Internet Marketing

It’s a common misunderstanding among some marketers to assume the guest post price you get is the same that everyone else gets. Owners of guest post sites are extremely good at maximizing profit and spotting opportunities to overcharge. If you’ve traveled from the US to an Asian country, you’re probably familiar with the experience. For those who have not, what happens is when you go to Thailand, for example, is they’ll charge you a different rate if they think you’re a tourist, just because it’s well known that Americans are rich. If you speak Thai, then you’ll be able to get a better price. This is why American nomads often get a translator to help them secure an apartment in Asian countries.

This is the same on the internet, of course. If they think you have money, you’ll be charged a high rate. So when it comes to guest post sites, it comes down to your ability to negotiate. Do you consider yourself a good negotiator?

I’ve been quoted $80 or $100 for a guest post and countered with $30. A lot of these sites will accept anything but shoot for the stars, and some people actually pay the first price they’re quoted. Especially people who are new to guest posts and never negotiated. They’ll take the first price and pay it, which is weird.

So it all comes down to your individual abilities. Make yourself appear less fortunate.

Social media panels are insanely popular right now. The amounts of services they offer range from Instagram followers to TikTok views. The problem in this space, is there are a lot of scammers. I’m going to be updating this blog post with some of the best (and worst services) I’ve used. Every month I spend over $1000 on different social media services, so I think it would be useful if I shared some of my findings with blog readers.

The Best

Let’s start with the best. These are some of the services I’ve used over the past decade or so.

YTBot

YTBot is one of my favorites. They are a custom panel, not a reseller. When it comes to YouTube, they offer some of the best services. However, even though their name suggests YouTube, their services expand beyond YouTube, so certainly check out their offerings. It’s a bit limited in terms of offerings but that’s expected. Anyone who offers a lot of services is likely a reseller meaning the quality will be spotty.

The Worst

There are no shortage of bad experiences on these platforms. Here are some of mine.

SMMRaja

SmmRaja has an awful reputation when it comes to customer service. I have experienced it first hand and also read reviews. My main issue was, even though their prices are unfair, their customer service consciously chooses to not help when given the choice to be helpful or not. I need receipt for my transactions. So if I load the account with $950 then I’d like a receipt sometime in the few weeks that follow for it. However, they refused to generate 2 separate receipts for my deposits. Separate receipts are essential

Given they were unhelpful (and honestly kind of rude) with such a simple request, I know how they’ll act in other requests. Check out the review below which backs up everything I just said.

TrendyIgPanel

Well these guys are straight up scamming. I got taken to the cleaners on a $400 test and then after taking a few more to the cleaners a few weeks later he was banned on the forums for dodgy activities. I don’t think this one needs further explanation.

BulkFollows

BulkFollowers took a 4 week vacation and ditches all his commitments for the time being. This is a standard thing in Europe to just disappear on vacation and drop all responsibilities, but this is odd behavior for anyone from the US, Canada, Australia, UK, etc and generally unacceptable behavior. It’s been a while since I’ve tested the service but you can read a bit more about his escapades on the forums.

Neutral

SMM.net

These guys are pretty solid, but they’re just ridiculously expensive. The owner has a spotty reputation on BlackHatWorld but I know he does well financially. There are certainly some hefty margins on these services.

JustAnotherPanel

These guys are the kings of reselling. They’ve had a bad rep for poor quality but it’s getting better. They’re pretty massive and have been around for a long time.

GoToTop

Really liking these guys customer service after a rough start. Sadly they only accept crypto which is why I stand fairly neutral but this is a great product so far. Happy this relationship turned around. They offer custom filters and push notifications that a lot of different panels don’t offer.

Here is a friendly reminder on how to place the order properly:

1. In the field -LINK- : URL to the Instagram account OR post where you want to redirect people
2. In the field -QUANTITY- : Amount od DMs
3. In the field -USERNAMES- : just put the link of the account you want us to collect users from
4. In the field -HASHTAGS- : specify the text of the message for sending

As it’s mentioned on our website and BHW, the pricelist is following:

Instagram Mass DMs with PUSH notifications
50k DMs – $2.8/1000
100k-300k – $2.3/1000
300k-5M – $2/1000

For your balance of $500, we can send 218k DMs with Push notifications. Or you can try any other smaller amount. For example, if you order 200k, then you will have $40 left on your balance.

Don’t forget that we have different filters that you can use if needed 🙂
Filters are already in a price, there no additional costs for filters.

Conclusion

Had an experience, good or bad? Let me know! Reach out on Twitter.

You guys won’t believe some of the stuff I get told. Today I was talking with an SEO agency from St. Petersburg, FL. He told me:

Sorry Josh. You lost me at backlinks still being a major ranking factor.

That’s right, he does not believe backlinks are a factor. Why? Well I talked to another agency who had another response:

Thank you for reaching out to us, our SEO team does not rely on backlinks as they are not as useful as they use to be.

Matt Cutts former head of web explained how backlinks will become irrelevant in 2014 [in another video].

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Even with all the new communication tools that companies are leveraging, such as Slack or Discord, email continues to be the main mode of communication for businesses.I don’t where my company would be, without leveraging some of the advanced tools on the market today.

HubSpot initially got me hooked on read notifications, but their free plan limits you to 200 notifications per month, which just isn’t enough for my business. Their introductory plan starts at $50/month and I feel it has a lot of useless features that are used to justify the price. After deciding I need reliable and affordable read notifications, I spent an entire evening testing and using alternatives.

MixMax

MixMax won me over because they had all the features I wanted and a beautiful interface. Every time someone opens an email of mine, it records when they opened it, from which device and where they were.

My second favorite feature is the email scheduling. Although I’ve been up working since 3:30 am this morning, I used to be a night owl, which means I’d be responding to emails at night. The problem with emailing at night, is the rest of the world is usually sleeping. So if I was writing an email at 1am, I’d schedule it to send at 9:30 AM in the morning.

However, schedule sending is nothing unique to this list. What is unique is the fact that MixMax leverages data to build predictions of when you should target each recipient. In the following screenshot, MixMax concludes that I should send an email to my dad at 1:26 PM. This number changes, based on who you choose as the recepient.

Although this is my software of choice, it’s not perfect and I am always following the competitors for better options.

Some of the things I’d like to see in MixMax:

• Competitive pricing. I pay $29/month for MixMax. It’s a bit high for just a few features, but I’ve yet to find a competitor with dramatically reduced pricing to make it worth switching.
• Schedule follow-ups without a template. I’d like to pre-write a follow-up when writing the initial email and have it send in 3 days if the first email doesn’t get a response.

SalesHandy

SalesHandy is also one of the top email marketing solutions available on the market. For any of the good features like a multi-staged mail merge, you’re looking at $20/month.

Similarly to MixMax, SalesHandy also makes you use a template structure for follow-ups, which very well could have been enough to make me switch from MixMax.

I did give SalesHandy an opportunity to perform, but I couldn’t get my contacts imported, without a vague error message. However, I will likely revisit SalesHandy in the future and advise all of you to give it a fair chance.

ReplyUp

For those of you on a budget and looking for automated followups, look no further than ReplyUp. For just $12/month, you can deploy follow up sequences which schedule bulk, personalized emails and track their open rate.

Gmelius

Gmelius is currently playing catch-up but priced at just $15/month with a load of features, CEO Florian Bersier could be sitting on top of one of the most promising email solutions in 2018. In a day and age where multiple followups are everything, the founder reassured me that this and everything I’m looking for is coming in 2018. Out of all the solutions available, this is the platform to watch.

Thanks for your email. Sequences or multiple follow-ups are not part of our solution yet. This is on our road-map and will be released at the start of Q1 2018.

All the best,

Florian
CEO, Founder

Boomerang

Boomerang is the reigning champion. They are the PayPal of payment processing, which is a good and bad thing. They’re well known mainly due to their free version, but the benefits don’t justify spending $15/month given the amazing options on the market. However, if you’re sending from a Gmail address, you can get a handful of Boomerang features for just $5/month whereas the others on the list start at a much higher price.

GMass

I tried GMass a while back and ran into some issues. The software itself runs out of Gmail, whereas competitors like MixMax and SendHandy have their own thought-out user interface to manage campaigns, reports and statistics. The messy labelling system used to report message reads reminds me of a makeshift mail solution I made a few years back.

They have a strong marketing campaign to get the company in front of people like myself, but they really need to rethink the product.

If you’d like me to review your email marketing software, send me an email.

1. Their registration box doesn’t work

So first, when registering on the registration page, there are several textboxes to fill out. However, the textbox wouldn’t take any of my emails. My personal joshmacodnald.net email, nor my gmail or hotmail addresses. It just said the email was invalid, when it clearly wasn’t. Frustrating.

2. Their website is full of errors.

So I click to email them, guess what? 502 error. I got back, click the button again, okay the email form appears now. So I send an email.

3. Their email is slower than they let on.

After submitting an email to the sales department to explain you can’t sign up (a HUGE CRO issue, probably costing them 5-10% loss in sales), you’re told they’ll be in touch “very shortly” and by that, I’d expect an email within an hour. No, of course they didn’t follow up within an hour.

4. Their phone number is out of service

As I said, an hour goes by without a response so I just try to submit the form. It gives me an error message, with a phone number. Awesome! I’ll hop on call and get this sorted right away I imagine. NOPE. After calling, a pre-recorded message says the number is no longer in service. Wonderful.

5. The live chat support agent was misinformed.

So I search Google and find a live chat option, cool. I’m connect with someone right away who says the issue is I must have my DNS records set for my domain. Why? He nor I have a clue. I run A records for my VPS and I run MX records to connect to my mail server. His answer doesn’t explain why I can’t register with my hotmail or gmail.

Also, why does the email of the admin need to have this? It’s not like this is the email we’ll be sending emails from anyways. This is more so my personal email for billing, support etc. I don’t want emails to be sending from this. But with GetResponse, yes, they try to imply that you’ll be sending from your personal email.

Whatever, so I exit out of that live chat, annoyed. I go to the homepage, there is a single form that asks for an email address and a password to get started. I enter in the EXACT SAME details as before, and it works. So one registration form works, and the other does not. Talk about lost sales.

6. The editor is super laggy and disfunctional

So I finally get into the control panel. Cool. I setup an email, and the HTML editor delays every input for 1 second. Frustrating! So you don’t spot a type until you’re 5 words along and have to click back or wait for the arrows to catch up, etc. What a mess. So I wrote the email text in my local editor, then just pasted it into GetResponse.

Would you believe me if I said the backspace button stopped working within the editor and I had to refresh the entire page?

7. Their docs are out of date

So now it’s time to integrate with my existing solution. I found someone made an extension for Contact Form 7 on WordPress and GetResponse (no idea why GetResponse wouldn’t code this for their own customers – it sure would be nice), so I download the extension and it asks for an API key. Okay, so I go into my dashboard, I can’t find it in the options. So I search on Google, and find this article. I try to implement what it says – outdated. The pages and settings it explains are no longer part of the current UI.

8. Their live chat is super laggy

So I go back to live chat to clarify how to find the API key. The worst part? It lags about 20 seconds when you try to type something in, and that is sometimes not quick enough before the live agent tries to cancel the conversation before a response can be fired off.

9. They send emails you can’t unsubscribe from

Here’s another one for you: you’re basically signed up for endless emails from them. No unsubscribe link.

End rant. So, does anyone have an autoresponder recommendation?

My Twitter has thousands of real followers which I have obtained through a number of ways. People tend to claim they are “social media expert” but I wouldn’t consider myself an expert. I just understand the system. Here are a few tips to get you to my level of engagement.

Post regularly

People will forget who you are if you don’t post daily on Twitter. I like to hit a minimum of 3-4 tweets a week, but my aim is 2-3 a day. If you get too many thoughts in one day, save them as drafts and post them on a day when you don’t have the creativity or time to craft tweets.

Post at the right time of day

You can schedule tweets, but I don’t. I like to tweet anytime from 9 AM to midnight. You could post earlier. People are always on Twitter at night, so that’s a safe bet.

Do not post links

Links are the spam of Twitter. Unless the link is of direct benefit to you, do not post it. Do not share interesting articles. Instead, take a screenshot of a good paragraph, crop it, and post that. See next point about images.

Do not post many images

I don’t get that great of results with images. Post them if they’re really good, but do not post many. Probably 1 out of 30 tweets of mine are images.

Do not retweet others

This is the same as links. Retweets can be viewed as spam. You want people to retweet you. Do not shove content in your audience’s face unless it’s of benefit to you. You do not get any benefits unless it’s a friend’s tweet, etc. Retweets don’t benefit you as much as you think they do.

Post your own thoughts, not copied

This world is in need of creative and original thinking. Twitter is spammed with popular quotes. Instead, try to make up your own quotes and explain yourself. Craft a specific way of thinking for your followers. My most engaged and popular tweets are simply random thoughts that I came up with.

A popular tweet of mine, containing advice that I came up with throughout my day.

Follow tons of other people

I use Twitter as a producer, not as a consumer. I do not view other people’s tweets, unless I look on a specific person’s timeline. I never view the newsfeed. That’s why I am not worried that I follow 5,000 people. I follow people because it makes them feel good and makes them engage in my content and retweet me. It’s these people that power every tweet to thousands of people using retweets, so following them is the least I can do. If you’re going to automated this, make sure you automatically unfollow others so your following count is always less than your follower count.

Facebook doesn’t have the option to target all countries, so you have to manually enter them — until now, when they added the bulk import option. I don’t know how new this feature is, but I do ads a few times per week and I just noticed it. They used to have a limit of 25 countries, but that seems to be gone as of now.

If you want to target all the wealthy countries in the world, or if you want to target all the poor countries, you have to import a list. Luckily, I’ve done this enough times, that I’ve already sorted countries out by GDP, etc.

Here is my list of countries with a GDP over $10,000 and sorted by population descending.

United States
Japan
Germany
France
United Kingdom
Italy
Korea, South
South Africa
Spain
Argentina
Poland
Canada
Saudi Arabia
Taiwan
Australia
Netherlands
Greece
Portugal
Belgium
Czech Republic
Hungary
Sweden
Austria
Switzerland
Hong Kong
Israel
Denmark
Slovakia
Finland
Norway
Croatia
Singapore
New Zealand
Ireland
Puerto Rico
Lithuania
Uruguay
Oman
United Arab Emirates
Kuwait
Latvia
Slovenia
Estonia
Mauritius
Qatar
Cyprus
Bahrain
Luxembourg
Macau
Martinique
Malta
Brunei
Bahamas, The
Iceland
Barbados
French Polynesia
Netherlands Antilles
New Caledonia
Guam
Virgin Islands
Jersey
N. Mariana Islands
Isle of Man
Aruba
Andorra
Antigua & Barbuda
Bermuda
Guernsey
Greenland
Faroe Islands
Cayman Islands
Liechtenstein
Monaco
San Marino
Gibraltar
British Virgin Is.

Here is the list of countries I use when targeting poor countries. These countries have a GDP under $5,000 and they are sorted descending by population. There are many reasons I need to target poor countries (hiring VAs, getting cheap likes to something, etc):

India
Indonesia
Pakistan
Bangladesh
Nigeria
Philippines
Vietnam
Egypt
Ethiopia
Congo, Dem. Rep.
Burma
Sudan
Tanzania
Kenya
Morocco
Afghanistan
Nepal
Uganda
Uzbekistan
Iraq
Venezuela
Korea, North
Ghana
Yemen
Sri Lanka
Mozambique
Syria
Madagascar
Cote d’Ivoire
Cameroon
Burkina Faso
Cambodia
Ecuador
Malawi
Niger
Guatemala
Zimbabwe
Angola
Senegal
Mali
Zambia
Cuba
Chad
Guinea
Serbia
Bolivia
Somalia
Rwanda
Haiti
Burundi
Azerbaijan
Benin
Honduras
Tajikistan
El Salvador
Paraguay
Laos
Sierra Leone
Jordan
Papua New Guinea
Nicaragua
Togo
Kyrgyzstan
Eritrea
Georgia
Moldova
Central African Rep.
Lebanon
Congo, Repub. of the
Albania
Mauritania
Liberia
Armenia
Mongolia
Jamaica
West Bank
Bhutan
Lesotho
Gambia, The
Guinea-Bissau
Gaza Strip
Swaziland
East Timor
Guyana
Comoros
Solomon Islands
Equatorial Guinea
Djibouti
Suriname
Cape Verde
Maldives
Belize
Vanuatu
Mayotte
Sao Tome & Principe
Saint Vincent and the Grenadines
Tonga
Micronesia, Fed. St.
Kiribati
Marshall Islands
Wallis and Futuna
Tuvalu
Montserrat
Saint Helena

There are many of you who are using rank trackers already, so this post isn’t really for you. However, there are a few who have not yet jumped onto a tracking service.

I’m not going to recommend a service in this post, just because this is not supposed to be an affiliate or promotional post, but rather an informational post.

You have so many keywords, URLs and days. Multiply all these out and you have thousands of data points and it’s hard to visualize what works and what doesn’t without a rank tracker.

With a rank tracker, you can see which keywords are improving, which are not, which are steady and how long they’ve been like this. Day to day, it feels like some of my keywords never move, but then I realize I’m at #3, when I was #120 for a highly competitive term just 12 months ago.

If you don’t have a rank tracker yet, you’re causing yourself stress and disorganization and you should jump on one immediately. There are many affordable options on the market and some even have a free tier, or trial.