Using Traffic Exchanges

Traffic exchanges are both quite popular…and unpopular. The problem is that while they are low-cost resource, they are hard to understand and actually use correctly.
The average traffic exchange is advertised as a free advertising resource that is as simple as viewing others’ websites in return for views of your website. What isn’t said is that you should not advertise your homepage or any other main page of your website and you probably shouldn’t advertise any regular page for that matter. Forget even advertising straight affiliate links too. If you are using traffic exchanges right now, that information is surprising. Especially considering how many small business sites and the traffic exchanges themselves tell their affiliates to advertise the affiliate links on traffic exchanges.

So what is the “secret” to traffic exchanges? In another post, I mentioned they should be thought of paid services. I’m also telling you they are lead generators.

Paid Service
Do not be fooled, traffic exchanges may be “free” to join and technically, free to use, but they are not free for you. On average, 30 minutes of surfing traffic exchanges will only allow you to view about 100-120 websites and you will only get about 20 to 120 views for your page out of all your viewing (because most exchanges only give you a fraction of a “view” for each of yours). Thirty minutes of your time to maybe get 120 views on your own website and in the same amount of time it took you took to earn those views, they will be gone. It doesn’t matter whether they’re unique views or not (honestly, good advertising is about getting a balance between new and returning users).

So if you want to use a traffic exchange efficiently, the best route to buy credits. It is at this point, I must point out that not all traffic exchanges are equal. A lot of people buy or acquire traffic exchange scripts cheap and don’t have the skills to manage them. So before you start buying massive credit packages everywhere, choose a couple traffic exchanges that are designed well, are well ranked among people using them, and have a responsive administration. Reading the fine print helps as well.
Start with a moderate package of at least one thousand views (which averages about $10) and test out your results – which I’ll get to shortly. If your results are favorable, try a larger package or start a credit subscription (communicate with the owner if a subscription isn’t listed in the section for buying credits).
Be sure to check on your results every once and a while to make sure your advertising is still going well. Advertisements can get “burned out” quickly in traffic exchanges, so be prepared to tweak your advertised pages often.

Lead Generator
As I have already noted, even many traffic exchange owners themselves encourage placing regular webpages or regular affiliate links into traffic exchanges, but people that get results from traffic exchanges don’t do that. Not usually at least. The page you put into a traffic exchange’s rotation should be an advertisement for the web site it’s connected to. The term for this is splash page or capture page (depending on how you connect to your main website).

Splash/Capture Page Basics

• Keep file size low: People are not going to wait past the timer for your page to load or to read your wall of text.
• Submit an alternative page: If you are submitting a page with media on it, even a plain sound file, also submit a page without media. Surfers do not always react favorably to media on pages, especially if it automatically plays. Be ready to pull a media page if the alternative performs better.
• Assure users: If you are presenting a surfer with a sign up form, be honest about your privacy policy. They don’t need the whole legal book, but let them know their information is secure (and it should be).
• Respect the surfing frame: Do not have a frame-breaking script on your page and open any links in a new window.
• Track results!

The important thing is to get surfers to visit your web site outside the traffic exchange. If you throw a regular page in the exchange, that is the only thing they will see. Repeat it to yourself, surfers will only see in a traffic exchange the page that has been submitted to the traffic exchange. This is true even if you have a great web site. Imagine you have been granted an opportunity to have a large advertisement below the search box on Google’s homepage. What would you put there? Hopefully, not an entire web page.

Tracking Results
Whenever you do any advertising, you should have a way to track what’s going on. At the least, throw a Google Analytics code in the footer of your page. The things you should know are how many hits you’ve gotten, the bounce rate (basically, whether users hung out or ran away from your site), the rate of hits per day, whether visitors are completing the actions you want them to, and what the real cost of your views are.
Traffic exchanges don’t really lend to a high conversion rate. The number of people that will click through your advertisement compared to all surfers during the time you are advertising will always be low. Even people that have made their success in traffic exchanges will confirm this. That said, if only 1% of people are clicking anything on your advertisement and less than that are completing desired actions, then you should take another look at your advertisement.

Tagged as: traffic exchanges