Email blastings, purchasing traffic, etc

I run a "make money online" website and its a great site. We convert a very high percentage of visitors into members. I just need help increasing the number of visitors. I'm considering purchasing an email blast (non-spam). Has anybody had success with these? What about purchasing guaranteed traffic? Can anybody recommend a good program for these types of things? I appreciate any guidance. Thanks!

 

Where's your traffic coming from now?

 

Word of mouth. With absoultely no advertising, we're averaging 30-40 new members daily.

 

If you do that sort of "email blast", it's possible that you'll be going from very high quality traffic to very low quality traffic.

I would focus on buying some more targeted advertisements.

 

Such as banner ads? Any suggestions as to a good place to begin this pursuit?

 

Yeah, banner or text-ads advertising on sites that your 'customers' are most likely to visit.

Maybe even dabble in some PPC.

 

How about finding someone with a related site (but not a direct competitor) and offering to promote that guy / gal's services to your members in exchange for them promoting your services to theirs. You could do a straight swap, or offer them an additional payment / incentive if there was a big disparity in relative membership numbers.

 

Does anybody have any helpful information regarding email blasting?

 

Not sure if this is the type of info you're looking for.
http://forums.digitalpoint.com/showthread.php?t=22501

 

That's my experience about email blast and we spent a lot of time on it:

- Rule #1: There is no spam free list you can purchase.
- Rule #2: If someone tell you that their list is spam free, refer to rule #1
- Rule #3: if you break rules #1 or #2, you pay for it.

The only email list you can trust is the one you build yourself as per the book.
We did some 30% of our travel business through our newsletters. It was awesome, then some people got lazy to click on unsubscribe and preferred to report us as spammers.
Then problems occur: banned from your ISP, your IP is banned from AOL, Yahoo...

Guess what: today we don't send any newsletter, we gave up on it too risky (we were obliged to switch ISP 3 times) and we built our own list as per the book!

 

Forget anything that has a "blast" in it. Most of them do or emulate a spam technique. You're the only one to lose, plmerlin above testifies to this statement.

 

Interesting... so even if they're sending the email through their system... I'm still the one who gets pinned with spam?

 

Definitively yes. Spamcop for example looks for links in the email and report the site IP as spammer.
Also all the "email blast" guys don't use their own servers to spam , they use proxy servers (see part of spamcop report below). So their own identity is 'protected' the owner of the server get a slap on the fingers for having his SMTP open and... the 'advertiser' is alone facing possible complains.

As I already said the only way to avoid big problems is to build your own list using software such as PHPList which offers a double optin solution.

SpamCop report: (I tried to hide information as possible)

As you can see the server used to spam is an open proxy IP 182.0.x.x, the 'advertiser' site IP is 210.123.x.x and was the one reported as spammer!

 

Good insight, thanks. Only problem with building my own list is once they've double opted in they're already my members! I need to generate NEW traffic for treasuretrooper.com Guess I'll have to find other options....

 

I went there too... you need traffic to your site to build your list that you will use to bring traffic.

So the best, believe me is search engine traffic since I started (Jan 2005) I went from 100 a month to 3,000 on one site and this month my new site will reach over 2500 from 50 in July.

 

Did you try advertising in targeted e-zines?

That's relatively cheap and great for testing.

Important: Do the necessary research to find the best e-zines - targeted market, high volume of subscribers, good quality/price...

Try different headlines & messages in your ads - simple changes can make a huge differnce.