With a free business model reliant on goodwill, community and the viral dissemination of free content, paid for by SEO & Viral traffic seeing advertising, it is a pretty viable concept.

It is quite possible that the direction they have taken is what works best for them as a technology company and is what their customers expressed a willingness to pay for, and based on Eric Ries’s article today, they went through various questionaire and testing phases to reach their eventual public service offering.

But lets flip things around a little

Alien Marketing Concepts

• Build a landing page with a presentation on it and an opt in form, and also include reciprocal links to all your business competitors.
• Drive PPC traffic to a Dmoz listing that includes not just your link, but also all your competitors
• Pay for traffic to a landing page you can’t split test effectively
• Encourage viral distribution of your marketing materials which then link to a site containing content from all your competitors
• Using a lead capture process that doesn’t use your own lead capture forms with your autoresponder, possibly with a confirmed/double opt-in.
• The purpose of creating an infographic is to drive links to Flickr

A Different Perspective

• Build a landing page with your presentation on it, and all links and actions on the page benefit you directly as a marketer.
• Drive PPC traffic to a landing page you have full control over, and any viral distribution of your content creates a traffic funnel directly to your properties… only
• Have complete control over your landing pages – create 10 different versions of your presentation materials and split test their performance.
• Lets be honest – viral distribution of content rarely happens without a push – that takes time and money. You want to maximize your ROI with complete control over the funnel, and benefit directly from any links.
• This isn’t dodgy leads from a conference where you don’t know whether you have permission to send them marketing messages. You want a clear process that works with your autoresponder directly, and the ability to immediately market and segment the traffic, maybe even sell without human intervention.

The Biggest Failing Of Slideshare

Free Embed

This is a presentation from one of the people I most respect in tech, Dave McClure, because he “gets” marketing – it is quite possible 50% of the visits I have made to Slideshare have been to view updates, though most of the time I have viewed presentations on his blog, or followed a tweet.

3 links to Slideshare
Dave has been driving traffic to his presentations

But that is fair enough… it is a free service, we can all be kumbaya for the greater good of the community.

Pro Branded Channel

Only 2 links… one to a banded channel – the branded channel is the only place with a link back to Edelman… and it is nofollow.

This presentation has been fairly popular

There has at this time also been 150 tweets, 72 Facebook shares, 159 Facebook Likes & 67 Slide Embeds

What an amazing marketing success and branding exercise for Edelman Digital, after all the first point raised in the presentation is:-

1. Marketing in the age of streams

Your customers, consumers and employees are no longer only visiting static Web pages but participating in conversations which increasingly occur off domain in “streams” flowing from Facebook, Twitter and even apps. In order to catch them, you must be highly relevant in their streams.

Which has resulted in zero comments on their original blog post

… and not ranking for the title of their own blog post

David Armano does a little better with his blog post, which was a syndicated (and attributed copy) of the original with a further 5 comments, 33 Facebook likes.

Lets see a comparrison between Slideshare & Edelman

Now imagine all those Tweets and Facebook shares had been directed to the Edelman blog post concentrating the viral message to a single point.
I haven’t analysed all the sharing activity, but I exect a fair number didn’t link directly to Edelman in any way shape or form.

Links – especially editorial links cost a lot of time = money.

Social Currency

Edelman have a huge amount of social currency to play with – the co-author Steve Rubel has a very popular Twitter account, a popular blog etc, and as a very early adopter I am sure a large percentage of anything he Tweets gets picked up by bots that can help magnify the social proof.

Topsy actually shows 109 Tweets, but only 34 of those are looked on as influential.

I would look on this at least as a partial failure… the big problem is that this is probably the most popular Slideshow Edelman have published on Slideshare.

All Roads Lead To Rome… Via Timbuktu

I understand social media isn’t direct marketing – you can’t control the message all the time, or where it takes place.

9 months ago I layed out a lot of this in emails to Slideshare via their advisor & investor Dave McClure when they launched their initial pro offerings… where you might pay $7 for a lead generated by a Slideshow on your own LinkedIn profile.

This new offering is a vast improvement, I am sure it will drive a lot of business – but is still not the offering it should be. Or it is not the product offering I would envision as being ideal…

It may well be ideal for Edelman clients where the development of a landing page or posting a blog post takes 3 committee meetings, 2 rounds of golf, and signoff from the legal department.

However my opinion is you are effectively paying to promote Slideshare rather than driving visitors into an optimized sales funnel.

Update

I spent a little more time digging around for a good video sample to share from a Pro account holder.

The only problem is I should really flag it as a potential copyright violation as it was created by the guys at Royal Pingdom… maybe used with permission or Jess3 were the creative agency that created it.

Thus I am glad to see Twitter will switch off access to their API using standard authentication of username and password, and providing access only by OAuth.

For that I applaud the Twitter team for taking a positive step for online security.

Do As I Say, Not As I Do?

Twitter are still scraping friend information from email accounts.

It doesn’t matter what they claim they scrape, or that they claim to not store the information

• Not using OAuth is now totally hypocritical
• Twitter have been hacked in the past
• A few hundred million people giving up their email passwords is quite a valuable target

I realise Facebook only fixed their Friend Finding / Tell-A-Friend system after they purchased Octazen (and shut it down to new customers), but if Twitter expect their developers to use OAuth, the least they should do is use it themselves.

Update

Just saw this in Facebook – I know that Skype contacts are hardly the key to your online business like a Gmail account, but I thought they were finally past all this account scraping crap.

Facebook sucks for privacy again… well even more… well you know.

Lets face it, Google does a pretty good job with advertising tageting, especially all those Acai berry, colon cleaning, IMVU and flash games, plus the occasional Chitika ad with Darren Rowse that end up showing as remnant ads.
Google can only monetize a percentage of traffic effectively, and lots of traffic doesn’t click ads.

If you have a landing page for a product, then in most cases an exit pop with some kind of special offer, or page switch to another offer is a very popular option.

But what happens if you just have a blog on general stuff?
What happens if you have a huge site that brings in lots of traffic about “stuff” but you would much prefer to receive traffic than rely on Google for reventue, then somehow use that revenue to buy traffic, just feeding Google all the time.

Advertising Credits

Exit Fire has some kind of multilevel referral system and ad traffic swap.

There doesn’t seem to be any quality control, but maybe there is an army of outsourced workers in the Philippines – there is nothing wrong with the Philippines, I have recently hired a programmer there, I just know that Russell Brunson has or had a lot of staff there.

I can’t rip the math of this apart, or even defend it, as there is not enough information provided in the vague video on the landing page.

This is multilevel marketing that will never get to level 10 – I doubt anyone using Blogrush had referrals beyond level 6 or 7 – mine only went 5 deep.

The service has to be of value even without referrals, but at least it is targeting people who are exiting your site, and it isn’t blocking external links, just people who have already gone.

Exit Pops

The problem with these exit pops is they are rarely worded clearly

Someone has just tried to close a tab and this pops up…

Which button takes you to the partner page and which lets them take the action they wanted to do (close the tab) ?

It is never obvious…

Actions which cause a popup include closing a tab, the back button and a Stumble button – maybe other bookmarking plugins etc.

Junk Traffic

I don’t believe they are going to bring targeted traffic… I just don’t… at least not for niche sites, unless they have humans in the background allocating traffic.

Say for my blog on worm juggling (juggling.. not farming)…. ok yes I am kidding about the niche… kinda ;)

Your general bizop type traffic isn’t going to be targeted.

But say you have a site with lots of untargeted traffic and you wanted to arbitrage that into more valuable traffic… I can see a huge benefit, especially if you have a high bounce rate with TONS of traffic, and something you want to target in a biz op niche elsewhere, maybe even an affiliate link (there was no mention of whether you can use aff links)

Multiple Sites & Spam

I don’t think Russell has learnt very much from John Reese’s experience, other than to make money on the front end as this will possibly burn out very quickly…

The ideal setup is to have lots of untargetted visitors be shown an exit popup to a high quality landing page, or a site which is stuffed full of so much malware the average computer will grind to a halt in a frozen state of activex overload.

It is quite possible to “bait & switch” as well.

I can see an Exit Fire infestation on the horizon unless there is proactive monitoring of every site on an ongoing basis.

If you are going to use this, ensure you send traffic to a suitable landing page, not necessarily a squeeze page.

Make sure you track your results such as

http://andybeard.eu/?utm_source=Exitfire&utm_medium=exit&utm_content=homepage&utm_campaign=Exitfire1

(that isn’t a suatable landing page currently, it is just an example)

At the moment I don’t fully trust their traffic stats, I will need to take a look at my server logs, but I am already seeing referral traffic. It is at the expense of annoying regular visitors, thus I will have to work out a technical solution to fix that if someone else doesn’t.

Verdict

I slapped it on… I even upgraded (the downsell)… as an affiliate as far as I know you don’t get any money for referrals, only traffic.

There is a high chance I will now receive at least one phone call trying to sell me something as they have my phone number… something to bare in mind if you do buy the upsell.

This is a referral link, I might gain some additional traffic to some of my sites if you use it, but as far as I know no financial compensation.

http://www.ExitFire.com/1151

Do I recommend it?

For many niche sites, at this stage not at all.

I really wish there was a lot more information about how the credit system works, and the targeting system if there is one other than someone in the background assigning a category with enough traffic.

If I get the code on a site with a few million visitors a month, will ExitFire even have the inventory to send that traffic somewhere targeted?

I also wish there was more info on the abuse mechanisms, as I would hate someone leaving my site and landing on a malware site that had been referred to as my “partner” in the previous popup, that suggests some kind of vetting.

Hopefully more information will become available, but this is a service that could offer a suitable traffic arbitrage system for many sites who could use a way to leverage lots of traffic into quality referrals.

http://www.ExitFire.com/1151

Now in the space of just a week I have been able to highlight a solution based upon one of my own blog posts that uses a slightly ghetto, but K.I.S.S method to achieve extremely effective viral tell-a-friend functionality, and now I want to mention another more sophisticated solution.

In my last post I mention that Stompernet currently have an offer to get their Stomping The Search Engines STSE2 SEO Course 100% Free with no credit card requirements.

Now if I am going to state that something is 100% free, I really want to be sure that there are no strings attached.

So I tested the signup procedure and created an account for my wife.

Stompernet Tell-A-Friend Process

As you can see, lots of import options, and whilst a few of them do require username/password, the most important business centric address for online marketers, Google, uses an API hosted by Google.

Remember, Google Account is Key To:-

• Gmail (Paypal, Domain registration, Hosting)
• Adwords
• Analytics
• Adsense
• Private Calendar

Entering your email and password into a form on a 3rd party site is a security liability.

Asking your customers to do it is a security liability for them, thus a business liability for you.

Stompernet are the first in the “Internet Marketing” niche that I am aware of to use a legitimate, safe process for gathering contacts for use with incentive based Tell-A-Friend, and do it better than Twitter, Facebook & LinkedIn.

Probably due to time constraints, one visible blooper is that they haven’t registered with Google (I am not sure of the procedure), and it might take a while to process.

Here is the email that gets sent to your friends.

It would be good if there was a way to edit it before sending

I Skipped Something

The observant will notice I skipped the import stage as I felt it wrong to crop the image, for impact. Whilst I am on a lot of email lists, and have a fair few contacts, I don’t think this situation is unusual.

This is going to be a usability issue with almost any primary email account used by an online marketer., unless they are ruthless with their email list pruning.
The more ghetto version doesn’t have this usability issue, because emails are filled out within the native email interface.

The script that Stompernet are using is Octazen which looks very capable, and they list lots of social networks among their customers. They also have a WordPress plugin though I am not sure of the capabilities – something I will be looking into myself.
I have no idea why so many sites still ask for passwords. Maybe they are using an old version of the script that doesn’t use the APIs for some reason.
I must admit that acted as a negative advert for them – I had been to the site previously, seen the logos for Twitter and LinkedIn – remembered how bad their systems were asking for Gmail passwords, and just ignored them.

Oh… that list of contacts – this rivalled John Reese’s 40 page Traffic Secrets sales letter… around 40 pages in this screenshot, though that only takes us up to letter “T” – my screengrab software was having problems with a file over 30,000 pixels high.

Gmail Imported Email Addresses

I am not sure what drove me to sign up as a JV partner with Dan, though the following factors almost certainly played a factor.

• Supreme confidence in the value of his product just oozes out of the videos he produces (there are lots of them)
• Lots of professional landing pages – it is obvious he has spent a lot of time working on them
• A great JV Opportunity but to be honest I would highlight this anyway… you will see why in a moment

Unobtrusive Marketing

I have spent a fair amount of time since I signed up with Dan chatting with him on Skype – his commitment to his JV partners is exceptional, but I am sure that has also lead to significant improvements in his sales funnel as affiliates give him direct feedback.

We have all seen various improvements to sales funnels over time, and a lot of what Dan is doing will seem very familiar. The overall design of the landing pages, the opt-in etc, but Dan has added a few of his own twists that take things to a new level.

What is special is that the things Dan has added are smart and unobtrusive, but still catch the eye and achieve the desired effect – many of them he has coded himself.

It is a rare thing for me to see something and immediately reach for Skype and ask “Where did you get that script from?”

Long Term Commitment To Success

I am going to swipe a small excerpt that Dan sent out in one of his JV emails – if you are a successful online marketer, this is the kind of email that might make you emotional, because you can almost see before you a guy that is just about to hit a home run.

******************************
1 Year In The Making!
******************************
Someone asked me the other day if I am starting to get excited, because launch is getting so close. I find it hard to put into words how excited i am getting. To give you an idea, I have been working on this project since September last year. 20 hours a week at first, then 50 – 60 hours a week for the last 9 months… and it finally feels like it’s within reach. So am I excited? What do you think?

The fact that I am so exited is only part of the contributing factor to me not sleeping at night. The other thing is the fact that I am on the other side of the world to pretty much everyone, and I spend hours on the phone. Amongst other things, I have spent ages on the phone making sure that I will be able to handle a huge launch in every respect.

The Personal Touch & Proof

There is nothing quite so powerful in establishing relationships with a JV partner than a personal greeting. The one I received from Dan was remarkable, not because of big promises of huge commissions, special access or anything else you might normally expect – the greeting I received was really personal, and at the same time provides me with something more valuable than even a $2000 boxed product… proof

I have been given permission to publish whatever I like, but here is just a small excerpt.

Thanks for coming onboard with TheBossBuster launch. Just thought I’d drop you a quick hello and welcome, and also let you know something that I learned from you that is going to make me a lot of money (and already has done alright for me).

Ok so that grabbed my attention but on its own isn’t much to go on, lets grab a few more snippets…

Originally I bought viral inviter, and was going to use that on my site. After ■■■■■■■, and ■■■■■■■, I went looking for another solution. What I found was a solution on your site, where you can just pass parameters to gmail, hotmail etc, and do effectively the same thing straight through them. This has a number of advantages over viral inviter (which I am sure you are aware of, so I won’t tell you how to suck eggs).

Yes I have ■ out some of this. I will quite happily criticise an application on specific technical issues that represent a risk to my readers, but I am not going to address other aspects that may be hearsay, or subject to specific circumstances.

But I digress…

So long story short, when I tested this with one of my affiliates, I made ■■■■■■■. I was also getting people to do some social networking referrals, but most of the extra was from the emails. The best bit about this is ■■■■■■■, so it doubled my income! Now I am rolling it out on this major launch, and I expect it will make me 6 figures!

I am keeping exact numbers confidential but suffice it to say most people would be able to live for an extra month on the additional income made on one relatively small test.

Now I can’t give you any specific reference, but a frequently quoted figure is that a Tell-A-Friend script, even some of the “viral” ones with features copying Facebook & Myspace rarely add more than 10-20% additional subscribers.

For a tell-a-friend implementation to double Dan’s income, and notice he was specifically tracking the emails compared to social media referrals, that is a huge revenue increase… from one of my blog posts.

Dan absolutely nailed the best possible way to encourage me to write something… providing me with some proof that helps me with any future product launch.

Tell-A-Friend Implementation

Dan didn’t just take an idea from my blog and implement it, he ran with it adding nuances that work so well, he doubled revenue.

Here is just a small part of his Tell-A-Friend page

This Tell-A-Friend implementation I endorse fully (though I did agree to disagree on a couple of details)

• No password is requested
• It is bullet-proof – it doesn’t even use APIs
• Email deliverability is most likely much higher than other solutions
• Emails are sent from a “natural environment” that the end user is familiar with
• Dan figured out a way to even add incentives that are delivered automatically
• The incentive system is multi-tier, rewarding people who refer more friends

Ultimately it is better than anything I have seen used by 6, 7 even 8 figure online marketers, and in many ways better than what is used by Facebook, Myspace and other social networks.

There are a whole load of other smart things he has added to the page that work very well, but I don’t want to spoil it for you for when you sign up to check things out.

It isn’t perfect (but pre-launch doesn’t officially start until Monday)

• The page needs a privacy statement
• A few trust marks could probably boost conversion even more
• I have encouraged Dan to change the way videos are being streamed, but more on that at a later date

Exit Strategy

This is what prompted me at 3am to immediately fire up Skype and contact Dan this morning (there are some advantages with him being in Australia)

• We have all seen corner-peel ads – they are effective to a degree
• We have seen automated “live support” robots on exit, which we all know are fake
• More recently the fashion has been to redirect to a new offer page, opt-in or other alternative, which is often confusing for me which button needs to be pressed to actually stay and read the damn things, I don’t know about anyone else.

What Dan has implemented is different… unique, apparently he coded it himself, and it was quite simple to do

It grabbed my attention as a geek, but I am sure it is something that would grab the attention of any audience, though it is something you would want to split-test extensively – it is something that can be split tested very effectively.

Just watch what happens on the page when you try to exit before opting in…

I am sure the code is very similar to a Page Peel, but the effect is quite different.

Video Use

Dan has made some great use of video in his prelaunch to JVs, keeping them informed on a regular basis. This is one thing I have strongly urged him to tweak however, but more on that at a later date.

I am not going to say he has done things better than others, but he has used video extremely well at every stage of the sales funnel that I have seen so far, and for regular JV updates.

JV Tools

Dan is quite proud of his JV Tools area that is pretty effective – plenty of preprepared emails and banners without the usual long confusing page. I can’t remember the last time I just used even part of someone else’s copy but that is just me. I tend to highlight things in a different way.

Smart Autoresponder Pages

This part isn’t quite unique, I know Big Jason Henderson sells a similar script, but it was very well implemented and no doubt increases email confirmation rates significantly as it is “smart” specific to each email service.

Product Fit For Your Audience?

Who knows, Dan is running a 2-tier affiliate program using Delavo which is fairly robust and has some interesting features in itself. I know lots of affiliates who love it.
The product is a little risqué for some territories, sports arbitrage, but Dan certainly seems to know what he is talking about, and the videos I have seen suggest he is an exceptional teacher – of course he provides a solid guarantee as well.

Apparently he has tested in multiple niches with some quite interesting results.

The Purpose Of This Post?

• Above all, I think Dan has been working his #$%^ off for months assembling this launch
• I love people taking action based upon my blog posts – Dan isn’t the only one who has seen remarkable success, but there is a danger in bragging about things like SEO. I want you to see Dan’s Sales Funnel
• I believe the product might be of interest to some of my audience.
• I love 2-tier affiliate programs and I know some of my readers are a great match. Sign up to JV with Dan

(Note: I will add in the links to the squeeze page on Monday, but you can navigate your way through easily enough – I wouldn’t want to be accused of emailing early for the launch)

This post has now been updated with an official response from Tweetmeme – the features have now been added to the development timeline.

The Tweetmeme site is a useful content source, but this article is mainly about the Tweetmeme buttons.

Adding something to your blog, especially something that can encourage viral behavior and add social proof is highly beneficial, and doing it correctly, without asking for passwords offers huge advantages.

Twitter is also a medium that is marketing content tollerant, as long as the people following you are marketers, unlike Digg, Reddit, and to a lesser extent Stumbleupon. 

Thus I have spent some time delving into the code and API for Tweetmeme and the existing WordPress plugin. It has just been updated, thus if you download the Tweetmeme plugin, it will be the latest version.

Important New Features

• Cleaned up cookie use a little, but it would be better if they set a cookie based on an action, rather than a display.
  The original RFC for cookies states that browser support for cookies should be a minimum of:-    
  • 300 cookies in total
  • 20 cookies per domain
  • 4095 bytes per cookie

  To be perfectly honest, I don’t want all those cookies, whether they are 1st party or 3rd party.

• Ability to brand the retweets with @andybeard etc, though you still get “via @tweetmeme” at the end
• The button is removed from excerpts using a filter on get_the_excerpt() – more on that to follow

However essential features of Tweetmeme and Tweetmeme Button are missing if it is going to be used by serious marketers.

Whilst I am not a huge fan of the @tweetmeme at the end of button tweets, it is something that users can just delete. However I have some additional problems / requirements / feature requests

1. The latest incarnation of Tweetmeme prevents the button, as standard, appearing on custom excerpts.

I can understand this from a user perspective:-

• Most bloggers are using automatic generated excerpts that might include the button javascript
• This appears ugly on the page, and is useless if they are also using that for their page descriptions

However some people use custom excerpts and custom meta descriptions, and like displaying tweet buttons on their front page without adding custom filters to functions.php or hacking theme files. Can the options be expanded with a separate set for use on the_excerpt? I can also see people wanting to use different buttons on full page, excerpt and rss, and only have one button on the_excerpt, but top/bottom on both feeds and posts.

2. The Headlines Used

Currently there is no way to define the text that is being used within a tweet – the text used is the Title tag from the header of a page. Many blogs use various titles for different purposes

• In the header for SEO
• For the title of a post
• Various navigation elements
• Custom titles for RSS feeds
• Calls to action for Social Media
• Calls to action for Twitter, or what Tim wrote about a few months ago, Social Bites

I really need to be able to define the text dynamically for each button display.

3. The Links Used

Tweetmeme like tracking things. Guess what? So do I…

I don’t so much care about branding of the final tweet links – it would be a bonus, but I need to be able to track the way I want to track.

• Within my short URL software
• Google Analytics for various goals
• Possibly for use with affiliates

I understand that Tweetmeme need the permalink to associate with tweets, but couldn’t I provide that, in addition to the link actually used to generate links? You might end up generating a lot more short links, but you would know in advance, without having to check headers, that all those links are to the same URL.

4. My Tweeps Like To Track Too

As a person who might occasionally click on Tweetmeme buttons, there is one fatal flaw.

If I use my own link shortener, I can track the response rate. I like knowing which topics and headlines generate a response from my audience. If something proves to be popular, maybe I will repeat it for people in a different timezone.

Tweetmeem Buttons remove my ability to test the popularity of the content I post.

The solution is actually fairly simple:-

The tweetmeme buttons are quite happy to write cookies all over a users system, why not read just one cookie, a unique user ID for Tweetmeme as well. The default user ID would identify which URL shortener they prefer, and their API ID. If you want to be extra secure, you could store both of these in a cookie on the user’s computer, rather than store them yourself. Links would ultimately go through the following redirects

• Tweetmeme Bit.ly
• Tweep (any)
• Publisher Short (any)
• Permalink + parameters
• Permalink

That is a lot of redirects, it might slow things down a little, and Googlebot might not like so many jumps, but ultimately this provides a better experience for users, and for once any SEO factors aren’t important – Google will have to cope. The 2 URLs to include with the javascript would be

• Permalink
• (optional) Publisher Short (any) / Permalink+Parameters

5. Split-testing

The observant among you would also notice that with all these parameters being set with each page load, it would be possible to split-test response to some degree. This level of functionality would add real value, and might even be looked on as a useful, modestly priced, premium feature – $10 per month/site  or $30 per month/site unlimited? For tweeps it would have to be free.

Thus I think Tweetmeme is a great idea, but to be turned into something that not only remains on my blog, but which I might even be willing to pay for, it needs significantly more flexibility.

Tweetmeme could be turned into a masterful, measurable viral marketing tool, with just a few tweaks.

Update: Tweetmeme Marketing Features Coming

Sarah from Tweetmeme has just left this message in the comments area

Hi Andy,

Your suggestions have been added to our todo list here in the office so do look out for the new features you’ve requested. They will take us a while to do but they are coming.

We’re using your post as our guidance, and if you are up for it when we have something to show, would you be up for looking over it and seeing if there’s anything we’re missing? We would like to get it right and have a really strong offering for marketing experts so feedback and working closely with experts like yourself is essential really.

Lets keep the conversations going between us and if you drop me an e-mail then I’ll make sure you are on our early adopter program :)

Many thanks
Sarah

I think this is a superb response and I want to thank Sarah, Nick and the rest of the Fav.or.it team for accepting my challenging post “head-on”.

This post is a year overdue – I have held back the material and refrained from pointing the finger for that period of time, but there is something I have noticed:-

If you don’t kick up a big stink, possibly including names, any advice just gets swept under the carpet.

I was on a very good webinar last night – Mike Filsaime and Anik Singal were highlighting all the mistakes that have been made with various “free offer” or “just pay shipping” offers.
This didn’t just cover mistakes that might have led to a poorer conversion, but also what has become known as upsell hell.

11 months ago after a number of prior warning posts I made the following statement.

Over the last few months I have already taken the decision not to promote a number of sites and services launched by Internet Marketers using these dangerous scripts.

I have proven I can rank highly in the SERPs for any product. It is going to help conversions when on the first page of the SERPs for your product name potential customers find…

Product Name – WARNING: SECURITY RISK – Read This First!
or
Product Name by Marketer Name – Warning: Security Risk

The only problem is, this won’t be a typical fake affiliate promotion, but a real warning

Note: I also provided a number of solutions within that post that don’t require a viral tell-a-friend to ask for a username & password.

Viral Hell – Prosecution Exhibit 1

Probably the most prominent viral tell-a-friend script is Viral Inviter, beta tested by Mike Filsaime for the launch of his Butterfly Reports site, and that site was used as “proof” of the effectiveness of the script within the launch of Viral Inviter, and on the sales page.

Here is what it looks like embedded inside Butterfly Reports (screenshot taken just a few hours ago)

How bad or insecure is it?

Here is a direct link to the framed form on the ButterflyReports.com site.

What could be tied to my Gmail account?

That is the key to unlocking:-

• Multiple Email Accounts
• Your Google Adsense Account
• Your Google Adwords Account
• Google Analytics
• Google Website Optimizer
• Your PayPal Account
• Affiliate program passwords
• Access Your Blogger account
• Access any scripts that allow you to resend or reset passwords
• Open any social media profile that used that email address
• Did you use that address for domain records? Wave goodbye to your domains

This isn’t a case of whether the script itself is secure, but the server

There is probably no such thing as an open-source content management or blog software project that hasn’t had at least one security vulnerability discovered within the last year.

It only takes WordPress or another popular script to be hacked, and rather than injecting a few links, any script, including a viral tell-a-friend could be modified to do something unintended.

This sin’t even about that specific script running on Mike’s server, but all the 100s or even 1000s of customers of Viral Inviter who might not have a team of programmers and security geeks working for them.

Also Butterfly Marketing has been customized to work with Viral Inviter out of the box.

Butterfly Marketing may or may not be as secure as WordPress, but just like with blog software, that doesn’t matter if you are not storing or asking people to input into forms highly sensitive data.

If a script/site gets hacked, you hopefully have at a minimum daily backups, and all that might be accessed are a few email addresses plus your content – annoying for customers but ultimately not a business liability for anyone.

If you run Viral Inviter with Butterfly Marketing, and something gets hacked, the most profitable exploit of your high traffic site is to grab Gmail username & passwords, especially if your site is targetted to novice online marketers.

Viral Hell – Prosecution Exhibit 2 – Twitter Scripts

As Twitter has become all the rage among marketers, especially how to create a viral “buzz” effect on product launches, or use it to build up a massive number of followers, marketers have looked for ways to encourage people to tweet about them.

The innocent methods are things like the retweet buttons you will see on my blog, or encoded retweet links.

Aside – have you noticed on recent product launches that the retweet links haven’t included affiliate links, thus are effectively “leaks” in a landing page for which an affiliate gains no benefit, unless they are offering huge bonuses to benefit from the buzz?

The more nefarious solutions are the “free” scripts that you can receive just by tweeting about them, install on your server, and then use to offer small incentives to tweet about your upcoming product launch.

The most popular early solution was Viral Tweets and I have seen tons of otherwise very respectable marketers use this script or a variation of it as an incentive to gain viral exposure.

Just like with Tell-A-Friend scripts that ask for your gmail account, the danger isn’t necessarily with the Tell-A-Friend script, but hosting it on a server which might be insecure in other ways.

A twitter account isn’t anywhere near as valuable as a primary email address with password, and accounts taken over can possibly be recovered with the help of the Twitter engineers and support.

But…

• Why subject potential customers to something that might be a security hazzard?
• If you are a respected marketing guru, isn’t it your responsibility to promote best practice, especially as whatever tactics you do use in your campaigns will be mimiced by others, often with less precautions such as server security and audits.
• Some implementations might be scraping off the cream that your afiliates have earned.

Viral Hell – Prosecution Exhibit 3 – Twitter Pyramid Scripts

If you missed being exposed to TweeterGetter on Twitter you were among the lucky ones.

The true “viral” effect lasted less than a weekend, and from then on, the viral exponent (a term I learned from Mike Filsaime’s Butterfly Report) was less than 1.00.

The headline claim was for users to achieve “19,530 followers”, a target only just achieved by the site creator within the 30 days – from memory he reached that number after 27 days.

Now in this case the “viral hell” isn’t for the users of the site, though there have been a number of individual Twitter applications where it was suggested the account details were being abused. As far as I am aware the script isn’t being sold (though it might be a backend offer), thus there is only one potential vulnerability.

The “viral hell” is for the readers. After the first week the only people tweeting links were:-

• Spam accounts
• Desperate newbies
• Otherwise automated accounts

I am sure some people still abuse their email lists in this way, but it certainly isn’t the pinnacle of marketing excellence.

Viral Hell – Prosecution Exhibit 4 – Twiveaway

About a month ago Brad Callen, a marketer I generally respect and whose products I have purchased (e.g. SEO Elite many moons ago) released a new script/service for Twitter giveaways.
I contacted him directly, and suggested ways to improve it, and that requiring passwords was not only a security vulnerability, but for giveaways it isn’t actually something that is needed.

Requiring a password for a 3rd party service is FRICTION – much more than an email address

It looks like a month later, the scripts out in the wild, such as used by Launch Tree, still require passwords.
It is highly possible that Anik actually has a beta version of the script, and that Brad is generally only providing this as “software as a service” to most users.

I expected much better

Danny Sullivan I think coined the phrase “craphat SEO” for the SEO tactics that exploit vulnerabilities such as link injection in blogs.

Jeff at Coding Horror described this kind of programming as:-

Email is the de-facto master password for a huge swath of your online identity. Tread carefully:

* As a software developer, you should never ask a user for their email credentials. It’s unethical. It’s irresponsible. It is wrong. If someone is asking you to code this, why? For what purpose?
* As a user, you should never provide your email credentials to anyone except your email service. Sites that ask you for this information are to be regarded with extreme suspicion if not outright distrust.

But it in many ways is worse, because this script from Brad doesn’t even provide any real protection, or that is the case from examples I have seen.

e.g. You can get a Twiveaway account here without using their forced retweet form, and I accessed that just looking at the form source code.

Viral Hell – Prosecution Exhibit 5 – Launch Tree

Launch Tree already have retweet links in various places, including on the main landing page. In theory, the majority of traffic to the site is landing there, and giving an email address to get access to free content.

Now as an additional barrier, for what might be one of the hottest videos with Andy Jenkins, they also require you to tweet about it.

These guys run companies making $10M+ a year, yet they are using Brad’s craphat software, and asking people for passwords to their Twitter accounts.

I am not worried about them collecting passwords, not even a huge amount with server security (well at least I hope they have that buttoned down).

The biggest problem is their position in the industry and endorsing this method as acceptable.

There is a reason on the TV they use a phrase

“Don’t try this at home kids”

I don’t endorse Google, Linkedin, Facebook et al scraping email accounts for viral marketing, but lets face it, they can do a better job with server security than the average internet marketer, and even then it is only one security vector being attacked.

A good implementation – maybe take a look at the way Dopplr uses APIs – just a small startup with a little funding, much less than the income from one major product launch.

Launch Tree

I still think Launch Tree is a highly valuable product for any marketer looking to promote a product and optimize their conversions and ultimate launch profitability.

Maybe even more so because of these issues raised, because it provides a central knowledgebse of what works, and what is acceptable. Such as one of Mike’s launches mentioned last might where even if someone only wanted the initial offer, and none of the upsells/downsells, it would take them 37 minutes to actually finish their order… real upsell hell that Mike learned from.

How good is the free material being provided during the Launch Tree launch?

Exceptional

As an example after the Brian Johnson interview (where they only revealed part of the launch details) I decided that I needed some notes, both to aid my long-term learning by writing things down in some way, and as an aid to actually understand what was being said.

So I put together a detailed process map, with all the numbers, and I was going to use it as some kind of squeeze page or purchase incentive.

I have decided to release this right here, for free, with no obligation for anything.

I have linked this one image as an attachment, so click the image, or here to get a full size version.

I created that using Xmind, and if this post reaches 100 retweets I will release the source file so you can edit it for your own personal use.

That is another important factor – I am sick of products that include mindmaps and process maps that don’t include files that can be edited. Procedures change, or get customized. A file that can be edited is worth 5x more, even if just for personal use.

No Passwords Link

So the newest video is Andy Jenkins being interviewed about their Stomping The Search Engines 2 launch, which made millions by giving away a high ticket SEO training course, just for the cost of shipping.

It is a very good course, and has just been rereleased, you can get it for $1, immediate online access. (but be quick, I don’t expect the offer to remain open forever)

STSE2 with this offer is probably the best value SEO training from an authority source currently online, though be warned, there is an attached continuity to the offer – the very upfront “ethical bribe” to try out their “Net Effect”

With Launch Tree, I honestly don’t feel comfortable sending you to a site which is asking you for Twitter passwords – it is that “ethical streak” in me, part genetic, part top grammar school education.

Fortunately as I have mentioned Brad’s script is easy to bypass.

Click Here For Andy Jenkins Launch Tree Interview

Direct Link (no password)

Now whilst some might look on this as me bypassing security, before posting this I did make sure the page was indexed in Google already, without any help from me.

Also it is set up as a landing page, and I am using Anik’s smart affiliate system which supports deep linking.

I would even extend that to buying any form of paid link or sponsored review, and possibly also links from directories, social networks, blog commenting etc.

Last June I provided a very simple guide to avoid being banned from Technorati but the same principle applies to many forms of viral marketing where you lose control of the content once it is introduced into the wild.

You need to be using tracking links, redirects, subdomains or even registering domain for the special purpose of ensuring that you have full control of where a user ends up when they click a link, whether it is next week, next month, or next year.

The same applies for search engines.

If you use links pointing to the root of your primary domain

• You can’t remove those links if you get hit with a penalty
• You can’t accurately track traffic from those links
• You can’t split test different landing pages for that traffic source
• If you decide to split your assets, or even sell part of them, you might need to change landing pages, even pointing them to a different domain.

It is easy to claim that Technorati should fix their algorithms to discount themes and blogroll links, or that Google should come clean about exactly what they allow with viral linkbait, but a lot of control lies in the hands of the creator of the viral linkbait, if they are smart enough to use it.

However today actually marks quite a significant landmark, what I believe is a major step forward in their content delivery plans.

Premium Digital Content Delivery Platform

FreeIQ provides a digital content delivery platform and affiliate market place, and up until now, everything I have seen available was quite “low end” or small scale products intended for very much a small niche market.

I recently mentioned that I purchased a ticket to go to The World Internet Main Event, but I won’t actually be attending, I purchased for the bonuses.

However the content is going to also be available via the internet, delivered through the FreeIQ platform and available to conference ticket holders free of charge.

What is more, they have just announce that the conference will be available separately for quite a reasonable one off fee, also through FreeIQ, and will actually be available just one day after the event.

That isn’t quite a live broadcast, but is very ambitious for what I am sure will be very useful content.

If you are looking for a way to deliver premium content recorded at an event without having to worry about the technical problems of setting up a membership site to deliver the content and some really solid server infrastructure just to handle the load, with the bonus of having access to thousands of affiliates, I think FreeIQ will probably turn out to be a very viable platform.

Take a look at the Digital Version of The Internet Marketing Main Event

One Of The Problems With FreeIQ

I would like to call this “viral separation”

As an affiliate I am provided with videos I can embed in my site.

Get the Flash Player to see this player.

Here is the code for the default video

<script type="text/javascript" src="https://freeiq.com/ufo.js"></script><script type="text/javascript">var FObringmetheworld = {movie:"https://freeiq.com/ipprime.swf",width:"480",height:"338",majorversion:"7",build:"0",bgcolor:"#FFFFFF", flashvars:"playlistURL=https://freeiq.com/vidxml.dhtml?lx=bringmetheworld|160214ad&autoplay=false" }; UFO.create(FObringmetheworld, "fobringmetheworld");</script><p id="fobringmetheworld"><a href="http://www.macromedia.com/go/getflashplayer">Get the Flash Player</a> to see this player.</p>

Here is the code from my landing page.

<script type="text/javascript" src="https://freeiq.com/ufo.js"></script><script type="text/javascript">var FObringmetheworld = {movie:"https://freeiq.com/ipprime.swf",width:"480",height:"338",majorversion:"7",build:"0",bgcolor:"#FFFFFF", flashvars:"playlistURL=https://freeiq.com/vidxml.dhtml?lx=bringmetheworld|68682ab&autoplay=false" }; UFO.create(FObringmetheworld, "fobringmetheworld");</script><p id="fobringmetheworld"><a href="http://www.macromedia.com/go/getflashplayer">Get the Flash Player</a> to see this player.</p>

For the observant among you, there is a difference in the code, thus the video I show is somehow linked with my affiliate account.

The video player however doesn’t seem to have a link to visit the sales page for the premium content, I have to provide that manually.

When someone visits the page, they can also pick up the video (with my link) to share on their blog, but there is nothing forcing them to also use the separate link through to the page, and within the player there is no link to encourage a visit.

As a content producer, I would love my affiliate to be able to provide my free content on their sites, and if visitors decide to share it, it shouldn’t require a visit to the site.
In addition, for further information, I shouldn’t need to provide a manual URL, it should be included in the player automatically.

I know why this might be the case, the manual links pass link juice back to FreeIQ, however that is to the affiliate’s own landing page, so they benefit.

However there is nothing preventing more code to be inserted, not just the javascript, but insert a real link as a caption below the video automatically, and possibly also include a noscript link back to the affiliates home page link or favorites as defined in their preferences.

It is possible to gain the SEO benefits whilst still maintaining a “Butterfly Effect”

LOLCats Marketing

I have mentioned using smart linking within javascript widgets in the past, such as used by Bidvertiser and Technorati using noscript.

I Can Has Cheezburger do something very similar with their attribution for images, that is very simple. Their images are hotlinks

<a href="http://icanhascheezburger.com/2007/09/05/teh-cloning-machine-was-suksesful/"><img src="http://andybeard.eu/wp-content/uploads/128297925696563750tehcloningmach.jpg" alt="128297925696563750tehcloningmach.jpg" /></a>

The thing they don’t do very well is alt tags so they only rank for very few phrases, because the links from images pass very little SEO value, and their posts have very little content. Then again, they don’t really need SEO traffic, and they will always rank for searches on their own brand.
They could improve the viral nature by including a self-replicating viral link

Fortunately Alvin Phang has a wealth of unique ideas on his blog, that I found extremely interesting, and although he is the author of a new blogging ebook for beginners, I can even offer a few tips he might have overlooked in his busy schedule (he has just come back from a seminar in Bangkok)

I have also proposed something different to Alvin for this paid review – Alvin mentioned a few things I might find interesting, and I decided that I will split the review into 3 parts.

• Blog & Content Review – that is what this post will be covering – I will highlight a lot of his unique content and one or two minor improvements.
• Ebook Review – I am an affiliate, and at first look I didn’t see anything within Alvin’s new ebook that I strongly disagree with – that is actually rare for many blogging ebooks, so I am going to write a separate review, and include affiliate links (the link above however isn’t an affiliate link, and was purely editorial if you want to take a look)
• Private consultation – there are a few tips that I don’t want to broadcast publicly, because if too many people know about them, they become less useful. In this case they are specific to some of the things he is doing.

The Gather Success Review

I like the design, the subscription options are very prominent in the header though slightly more subtle than my own. His feeds are all redirected to Feedburner using the Feedsmith plugin, though there is one problem, the “RSS Logo” and “Feedburner Logo” are not hyper-linked to his RSS feed. This means that RSS users would only be able to add him to their RSS reader using auto-discovery in their browsers. This might be something Alvin just overlooked, or a deliberate attempt to gather more email subscribers rather than RSS.

For monetization Alvin is using a number of subscription based affiliate programs which provide him with recurring income, and offers a useful free ebook as an incentive for email subscribers. He is also offers Sponsored Reviews, though I couldn’t see any conversions.

2000 MyBlogLogs

Alvin is a fan of MyBlogLog, and 2000 Bloggers. That is clearly evident from one of his viral projects, 2000 MyBlogLogs.

I am going to paste the widget code at the bottom of this review though I am going to use a “more” tag so it doesn’t slow down my front page from loading (it is heavy enough already)

I should point out that the 2000 MyBlogLoggers is purely javascript, so taking part isn’t going to affect your Technorati or search engine ranking, positively or negatively.

Anyone can join in, they just have to visit Alvin’s site and leave a comment in the 2000 MyBlogLoggers thread.

He provides video instruction on how to set up the code to display in a page which is typical for the whole blog, he uses video extensively to express his ideas, provide tutorials, and conduct interviews with top internet marketers.

Ask Campaign Takes a Leap

This is the first time I have seen this idea, though maybe others have done this before.

One of the best strategies for product creation is to ask potential customers a series of questions and then use that for either blogging ideas, or for a paid product.

The concept and even a useful service was widely promoted by Alex Mandossian with his Ask Database.

It is also similar to techniques used in the Project Launch Formula, because he has created a blog post that over time will gather 100s of comments with people sharing that they are having the same, or similar problems online.
If Alvin eventually launches a product that solves all these problems, those customers are going to be warmer.

However Alvin has taken this to another level,
the World’s First Paid Per Comment

Rather than what is typical of an Ask campaign, offering an incentive for filling out a questionnaire, or a teleconference actually addressing the problems, Alvin is paying cash.

It is a smart idea that might need a little refining. I think it needs a random element, rather than declaring which comment number is going to win the prize, and also some prizes for best comment as voted for using a voting or rating plugin.

I am actually amazed at the quality of the comments so far, and it is clear that this technique could be used by others to great effect.

Hits Report

I mentioned that Alvin is using a lot of video on his site, and no exception are his monthly traffic data reports. He goes through how much traffic he has been generating to his blog, and what techniques he has been using.

He uses a lot of video for this, but as the following video shows, he is well aware that this type of video isn’t going to get him a lot of traffic.

Embedded Video – you may have to click through to watch

Well worth watching the video, Alvin goes through the kind of videos that are successful on YouTube, and points out how little traffic most marketing related videos actually receive, even if they are pushed by someone with a reasonably sized email list.

Blogging Tips

• When Alvin has tags in his content, he should really point them to his own tag pages, and not to Technorati.
• There are a lot of links to external sites in his sidebar, especially things like affiliate links that should be nofollowed. He uses lots of internal linking on every page which helps to counteract this, but why throw Google Juice away?
• I would like to see related posts as I find it useful when browsing a site, and it is good for SEO
• I would be tempted to turn off the MyBlogLog display of how many clicks an advert has received. You don’t want me to know your best performing adverts
• Add some tracking of your own for affiliate links – I use Adtrackz, but there are plenty of other scripts available which do similar things.

Alvin has been quite busy recently, with both a product launch and a lot of travelling, so a lot of things sometimes get overlooked.

I spent a fair amount of time reading Alvin’s blog, and I am now a subscriber. He is working really hard to develop unique content and I am sure most bloggers and marketers will pick up some useful ideas, not only from the content Alvin creates, but also in how he is doing things in a much more organised manner than many blogs in the same niche.

A review of Atomic Blogging to follow, and Alvin should have an email from me soon with some more private tips.

The 2000 MyBlogLoggers widget code follows