I’ve just opened the Pre-Launch of the Social Marketing Gifts JV.

You are invited to join us as a Contributor and add a couple hundred new subscribers to your list.

Click Here To Signup

For those of you who don’t know what a Giveaway Event is, let me try to explain it in a few words.

A giveaway event is basically a place where several internet marketers create a Team to add new subscribers to their lists.

Every marketer enters a Free Gift into the giveaway event that people can access once the giveaway event opens.

Also, every marketer promotes the giveaway event, that’s how people find their way to the event.

The Social Marketing giveaway event is currently in Pre-Launch, that’s the phase when all the internet marketers signup and add their gifts.

If you read this, you are invited to join us in this Pre-Launch phase.

Be aware that this is not a free-ride… you’ll either have to promote the event or you can upgrade your account to add gifts (and other stuff like banners, special offers and your profile with links to your blog, website, twitter and facebook).

Are you ready to join the Team?

Then signup now, Click Here

I’ll See You Inside!

Guido Nussbaum

PS. Contributors of this event get Early Access to Giveaway Manager 3!

Hey Guys,

it’s been already 2 days ago that I had my first wake-boarding experience at a lake near Cologne and all my muscles are still sored. So, I can’t do sports besides watching the Germany vs. Spain football match, which we unfortunately lost. So no party either today… and I got time to write this blog post.

First of all I want to say Thanks to everybody who has commented on my last post. It was an adventure moving my lists to a new autoresponder company but finally the guys from GVO were very helpful.

I’m currently using 2 Autoresponders as I had already switched the signup forms on my sites to Traffic Wave. Well… I guess that gives me a chance to compare the delivery and signup rates of those 2 autoresponders.

Alright, now that I got this autoresponder problem solved it’s time to focus on other things… things that also have to do with Listbuilding.

Let’s talk about Giveaway Events and the Giveaway Manager 3 software.

Yes, it’s coming!

In one of my previous blog posts I have asked you whether to release the Giveaway Manager 3 software or not. First of all I want to thank you for your comments and opinions, they have helped me to come to a conclusion.

I came to the conclusion that those people who want to run their own giveaway events will do so no matter if I release the software or not. So the argument of flooding the market with new events is only half-true as there are other giveaway event scripts out there.

Second, I came to the conclusion that I won’t sell the software for a one time price. It will be released in combination with a membershipsite, this will be kind of a Master Mind Community. This has 2 advantages: First of all you won’t have to hand out a huge amount of money to start your first event… this way you’ll be in profit much faster. Second, I can concentrate on coaching, support and programming new updates instead of having to keep selling more pieces of the software.

The great thing for you is, that the monthly membership will be very affordable, in fact it will be much lower than most coaching clubs where you just get the coaching but no software… and it will be limited to just 100 people, so that I can even do personal support.

The software is ready and some people who got early access are already running the first events on the Giveaway Manager 3 software. You can find these events at my Giveaway Listing Website. Signup as a contributor for these events to get a feeling of the quality of this software.

Currently I’m recording the installation, setup and promotion of my upcoming Social Marketing Gifts giveaway event for the GM 3 community. Contributors of this event get Early Access to Giveaway Manager 3. The Social Marketing Gifts event will go into Pre-Launch next week, July 13th. I’ll send out an invitation and post it on the blog, so you don’t miss it.

Hey guys,

today I have a very sad story to share… My Aweber Account was suspended and closed and I don’t like to say this… but your account might be at risk as well.

Here is what happened:

I’ve received a support request from one of my customers at Traffic Witch. I’ve pasted the important part of that support request below.

————————
Aweber doesn’t allow me to log in:

Sorry, the account you tried to access is currently unavailable from your IP because of too many requests. If you are the owner of this account, please contact help[at]aweber.com for assistance. Please reference “Web Form Throttle: trafficwitch **ip address removed**” in your support ticket.

Frankly, I’m tired of aweber. They cause too much trouble.
————————

I contacted the Aweber Live Support. I gave them this error message, the Traffic Witch website URL and my Aweber account login as they requested that. It took them a few minutes and then they replied to me that I was violating their Terms Of Service the way I’ve integrated the Aweber form at Traffic Witch.

Well, I told them that this is how all membershipsite scripts integrate Aweber. I haven’t seen any membershipsite script that didn’t do it that way and I’ve tested many of them.

The Aweber Support people didn’t care about other websites and gave me a deadline to remove the Aweber form from Traffic Witch. I was shocked and even speaking to a Supervisor didn’t solve the problem, they say it’s against their TOS to integrate the Aweber form in the php code and pass the subscriber data to Aweber after entering the subscriber data in the membershipsite script database first. I would have to use some kind of Email Parser to do the integration they say.

Well, I took action quickly and switched the form integration of my Traffic Witch site to another autoresponder company before the Aweber Deadline was over. Seems that this didn’t matter… they closed my account without a further warning. They didn’t even ask if I’ve removed the form.

So when I tried to login to Aweber today, this is what I saw:

So, if you are using a membershipsite script that integrates Aweber in the PHP code (and I don’t know of any that do it differently), then you might most likely be violating their TOS and your account could be suspended without any further notice. Your subscribers could be completely gone if you don’t do backups!

Normally I’d suggest you go and contact their support to make sure you are not violating their TOS… but as you can see in my example, exactly this move could get your account closed.

By the way, I’m not the only one that got his Aweber account suspended. Several fellow Traffic Exchange owners had to move to a new autoresponder company as well and some of the big names in the internet marketing industry as well, including Frank Bauer who wrote about this on his blog.

So, make sure you don’t integrate Aweber with any membershipsite script (unless you use their own email parsers)… otherwise you might either get your account suspended or you might run into the problem that your subscribers can’t click on your links due to too many IP requests (don’t ask me how too many requests can be happen, I’m speachless).

Anyways, now I’m a bit out of email business, at least for a while until I’ve imported my lists into a new autoresponder company… which is hopefully soon, so that I can contact my subscribers again. I’ll keep you updated on how I solve this problem.

Let me know what you think and post your comment below.

Guido Nussbaum

Hey Guys,

First of all a Big Thank You to everybody who has supported the Easter JV 2010.

This year’s Easter JV was very special as we tested several new things. The great part about this is that all of these new features helped to make the Easter JV 2010 one of the most successful events ever.

The new Twitter Box was used by at least 10% of our contributors. You can check on Twitter how many tweets were posted if you simply search for the easter jv domain name.

The new Viral Friend Inviter was hopefully a useful tool as well. Unfortunately there is no way that I can track the usage of this tool… or at least I didn’t find a way yet on how to do this.

One big change that we did this year was to only show 1 One Time Offer to member signups. We’ve done this because in past events the data has shown that many member signups stopped the signups process after the first or second OTO when we showed 3 of them. So the switch to only 1 OTO has resulted in a higher signup rate to the gifts listed inside the members area. This was also compared to the numbers from past events.

The last big change that we did this year was adding the Short Term Referral Contests. This was probably the best thing I’ve ever done to a giveaway event because it helped to keep the traffic up over the whole period of the event.

By the way… did somebody say Giveaway Events Are Dead?

I’ve taken a screenshot of the evolution of the giveaway events that I ran. Have a look at the picture below.

Giveaway Event Evolution (opens in new window)

Now that Giveaway Events are getting more and more popular we automatically attract more and more cheaters and people who try to take advantage of our events.

This year it was extreme and chasing cheaters has cost me alot of nerves and time. Unfortunately there is no way to get rid of this problem through security features in the script… cheaters will always find a way no matter if we exclude IP addresses or setup other security barriers. So my strategy is to let them do and to collect data in the database. This way I was able to search for certain patterns to find and suspend the cheaters. But I’m honestly not sure if I caught all.

Alright, let’s get to the fun part of the Easter JV 2010… The Numbers.

- 416 Gifts listed

- Over 9000 Signups

- Over $17,000 in Sales Volume

- Over $9,000 in Commissions and Contest Prizes

Below you can see the winners of our Main Referral Contest. As we already mentioned in our emails, we had to place some restrictions on this Main Referral Contest. We didn’t want to place a certain upgrade rate percentage as a barrier or anything alike, so we chose the simple rule that those who want to qualify for the Main Referral Contest prizes must have at least made some commissions from upgrades or special offer sales or that their contributor signups add gifts themselves to the event or promote the event themselves. Basically we wanted to see some kind of action from the signups.

Some contributors did not qualify for the prices. That does not mean that these people did anything wrong. Below are the final results and the cash prizes have already been paid out. Congratulations to our winners!

Position 1: $400 Abhishek Agarwal

Position 2: $300 Mawardee A.

Position 3: $150 Damian Leon

Position 4: $100 Zech Smith

Position 5: $50 Josh Abbott

A Big Thank You goes to the contributor who had by far the most upgrades, Gary Bacchetti (The Gentle Mentor). There is a reason why Gary has such a high upgrade rate: He teaches people internet marketing, step by step on his computer screen… so people trust and follow him. You can access his training for free, click here (opens in new window)

Alright, today we officially close the Easter JV 2010 but we keep the doors open a bit longer so that the rest-traffic does not get wasted. All gifts will stay listed inside the members area so that current members can still signup for them. The Top 10 gifts stay on our Outside Gifts Listing Page so that people can signup for these throughout the whole year.

Thanks again for supporting the Easter JV 2010!

Feel free to post your comments, suggestions etc. below.

Guido Nussbaum

It’s been a while since I’ve updated this blog. The last couple of weeks I’ve been really busy. We launched the Viral Traffic Bar website that runs on the MTB script and I had to fight with several bugs that were in the script. Now the Viral Traffic Bar website runs smoothly and it grows very fast.

Now that we are done with the Viral Traffic Bar launch it’s already time to get prepared for the Easter Giveaway that we run every year. This year I’ve teamed up with Brad Smith again, the guy who started the very first Easter Giveaway.

Many of you know that I’m still programming and testing the Giveaway Manager 3 software. We’ve used the software for my past 5 giveaway events and steadily improved it. It’s not a secret that the signup rates and conversions are way better than with other giveaway event software. This comes from an integrated tracking feature that no other software on the market has. The software is also the first one that can show up to 3 One Time Offers in a row (and we can switch it to show only 2 or 1 or even no One Time Offers, easily through the Admin area).

Many of you have seen the new Points System that only the Giveaway Manager 3 software uses and many of you have seen the new Web 2.0 Integration with Profiles and links to Twitter, Facebook, your Blog and your Website. What you haven’t seen yet are the new features that I’ve integrated this week into Giveaway Manager 3. These are again very new features that no other software out there has and you’ll see these new features the first time at… yes you guessed it right… at the Easter Giveaway 2010.

We plan to open the doors for contributors on March 9th, so watch out for our emails and blog posts that announce the opening for contributors.

Now, some of you might be wondering: “When will Guido finally release the Giveaway Manager 3 to the public?”.

Well, to be honest, I’ve been thinking a long time about this and many times I came to the conclusion that I shouldn’t release it at all. That’s because with this software I have a unique standpoint in this industry… my events are different than other people’s events. With each giveaway event that I run I make a profit of between $5000 and $15000 and that is only the direct profit from the event… affiliate commissions from banner ads or the income that I make from the new list subscribers are not included.

So tell me, would you release this software… and if you would, how much would you charge for it?

But that’s not all, there is another problem: How many copies of the software would you release?

See, most people who buy a giveaway software run a giveaway event that is targeted to the Internet Marketing crowd. How many Niche giveaway events did we see?

So if I release 500 copies of the Giveaway Manager 3, the market would be flooded with giveaway events.

I guess you can see the problem… Post a comment below and let me know what you think I should do because I haven’t made a decision yet.

Have a great day!

Guido Nussbaum

Hey guys,

in my last post I promised some insights into my business and what I meant by saying that I’ll concentrate on the 20% of actions that have resulted in 80% of my profits.

Now, what does that have to do with listbuilding?

Well, first of all 80% of my profits came and still come from my lists… or from other people’s lists (stop and think!)

There, I just gave you one of the biggest secrets to online success… and I’m happy to repeat it for those who didn’t get it:  You must get other marketers to promote your offers through their lists… so that you get their subscribers onto your list.

Now, don’t get me wrong… you don’t go out there and pump the subscribers of other marketers over to your list… this happens vise versa… you must also promote their products to your list.

That’s called a JV (Joint Venture).

Now, to setup these kind of JV’s you need 2 things:

1.) Your own product or service

2.) Some subscribers on your list to start out

The big problem here is that in most cases you’ll first have to promote other marketers products to your list. You know, give before you shall receive… that’s how it works unless you have a big name.

So your first step towards online success must be to create your own product or service. The second step is to setup a listbuilding system with your product or service. Then you promote your system on your own to get some subscribers on your list.

Once you have a couple hundred people on your list you can start to do JV’s with other marketers. Don’t try to approach the big marketers with your small list… start with marketers who have lists that are about the same size of yours and then work your way up to the big list and to the big marketers.

But wait… that’s only half of the truth!

You can actually create products or services that other marketers promote to their lists without you promoting back for them.

Still, you need to give them something back in return and that can be handled automatically through your product or service.

Let me give you an example: Many people promote my website Traffic Witch to their lists and I don’t have to promote their offer to my lists… that’s because they get free traffic if they signup new members for Traffic Witch… this all happens automatically without me doing anything.

On February 2nd you can see something like this happening again when I launch my next website (more about that later this week).

Let’s call these sites “Viral Membershipsites”.

Another related technique is: Running your own Giveaway Event.

When running your own Giveaway Event other marketers promote it to their lists without you promoting back for them… that’s because they get signups to their list automatically by promoting your Giveaway Event.

I guess most of you know how a Giveaway Event works, for those who don’t, simply signup for such an event as a Contributor and you’ll find out how it works.

OK, so let me resume the above said in one sentence:

“My two most successful strategies for building my list are: Running my own Giveaway events and running my own Viral Membershipsites.”

These 2 techniques are the 20% of action that brought in 80% of my 50,000 subscribers.

Now, I would really like to go more into detail about these techniques but I’d have to write a complete book to tell you everything.

You’ll get more information about both techniques in future blog posts here.

Maybe you have experienced similar results in your listbuilding efforts… leave us a comment and tell us what you think about listbuilding and how you do it.

To Your Success,

Guido Nussbaum

Hey Guys,

with this Blog Post I want to give you an overview on what I’m currently doing and what you can expect from me in 2010.

After working like a maniac for the last 30 months it’s time to change the way I’m doing business. I regard the last 30 months as my business start-up period and like it is with every business, you have to put a lot of time into it at the beginning.

You might have heared about the Pareto Principle, also known as the 80-20 rule. It states that roughly 80% of your success comes from 20% of your actions. That means 80% of the work that I’ve done in the last 30 months must have been unprofitable. And looking back, I have to admit that it’s true.

I have about 50 domains and only about 10 of them are profitable… I’ve tested literally hundreds of ways to get website traffic and only a few are worth the money or time you have to invest to get the traffic… I’ve tried several “business models” and only a few worked for me… and the list goes on.

Looking back I must say I’ve done alot of work for nothing… so it’s time for some changes. I’ll cut down my daily working hours by 80% by concentrating only on the most productive tasks and I’ll try to get more organized.

Another change in my business concerns Blogging. I run several blogs and used them mostly as kind of an article publishing platform with little personal touch. Don’t get me wrong, the information in the articles are great but there is no real interaction with the reader and that’s what blogs were made for. So on this blog I’ll try to concentrate on personal posts rather than articles. Also video-blogging is on my list.

Now that I want to do a more personal blogging style I also need to change certain things in my life… not much to talk about when you are hanging 15 hours a day in front of your computer… it would be much more interesting if I can blog about offline seminars, trips to other countries, meetings with other marketers and just fun stuff.

So one big task for me in 2010 is Traveling!

Hey, if you know of any offline seminars or meetings in 2010, leave me a comment and invite me.

Unfortunately I can’t just drop all current projects and get on a plane… before I start my travel journey there are just a couple more projects that I have to finish. The first one will be a viral traffic generator, launching on February 2nd. Make sure you mark that date in your calendar.

Until I’ve finished my upcoming projects the offline journey will start locally here in Cologne, Germany. I’ll organize some meetings here with other marketers… so if you are living in or near Cologne and would like to meet me and other marketers, contact me through my Help Desk or by phone.

Alright, I’ll be back with more news soon.

To Your Success,

Guido Nussbaum

One of the things I wanted to do for this new year 2010 was a re-design of my personal website.

So this is my first test post… more will come soon.