This is the review you’ve all been waiting for! You were drenched with emails about it yesturday, but you all held out until you found out what Tim said, right? Oh, you got it anyways? Eh, that’s ok!

Kidding aside, Instant Banner Creator is pretty sweet. I had my chance at the banner creator gig. I’ve had one on StartXchange for quite some time, but nowhere as close as this:

Now that might not be the best graphic in the world, because your’s truley made it. But I wanted to show you a few things about it..  See how the red text overlaps the other text? Yep, I did that. I just clicked and dragged it there.

You can make Banners, Buttons, Headers, Footers, Animations, and Peel Away Ads. My creator..  Just a banner.. And it had the StartXchange logo (the really old one) as the background, and only black text. At the time it seemed great because you could stick your photo on it.

LOL thinking about it now I probably should have used a different template to show you the different ones there are, but hey I like the blue button OK! So my official review is that it’s easy to use, and it works. If you have photoshop and are great at it, chances are you won’t need this. But for the 99% of us that don’t have a clue, that’s who this is for.

So why do graphics matter? Well we are visiual people afterall. When you’ve got your splash page all made up, just a simple button as a call to action instead of a normal link could make a big difference. I challenge you to try it out and split test the results!

Reference: TimLinden.com — An Instant Banner Creator Review

I know I talked about this before, but its one of the most important things you need to do online, and that is tracking your stats. I’ll admit it I never really put much effort into tracking my stats until about a year ago. I’ve tested a lot of programs and out of everything I’ve tired Hits Connect does it all for a very affordable cost.

They not only track your traffic, but they can show you where a sale/lead came from, and that’s the most important thing. Knowing where sales/leads come from will help you cut down on the places then work and don’t.

Below is a screen shot of my Hits Connect account. What I like most is that you can use the Parameter to type in what ad is what so you can target every ad you send out.

For example if you sent a Smart Safelist solo ad out your Parameter could be smartssolo (standing for smart safelist solo).

Then in the Parameter filed like in the image below it would display that name for your total hits and the sales/action conversions. This will help you determine what is working for you, and what is just wasting your time and money.

Hits Connect is very affordable, and well worth the monthly fee. If you want to invest into your business one place I highly recommend spending a little money in is ad tracking.

Reference: Smart Safelist — A HitsConnect Review

Social Bookmarking Exposed is a tutorial e-book that focuses on the importance of social bookmarking in your Internet marketing efforts. Creator John Merrick expounds on the explosion of popularity that social networking sites have seen in recent times and shows you how to profit from this popularity. In Social Bookmarking Exposed, Merrick promises to provide easy steps to exponentially increasing your Internet marketing profits through social networking sites.

Social networking websites are today’s hot trend. There are very few people who own computers and go on the Internet these days who don’t have accounts in one or more social networking sites. Social Bookmarking Exposed promises to show Internet marketers and aspiring Internet marketers how to capitalize on social networking sites and bring traffic to their own sales websites, squeeze pages and blogs. In this tutorial e-book, John Merrick provides information that promises to clearly show the right ways and the wrong ways to use social networking websites for marketing. In Social Bookmarking Exposed, Merrick warns that marketing your websites and products the wrong way in these places can be extremely detrimental to your efforts. That being said, however, he states that the right marketing to social networking sites can be a source of increased sales for you—so much so that you could see double or even triple profits after a short amount of time.

In Social Bookmarking Exposed, Merrick claims that there is more to marketing through social networking sites than just getting people on your friends lists to see your advertisements. The right efforts can actually get your websites ranked high in the search engines; something that every Internet marketer strives for.

Critics of Social Bookmarking Exposed claim that marketers have saturated social networking websites so much that people who belong to them are automatically turned off by anything that even resembles marketing. In this e-book, however, Merrick promises to show you how to approach your social bookmarking in a way that will make people feel that you are always providing them with something of value.

Social Bookmarking Exposed was never intended to be a huge sensation in the Internet marketing world, so you don’t hear a lot about it. Merrick simply felt that he could provide the answers to a lot of questions that marketers are asking about how to use social networking sites to increase their profits. Those who have purchased the e-book have provided mostly positive feedback about what it has done for them. Nothing earth shattering, just solid information.

Reference: IMReportCard — A Social Bookmarking Exposed Review

Are you still guessing? Or are you serious about your business?

In one of my recent posts I reviewed Jon Olson’s Pizza Plan. In his Plan Jon makes a very blunt point about a must-have tool – a link tracker.

Let’s face it, if you don’t know which links are producing the most results for you, whether those links are on a classified ad or on a traffic exchange splash page, then you are probably wasting money on ineffective advertising.

Yes, there are several free link tracking services available online. But when it comes to tracking your results, you absolutely require reliability and the right mix of some advanced features those free services do not offer.

Hits Connect is full-featured link tracking and rotator system second to none. I’ve used this service for many, many years. I use it to track my traffic exchange, pay-per-click and classified ads results.

Here’s a sample of what Hits Connect offers:

- You can rotate an unlimited number of tracker links;

- You can enjoy access to a rotator which is traffic exchange friendly because it has a built-in frame-breaker tester;

- You can enable and disable specific links at any time without deleting them from your list.

The monthly fee is reasonable and represents a very cost effective solution for all your advertising tracking needs.

Don’t guess – go with the best – Hits Connect can revolutionize the way you measure your advertising performance to ensure maximum profitability.

Reference: Traffic Exchange Reviews

In the true spirit of WordPress plugins, this one is completely free! It works like this..

Each time you make a post on your blog, it automatically, and instantly, makes a new tweet on your Twitter account. Now there are other WP plugins that do this, but, being produced by two internet marketers (John Merrick and Soren Jordansen), TweetMyBlog has got some clever twists.

Not only does it post a tweet when you update your blog, but on your blog, it also puts your recent tweets in a WordPress widget in a sidebar. So it both drives your Twitter followers to your blog and your blog readers to your Twitter account.

But it gets better.. John and Soren have added some rather tempting off’ers to people signing up for their free TweetMyBlog plugin. And, when you sign up, you automatically become an affiliate of TweetMyBlog. You get commission when someone signs up for their plugin through your link and takes up one of those off’ers – and they are good products.

And where do your affiliate links appear? In two places! In your blog’s sidebar widget, under the list of your recent tweets, there’s a little “Powered by TweetMyBlog” message. That’s linked to the sign-up page through your affiliate link.

When one of your Twitter followers hits one of your blog tweets to go to your blog, they see, in addition to your blog page, a banner across the top promoting TweetMyBlog – again with your affiliate link. Oh, and the banner is only displayed when a visitor comes to your blog through one of your automated blog tweets.

I really like this win-win integrated system – and it only takes minutes to download the plugin and install it. When you’ve done that, you immediately get these benefits:

• Automated tweets which look, and are, genuine.
• Visitors to your blog from your Twitter account (get more readers of your blog)
• Visitors to your Twitter profile from your blog (get more followers)
• A chance of commission when someone goes from your tweet to your blog
• A chance of commission when someone checks out TweetMyBlog from you sidebar widget.

Reference: MarketingSparks.com

by: RoseyRoser

I joined Social Bookmarking Exposed as a free member. They offer you a free e-book with tons of helpful information in it. The e-book covers how to use social bookmarking websites to promote and get traffic to your website or blog. It has a lot of information in it that is very useful. I can tell you that it will continue to help me promote my web site and blog.

I recommend you join Social Bookmarking Exposed. You can learn so much information for FREE!

Reference: IMReportCard — a comment for Social Bookmarking Exposed

HitsConnect.com is a membership program that has an online system that helps you track your advertising campaigns to see which methods are working and which ones are not. There’s no download involved; you simply log in to the site and use their program right for there. With this program, you can configure it so it will show you where your website traffic is coming from, which helps you to know which traffic generation methods are working best for you.

One of the things that most successful Internet marketers will advise you to do when you are planning on running an Internet marketing campaign is to continually track your advertising results, and that’s what HitsConnect.com is all about. When you run an Internet marketing campaign, you usually use several different kinds of methods for generating traffic to your sales website or squeeze page. Though you are hopefully getting traffic to your website, if you’re not tracking it then you don’t know how much traffic you are getting from any of your methods. The people at HitsConnect.com claim that as a member of their program, you can track the traffic that comes from each of your advertising methods so you can cut out the one that aren’t working and put more focus on the ones that are. Expert marketers say that this can significantly increase your sales.

Some of the things that you can track with HitsConnect.com are pay-per-click advertising campaigns, traffic exchange programs and online classified ads. When you really think about it there are so many ways to conceivably get people to your sales websites that you could spend considerable amount of time on advertising alone. This program promises to help you make sure that every minute that you are spending on your advertising is well spent.

HitsConnect.com has a free membership and a paid membership. With the paid membership you get more benefits, of course, such as being able to track more ad campaigns at once than you can with the free membership. Signing up for free and giving it a test drive is a great way of finding out how well the program will work for you, though.

HitsConnect.com has received positive feedback from the people who have joined the program and utilized its services. A lot of people say that just having a free membership has been good enough for them, although those who do a lot of marketing often find the paid membership to be better. The program is easy to use, and they offer bonuses as well, such as being able to post your ads directly on their site.

Reference: IMReportCard — A Review for HitsConnect

- a Review for Instant Banner Creator by poweronoff

Since it’s a free program, it’s got it’s faults but I FIND IT GREAT NONETHELESS. As the owner of a site, I want banners that I can place in random places to get people to join my site. What better to do that with than making a banner with Instant Banner Creator and placing a small “a” tag on it in HTML as a signature to my most visited forums? This program cost me no money and made many banners for free quickly that I could use.

Reference: IM Report Card (wontyoubemynaber)

If you are using twitter, then you should be sending tweets with your latest blog posts. This is an easy way to get a lot of extra traffic to your blog, and it’s an easy way to keep building a targeted relationship.

I have been testing several services regarding updating twitter with my latest blog post, and I have been doing it manually as well. If you are not sure whether you should use an automated tool or not, then ask yourself how many blogs you have, and if you want to automate it.

I think it depends on how many blogs you have. If you have one blog, it won’t take you much time to add a new tweet about your latest blog post.

The reason I found Tweet My Blog, the wordpress plugin created by John Merrick and Soren Jordansen so interesting, was that it was created by two well-known marketers. Another reason why I just had to test it, was that it was completely free.

So, what’s this Tweet My Blog plugin all about?

It pings twitter as soon as you publish a new blog post. It’s fast, and it updates twitter within a minute, and it works great for this.

The extra feature that people are talking about is this one.

Whenever someone clicks on the link for your new blog post, they will open your post and see a stripe at the top with your referral link to Tweet My Blog. It will say something like:

Easily Combine The Power of Twitter & WordPress To Create A Viral Traffic Monster. Click Here For Free Instant Access!

When they click the link, they will be referred by you if they sign up. As they sign up under you, they will be presented with a one time offer, and if they buy it, you’ll get 50% commission. They will also be presented with similar offers in the future, and you will receive 50% commission.

… but there’s more

The last detail of this plugin is a widget. You can put it in your sidebar and all the visitors to your blog will see your latest tweets.

I am not using the widget, but I can see why it can be useful.

Reference: MarketingFlop.com — a review for TweetmyBlog

Totally Awesome!

Having next to none Graphic Editing knowledge, Instant Banner Creator has been – just – HEAVEN! After dipping a toe into affiliate marketing 2 years back, I learned quite a few techniques. Back then, when I didn’t know Instant Banner Creator even existed, Graphic Editing problems played a major role in me quitting.

The usual Affiliate Banners I got looked 16-bit so I usually had to resort to Paint and you can guess the results! Now in this economy, when I started Affiliate Marketing again, Instant Banner Creator has made it heaven!

The whole thing is SO easy to use and very intuitively knitted together. The start page tells you everything you would want to know to jump in! They even HOST your Banners or Buttons. Overall, Instant Banner Creator ROCKS! Excellent job by John and Soren!

Reference: Instant Banner Creator Testimonal