What do you get for the person who has everything? Freebies!

Today is your first of 12 warnings not to be last person to pick up all the free stuff from the 12 Days 2008 special going on over at Mark Hendricks’ site. If you’d like to contribute gifts to thousands of people, go on over to the same 12 Days 2008 link and follow the instructions.

Don’t make me tell you every day!

I JUST turned the page back on for more Traffic Reality memberships, with immediate access to the site and the last two newsletters. And some people must have those notifiers turned on that tell them when a page has changed, because the first 12 are already gone! I was preparing to announce it in the newsletter in a few hours, but okay – go get ‘em if you want ‘em!

(And if, by chance you really don’t know what I’m babbling about, you can click the link. )

Getting a whole lotta free business related gifts. There’s over 300 of them, but it’s all over at midnight.

Some of the stuff:

• “Moron-Proof” System to “Smart” Selling ” On eBay…
• Advice from 58 of the Internet’s Top Money Makers
• Mistakes with Master Resale Rights
• Smart Google Kit
• List Building Made Easy
• “The Art of Money Getting” by P. T. Barnum
• Google Adsense Quick Start Guide

Some of these promotions have a lot of junk products in them, but this is quality stuff. That’s the reason I didn’t tell you about it before – I didn’t have the chance to research it.
If you sign up by midnight, tonight, let me know by leaving a comment, I’ll give you a free, brandable copy of Introduction to the Blog Virus on April 12th. I’m not giving this away in the promotion. It’s just for people who use my link to sign up.

My name’s Tinu, and I’m a feedaholic.

I love the sophisticated surfers I get to my site via my own feed, I love how much the search engine spiders love my feeds, and I simply adore reading sites via their RSS Feeds. I do the majority of my research for my column that way.

If your site doesn’t have one and you want to be featured in one of my daily columns, you’re out of luck. It isn’t that there aren’t great sites out there with great tools out there that aren’t feed-capable, it’s just that now that I use web feeds as my primary source of news, unless your site was featured in someone else’s feed, it just wouldn’t occur to me.

To folks like me, your site is effectively invisible, unless you happen to come up on the first page of a search, and since I know where to go to find the information I want quickly, I don’t use a search engine on a daily basis.

True story.

But why should you care. I’m just one isolated surfer, a special case, a techie, a feed nut.

Wrong friend.

We feed readers may be in the minority for now, but we’re a powerful, educated, relatively wealthy group of consumers. In my free course about RSS , I’ll tell you the demographics as quoted from a study done by blogads.com – it’s a little skewed because of the pool of consumers they surveyed, but it’s no less telling of the group studied.

Some hints: we’re a middle-aged group with the money to spend on your premium products. The way you might skim past a product priced at $3.99 is the way we might skip over a $25 ebook – particularly if we can hire someone to do the work for us, for the same reason: we’re looking for a balance of quality and price.

I’m not pointing this out to be mean, or insinuate that your site is less than top quality. I’m just telling you what you’re missing by not having a feed on your site.

Mull that over while I post the next tip.

I was too tired to do the extras day yesterday, and I’m still pretty much feeling the effects of adjusting to this new medication for my back. But I promised I would do another day of fun free feed tools so here it is.

To get you started, you can read the article I wrote this morning: Fun Free Feed Tools for Both the Publisher and the Reader They’re more for the Puublisher than for the Reader, but they’re still fun all the same.

The News

If you go to Looksmart this morning, things will look ever so slightly different. There’s a link to Furl on the front page of the site. Hm… what’s Furl?

Furl is a sort of personal web archive. Instead of just bookmarking a site, Furl saves you the version of the page as presented that day as well as a link to the new version of the site. You can also create a daily link archive that other Furlers can subscribe to, and read your news feeds at their site.

This handy service was just acquired by LookSmart, as annoucned to its members in an email at around 1:25 am Pacific time this morning. They don’t expect any changes for the worse, but they’ have made one change for the better already.

Here’s a quote from the email:

“To show how serious that commitment is, we are officially allocating 5 gigabytes (GB) of storage for each individual member’s public archive, enough space to store tens of thousands of archived items.”

They also pledged to remain free.

My Own Wild Theories and Speculation

In the emal sent out to subscribers, CEO Mike Giles addressed the issue that many small or free services often face when they are aquired by a larger corporation. The ugly “sell-out” whisper inevitably rears its silly head.

As a subscriber of the service, I say more power to them. People who provide free information, services or tools have to eat, too. Kudos to him for heading those mutterings off at the pass.

As far as I’m concerned, especially with the vast increase in free space, they didn’t sell out – they made an educated decision for their own welfare and for the good of their service, and sold Up, as in Upgrade They’ll be able to do what they’re doing better and faster, and get the compensation they deserve for providing the Net with a great tool, all without having to charge the end user for it.

Seilling out is when you corrupt something creative that was beautiful the way it was, just for the sake of money.

While we’re on the topic, to any larger corporations listening, as long as you can guarantee in writing that I retain full creative control of my words, you can aquire me anytime. Asking price starts at $2 million though….

See the trackback section on the site for more links about this story (and send your buy offers by email only please).

I haven’t gotten John Reese’s report, so I can’t offer my own opinion about it.

But one fact is indisputable – the report he’s giving away free about his results, in my opinion, should have been for sale. Couldn’t have said it better myself… You can download a PDF version of it here: Good stuff.

I’ll admit it now. I’m cheating. This site isn’t supposed to open until tomorrow. But as I write this, it’s 11:39 pm Pacific time. Just in case it opens at midnight, bookmark this site: TrafficSecrets.com.

I haven’t a clue what’s in store for you there, honestly. But I know there’s a buzz about it opening. And I’m here to help you stay on top of that traffic thing, right? Whether it’s one of my sites or not, affiliate program or no, my ultimate goal is to help you get more traffic.

So while you’re at it, bookmark Trafficology.com. While you’re waiting for your first issue, check out the free issue that’s posted on the site.

I’m willing to bet – cash money – that this post will be the most popular one I do all week.

Why?

It’s summer. People are hot. People don’t feel like doing anything except lie around in a T-shirt. Unless that something involves winning a free t-shirt to lie around in.

I’ve never understood it. I don’t care to try. But every single time I’ve ever run a campaign that had something to do with a t-shirt, people came out of the woodwork. I don’t get it. I never will. But as long as I can squeeze ten customers out of it, I’m happy to do it.

Especially when I’m building a hobby site, the first thing I do is have some sort of contest in which the winner will get a free t-shirt. The free tee promotion works equally as well offline – you can sponsor community events, or just have a booth where you give away tees.

Or something else.

Give away pens, penciles, mousepads, a copy of your free ebook in book form, a copy of archived newsletters on CD – there’s got to be some popular item you can emboss your site name on that will get attention and clicks.

The problem? Where do you get cheap t-shirts in bulk? And how do I turn my giveaway into repeat traffic or sales?

I’ve tried many different solutions for free t-shirt suppliers since I started doing this in 2002. And because of the types of items they add, the longevity of their project, and how easy it is to have a whole store in an hour – CafePress.com wins hands down.

Yes, they are a little pricey. But I use them mostly for promotional items, where I buy myself items in bulk and give them away to interested clients, subscribers and sometimes, just at random. The key to seeing eventual returns is to put your domain name on the t-shirt with a slogan that will make people ask the wearer about the shirt.

My favorite T-Shirt in the whole world, is an oversized T-shirt that says “BITE ME!” in huge white letters on the front.

On the back it has a picture of a little happy red crab, and the name of my favorite seafood place in Vegas – Joe’s Crab Shack.

I bet I send them tons of business….

If you can make a graphic, you can have a Cafe Press store – I really did build that in less than an hour, grahpic, store and all. Just don’t expect a huge wave of orders from the site itself – that CAN happen, but remember, you primarily want to use the items in the store as an attention grabber, not necessarily the store itself.

I have one more item to bring to your attention, then I’ll be taking a nice nap. See ya!

Today’s site of the day is Wilson Web.

Waiting for a phone call, I was searching my bookmarks in Mozilla Firefox, trying to find out if sites that I no longer had time to visit had RSS Feeds. I haven’t been to Wilson Web in a year, and that was my bad, because Ralph F. Wilson has been talking about RSS Feeds and Marketing since last year.

The site has changed a lot over the years, but one thing definitely hasn’t – there’s a lot of good, free information, though some of the content is for paid subscribers only.

I wasn’t going to tell you this until Friday, but I just can’t take it any more. Jack Humphrey has finally lost his mind and made his incredible EquipMint site free for everyone. Get on it before he goes sane again.