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Speaking from personal experience, traffic exchanges do work - if they are properly used to promote the right type of program, opportunity or resource. It would not make sense to rely solely on traffic exchanges to promote your opportunity, but they can be a cost effective method of building your online business. They can also be very useful when used to “trial” advertising sites prior to launching a paid advertising campaign.
How To Maximise Your Returns From Traffic Exchanges
The types of programs which work best on traffic exchanges are those which are free to join or which offer free information or tools which can be used to help promote existing opportunities. Results can be seriously boosted if there is some free bonus for signing up of for giving your e-mail address.
It is also good to stand out from the crowd. If you surf traffic exchanges on a regular basis you will doubtless see the same websites again and again. Many opportunities provide their members with a website to promote the opportunity or the products. The message is clear - just plug your new cooky cutter web page into the traffic exchanges and away you go.
Unfortunately surfers very quickly get used to seeing the same websites plugging the same opportunities over and over again - with the result that they “tune out” the very common ones. It’s a form of “ad blindness”.
Fortunately, there is a very simple and extremely effective solution to this - the “gateway” page, also known as the “splash” page. It does involve a little work - but the improvement in results when using these pages is massive, so it’s well worth the effort. In a nutshell, you should create a very simple one page website which heavily emphasises the benefits of your offer and use this as an “introduction” for your visitors.
Key Points For Traffic Exchange Success
- Use a specially designed gateway page rather than a standard promotional page.
- Have an uncluttered page which loads quickly and focuses on only a few key benefits.
- Use pop-ups or pop-ins.
- Have a free bonus available for your prospect.
- Make it clear what action your visitor should take - and allow them to do this without scrolling around the page.
- Customise your page for the traffic exchange you’re advertising on.
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It should be uncluttered, just a few bullet points with the main benefits, possibly a graphic to draw the eye and ideally with a sign up form so that you can capture e-mail addresses and then send the prospects further details using a series of pre-loaded messages by means of an autoresponder.
If you don’t want to capture e-mail addresses then your gateway page should have a link - which will open in a new window so that surfing is not interrupted - to a more detailed website which will provide further information about your opportunity. However, this is a very much less effective method when compared to capturing e-mail addresses.
Remember, one of the huge benefits of capturing your prospect’s e-mail adress is that, if they aren’t interested in your initial offer you can always follow up with an alternative offer later. Sometimes you don’t even need an alternative offer. If the time just wasn’t right for them then a simple reminder about the initial offering will often be enough to get you one more signup!
Whichever method you elect to use make it very clear to your visitors what you want them to do:
- Enter your email here...
- Click here .....
If you want to increase the signup rate even further then consider using pop-ups or pop-ins, especially if these can be configured to contain details of a bonus offer. Although most people will tell you that they find these annoying, they are very effective.
Another good technique to improve your signup rate is to customise your splash page for the traffic exchange it will be shown on. For example, if you’re advertising your page on Traffic Swarm include a message along the lines of “Traffic Swarm user - you need to see this!”. If you’re advertising the same opportunity on Traffic Roundup then you modify it to read “Traffic Roundup user - you need to see this!”. Once you have designed and generated your original gateway page it really doesn’t take very long to produce a few more pages which are specific to the traffic exchanges you surf.
Of course, all of these techniques take a little time - but it’s worthwhile effort which is carried out only once and which will pay dividends for as long as you use traffic exchanges. It will help you to stand out from the crowd and differentiate yourself, as well as your product or service. Do it right and you will reap the rewards.
Example Sites
Here are a couple of sites which I use on traffic exchanges. They may not be examples of cutting edge web design but they are very effective. If you use this type of system, coupled with an autoresponder, it is quite easy to achieve double digit signups on a daily basis.
Site 1 - I use this for Traffic Swarm.
Site 2 - This one is used on StartXchange. It’s basically the same site as the first example but customised - which took only a few minutes.
For each of the key traffic exchanges I use, I have a customised gateway page.
Pitfalls To Avoid
Traffic exchanges work, and work well, if properly used. As with any other technique there are some common errors to avoid. Don’t become over reliant upon the exchanges for your advertising - use some other techniques as well. And don’t waste hours every day clicking away on traffic exchanges when you should be doing other things to boost your performance.
Make sure that you use good quality exchanges which deliver your hits in a reasonable timeframe. If you find that things aren’t working as well as you would like - experiment: Try using different exchanges or change the design of your gateway page slightly.
Common Errors To Avoid When Using Traffic Exchanges
- Don’t try and cover everything on one page - your prospect will be confused. Focus on the main benefits only - 6 maximum.
- Don’t spend all your time clicking on traffic exchanges. They are only one of the methods you should be using.
- Don’t use the standard site that came with your program.
- Don’t persevere with an unproductive campaign for too long. Experiment if you don’t see some results after 4 - 6 weeks.
- Don’t waste your time with low quality exchanges which don’t deliver.
- Don’t expect your prospects to be mind readers. Tell them exactly what you want them to do.
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