Greetings to all CaliStyle101 members

Wow, August was indeed an eventful month, both personally and business-wise. On the personal side, I’m back at work teaching, molding young minds on a day-to-day basis. On the business side, there have been a lot happening at CaliStyle101 that we wanted to address

As many of you know, the Freebie Industry took a hit back in March. Since then, the most talked-about issue has been TRAFFIC. Freebie Trading forums have ALL been working hard to try to replace the traffic that once flooded the industry. All of these forums (as far as we can tell) have been earnestly trying to generate traffic.

We have also been working on traffic in various ways. Some of the methods that we have been using are Free methods, and others are paid. If there’s one thing we (Chrisdeals and myself) know from our past experiences is that traffic does not happen overnight. It takes a LOT of planning, energy and even money.

How has the traffic been?

It has been going very well. For a forum that was relaunched four months ago, the level of traffic we’ve been able to accomplish has been pretty good, especially when you consider the standard when it comes to Internet Marketing. On the flip side, it is not as high as the industry is used to. That’s a process that takes time to develop. However, we are confident that if we continue with the plans we have been implementing, CaliStyle101 will be the industry leader.

Featured Sites

Featured Sites at CaliStyle101 are featured for a number of reasons. These have been leaders in the industry, delivering excellent support, great crediting and just all in all high quality service. In addition to those important factors, these are sites that financially support the forum because they see the potential and want to help CaliStyle101 become the Best forum in the industry.

That being said – the featured sites have not been doing well recently. In fact, most Freebie Sites in the industry have not been doing too well due to the changes that have been happening. This poses a problem because the Freebie Sites drive the industry and if they don’t do well, no one does well.

As a result of these things, some of the featured sites have decided not to continue being featured at CaliStyle101. This is a business decision that some sites have had to make due to the current climate of the industry – some with the hopes that things will pick up so that they can continue.

We want our featured sites to do VERY well, because if they continue to thrive, that will be a strong driving force behind the success of this Community. To help this to happen, we are making some changes that we believe will help the Featured Sites that remain in a significant way.

• We are Closing the “Other Freebie Networks” subforum. We’ve thought long and hard about this and have decided that this would be in the best interest of our Featured Sites.
• We will be holding a weekly $25 raffle for all trades conducted on Freebie Sites. This promotion will be continued until further notice and will be one of our standard promotions.
• We are Guaranteeing Trades on Featured Sites that are conducted with Silver Members. Basically if you are a silver member and someone trades with you, they can have 100% confidence that they will make money when a trade is completed. We believe that this Iron Clad Guarantee will motivate new traders to follow through with you guys in a way that will increase your success rate.

These changes will be happening over the next few days and should be completed by Monday.

The fact is that it takes money to do what we are trying to do, and we do not apologize for trying to make CaliStyle101 the best. The featured sites financially support the forum and we want to work with them to deliver value to you.

If you have any question about how much money it can potentially take to run a successful Freebie Trading Community, just take a look at the the following image, which gives you some insight into just ONE aspect of Project Payday’s marketing methods (pay attention to the Daily Ad Budget – Click it to enlarge)

If you would like to know how much traffic it takes to make a forum such as this successful, take a look at how many unique visitors PPD gets per month:

Our goal is to be able to reach to THAT LEVEL and we will work our Behinds off to try to make that goal a reality.

Members

The most important aspect of any forum is the members. The members are the driving force to keeping the community active, and thriving. Our membership continues to increase, and we are seeing a higher participation level from the beginners.

We want to thank all the members who have chosen to upgrade to become a Silver Member.  We will continue to work hard to bring additional value to your upgraded membership. In addition to the resources that you currently have access to started next week, Chris will be adding specific content on how you can get more referrals. He will provide free articles, Calistyle101 reviews, adverts, and video tutorials on how to effectively take advantage of your Silver Membership

We need and appreciate your support. If there is anything you feel you need to be successful with Freebie Trading, please lets us know, and we will do our best to provide you with it.

We will be HIGHLY focused on getting exposure for our featured sites, our silver members and the forum in general. However, we need your support. We would like to encourage you to use our Featured sites and trade with Silver members. By doing this, you are supporting CS101 and contributing to taking it to the next level.

Please leave you comments, critiques, and suggestions on CaliStyle101 Forum

Until Next time!