Bob's Work Site

Category: Hits Connect

  • Results Are In

    I would like to thank everyone who used their time to provide their thoughts on yesterday’s post. I ask whether people thought a HitsConnect tracking link, software for tracking advertising results, should work in CTP’s Gauntlet, a feature designed to provide feedback on web page design, should work or not. Well, the results are in and I want to share them with everyone.

    I didn’t have to spend much time analyzing the results. The were unanimous. 100% of the responses thought that a HitsConnect tracking link did not have to work in the Gauntlet since the Gauntlet is not suppose to be an advertising platform. I yield to the unanimous opinion. I will never bring it up again.

    The other question that occurred several times in the responses was, “Why would anyone use a HitsConnect tracking link in a non-advertising environment?”

    My answer to that question is, “I consider the Gauntlet as part of my testing of a new page and I want test my page exactly as it will run live.” I am sure I can attribute that philosophy to my 40+ years of delivering software to clients who expect perfect results. And, believe me, no matter how much we thought every scenario had been tested, the client would find one we never imagined.

    My favorite example of this is a system where the user entered the quantity of a product to be shipped to a store. There was a limited number of stores on a page and the user expected to complete 1 page at a time. We delivered the software after extensive testing. In less than 4 hours I get a call that says it doesn’t work. I talked with the user and the problem was that they could enter data past the end of the page. We test more and could not produce the result the user was describing. I went back to the user and ask them to show me. I watched and they were right and I saw the problem. They knew how to type and were not looking at the screen while entering data. None of the programmers knew how to type so they watched the screen as they entered data. The programmers saw they were ate the end of the screen and the users didn’t. We made a very small change that stopped the user after the last store and made a noise to let them know. Problem solved.

    Enough said, I am moving on in search of my next windmill. Thank you all again for your input.

    I look forward to your feedback to help me improve,
    Bob Caine

    PS – I switched pictures because It dawned on me that a real photo is probably more credible than a caricature.

  • I Have to DE-CLUTTER First

    I have to de-clutter first.

    Yesterday, I was so befuddled about how to put a marketing plan together, it woke me up early. After thinking about it most of the day, I finally came up with a starting point at least. What I came up with is not a full blown marketing plan. It is more a plan for what I need to do to advertise more efficiently. If I am more efficient, I should be able to put a plan together.

    So I thought about where does all my time go when I want to start marketing something new. Most of it goes to entering urls into traffic exchanges and sending emails. I can spend hours going from one traffic exchange to another enter the new urls. It dawned on me I have the solution to this – ROTATORS.

    I use HitsConnect as my tracking software and it has rotators. Why don’t I put HitsConnect rotator URLs in the traffic exchanges instead of the direct links. I am sure many others have thought of this but it was an original idea to me today. If I use rotator urls then I can change what link I am showing in multiple sites by just changing it in HitsConnect. Also, this sets me up for split testing. Just add the urls to be split tested in the rotator, drive the traffic to the rotator and, poof, I am split testing. The only other thing I need to do is reset the counters.

    How easy is that? I don’t even have to type what is entered into the rotator. HitsConnect provides a list of all the urls entered and I just have to check the ones I want in the rotator. There is a couple of complications with this method.

    1. There are some traffic exchanges that don’t allow rotators. I assume this is because only one site is verified when a link is added. So a rotator could ‘hide’ a site that does not meet the te’s rules. But I am going to give it a try. The traffic exchange will let me know if I do something wrong. I will just have to keep a list of those TE’s that reject my rotators.
    2. To me the bigger problem is the HitsConnect urls. I have run into several sites that when I use HitsConnects tracking urls, they won’t verify when checked or they verify but don’t display. The original url displays fine, the tracking url displays fine outside the traffic exchange but do not display in the TE. (HitsConnect says this is because the traffic exchange hasn’t updated something.) So I will just have to use a different rotator. I will add these to the list too.

    Hopefully, the list doesn’t of problem TE’s doesn’t get to long or this idea won’t work as well as I think. So, tomorrow I will start changing the sites displayed in the TE’s to rotators. That will easily take all day, maybe more.

    I didn’t intend for this to be a review of HitsConnect but it did. I really believe rotators are the way to go and once I get all the traffic exchanges converted I will save time. At least, I won’t have to wonder about what is being displayed on what traffic exchange reducing elminating that clutter from my mind.

    Until Next Time,
    Bob Caine

  • Question Answered

    Question Answered

    Angry Crab

    If you read yesterday’s post, you will remember that I found the Angry Crab badge. Every time I found that badge before, the next day the Angry Crab surf badges replace the more common Turtle surf badges. So I speculated that if you found the Angry Crab badge one day, the next day would have the Angry Crab surf badges.

    Now I can tell you for sure that this is not true. I did not have the Angry Crab surf badges today. Darn it. So I guess I will agree what one surfer told me. The Angry Crab surf badges appear randomly. I will just have to surf SeaLifeHits each day and see which surf badges are used that day.

    The CTP SealifeHits Mastery challenge requires surfing 1000 sites 10 times with the Angry Crab surf badges. I have 3 out of 10. Who knows how long completing this task is going to take me but I will bet not as long as one of the CupofTraffic tasks.

    It dawned on me that not everyone reading my posts is a member of ClickTrackProfit and therefore doesn’t know about the mastery challenges. CTP is one of the best, if not the best, training hubs on the internet. The mastery challenges are exercises which encourage you to use your training to accomplish specific tasks and “MASTER” a particular internet site. There are seven mastery challenges. They are

    All but one of the challenges requires getting referrals to join the program and all but two require earning a certain amount of commission. Other common tasks require surfing sites for the traffic exchanges, read and writing a number of emails for the mailers. Again, these tasks are designed to create good affiliate marketing habits; e.g., creating posts like this one or regularly sending emails, and not meant to be easy.

    But there is one task in particular that I just don’t understand its purpose or at least the ‘why’ for length of time it will take. CupofTraffic has one task, Login Points, that will require almost 3 years to complete. When you login to CupofTraffic the first time each day, you receive one half of a point (.5). 500 points are needed to complete this task. That’s 1000 days of logging into CupofTraffic or 2 years and 270 days. What am I learning after say 180 days of logging in? This seems a little excessive to me maybe too excessive for me to bother with this challenge. What do you think? Let me know in your comments. (If there is a way to get more than .5 points in a day, I haven’t figured it out.)

    I will talk more about the Mastery challenges in future posts and keep you up to date on my progress.