traffic

A while ago I decided to experiment with a few Traffic Exchanges, now I do follow the methods I have been taught on how to get visitors to my websites, but there is no harm in trying a few other methods to get more, so what were my results?

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The results were great, in one respect, but not so great in another.

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Free Traffic

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I decided to join a few traffic exchanges as a free member, you can upgrade in all of them and pay a monthly amount and you can also pay for traffic, but I wanted to keep it free and see what would happen. I started this experiment towards the end of November and carried it through to the end of January, I thought I needed to give it at least a couple of months.

The basic idea is that you have to view other peoples websites to receive credits that you can then assign to your own websites, that then get rotated and viewed by other people, simple concept, but does it work.

Yes, it does work and being a free member the only thing it costs is time. The trouble is that when you are surfing other peoples websites to gain credits, you don’t want to hang about and in my case, I was not really paying much attention to what I was viewing. You have to view a website for a certain time frame in order to be credited for it, this can range from 5 seconds to 30 seconds on average, but it differs between exchanges.

So I was viewing for the specified time and then clicking away and on to the next, so it is easy to rack up some credits, the problem is that everyone else is doing the same, which means only one thing, it ain’t a great method of getting visitors that are taking note of your content or offer.

The up side is that it is free traffic and you can boost your visitors massively, go to your Google analytics account the following day and it looks impressive, it even makes you feel good. Look a little deeper and you see that your bounce rate has gone through the roof and the time spent on your site has dropped dramatically.

So is it really worth the effort?

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Time V’s Results

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This is a graphic from my Google Analytics account for my blog.

google-analytics

It does make me wonder, you know when you get a marketer trying to sell a method of traffic generation and they show you a screen shot of how their traffic suddenly goes off the scale once they implemented the magic software they are selling, well you know what I mean.

If you spend several hours in a traffic exchange surfing for credits, you can accumulate a lot of credits, assign them to your site and hey presto, your traffic goes through the roof or off the scale. Now this is time that you are not spending on your business. So is it worth it?

Looking at my own experience, yes and no, that helps you a lot right!

I tried 3 different angles, I put up an affiliate offer, an opt-in squeeze page and a blog, the results have been that I have sold a couple of products from the affiliate offer, I got one opt in on the squeeze page and two op-tins on the blog, so I got results all round, but was it worth it for the amount of time spent.

Not Really, I did not want to disrupt the time I spent on my online business, so I just surfed for credits for about one hour everyday at night, just before I retired. I did several hours during a couple of days just to see how much traffic I could generate, but apart from that I kept it to an hour per night.

So if we look at this being done over two months, then including the couple of times where I put in several hours, I have spent around 70 hours surfing for credits, that is a lot of time, but is it worth 2 sales and 3 optins, I guess that depends on the individual.

I personally think it is a lot of time for little results, but is it worth sticking with it, should I carry on with traffic exchanges. There are a couple that I will stay with, these ones send me emails which contain a link that I click on and receive credits. This means I don’t have to log in to the exchanges everyday, my credits just build up and are auto assigned to my websites.

In the future I may just pay for credits, but at the moment it was just an experiment, one that ended up with a couple of sales and optins, so I am not complaining.

The bottom line is that it is easy to boost your traffic with exchanges, the trouble is the traffic on the whole is not of very good quality because everyone is just surfing for credits for their own websites and not taking much notice of what they are looking at, but you do get the odd person that does take action, so I will leave it up to you to decide if Traffic Exchanges are worth it to you or not.

That’s it for now

Regards

Robert

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Remember to leave a comment with your thoughts or experiences with Traffic Exchanges or any other methods you may have tried.

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Filed under: Internet Marketing Strategies

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