Traffic Exchanges....Do They Still Work? by Bill Thomas
Many years ago, there was a
commercial in which an actor portraying Abraham Lincoln walks into a
'headhunters' (Employment Agency) office, sits down, and hands the agent the
application. After looking it
over for a few seconds, the man leans back in his chair and says to Lincoln,
"well Lincoln, tell me a little
about yourself"? Lincoln, with eyes cast down responds hesitatingly, "well, I've
done a lot of reading, sort
of on my own". The agent leans back in his chair, and then quickly leans forward
and looks Lincoln directly
in the eyes and says, "Look Lincoln, you know you're a smart guy, and I know
you're a smart guy, but without
that sheepskin, you ain't going nowhere fellow". It's the same with websites.
You can have the most hi-tech
website offering the best products going, but without sufficient website
traffic, it 'ain't' going nowhere.
When people mention traffic generation you'll usually hear terms like; Search
Engine Optimization, Pay Per
Click Advertising, Linking, Email Marketing, List Building, Writing Articles and
things such as that. While
these are all important components to generating traffic they usually all
require money and or talent.
However, there's another method that people have been using for years to
generate lots of FREE traffic to
their websites that are called Traffic or Hit Exchanges. Although I've used them
for years to generate lots
of traffic, I've recently taken a look to see if they're still effective. The
answer I've come up with is,
yes, and no!
If you're not familiar with a Traffic or Hit Exchange it basically works like
this; you look at other
websites and in exchange for this, your website(U.R.L) is viewed by others.
Usually it's on a 2-1 basis in
which for every two times you look at other sites, your site gets viewed by
other people once. There's many
variations on this, but the basic premise is, you look at other people's sites,
and in exchange they look at
yours. But just who is looking at your sites?
One of the things that you have to keep in mind when using the Traffic Exchanges
is, most people who use
Traffic Exchanges are fellow advertisers looking to sell you their program or
product. That's one of the
reasons it's rather difficult to make most Affiliate Programs work with Traffic
Exchanges. When you're just
one of hundreds of people trying to sell the same type of program to fellow
advertisers, the chances of
success are pretty slim. Unless you're one of the first to advertise a program
and can hit the exchanges
hard, you're not likely to succeed here with Affiliate Programs. How then can
you make Traffic Exchanges work
for you?
One of things I've found that helps in making the exchanges work is creating
your own pages. You don't have
to be a website designer to create simple pages or websites these days. There
are literally thousands of
places to find templates....things that allow you to design pages or websites
without having any knowledge of
H.T.M.L. By using your own unique pages, you'll have something that's different
from the hundreds or
thousands of other people advertising the same programs, and uniqueness is a
plus with Traffic Exchanges.
Another thing to keep in mind is since most of the people using the Traffic
Exchanges are fellow marketers,
try to cater a product or service that appeals to them. If you have a product or
service that can help these
marketers sell their products or programs, then you have a pretty good chance of
making some money yourself.
For instance, everyone marketing on the Internet is looking for a way to create
'leads'. If you can come up
with a program that helps them generate these leads more effectively, you're
quite likely to succeed.
Speaking of leads, I've found one of the best uses of Traffic Exchanges is to
generate new leads. The process
involves creating a page that piques someone's interest, and encourages them to
fill in some information,
usually an email address and phone number. Once the advertiser has that
information, the prospect will be
sent a series of emails that basically try to get the prospect to buy the
product, service, or business
opportunity that the advertiser is marketing. It's the old 'two step' method of
marketing except in this case
you can largely use automation to do much of the selling or marketing.
There are literally hundreds of Traffic or Hit Exchanges out there on the
Internet that will enable you to
generate loads of FREE traffic to your site. While not effective for all things,
they can be used to generate
new business AND money. With a little imagination and some effort, you can
develop a virtual non-stop flow of
traffic to your website.
About the Author:
Bill Thomas lives in Seattle, Wa.
He is actively engaged in E-Commerce and Internet Marketing. His current website
is--Build
Lifetime Income from Home
Source of this article:
www.goarticles.com
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