Thursday 30 April 2009

Splash Pages, Banners and Text Ads on Traffiic Exchanges - their relative value





Even the newest visitor to traffic exchanges will quickly note that almost all Traffic Exchanges offer three means of advertising your website or product. Until now I have only mentioned one - your web page.

In addition Traffic Exchanges also offer the possibility to place both banner and text ads. These you will usually find at the top or bottom of the screen. Interestingly enough you will also find that the price for both banner and text ads are minimal in contrast to the one credit for a view of your webpage, Indeed many Traffic Exchanges even offer you the possibility of turning credits into impresisons for your banners or your text ads. One credit can buy 20 even 30 or more banner impressions and even more impressions of your text ads.

There is a simple answer to this. In my own experience both banner impressions and text ads have a dismal conversion or click through rate and are scarcely worth the trouble. Others maintain, however, that advertising is advertising so use it if it is free. Equally true, but if you think about the psychology of the person surfing a traffic exchange, they are there to gain credits by surfing and really will not waste time on clicking on (usually) very bland and unimaginative banners and text ads. My advice - concentrate on the webpage or splash page. In my next posting I will explain what a splash page is and where you can find them AND why they are so popular.

Sunday 26 April 2009

If you are serious about traffic exchanges (TEs).....Get Things Right from the Start!







One of the pitfalls most newcomers to Traffic Exchanges fall into is that they decide to join 10 even 20 exchanges. Very soon they are in a mess. Forgotten login's for each exchange, missing assigning credits, and above all, an email box which is full every day with messages from the exchanges they have joined offering special promotions. My advice is to approach the whole exercise with discipline.

A few rules which I learned the hard way!

(1) Open a gmail account especially for your traffic exchanges, i.e. mytrafficexchanges@gmail.com. Use this address when registering so as to avoid cluttering your usual email box.

(2) Open an excel sheet and keep a list of every exchange you join as you do it. Also keep your login and password there, list any offers, etc and the cost of upgrading and buying credits. Later this provides you with an easy overview of the entire thing.

(3) Look carefully before joining an exchange. Those with low memberships (free or paid) will have a low surfing ratio and thus you will get little exposure for your site.

(4) Don't be tempted too early on to upgrade or buy extra credits. Wait first and see on which exchanges your manual surfing brings results.

Saturday 25 April 2009

Are all traffic exchanges the same?

If, by that you mean, do all traffic exchanges help you create exposure for your website, then the answer is YES.

But, anyone experienced in traffic exchanges will be careful to tell you to be careful which exchanges you chose. You will soon discover that traffic exchanges are extremely competitive with each other - obviously the more surfers, the more activity and the more money spent on buying those credits, the better for them.

Before deciding on a traffic exchange, there are a number of things you should take into consideration.

1. How many members does the exchange have? That you will find somewhere on their site as they are all very anxiously to claim they are gowing faster than their competitors. In simple terms I have seen smaller and newer traffic exchanges which - if you look carefully - states: "There are currently two people surfing". You can imagine that such exhcanges will never provide visibility or anything compared to the big guys where you have currently 746 people surfing.

2. What is the credit ratio for surfing? By that I mean how many pages do YOU have to surf to get rewarded one credit as a basic member. This varies greatly but plays a major role if you have to do all the manual surfing and do not buy credits.

3. In addition to selling credits traffic exchanges also offer you the chance to upgrade to a higher status. This has a number of benefits but I would avoid this as a newbie until I am convinced that that exchange is bringing results.

So that is why traffic exchanges exist?

Nope,
if I were cynical - traffic exchnges are there for the owners of the exchanges to make money from you. How can they do this when I just said Traffic exchanges were free of charge?
Answer - Yes, they are free of charge but this gives you what sites would call a "basic membership". That means you get the bare essential without the bells and whistles. To actually surf for credits on traffic exchanges can take up a lot of time every day (a few hours) in order to accumulate the credits you need to show your websites.

All traffic exchanges differ in the way they reward you for surfing but there are some where you have to surf three other pages (and the page has a timer of 15 seconds) in order to gain one credit. As it is easy to use up 100 credits a day no problem, simple mathematics means that you would have to surf 300 pages for 100 credits. If each page has a timer of 15 seconds then you can easily spend up to 2 hours to accumulate those precious 100 credits.

So, to make things easier, traffic exchanges let you buy credits in packages of various sizes. Let us say a package of 1000 credits at a certain traffic exchange costs $3.97, then instead of surfing for those 1000 credits - which would probably take up most of your day, you buy them (usually through Payal or Alertpay). That is how exchanges make their money.




Traffic Exchanges for Newbies

So, you have just discovered the world of traffic exchanges and now you are wondering what they are all about. Basically, traffic exchanges offer anybody with an Internet site a means of getting visibility. At it's simplest for browsing other sites on the traffic exchange you earn credits which you can then use to show your site on the same traffic exchange. That is what the whole thing boils down to at the end of the day. Though as we shall see it gets more complicated than that ..........



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