Now I realise that not everyone has an email list. I don’t have one myself other than the members of WWT, GimmeHits and HardRockHits. And to be honest, I’ve never thought of these members as a ‘list’. Nobody joined any of the SOHO Internet traffic exchanges to be bombarded with get rich quick schemes. Heck, I’d cancel my own membership if I started treating the members as a ‘list’.
Still, if I do find something that is really good value or particularly useful then I’ll send an email to the members to let them know. I follow two very simple rules though and it struck me that it might be worth mentioning them.

1. I never recommend or endorse any product or service that I haven’t used myself. I often see emails from people who are very obviously just sending out email after email, product after product, with no real interest or knowledge of the products they are trying to sell.

2. Before I promote anything it has to excite me! Seriously. If I use a product or service and it doesn’t stand out from the crowd, get my heart pumping, make me say ‘WOW’ … then I’m not going to recommend it. There are thousands of mediocre, okay, same-as-the-rest products out there. Every now and then I see something that I think is a ‘killer application’ or it stands head and shoulders above the other products or services in its class. Now that’s something worth telling people about.

Just like the next guy or girl, I like to make money. But if I’m going to direct anyone to an affiliate link then the product or service has to be something that people will thank me for alerting them to.

Having said all that, here’s the salesy bit . Well, not so much a salesy bit as a couple of products I’m using that make me feel all warm and fuzzy .

Domain Dashboard – I use domain dashboard EVERY day. Domain Dashboard is a SEO and management tool (or should I say a swiss army knife!) for CPanel websites. I don’t often label windows programs as ‘killer applications’ but Domain Dashboard is one of those tools that very quickly becomes ‘essential’. I use it to manage and keep track of around 60 or 70 websites. There’s a demo video on the website – I’m sure you’ll be as excited as I was when you see what Domain Dashboard can do!

Site Vault – I don’t know if it’s because of my background as a programmer and tech head (since 1980!) but I’ve never trusted others to back up my web files and databases. I searched over a period of months, on and off, for a good backup solution for my websites. About a month or so ago I found Site Vault. Site Vault allows me to define web sites (with ftp) and databases and then tie them together in a backup. It is by far the easiest to use backup program for any web site and gives me complete peace of mind knowing that I can see the backup right here on my hard drive at any time. I’m going to be doing a tutorial video on this one soon as I think it is just such a great backup application for web sites that I want to make it accessable to anyone regardless of their technical knowledge. It isn’t all that difficult to set the backups up, but for someone who has never done this type of thing, a lack of knowledge can be a barrier to having the confidence to try an application like Site Vault.

Popularity: 18% [?]

There’s a new manual traffic exchange launching on Feb.3 that is sure to be amongst the more successful exchanges for TE surfers. It is called Traffic Heroes and the owner is Rich Morris. Many of you may already know Rich … he’s been around TEs for as long as TEs have been around .

If you are lucky enough to sign up before Feb.3 you will have a chance to promote Traffic Heroes and build your downline before everyone jumps on the bandwagon. If Feb 3 has passed by the time you read this I would strongly recommend that you make Traffic Heroes one of your regular surf sites. It has some great features AND you can earn from 10-50% on sales to your first level referrals. Here’s the link:

Traffic Man To The Rescue!

Popularity: 20% [?]

Well, another year has gone by quick as a flash. They just seem to go by faster and faster. I hope you had an enjoyable break (if you managed to take a few days off). I took it a little easy over the week between Christmas and New Year.

I’d like to welcome all our new members. It’s been a little longer than usual between newsletters but I can assure you there has been plenty going on. I added in the new downline mailer a few weeks ago, so please let me know if it is working for you.

I’d like to talk a little about list building this time. If you ask anyone who has used traffic exchanges for a reasonable amount of time you will find that they will generally say that list building is one of the most effective uses for traffic exchanges. I struggled for months and months trying to figure out exactly what it was I had to do to begin building a list. I also struggled with the ‘what for’ question. What I mean is that you don’t just go and build a list just for the sake of having one. You need to be able to provide some useful information and if you are going to sell products on your list you really should be familiar with the product(s) yourself. I’ve been on a lot of lists over the past few years and I’d say maybe twenty or thirty percent of list owners have a genuine interest in providing information to help build your business and the other seventy to eighty percent are only interested in squeezing as much money out of the list that they can.

Don’t get me wrong … anyone who builds a mailing list builds it with the intention of making money but just as it is in offline business there are people who you want to deal with and people who you don’t, based mostly on how they approach you with their sales pitch. There are sales people who take the time to ensure that the products they are selling are top quality and go out of their way to assist you. There are others that simply look at the profit and sell the product that makes them the most money, regardless of whether the product is good quality or not.

Anyway, getting back to the ‘how’ … the most useful resource I found for building lists is Jimmy Brown’s List And Traffic. I’m not the only one either … every time the subject of list building comes up at the Warrior Forums, List And Traffic is the most suggested resource. It’s not at all costly either at $10 per month. The reason I brought this up now is because the members area contains all of Jimmy’s reports and audios from previous months. From February 1 he is removing them and there will only be the current month’s report. This is partly due to ‘information overload’ .. there’s a lot of info in there, and partly due to people subscribing once every few months to grab the reports and then unsubscribing again which is a little unfair to the loyal members, particularly when it’s only 10 bucks per month. If you join now you will be able to download the material he has in there before it is removed. Please, don’t just subscribe for a month to get the extra info … if you stick around I’m sure you will find the site very useful for your list and traffic building.

If you are interested in finding out more and/or joining head on over to List And Traffic and have a listen to the audio there.

Testimonials

My call for testimonials yielded the grand total of …. drum roll ….. none! I guess it wasn’t a good time to ask people to be writing testimonials just before the Christmas break so I’ll ask again . If you would like to write a few nice words about WhirlwindTraffic that would be great. Your testimonial will be displayed in a rotating area on the WWT homepage. The easiest way is to send me a ‘Contact Request’ while you’re logged in. You can also let me know the URL of your site and the URL of a picture if you would like those included.

Popularity: 20% [?]

During the past few months I’ve been working on some new sites. One of these sites is closely related to my new years resolution. That resolution is to focus on just a few things this year. The new sites are:

• Membership-Sites.com
• HotMarketingSites.com

Membership-Sites.com is a directory of membership sites for internet marketers. t lists all manner of resell, e-book, PLR, adsense, traffic, list, downline building and many more sites. You can rate each site and write comments as well. The site also has a blog where I announce any new sites that are added and review sites.

HotMarketingSites is also a directory for internet marketers. It doesn’t list membership sites though. The listings at HotMarketingSites.com are all useful resources for internet marketers. These include things like free software, links to sites that assist you to make your own productgs, copy writing resources, research tools an more. I still have some work to do on the appearance of HotMarketingSites.com but that doesn’t amke the links any less useful!

Popularity: 19% [?]