I am going to start this post off with a bit of a rant.
Yesterday I had a paid ad disallowed by a major traffic source stating that the ad made unrealistic or unlikely claims.
What surprised me most was that there were no actual claims made. Since most ads are human reviewed on this traffic source, I can only be led to believe that this was an arbitrary decision made by someone on the review team.
Luck of the draw.
The frustrating aspect of this is that my competitors in the same market are running really shady ads and landing pages on this SAME traffic source without any consequences.
My sneaky suspicion is that since these competitors spend a lot of money, the traffic source is simply turning a blind eye.
What a joke.
But then again, this has been going on since the early days with other traffic sources like Google Adwords.
Which leads me to the question; are you really ever in control of your traffic?
Whether you buy your traffic or invest your time into getting free traffic from search engines or social sites, the truth is that you never are if traffic is always coming from external sources.
Whether you buy traffic or get it for free, things can change literally overnight.
I just read that eBay lost 80% of their SEO rankings with the latest Google Panda 4.0 changes.
So what is the simple solution to stop relying on third party traffic sources?
Simple.
Build your own audience and the easiest way to do that is with an email list.
When you build your own email list, you are 100% in control. You don’t have to get your emails approved by a quality assurance team before you send them out.
You can email your list as many times as you want without having to incur additional ad expenses (aside from your normal list hosting fees).
You are not competing with dozens of the similar ads on the same page as your ad.
When you launch a new product or service, you already have an audience to advertise to when you have an existing email list.
You can actually build a relationship with the people on your email list, as opposed to them only seeing your ad once.
That is why I believe having your own email list is a must for anyone looking to build a long-term sustainable income online.
I have come to the conclusion that if you want to get traffic from “hard to deal with” traffic sources, the best strategy is to siphon their traffic onto your own email list using ads that you know will get approved.
Then you have free reign on what you can advertise to that prospect without having to deal with “arbitrary” ad reviews.
Good riddance.
People say that you can’t run an optin page on Google Adwords. This is not true.
I have been running optin pages successfully on Google Adwords for years now and have built email lists that now have thousands of subscribers simply from Adwords.
It is how you set up your optin page that Google Adwords looks at before allowing it to run.
To me, having your own targeted email list to mail to is the greatest traffic source on planet earth.
If you haven’t started building your own email list, there is no better time to get started then now.
That is truly the only way you will ever be in control.
Your thoughts?
