Bribe Machines

It’s a great time to be a marketer! The introduction of Bribe Machines marks a true turning point in the timeline of Internet Marketing. With today’s review, Bribery itself has finally been made transparent & easy enough for the average Newbie to use immediately. Obviously the concept of bribing our readers to take some form of action is certainly nothing new… Internet Marketers have ALWAYS, each and every time without fail, used bribes of some kind to get their traffic.

Bribery online comes in all forms, from articles, to videos, to downloads to even cash… But these bribe machines that my good friend & neighbor Ken Reno invented are nothing short of the purest form of the online bribe.

To truly understand this concept, let’s examine what an internet marketer really needs in order to bribe his or her readers ethically.

First off, what’s in it for the reader?

Short of handing out cash, this machine should ideally facilitate the download of any kind of electronically-formatted document or software package for maximum flexibility. More specifically, it should simply send the reader, after taking the desired action, directly to the page of your choice on which you can do whatever you want to on. (It could be a membership site, your product, a special report, another bribe, an article, a secret, a rating system, a service portal… Anything at all, really.)

But more importantly, what’s in it for the Marketer using this script?

Let’s be honest here… All marketers, and that includes all website owners, really want the same thing. Traffic. If it was possible to trade your downloads directly to Google in return for AdWords traffic, then that is exactly what this script would be doing… But unfortunately, Google doesn’t want your reports nor software.

Bribe Machines are the next best thing. Instead of getting traffic from AdWords, Bribe Machines use other sources of traffic, including YouTube, Digg.com, StumbleUpon, and Technorati to drive people to your bribery page! In fact, since this is a monthly service, there will be many more sources in the future, too!

And before you even ask it, yes, you can use them all at the same time, and even ’stack’ them together so that one reader has to take multiple actions before downloading your bribe!

What kind of actions?

For each service it’s different. The way to get traffic from YouTube is to have lots of subscribers to your YouTube account “Channel.” -So the YouTube Bribe Machine will force your reader to Subscribe to your channel first before letting them download your bribe!

In Technorati, they have to add the link of your choice to their Technorati “Favorites.” At StumbleUpon.com, it’s a little different, and all they have to do is hit the “Thumbs Up” button in their browser while on your page to get your bribe. With Digg.com, they simply have to be logged into Digg and then Digg the content of your choice.

It’s even more flexible than that, in fact. You have the choice of making them take mulitple actions per bribe, so you could, for instance, make them Digg or Stumble every single article under your AssociatedContent.com profile before they can get to your bribe!

Add to that the way you can stack these bribes and you will soon realize that there has never been such a flexible way for a marketer to get his readers to take the exact desired action that he or she wants them to before.

As I said, it’s really a turning point for the industry. What this means is more HONESTY & CLARITY… Ironically enough.

The Transparency Factor

At first glance I thought that bribe machines, like their names imply, would actually make the industry more ’seedy’ or ’shady.’ I’m sure your first reaction to them was similar… Perhaps you thought that this product would move the “ethical” line a few inches one way or the other?

However if you think about it for a moment, you can easily see how every internet marketer’s business is already more seedy and shady than this product. -Mine included.

We all survive by putting content of some kind out there online and if the customer likes it, there is some kind of ‘hook’ on it like an opt-in form, affiliate link, or some other plan to monetize it that might not be obvious and transparent to a newbie.

Our industry isn’t evil, of course, but it is far from Transparent. All too many new folks online have fallen into traps where they think that some marketer is giving them this content out of the goodness of their hearts with nothing asked for in exchange.

Bribe Machines cut through that totally by asking the user for something in exchange right up front… No messing around, no deceptions, 100% pure bartering, plain & simple.

To see an example of one of my Bribe Machines, Click Here .

See? It’s completely straightforward, fast, & harmless. You get what you want, and I get traffic in exchange for it, but now it’s transparent so no one gets fooled about anything. -I feel that all of the marketers with the most integrity will be using this service soon and forever afterwards.

The Downside

Every silver lining has a cloud, and sticking to the clarity theme, this downside is very obvious… You have to own the rights to give something away first before offering it as a bribe.

This could be anything though, including those free things that are always being given away online such as a PLR Pack, some eBook or software with MRR Rights, or even just a short report you write yourself.

There is one other small issue which bugs a few people but I hesitate to mention it.

Some people feel that using Digg.com, StumbleUpon, Technorati & YouTube in this way is a little bit immoral. In some instances they feel it may even be against the terms of their service.

I have no moral qualms whatsoever using those services to promote my business with, as I know that the VAST majority of the people using them are doing the exact same thing. Every blogger there who has a monetization factor on his or her website (& that’s likely all of them) is making more money using these services. That’s how things work online. -And there is nothing at all in the terms of service to say they shouldn’t.

If anything, they may change their TOS in the future to specifically say that their individual service no longer accepts content on a page that uses bribe machines. -They would be within their rights to do so if they feel Bribe Machines are skewing their results… However I would suspect many years will go by before they notice and such ’skewing.’ (Our industry simply isn’t that large.)

If that does happen one day, it’s simply one less service you can use Bribe Machines with. -Keep in mind that the bribe machine website plans to add more services every month!

At the time of this writing, one week after Ken launched the Bribe Machine website, there are only Four services to use it on but several more are on his workbench. He’s told me about
6 others and I can’t wait to get my hands on them. (Especially that FaceBook Machine!)

So, how well do they drive traffic?

So far I’ve only tested out two Bribe Machines, both to give away my “How to Get Rich with Web 2.0″ report that pre-sells Surefire Success.

One is a StumbleUpon Bribe Machine, and the other uses Digg. Since the number of StumbleUpon users who see a web page once stumbled is much higher than a ‘dugg’ page, it would be unfair to compare them to each other… The StumbleUpon page would appear much more powerful but in fact the people who arrive on the page are less likely to read it.

So what I’ve done is tracked DOWNLOADS of my free report from each one. -These are all people who have successfully Stumbled or Dugg my page and then arrived at the “reward” page where they can download the free report.

Within 2 weeks, (Yes I got my hands on them well before they were offered to the public… It’s really good to be Ken’s Neighbor!) I’ve enjoyed the following hands-free downloads:

• StumbleUpon Downloads: 28

• Digg Downloads: 19 *(Note: Some users “Buried” my story too so my Digg count is lower than the number of people who downloaded.)

Keep in mind I only set them up and Stumbled/Dugg them both just once to set them in motion. The traffic has NOT stopped yet, although it didn’t really keep growing exponentially.

Bonus:

All these votes are Backlinks to my website as far as Google is concerned, so I’m already seeing some search engine traffic from all these easy backlinks.

On the first day I got over half that number of downloads, as it seems that both services show an explosion of interest right out the gate. -Each time someone downloaded the report, they were forced to first make my site more prominent by digging or stumbling it… So naturally the growth would happen very quickly.

Then the Digg.com traffic eased off gradually, whereas the StumbleUpon traffic came to a halt almost all at once. -I worried that StumbleUpon removed my listing for a little while, but if you look at my profile right now you can still see it there. (And a tiny amount of traffic does still come from StumbleUpon, even today.)

Now just imagine if I told my whole list to visit such a page. -Instead of just one stumble or digg to start things off, I’d get a hundred or more… Since it’s free I could liekly get a huge conversion if the bribe is right, and be on the first page of Digg.com within minutes!

Let’s also not forget that the level of interest in my report accounts for a lot of this traffic too. If you simply write trash that no one wants to read and give it a crummy eCover graphic, then you shouldn’t expect anyone to want to download it at all. -But if you give away something with more apparent value than my 12-page report there, you really should expect a much better response than the numbers I just showed you!

Final thought

I’m going to start working these clever scripts into my marketing more and more… If for no other reason than to show more integrity in my business…

But if we’re going to be brutally honest here, I’m probably doing it because I finally want to see my face beside the #1 story in Digg.com!

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