB will see your affiliate link

Now I’m going to explain why VitalViralPro should be your downline builder of choice. Don’t take my word for it though, as you always should, do your own research – think about it!

Most traffic exchanges are single level. Likewise, most downline builders are really also single level – a fact conveniently glossed over by advocates, including myself…

Let’s deal with traffic exchanges. They for the most part just are single level. You get (e.g.) 10% credits for your direct referrals and ZERO for any indirect referrals. Cut and dry.

What about downline builders? Well, you can benefit from ID flow through meaning you might introduce Joe as your DLB referral and he doesn’t fill in IDs in all the programs. When Joe brings in referrals, he is showing your affiliate link to his referrals (for any programs he didn’t enter an ID), so you may pick up some indirect referrals. In reality, most people that are active enough to get referrals are also savvy enough to make sure they join all the programs within and have their IDs filled in – they don’t want to lose any referrals. The ones who don’t bother to fill IDs or join the programs are the ones that typically aren’t so active anyway.

So ID flow through is a good sales point but is not as valuable as it might seem – though never join a DLB that didn’t have it !! Every little helps!!

Now, this is where I will either lose you in the explanation or make you have an ‘ahaah’ moment and become a lifelong VitalViralPro fan

VitalViralPro has done something remarkable. It has made it possible to benefit (i.e. gain credits/traffic from):

• members of traffic exchanges that are NOT your direct referrals
• members of VitalViralPro that are NOT your direct referrals, even if your direct referrals have filled in all their IDs

How does it do this?

VitalViralPro is unique in that it allows members to upgrade (i.e. have access to more features) by paying in traffic instead of dollars!! The traffic collected as ‘payment in kind’ for the upgrade is given to eligible upline members, mostly to paying members.

This is probably hard for you to get your head around easily so let me try to explain how it works…

Let’s say you are a premium member. And you introduce Betty, Betty is not interested in upgrading so she remains free. Betty introduces Doris who also remains free. But Doris introduced Steve – and Steve takes a gold membership – meaning it costs him no money but he pays in kind – with traffic.

He now is required to send 1000 hits a month to VitalViralPro to pay for his membership.

And this is the key point…

VitalViralPro keeps some of that traffic but up to 80% is passed upline, mostly to the first upline premium member- in this instance 10% goes to Doris (as the sponsor) and 50% goes to you!!

You now gets 500 hits a month from someone 3 levels down in your downline!!!!!

And where does that traffic come from? It comes from any of the 40 top traffic exchanges, whether you’re a member of those traffic exchanges or not and whether that person (Steve) is in your downline in those traffic exchanges or not!!

You should be excited by that, provided you’ve already had the ‘ahaah’ moment.

There’s one more bit I need to explain though.

For reasons I won’t go into (but are in your best interests for traffic building), you have no control over where those free hits are sent – they are sent to your VitalViralPro affiliate link and will build your VitalViralPro direct referrals. That leads to more traffic exchange direct referrals for you and free credits that are truly yours – i.e. you can do what you want with those credits

I have to stress, no other program in the world will do this for you. So which is going to be your primary downline builder?

VitalViralPro has become even more VIRAL and simply has to be your preferred downline builder. But as I say, do your own research, don’t just take my biased word for it

Troy

PS of course, VVP is also the only DLB that can track 3rd party pages too – reason enough on its own to prefer VVP