Finding advertising gold in the rough

When I worked in Stawell ( a small country town in the Australian state of Victoria) the town revolved around the local gold mine (and the gold price).

When the gold price was high, the company investigated methods to go through the tailings to extract gold lost in the initial mining process. It demonstrated the need in business to always look for new ways to grow as well as to look to make the most of what you already have.

I've been thinking about that process this week as I've taken advantage of some advertising resources that probably are flying under the radar. You might say I've found some advertising gold buried in the internet sludge pile.

I track every ad and I advertise extensively across well over 250 sites. It is fair to say that the 80/20 principle applies to my advertising process. 80% of my traffic comes from 20% of my advertising sources. But I still look to constantly expand my reach and I'm a firm believer that the next ad may deliver an important customer - regardless of the platform.

This leads me down some less travelled paths.

Sometimes I find myself in virtual advertising ghost towns that would make Myspace look like Times Square. Sometimes though, I find really surprising results in unlikely places.

As luck would have it, I've found a couple of gold advertising nuggets in places that may surprise you.

The first of these is a site I joined for no other reason than I was offered some bonus credits there for taking a CEO 90 upgrade at Wifi Mailer. The site is Express Train Mail which was ll the rage promotionally maybe 12-18 months ago. It is still quite active but has fallen off the radar as far as people advertising it is concerned.

Remarkably it offers lifetime pro memberships from as low as $17. I did some maths based on their membership and figured $17 wasn't going to kill me. Part of the package included 1 Solo mail. This mail it turns out goes out to 20 sites in the Express Train/Wi-Fi Mailer network and the results are way more than I could have anticipated.

Here is a snapshot of my tracking result for that one solo mail extracted from Leads Leap.

Those 10 actions are all opt-ins. That' represents outstanding value.

My recommendation is to join express train mail and to at least take the $17 upgrade and when you're ready mail out that solo mail.

While I was playing around with Express Train Mail, I noticed that Digiproducts was giving reasonable response rates for what I consider to be a second or third-tier advertising platform. It wasn't setting the world on fire, but it was punching above its weight. It is one of the many mailers now owned by Dave Mosher, who has made a career out of accumulating mailers. I'm not sure what his business model is but I suspect it has something to do with advertising bulk super solo services like his safelist blaster site which can deliver astonishing levels of traffic.

This suspicion has been somewhat confirmed by the offers made by Dave with most of his mailers. These offers usually involve several "super solo" mailings to multiple sites.

With this in mind, I took a silver-level upgrade at Digi Products through one of the numerous OTOS on display. I think I have ten super solos, global viral solos and apex super solos to take advantage of and they deliver serious traffic. Here is a snapshot of the first supersolo mailing that I sent through Digiproducts.

A follow-up mail gave these results

While these figures are not as impressive as Express Train Mail, they still represent very solid returns.

Offers like the one I took are available in just about all of the 350 or so mailers that Dave owns and if you're a member of any, I'd pay close attention. Not all of his mailers are equal. Some are quite dormant. Others like Free Business Builder, Digiproducts and the Last Mailer are delivering regular visitors.

My recommendation is to join one of these sites and to pay close attention to the OTOs available. Don't take the first one you see. Look for value. Some of these offers are as low as $7 or $14

Alternatively, you can go for broke and take a look at MasterSafelist Blaster.