Did that grab your attention? LOL Before I’m cussed out for being a slime ball and drama queen, let me get my disclaimer out there right now…I like list building. I think it’s a great way for all online business people to get a start and if you build your list properly, it can be the best asset you will ever have in your time online…

HOWEVER!

There is something even more important to list building, that is very much alive and well in this industry and that is relationship building. Sorry folks, no easy button answer for this one, you need to roll up your sleeves, get dirty and actually CARE about the people on your list.

Gone is the time of firing off emails constantly with the latest greatest. People are fed up! They want to be treated with respect and not like just another name on a list. That’s why ‘old school’ marketers are having such a hard time adapting to the new social rules in business. They come from the school of ‘hands off marketing’ where they just load up their auto responder and fire away at you.

It just doesn’t work anymore because relationship building > list building!

Think about how powerful your list would be though, if you treated it with respect and actually KNEW the people you were emailing. Take for example the latest (and very rare) promotion we did for List Surfing, we are leading the JV contest and to be honest we ‘know’ most of the people we have referred. We have relationships with them and they know they can contact us whenever they want.

It’s the new model and while a lot of ‘hands off’ marketers will tell you it’s too much effort and too much work. Well the results speak for themselves. Put relationships above EVERYTHING else in this business. Get to know your referrals, your customers and your circle. You may not see the dividends right away but here’s a little story…

Tim and me started TE Live about a year and a half ago. We knew, there would not be any immediate ‘income’ from us showing up, every day and interacting with our community. Looking back, it was the best investment in time we ever made. Because we put people before profits. No list, no sales, just building relationships one person at a time.

Very powerful business model when you put people first! Yes, I’m a fan of list building, but without a relationship with that list, it sucks…

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So we did this crazy thing a few months ago at TimTech when we released the ClickTrackProfit Badges. They have been quite a success, mostly because they have added a lot of fun back into surfing. Combined with all the social chat systems that are in the traffic exchanges, badge hunting has become quite the event.

One of the first things we wanted to do, was to add the opportunity for other traffic exchanges (and advertisers) to get their own badges and hide them all around their sites. We have some of the best traffic exchange owners on board and the list of them continues to grow every day.

Yesterday, we took it one step further…

Tiered badges were exclusive to the TimTech traffic exchanges, which rewarded active surfing (daily) for surfing a set amount of pages. This created some wonderful surfing results and even more eyeballs looking at pages in our programs. So yesterday, we opened it up for EVERY traffic exchange to reward their surfers for daily surfing…

We added Traffic Fugitive, Surf Skeleton and SiteXplosion almost immediately and the interest has grown over night. We even had Blain Jones offer to set up badges at the various traffic exchanges. So things are looking pretty good for what I’m terming, Badges 2.0 (These T.E.’s are installing the API’s into their programs very soon…)

Own a traffic exchange? Want to offer your members tiered surfing badges (meaning surfers get a badge at 50, 100, 250, 500 and 1000 page views…Every day)….Here’s how;

1. Log into ClickTrackProfit

2. Click on the order page. AND grab your custom set of tiered surfing badges.

3. Then sign up for our Tiered Badge API subscription. Note: You do NOT need step 2 if you already have badges with CTP. You can simply ask us to tier any collection you have. However, I highly recommend a custom set of numbers surf badges.

Now, please note. This will be an investment and *gasp* it will not cost $4.97 to do this. However, badges have proven to be a fantastic reward for your surfers and TimTech has grown by leaps in bounds, by activity and so much more, a lot of it because of the badges.

It’s amazing what happens, when you reward your loyal surfers. =)

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