Traffic Floodgate Blog

I’ve decided to put the Traffic Floodgate release back by a few days, to Wednesday, May 14. I’d been thinking about doing this anyway, because I wanted to check out and write up a new technique I came across, but the decider was when my web host decided to take the new Traffic Floodgate website off the air. Why? Because I used their SMTP server (which I’m allowed to do) to send an email to one of my opt-in lists of several thousand people. The email was fully can-spam compliant, containing my name, physical address and 1-click unsubscribe link. Unfortunately, my mailing system/autoresponder sent out more than 500 emails in an hour which broke a rule in the terms of service which I admit I’ve got a bit vague about in the 5 or so years since I signed up and so the site was suspended. Two or three emails to the help desk later, they had a look at the email, agreed that it wasn’t spam and said the site was now unsuspended. Except that it wasn’t! Someone forgot to flick the switch? Whatever, it all happened over Easter, so I ended up being down for several days. What a pain. Lesson learned. I’ve now set up a mirror site, on another host, so the longest I can be down is the few hours it takes to propagate a DNS redelegation. I’ll add this detail to my Short E-Book on building a website. Imagine this happening to you the day before a launch.

What’s this got to do with traffic cops? I reckon there’s a similarity. Traffic cops, or rather their bosses (and ultimately the politicians) don’t have the will power or resources to tackle the real causes of the road toll, poor driver education, driving attitudes, bad intersectional control and so on, so they pick the easy targets and mount speed cameras where they’ll punish a mom who exceeds a low speed limit by a couple of miles per hour dropping her kids off at school. Where’s the parallel? I get hundreds of emails every day that are clearly spam. They are offering to enlarge my private parts, get rid of my body fat and arm me with a fake degree to go with my fake Rolex. Is there a physical address? Hardly. An unsubscribe link? You’re joking. But does anyone do anything about them? No, it’s too hard. But let a legitimate internet marketer try to increase website traffic (sorry, I had to get one keyword into this post) and either they’re down on her or him like a ton of bricks for sending out too many, or sending them too fast or, heaven forbid, using obscene words like “money”, “marketing”, “opportunity” or worst of all, “FREE.” The result is that 80%-90% or more of the people who’ve actually asked for this information, never get it.

On the good news front, the new Traffic Floodgate website sat in the Google sandbox for only 2 days. The secret? A link from a high PR site that I own. Why’s it good news? I’ll make links from this site available to any Traffic Floodgate customer for the same purpose.