|
The Truth of the Traffic Exchange |
|
|
|
Contributed by Anthony Feint
|
|
Without traffic a website will make no sales! And driving targeted and effective traffic to a website is not easy work. Not only does a website need traffic, but if it plans to make any sales then its going to need “targeted traffic”. Targeted traffic is visitors that are interested in the websites product or content. There are literally hundreds of various ways to drive traffic to a site but one that interests me and thousands of other webmasters is the traffic exchange.
Experienced web marketers will tell you that Traffic Exchanges don’t work and are completely useless and I have to agree. But without the proper research how could I judge this system used by thousands of hopeful webmasters worldwide. So I decided to conduct some tests on various exchanges and here are my results.
To start off with, let me firstly explain what a traffic exchange is. When you register with a traffic exchange you surf other members websites and in return they will surf yours. This is all done automatically. Depending on the exchange you will have to surf each site for around 20 seconds and the number of visitors that are returned is based on a ratio. Most sites have a ratio of around 2:1, meaning for every 2 websites you visit, you will get one visitor in return.
You are usually required to surf each website for around 20 seconds and this seems very short. And your right! How many people can sell someone a product in just 20 seconds! Even the very best salesmen would struggle. So how can you get around this problem? What if you showed your website to someone for just 20 seconds but 10 times. After the 10th time your sales message would have most likely got through to them and they would be tempted to stay longer. It is scientifically proven that you will remember something like a brand name after it has been shown to you for the 11th time. It is no good in me simply telling you this, I might as well test it. To do this I registered at a popular traffic exchange and started to surf through the websites. At first I simply would visit each site for the required 20 seconds and then click to visit the next site. The more I surfed and saw the same pages, the more inclined I was to read the entire page.
The next test was to see if people visiting your site through a traffic exchange would actually buy something from you. At this stage I would like to point out an obvious but sometimes overlooked point: The type of visitor you want to attract to your website is someone who obviously can afford to buy what you’re offering. Now, why would someone with lots cash who is willing to spend it, join a traffic exchange when they can easily buy targeted traffic in the form of PPC advertising or similar medium? So with that in mind its probably not the best idea to try and sell a $200 product in a traffic exchange. The truth is traffic exchange users may be able to afford it but aren’t willing to spend that much money. So I decided I would try and sell a cheap product through a traffic exchange and I chose to sell a $9.95 membership to my site www.myezy.com. After sending 1000 visitors through the exchange to my sales page, I sold nothing! This wasn’t suprising. Why? The site that I was sending them to wasn’t a sales letter or catchy site it was just my regular homepage. I wasn’t ready to give up yet so I built a new page which was a simple sales page with the heading “Download Over $8000 Worth of Software for $9.95 ”. Again I sent 1000 traffic exchange visitors to the site and amazingly I got 1 sale. Was it worth it? No. It took around 1 day of surfing to earn enough credits to send 1000 visitors to my site. And in the end I only made $1. To put it in context look at this scenario: If I was to employ myself to surf in the exchange I would have to pay myself around $12.00 per hour. If it takes around 6 hours to surf for 1000 credits then it would cost $72 in labour and with only 1 sale….can anyone see why this isn’t working!
You may be thinking that my sales page was the problem but I can tell you that the same page has sold the same product over 200 times for the same price using Pay Per Click and search engine traffic.
So what good is a traffic exchange! Although they aren’t to good at making sales they are handy to capture leads. I have used a traffic exchange to build an opt-in list of over 1000 subscribers. How? I simply told visitors of my opt-in page, that if they gave me their email address I would give them in return free e-books, scripts, software, memberships and more. I placed this page in a traffic exchange and with relatively little surfing I capture on average 10-20 email addresses per day. On average I will make a sale out of one in ten subscribers, after 8 ezine issues have been sent to them. If you would like to join this ezine or discover my great site visit www.myezy.com
By Anthony Feint
Article Source: http://www.articlematrix.com
|
Home 
Internet and Business Online 