In this blog post, I’m going to share my answer to the following question:

“If you were to start from scratch with NO list, NO JV partners in your niche, and all you have is $100 capital, what would you do to start making sales for your niche membership site within just 15 days?”

Before I answer this question, let me state my assumption.

I’m assuming that you already have a niche membership site and you can make some modifications to your website to accommodate the marketing plan that I’m going to tell you.

Ready? Here we go……

If I have a niche membership site, with no list, no JV partner and only a hundred bucks……

1) I’ll go to Clickbank and see what kind of ebooks people are buying in my niche.

2) I’ll think of a topic that complements (not competes with) the popular niche ebooks sold in Clickbank.

What I’m going to do is to turn that topic into a special report that people are willing to buy.

It is important that you don’t write something that compete with the popular ebooks sold in Clickbank. You will see why later.

3) Since I only have $100, I’ll have no enough budget to outsource but to write the report myself. So I’ll spend 2 solid days to write a report on the topic that I’ve researched.

I am planning to sell the report for just $7.

4) On day 3, I’ll spend 1 day writing a powerful sales letter to sell my new report.

In the sales letter, I’ll include my niche membership site as a free bonus, i.e. those who purchase the report will get 1 month free membership to my niche site.

5) Day 4 is a technical day. I’ll have to spend the whole day to integrate the sale of the report and the one month membership trial together. (If you are not a technical person, you can outsource this job to a freelancer at GetAFreelancer.com for $60. This was what I used to pay before I figured out how to do it myself.)

6) Day 5 onwards is all about marketing.

First, I will go to Clickbank and find all the best selling authors in my niche. I will then contact them with my JV offer.

My JV offer is that I will give them 100% commission for the $7 report that they sell. I will also give them 50% commission on all the future sales generated from my membership site if their leads stay on my membership site after the one month trial.

Since my report actually complement the ebooks they are selling, there is a high chance that they will be interested to promote the report to their customers and lists.

Next, I’ll go to the top bloggers in my niche and contact them with the same JV offer.

With 100% upfront commission and 50% recurring commission in the future, I’m pretty sure that a handful of the bloggers in my niche will take up the offer.

7) Finally, my job is to overdeliver to my members so that they will stay on my membership site for as long as they can.

The entire plan actually costs me $0. But if you have $100, you can spend it on outsourcing certain tasks such as system integration.

Today’s blog post is for LeadsLeap members. If you are not a member, you can sign up here.

In this post, I’m going to bring you to our back-office and show you some stats about the traffic that we send to you.

Some background

Early this week, we added an extra fraud prevention system that tracks the userid, IP address and number of clicks. This system will tell us which IP address is viewing our members’ ads and whether the visitor is a member or non-member.

When we launched the system, I was excited to see what it will return.

I was surprised!

Take a look at the screenshot of the database that recorded the click-through in the first 10 minutes after we launch.

The userid column is blank, meaning none of the clicks is from our own members!

This means our members are getting traffic from non-members, people who happen to come to our website via non-referred links such as the search engine. Frankly, I was pretty excited when I saw this.

This is just the first 10 minutes. After 24 hours, I exported the 24-hour record and separate them into member and non-member clicks.

The result is 64% are member clicks and 36% are non-member clicks. In total, we recorded 4763 clicks on that day.

Why am I showing you all these?

First reason, I’m excited. I can’t wait to share this info with you.

Another reason is I want to show you that LeadsLeap is more than just a traffic exchange system. Our members are getting traffic from non-members. 36% is not a small percentage.

How can you channel our traffic to your website?

One way is to become our PRO member. Your PRO ad will be shown in our network all the time 24/7.

Another way is to make sure that you have enough credits in your account so that you FREE ad can be shown in our network. If you are a member, you should have learnt the different ways to earn credits. One smart way is to refer 20 people to join you in LeadsLeap. This will earn you 500 credits every month.

20 people one time = 500 credits every month = endless traffic months after months.

Do the math. It’s a good deal.

Monthly bonus credits will be added on the 1st of each month. If you want to quality for the bonus on the 1st of August, you still have about 5 days to reach your 20 referrals. Go for it!

In today’s blog, I’m going to share with you how to get good response from safelist advertising.

Many gurus will tell you that safelist is a complete waste of time and to certain extend, I agree. But if you know the tricks, it can be a good source of traffic for you.

Without further ado, here are the tricks to get good response from safelist advertising.

1) Don’t sell. Build list!

Safelist traffic seldom buy stuff on the spot. Don’t advertise your business opportunity directly or sell your product upfront. It won’t work.

Instead, your main job is to give. Give away free gifts, free info and/or arouse their curiosity so that they opt-in to your list.

After they opt-in to your list, you can lead them to a one-time offer using the strategy I shared with you earlier on. If the offer is good, they will bite.

To illustrate, when I advertise LeadsLeap program, the sales page I use is this. (You can use the same page to build your leadsleap team by simply adding your referid at the end of the url).

As you can see, I’m giving away more than 1000 minutes of internet marketing videos. The opt-in conversion is good. After prospects opt-in, they will see my one-time offer. About 5% will take up the offer, but bear in mind that it’s not the end.

Safelist traffic are usually newbies of the newbies. Once they opt-in to your list, if you can feed them with great information and show them the way to make money online, they can be your best long term customers.

2) It all started with a catchy email subject.

Safelist members receive tons of emails a day. Wanting them to read your email is very tough and that’s why most people fail to get much traffic.

(Usually, when you join an individual safelist program, the response is so low that it can be a waste of your time. For better response, it is wiser to use a safelist submitter that allows you to submit your ad to thousands of safelists at one time.)

As I’ve said, safelist members receive tons of emails everyday. When they browse through their list of emails, the only thing they see is your email subject. Therefore the only way to capture their attention is through your email subject.

There are 2 important tips on writing email subject:

i) When writing your email subject, focus on giving and don’t try to sell or hype.

Email subjects such as “Make $3000 A Month On Autopilot” will not work because people know you are trying to sell something.

Instead, email subject like “Free Report: How I Make $3000 A Month On Autopilot” will get some traffic to your squeeze page.

ii) To further increase the response, you MUST make your subject stand out VISUALLY.

This is the main secret, so pay special attention to this.

What I’m saying is you should add some special characters that can make your ad quickly recognizable from the list of email subjects.

To illustrate what I mean, look at the list of email subjects below and tell me which one captures your attention.

Still Reading Commercial Emails For Free?
Start to Increase Your ClickBank Sales Today!
The Gas Alternatives Report : Up To $2000 Monthly!
### Free Report ### How I Make $3000 A Month On Autopilot
You won’t believe this is free
THE LIGHTNING RESULT SAFELIST - FREE TO JOIN - FREE TO EARN!!
3 Reasons You Should Consider

If you browse through the subjects above, you should see that “### Free Report ### How I Make $3000 A Month On Autopilot” stands out from the rest.

The trick is to use some special characters to increase your chance of having your email subject being read.

Some tricks you can use include:

### Free Report ###
**** Urgent !!! ****
[Unadvertised Bonus]
FW:
RE:

I’ve also seen people starting an email subject with characters like these:

(¯`*
L@@K HERE >>

Be creative and think out of the box when using characters to capture attention.

But remember, this trick can ONLY capture people’s attention. Eventually, it’s the words that determine if they want to read your ad. Remember to give rather than to sell or hype in your email subject.

Email subjects like this

**** Urgent !!! **** Start to Increase Your ClickBank Sales Today!

will not get you much traffic, but email subjects like this

**** Urgent !!! **** 6000 Free Leads For You At $0 Cost

will.

To sum up, effective safelist advertising begins with 1) a VISUALLY powerful email subject, 2) an irresistible email subject that offers something that one would be crazy to reject and 3) a squeeze page that can get people to opt-in to get the offer, and finally 4) a good follow-up system that lives on the principle of “give and thou shall receive”.

Last but not least, remember that the success of any advertising campaign does not lie in the source of your traffic (so long as the traffic is targeted). More importantly, it lies in the amount of charcoal you have set up.

Helping you to increase your web site traffic has always been my top priority and today, I’m going to share with you my best kept secrets to increase web site traffic from scratch.

Like many of you, I started my career in internet marketing with little knowledge, no JV partner, no internet marketing friend and I didn’t pay thousands of dollars to attend any seminar on internet marketing. I started from scratch, learning the ropes by reading tons of ebooks and email newsletters (blog wasn’t popular when I started online).

So I believe whatever web site traffic strategy that works for me will work for you.

My Most Important Web Site Traffic Strategy

My most important web site traffic strategy is viral marketing.

Viral marketing is a huge topic by itself and it encompasses many different strategies, including viral ebook, viral software, affiliate program, tell-a-friend system and even list building.

Before I even start thinking about the details of any new web site, the first question I will ask myself is “How can I multiply my initial traffic into more traffic?” If I can’t get a good answer to this question, I will not build the web site at all. (Clarification: I’m referring to mega web sites like LeadsLeap, not those little Adsense or affiliate web sites that rely on search engine traffic.)

The whole idea of viral marketing is that you want people to tell other people about your website.

You may think all you need is an affiliate program. If you do, you are dead wrong! Just because you are having an affiliate program doesn’t mean that people will start spreading the words. In most cases, they won’t!

The key in viral marketing is to create a buzz in the community. You need to position your new web site in such a way that there is some novelty in it, something that will make people say “Hey, it sounds interesting” or “Hey, this is something new”. If you can do that, together with a good supporting system such as an affiliate program, your web site will spread like wild fire.

Next, You Need Web Site Traffic Starter

I derive the term Traffic Starter from Fire Starter. When you set up a fire, you need fire starters. Similarly, if you want  your website to spread like wild fire, you need a traffic starter, which is the initial traffic to your website.

Can you imagine what will happen if you burn lots of fire starters but you fail to put some charcoal around them? Yes, you get some initial fire but it soon dies.

In the case of web site traffic, the charcoal is the viral marketing components. That’s why I say viral marketing is the most important web site traffic strategy. You MUST have that in place before even thinking about where to get your initial traffic.

Am I clear on this point?

Ok next, where do you get the initial traffic?

Frankly, it really doesn’t matter where you get the initial traffic, as long as the traffic you receive are targeted.

When finding the initial web site traffic, an important question to ask yourself is “Where can I find people who are interested in my web site?” Whatever answer you get, go there and find ways to channel the traffic to your website.

It could mean you have to pay some money to advertise. It could also mean you have to write to some website owners and strike out some JV deals.

When I first started, I had no JV contact and I got all my initial traffic from advertising. I spent quite a bit on advertising (5 figures to be exact), but I soon earned back the money because I put a lot of “charcoal” around my traffic starter. Get the idea?

That’s really my main secret to increase web site traffic and I hope you get the gist of it.

Recently, Ewen Chia advertised with us again in one of our advertising channels. He was trying to promote one of his offline seminars in Singapore.

Whenever Ewen advertises, there is something we can learn.

In Singapore, most seminar organizers sell their seminars via free previews. I believe this method of selling was copied from the US. The idea is to give you a 1-2 hour free seminar which will then upsell you with a $1000+ full seminar. This method works.

Of all the seminar organizers who advertise with us, almost all of them advertise their free seminars directly. That means they advertise a sales page that tells you about their free seminar, how you can benefit and how you can register for free.

This method of advertising is direct and you get attendance to your free seminar immediately. But it’s a short term strategy.

Guess what’s the long term strategy?

It is to put list building as the first priority.

Here is what Ewen did - Instead of advertising a free seminar, he advertised to give away an ebook that he is currently selling in the market for $19.90. It’s a no brainer, even I opt-in to download the ebook!

And here is the smart trick - As a ‘bonus’, those who opt-in are entitled to attend a free seminar by him!

Can you see how powerful this strategy is?

If you simply promote a free seminar, people will check their schedule and if they can’t make it on that day, they will not sign up. On the contrary, if you give away an ebook that you are currently selling in the market, many people will opt in to your list to download the ebook. At the same time, they know that they have the privilege to attend your seminar for free. If they can’t make it this time, you can always follow up with them for your next seminar.

Building a list is no longer a secret. But when it comes to paid advertising, most people still tend to sell the actual product directly instead of giving away something of value to build a list. I believe that’s because most people have the mentality of “if I pay to advertise, I want to make sure that I earn back the fee.”

This mentality is not wrong. But there are smarter ways to do it.

Like what Ewen has done, instead of selling the product directly, you can give an irresistible offer to entice people to opt-in. Once they opt-in, I rephrase, immediately after they opt-in, you can show them whatever offer that you want to sell to them. This way, you can build a list and make sales at the same time.

An important thing to note in this strategy is that you must present your offer immediately after your prospects opt-in, not via autoresponder or after a day or two. This is because if people bother to opt-in, you have already gotten their full attention. You want to continue showing them your offer when they are still with you. Once they divert their attention to some other things, it will be harder to sell to them again.

To make sure that you grab the concept behind this strategy, here’s the flowchart:

Give an irresistible offer > Opt-in > Once prospects opt-in, show them your offer (it can be an affiliate product you’re selling, a network marketing opportunity, a seminar you’re promoting or your own product) > Follow up

If you put list building as your first priority whenever you advertise, your list will eventually grow and when that happens, you can do traffic exchange with other list owners and grow your list even bigger.

Look at your advertising campaigns today and ask yourself if you are putting list building as the first priority. If you are not, you may want to re-think your strategy.

Today I’m going to share with you how I get one of my old websites back to top 10 in Google, spending very little time and money.

But before I tell you what I did, let me give you a brief background about this particular website.

I have a niche website that I created back in 2004 and it has been in the top 10 in Google for a competitive keyword for years.

To give you some idea, that ’single word’ keyword gives 6,900,000 results in Google, i.e. more than 6 million websites are fighting for that keyword.

A few months back, I realized that the sales from the website dropped. I suspected that my ranking in Google had probably dropped. Indeed, it dropped out of the first page into the second page. The exact ranking was 12th position. Just missed the top 10 by 2 positions.

To regain my top position, I needed to get lots of backlinks fast.

Thus, about 2 months back, I engaged a freelancer to submit the website to 1000 link directories for less than $30. That’s all I did.

A few days ago, I realized that sales from the website increased. I went to Google and checked. Indeed, I’m back to the top 10. I’m now in the 7th position.

From this experience, I once again prove that directory submission is still a viable promotion method.

Some Advice In Website Creation

When I first started creating niche websites to profit from Adsense and affiliate sales, I followed the advice of the ‘experts’ - follow your interest.

I wrote very good articles and each website took me one month of intensive effort!

Soon, very soon in fact, I ran out of interested topics and I had nothing to write. It took me a while before I decided to create websites using Private Label Articles.

I’m glad that I made that decision.

The traffic and earnings from some of the websites created using Private Label Articles outperform those ’sweat and toil’ websites I’ve created.

For example, one of the websites I’ve created using Private Label Articles is now consistently generating more than $500 a month from Adsense. The highest record was $700 in one month. It took me only a few hours to create the website and a few hours to promote it.

I’ve tried at least 4 different Private Label Article services in the market and there is only 1 that worth my time and investment. Unfortunately (or fortunately?), that website will be closed on 30th June 2008, i.e. it will stop accepting new members after 30th June 2008 (but existing members will still continue to receive new articles). When it reopens, probably after 3-4 months time, the same service will cost you double.

If you are just starting out but are committed to build some passive income online, I suggest you grab this PLR service that I use before it’s closed to the public and ‘naively’ follow the instructions laid out by them, especially their 90-day challenge as well as my step by step guide. If you can just do that, you will thank me one year from now.

After 3 months of work from gathering ideas from our members to building the software, finally I’m excited to present to you our first viral software - Affiliate ID Manager.

If you were with us since we started, you may recall that we did a poll to vote for the best idea for our viral software. Now we’ve turned that idea into reality!

Before I move on, I need to mention that this post is mainly for LeadsLeap members. If you are not a member yet, join us now to get the benefit!

What Does Affiliate ID Manager Do?

Before I answer this question, let me ask you a question.

Where do you keep all your affiliate IDs, passwords, affiliate links, payment info, cloaked links, etc? Excel file or simply keep them in your email inbox?

How about your hosting login passwords, membership passwords, social media passwords and tons and tons of other passwords? Where do you keep them?

I think you get the idea.

Affiliate ID Manager will manage all your IDs, passwords, links and many other details related to that particular account in one secured database, with powerful search function and organization features. This means you can easily look for the details that you need and update it any time if necessary.

How About The Viral Part?

Good question. As a LeadsLeap member, you will get the rebrandable version of the software.

The rebrandable version allows you to rebrand the software with 2 banners and 4 text links. By simply giving away the rebranded software, you will be able to build massive traffic to the websites you’re promoting.

Many of you have probably read about the S-Buzz phenomenal that is happening now. It’s the power of giving away free software to build traffic.

If you are an affiliate marketer or you are running your own website, it is vital that you have some form of viral campaign running. Rebrandable software is definitely a powerful viral tool.

A high quality rebrandable software will typically cost you $39. But now, you have the same power at $0 cost.

If you are a LeadsLeap member, you can download the rebrandable version here. (login required)

The Purpose Of This Blog Post……

The main reason why I post it up in our blog is because I want you to post all your technical question about the software in the comments section of this post.

This is a multi-functional software and I reckon that some of you many have questions on how to use it. Instead of flooding our support emails and answering repeated questions, I thought it would be easier if you can throw all your questions here so that other savvy members or I will answer the questions here.

Of course, before posting your question, please make sure that it is not already answered.

If you know the answer to some questions, I would appreciate that you can contribute your answers.

Thank you and have fun playing with the software.

Many new marketers fail to start because they are not sure how to promote a new website.

So today I’m going to show you step by step what I normally do when I start a new website.

Before listing down the step by step instructions, I need to clarify that what I’m doing is to promote 15 to 40 pages Adsense website or product review website. It can be a static site or a blog.

“Why is it important to clarify on this?” You may ask.

This is because you can start many kinds of websites. Adsense or product review website is just one easy way to make ’small’ money online, but when you have 100s of these little sites, it’s more than enough to quit your job!

Other forms of website you can start include a squeeze page to build list, a mega service site like LeadsLeap, your own product site such as your own Clickbank product etc. The strategies required for these kinds of website is different from promoting Adsense or product review website.

For one, you can’t do any form of joint venture for Adsense or product review sites. You can do advertising, provided you know what you are doing. But search engine optimization is a surefire free traffic source that you can rely on and once you get such traffic, it’s going to serve you for years!

So in this article, when I say promoting a new website, I’m really talking about promoting it to get search engine traffic.

I’m not going to talk about on-page search engine optimization here. You can read it somewhere else or if you post a request below, I’ll probably discuss it in my next blog post.

Today, what I’m going to share with you is off-page optimization, which is all about building link juice to your website.

Ok, I hope by now you get the whole picture and are ready to see the simple steps that I use for all my little sites that are enough to earn me a full time income.

Step 1 - Bookmark 1 page of your website at Digg and Propeller

This is the first thing you should do once your website is ready. Just choose any 1 page and bookmark it at Digg and Propeller. This will get your website indexed by Google, usually in less than 3 days.

Warning: Don’t bookmark more than 1 page and if you have tons of websites that look similar, make sure you open different accounts to bookmark or your account may be suspended. I have my account suspended twice! Technically speaking, you shouldn’t bookmark your own website. But if you do it under the radar, it is the fastest way to get your website indexed.

Step 2 - Write 5 articles and post to as many article directories as possible

Some of the directories you must “hand” submit to are Ezinearticles, ArticleDashBoard, Buzzle, GoArticles.

Next, take up a lifetime membership here and submit all your articles there. From my experience, 5 article submissions will give you 100-200 backlinks.

Step 3 - Submit your website to link directories

There is an argument on whether submitting to link directories is still effective as a form of link building. I’ve been doing it since 2006 as an integral part of the whole process and frankly I’m not sure what would happen if I stop doing it. Maybe one day I should try!

However, one thing for sure is the links count. If you do a link search for some high PR sites, you’ll see that many links come from link directories. If you believe that every link to your website will help you in your search engine ranking, submitting your website to link directories is a great way to get tons of one way link.

You can either do it yourself, which was what I did when I first started, or if you have the budget, get a freelancer to submit for you. You can get some cheap bargain here.

Step 4 - Set up 3 way link exchange

You probably are familiar with 3 way link. Yes, it’s one of my favorite tools too. If you are new, 3 way link is a little too ‘expensive’ for you. The price is $47 a month. Get it when you have 10-20 websites.

That’s all I do whenever I launch a new Adsense or product review site. Even without step 4, just by doing step 1 to 3 will get your website to PR 2-3.

What can you do with a PR 2-3 website?

Well, besides making money from Adsense and affiliate sales, you can sell link and make another $20 a month from each website you own. You can read about selling text links in this post.

One of the ways to build your opt-in list in internet marketing is to give away a free gift in exchange for the prospect’s email address.

If you have been trying to build list by giving away free gift but you are not getting the desired result, this article may help.

In this article, I’m going to share with you what kind of free gift will make people bite!

“Kenneth, what makes you qualified to write this article?”

Fair enough. I’ve not given away 100s of different types of free gift to test what kind of free gift will yield the best response. Who will have such experience anyway?

But recently, there is a mega giveaway event called Easter JV Giveaway 2. If you are on a few lists, you probably saw this offer.

In a giveaway event, several marketers, called the Contributors, come together to contribute a free product. They will then invite other people to download the free products. The trick is, in order to download a free product, you will have to opt-in to the Contributor’s list. Can you see how the Contributors build list using this approach?

I am one of the contributors in Easter JV Giveaway 2 and I have access to the signup statistics for different products. By analyzing the stats, you can tell what kind of free gift results in more signups.

Interested to see the stats?

These are the top 20 products (at the time I last checked) with the most signups:

The first column shows you the position of the gift. Page 1 means the gift is found on page 1.

For your info, each page has 10 gifts. Interestingly, only 5 gifts in page 1 make it to the top 20 downloads. This says something……

Ok, let’s look at the top 2 gifts. Both of them receives more than 1000 signups. One is on page 1 and the other one is on page 2. There is no surprise that gifts on page 1 and 2 receive more signups. But these two gifts receive double the signups compared to other gifts on the same page!

So, what’s common in these two gifts?

The answer is they are both software. One helps you to manage and organize projects and the other one helps you to create ebook covers.

Do you get the hint? Software is a good product to give away to build your list!

The 3rd gift with the most signup also outperforms the rest with close to 1000 signups. The 4th position is 300 signups away! So it’s worthwhile to look at what this gift is all about.

The 3rd gift is a video tutorial teaching you how to set up your own wordpress blog. This means video is another good product to give away. But there is more……

There are many other video products in this giveaway. But this video product attracts more attention because it teaches people how to set up money making blogs. This implies that making money from blogs is a hot topic that many people are interested to know.

The last interesting thing I want to share with you is the 17th and 19th best-performing gifts (I’ve highlighted them in yellow). One is found on page 23 and the other one is found on page 30. If gifts on page 23 and 30 can make it to the top 20, there must be a reason.

Just look at the title of these 2 gifts and you should know the answer. That’s right. Both of them are PLR or MRR products. Not just that. They are PLR and MRR products with high perceived value. One gives away 20+ PLR products whereas the other one gives away 50 MRR products.

This is another lesson you can learn. If you are currently giving away one PLR product to build your list, why not give away 20? You can probably double or triple your current response!

Let’s do a quick summary of what we’ve learnt from this:

1) Software is always a good giveaway product due to its high perceived value.

2) Video is also another good giveaway product with high perceived value.

3) How to make money from blog is a hot topic with huge demand!

4) Don’t just give away 1 or 2 PLR or MRR products. To dramatically improve the response, give away 20 - 50 PLR and/or MRR products.

These are just some of my observation. If you manage to discover any other interesting trends, feel free to discuss it in the comments section below.

One of the hardest things in online marketing is probably to get your online business of the ground and let it run on autopilot.

Although I’ve done it before, it is still a big challenge for me whenever I start a new website.

Today, I’m going to show you how a new website put a simple twist to an old concept and achieve extraordinary results in less than 3 months.

The website that I’m talking about is Qassia.com.

Qassia is a new website started in January 2008. But today, it ranks 4,762 in Alexa ranking and has more than 4000 webpages listed in Google.

So what is Qassia?

Why are people crazy about it?

More importantly, what are the marketing mechanisms that are making people crazy about it?

Let’s see……

If I were to break down Qassia into its simplest form, Qassia is nothing more than a combination of an article directory and a link directory. (For newbies, some examples of article directories are ezinearticles.com and goarticles.com, and some examples of link directories are DMOZ and Yahoo!Directory.)

If you were to start another article directory or link directory, chances are you are going to fail because the idea is no longer novel and there are thousands of them out there.

Think about this: If you were to start an article directory, how are you going to find thousands of people to submit articles to your directory, especially when you are just starting.

But Qassia has done it. Qassia is hardly 3 months old, yet thousands of people are happily sending their unique articles to Qassia and eagerly promoting it to other online marketers.

The secret lies in its credit system.

Qassia positions itself as a free link directory that gives you unlimited one-way backlinks to your website for free. Why do webmasters like one-way backlinks? Well, backlinks are good for two reasons: 1) for direct traffic, and 2) for better search engine ranking.

The catch is in order to achieve better ranking for your backlinks, you will have to earn credits.

The more credits you earn, the higher your website ranks in their link directory, which translates to more web traffic to you (both direct traffic and search engine traffic).

See the twist in the system? That’s why people are working hard to submit articles to Qassia.

Similar to all other successful websites, Qassia also has a referral system. It’s the same old story. The more referrals you have, the more credits you earn and the higher your website ranks.

Does this concept work?

Check out its Alexa ranking. It’s moving up superbly fast. This means the website is receiving lots of traffic.

If you do a search on Google.com by typing in site:www.qassia.com, you can see that it already has more than 4000 pages ranked in the search engines. Most of these are articles submitted by its members.

Whether this system is sustainable or not is too early to conclude. But it is set for a great start and I believe there is a great deal we can learn from this website, especially its marketing strategies.

This website is currently in closed beta and everything is kept secret to the public (I’m not sure if it’s another well-planned marketing strategy). There is no way you can signup Qassia unless you are referred by an existing member.

If you want to signup this website and see for yourself some other brilliant marketing strategies they’ve used, you can sign up through this invite-only link: http://kohym.qassia.com/.