Case Study: How I Acquired 100+ Tire Kickers/Freebie Seekers Onto A Brand New List

Hey. This case study does not end well about these freebie seekers. With that out the way, let’s begin.

The Backdrop

So, last year late 2021, Barry Rodgers came out with an offer for a DFY funnel.

I bought it.

I uploaded the whole funnel to a new website. For viewing purposes, you can check out the second site I built it on, socialtrafficzone.com

(Please don’t try to subscribe there; I can’t guarantee anything will fully work there. If you want to subscribe, I have the real website I used. Just get in contact with me using the contact form, comment here or message me on social media.)

After uploading, I was a bit confused about how I would generate traffic to the website. I wasn’t trying to get freebie seekers… I was trying to get solid subscribers for my list.

Then I saw Kevin Fahey’s email about Dawud Islam’s link rotators, otherwise known as “Traffic Time”, Triple Traffic or Xmas Traffic, etc.

I Knew Better…

Now I knew this was a bad idea but I decided to do it, especially since I had tested out “Traffic Time” and I got good results.

I placed my link with his rotator (can’t remember which) and I hoped for the best (which was no freebie seekers LOL).

Here’s where things go wrong.

I got valid email addresses for the most part on my list. No problems there.

But every single “first name” (save for 1 subscriber!) that was inputted in, was a mix of letters. All of these first names or names were a jumble of letters; There were no actual “names”.

To put this into perspective, the “name” field for any given address went something like this:

Kjsbgskbs

The ONLY names that were real were one person’s name (If you ever read this, Thank You Junaid!) and MY NAME!! 

SIDEBAR: I gave Junaid the option to sign up to my list on this blog since he was the only one to enter an acceptable name. I sent him an email and within 24 hours he signed up (which means he opened my email, read it, and took action).

Of course, that would be because I tested my funnel.

Make sure you do that if you ever have any of your funnels. It doesn’t hurt.

Continued…

So, I believe I added my site to the rotator around late November – Early December 2021.

Within a MONTH, I got close to 100 names/emails.

Maybe that might be due to Barry’s slick copy, but I digress. The results were trash overall.

This is mainly due to my traffic source and which is from Dawud Islam.

Thing is, while I’d like to trust this guy, I can’t for now. 

His support was quick when I was a first-time buyer, but it dwindled once I started to have problems with his rotators.

I can’t even get his support team to message me back to remove this site from his rotators. 

I purchased “Xmas traffic” in December 2021 and I still haven’t gotten around to using it since I can’t get a message back from his support team.

All in all, this is just a bad showing professionally. But, despite all of that, I still built a list of “users” that almost totaled 100 emails.

Proof Of The Spam/Freebie Seekers

I have a couple of screenshots to show for the names just in case you don’t believe me. 

However, I will hide the emails that the people used.

So, there you have it.

This is the unfortunate route I took to try to build a list and generate income. 

I do believe that one day I can prove this funnel to be a killer. But for right now, while the site is still stuck on Dawud’s rotators, I cannot do so.

At this point, people are spamming for no reason because they’re not even opening the emails or clicking on any links.

It makes no sense. The freebie seekers are too strong here. LOL.

But I did build a list and I almost got 100 subs. So there is some silver lining in this.

I hate to leave this post like this, but I got to say this: my experience with Dawud Islam’s traffic products has been sub-par. 

I’m willing to change this narrative that I have about him, but he has to prove to me that he and his support team are better than the experience that they have given me.

At some point, there’s just got to be a level of professionalism that one has to uphold.

Continued…

Now that I got that off my chest, I’d like to turn this blog post into a more positive note by saying that this is not the only Case Study I will have on building a list.

I have another Case Study coming up on how I built my list that I mail weekly.

Plus, once I use some actionable strategies to build a list from scratch, I will be posting a case study on that as well.

It just so happens that this “list-building experience” turned out more negative than positive. Also, it showed me how some people can be out for the free stuff only (freebie seekers) and will mess around with your site.

Either way, it’s all a learning experience and I’m glad that I was brave enough to take the jump and learn from my mistakes.

The “Freebie Seeker’s” Statistics

Because you read to the end, I’ll reward you by giving you the straight-up statistics:

These statistics are based upon the time of writing this post (1/11/22)

I have an autoresponder sequence after someone signs up for this “site”; 7 emails (1 ty email, 6 follow-ups) over 7 days.

Email 1 (ty) – 110 Delivered, 9.09% open rate, 0.91% CTR (click-through rate)

Email 2 – 53 Delivered, 3.77% open rate, 0% CTR

Email 3 – 50 Delivered, 4% open rate, 0% CTR

Email 4 – 48 Delivered, 4.17% open rate, 0% CTR

Email 5 – 46 Delivered, 4.35% open rate, 0% CTR

Email 6 – 46 Delivered, 0% open rate, 0% CTR

Email 7 – 46 Delivered, 2.17% open rate, 0% CTR

This tells the tale of the “automated traffic” “link rotator” “list building” “freebie seekers” experiment.

(I forgot that I had more than 100 subscribers [Email #1]… I mean, who remembers unsubscribes? LOL)

UPDATE: Hajra (Dawud’s VA) responded to my message today (2/22/22, would you look at that!) in the early hours of the morning. He said that he couldn’t do anything about what I’m going through since it wasn’t a hiccup on their end. That’s understandable given that I have realized that people are spamming my website with bots.

So, technically, there’s nothing they can do about that except to remove my site from the rotator. A learning point here is to not use “traditional lead pages/squeeze pages/landing pages” without recaptcha because people may spam it. So, to circumvent the issue, I would advise anyone to use warrior+ or thrivecart or recaptcha with their forms.

My problem now is that the spammers/freebie seekers are doing it with another lead page I put on the rotator with different email addresses (and names). When will it stop!?

In Closing

P.s. There’s this newly released product that has to do with driving free traffic to your products, offers, or websites. This product is Free Traffic Shotgun. I got early access to it and it’s phenomenal. But it’s currently on a dime sale and it got Deal of the Day.

So if you’re interested in using free traffic methods to build a list, send traffic, etc. I highly suggest you grab this while it’s still low. I’ll be doing a product review soon on it.

p.p.s. If you’re looking to get updates whenever there is a post, please sign up using the form on the upper right-hand side of the blog. I send tips, tricks, free content, the latest insights in the Internet Marketing/PLR field, and update you on these latest posts. Sign up above to never miss a beat.

Till Next Time…