Amazingfreereport@.blogspot.com - Success With Traffic Exchanges by Robert Cutler

10/1/2009

S UCCESS W ITH E XCHANGES

T RAFFIC

Getting The Best Results Possible

Hundreds of thousands of people use traffic exchanges to try to earn money online. Traffic exchanges are a low-budget way to get people to see your offer but that doesn’t mean that you should take it any less seriously than if you were paying $1 a visitor. After all, the traffic costs you time and effort and that has a monetary value. This book will teach you how to make small changes to what you’re currently doing to make sure you get the results you want. This document © Troy Wray 2009. All rights reserved. This document may be freely distributed and given away but may not be sold. The document can be rebranded by joining VitalViralPro but may not be modified in any other way or reverse engineered. Troy Wray 10/1/2009

10/1/2009 Introduction....................................................................................................6 ROI .............................................................................................................7 A Taster .........................................................................................................8 What Is A Traffic Exchange? ............................................................................9 What You Might Not Know… .........................................................................9 Surf Ratio ....................................................................................................9 Surf Timer ................................................................................................. 10 Delivery Rate ............................................................................................. 11 Membership & Unique Views....................................................................... 11 Popularity .................................................................................................. 12 Performance .............................................................................................. 12 Anti-cheat System ...................................................................................... 13 Autosurfs................................................................................................... 13 Referral Commissions ................................................................................. 13 Credit Commissions .................................................................................... 14 Surf Breakers ............................................................................................. 14 Speed ....................................................................................................... 15 Audio & Video ............................................................................................ 15 Terms Of Service ....................................................................................... 16 Pop-ups..................................................................................................... 16 Other Bits & Pieces .................................................................................... 16 Assigning Credits .......................................................................................... 17 Earn More Credits Surfing .............................................................................. 18 Beating the timer ....................................................................................... 18 Using the right browser .............................................................................. 19 Which traffic exchanges to surf simultaneously ............................................ 19 Surfing ...................................................................................................... 20 Setting up further groups ........................................................................... 20 Buying Credits .............................................................................................. 22 Delivery Rate – Add Your URL Multiple Times ................................................. 23 Banners ........................................................................................................ 24 Creating Banners ....................................................................................... 24 Text Ads ....................................................................................................... 25 Creating Your Own Splash Pages ................................................................... 27

10/1/2009 Variety – Stand Out From The Crowd .......................................................... 28 Make Your Text Specific ............................................................................. 29 Open The Page In A New Window .............................................................. 30 Hosting Your Splash Page ........................................................................... 30 Creating Your Own Squeeze Pages ................................................................. 31 What Details To Ask For ............................................................................. 32 Privacy Statement ...................................................................................... 32 Be Specific About What They’re Signing Up To............................................. 32 NEVER Trick People On To Your List............................................................ 33 Branding YOU! .............................................................................................. 34 Dynamic Surf Ratios And Team Surfing .......................................................... 35 Rotators ....................................................................................................... 36 Viral Bars ...................................................................................................... 37 Micro-Profitability Vs Macro-Profitability .......................................................... 38 Macro-profitability ...................................................................................... 38 Micro-Profitability ....................................................................................... 39 Micro-profitability by back-end promotion .................................................... 41 Micro-profitability using a downline builder .................................................. 41 Using A Downline Builder ............................................................................... 42 How Do You Get Referrals? ........................................................................ 42 What If They’re Already Members Of The Exchanges? .................................. 43 Downline Integrity ..................................................................................... 43 But There Are So Many Downline Builders?.................................................. 44 Choosing The Right Traffic Exchanges ............................................................ 45 Monitor While You Surf............................................................................... 46 You Should Start With Popular .................................................................... 46 Then Migrate To Performance..................................................................... 47 Track & Test Always................................................................................... 47 PART II – ADVANCED.................................................................................... 48

The following sections are in the full version of this book only: What Programs To Join Multiple Programs

10/1/2009 The Wrong Way The Right Way Scams What To Look For In A Program Residual Income Keep A Swipe File Your Model – Funnels & Pipelines Map Out Your Model / Process Segmenting Your List If You Can Draw You Can Create Your Own Model Signal To Noise Influence The Offer Selling An Affiliate Product Showing The Sales Page Directly Using A Splash Page Using A Squeeze Page Selling Your Own Product Building A List Getting Signups To A Program Conclusion The Food Chain Single-Tier Programs Two-Tier Programs Multi-Level Programs Build Your List Create Your Own Product The Funded Proposal Getting Paid To Build A List Method 1 Method 2 Funded Proposal Part II Make The Tools You Use Pay For Themselves Who Are Surfers? Optimizing A Splash Page The Split Test / Beat The Control Advanced Testing The Solution To ‘Beat The Control’ Traffic Exchange Customization Of Splash Pages Success With Traffic Exchanges © 2009 VitalViralPro.com

10/1/2009 Tracking How To Track Autoresponders Blacklists & Whitelists Double Opt-In Creating Follow Up Emails How Many And How Often Spread the emails out further as time goes on Make the first few content-rich Create a series spanning at least a year (eventually) They have to be time-insensitive Have as high a ‘free content’ to affiliate links ratio as possible Using Broadcast Emails Viral Promotion Conclusion Resources

This document © Troy Wray 2009. All rights reserved. This document may be freely distributed and given away but may not be sold. The document can be rebranded by joining VitalViralPro but may not be modified in any other way or reverse engineered.

10/1/2009

SUCCESS WITH TRAFFIC EXCHANGES Getting The Best Results Possible

INTRODUCTION Do you use traffic exchanges? Are you confident that you’re doing everything right in order to get the best results you could be?

The Best AND Worst Thing About Traffic Exchanges Is That The Traffic Is ‘Free’ !!

Has this guy lost his marbles? What IS HE ON ABOUT? I’m regretting buying this book already… I’m serious. Of course it’s great that anyone can get ‘free’ traffic using traffic exchanges – they don’t pay for it, right? And because they don’t pay for it, many people throw that free traffic down the drain – wasting it by not doing things properly. Free is NOT FREE!! I’m sure there’s proper terminology for the psychology involved but many people don’t associate a value to the time they spend surfing; but if I said to you, “you have a choice of surfing 1 hour or 4 hours for 1000 credits”, you’d assign a value to your time then, wouldn’t you? I hope that you’re not so flippant with your traffic. But if you are right now then look on the bright side – you have the most to gain from this book! So the point about the ‘best and worst’ comment is that if everyone had to pay for their traffic, everyone would try harder to improve what they’re doing. Since many people perceive the traffic as free, they don’t treat that traffic (in the sense of caring how wasteful they are) as if it had cost them anything – but it did! Success With Traffic Exchanges © 2009 VitalViralPro.com

10/1/2009

ROI In this book, you’re going to learn how to get the most from traffic exchanges. I’m going to use the shortcut expression ROI (return on investment) referring to the end-to-end process and I’ll leave it up to you exactly what you define as return and what you define as investment. For example, if I only buy traffic and use it to promote and sell an ebook or other digital product, I would probably consider my ROI to be simply the money I make per amount of money spent buying credits. If I’m selling an ebook at $27 and I buy credits at $10 per 1000 and average 1 sale per 1000 visitors, I make $27 for every $10 spent – that is my ROI. I could express it as a profit of $1.7 per $1 spent. I don’t expect you to buy traffic necessarily but see how easy it is to measure ROI in this case. If the ROI is positive, I’m going to keep doing it. If it’s negative, I’d be foolish to keep doing it (assuming making money is my goal; it isn’t always but we’ll assume it is). If I tend to surf to earn my credits then the situation is a little more vague and it’s harder to calculate a ROI but it can still be done. If it takes me 4 hours to surf and earn those credits then I could say I’m earning $27 per 4 hours or a fraction under $7 an hour. That would be the best way to express my ROI in that instance. By way of one more example for now, suppose I’m not selling an ebook but I’m getting leads into an autoresponder list with a view to promoting affiliate products to that list. Trying to calculate the ROI in terms of money made is now complex and I’ll cover this later in the book. But for now, let’s just say I might then express my ROI as x leads per $ if I buy my credits or x leads per hour if I surf for credits. In other words, I’m separating the lead gathering from the monetization of the list. Don’t worry if you don’t follow this for now. Ultimately, this book is about improving your ROI, however you care to define it. But we must agree that if you don’t already know what it is, you need to work out a definition and measure it. You’ll see plenty more examples throughout this book.

10/1/2009

A TASTER This book is going to cover lots of different ways to improve your ROI. Some of them will be small tweaks; some of them might be a significant or complete strategy change. For example:          

How to improve the CTR (click through rate) of a splash page Why, when and how to use squeeze pages The importance of branding How to earn maximum credits while surfing How to get traffic for free The funded proposal Building a list Using an autoresponder Keeping a swipe file Measuring – the key to maximizing ROI

So the book will be diverse and hopefully interesting. And I hope you won’t find it frustrating that it jumps from topic to topic; I thought it was too boring talking about sections that were too similar too close together. Since each section stands alone reasonably well, I hope it makes for an easier read. Remember, this book is about traffic exchanges. I may mention other traffic sources throughout the book but they’re not covered in depth. And one thing I apologize for now because I’m going to do it a lot… You’re going to see ‘see section xxx’ or ‘see later’ or ‘see elsewhere’ quite a bit because while I need to mention something, I don’t want to get into detail in the section I’m in. Plus many of the bits that I refer to would need to be said in many places so they’re only written once and then referred to, ok? Also, I don’t want to break the flow of the book by constantly mentioning online services or products – there’s a link to all the resources you need at the end of the book. So with that said and to make sure we’re all definitely on the same page…

10/1/2009

WHAT IS A TRAFFIC EXCHANGE? I’m sure you know exactly what a traffic exchange is but just to make sure every reader is on the same page… In purest terms, a traffic exchange simply enforces an agreement between members to view one another’s’ offers. Simple, huh? To enforce this agreement, traffic exchanges all have their own currency called credits – to have someone view your offer costs you credits. If you don’t have any credits, you can earn them by viewing other peoples’ offers. You can also (generally) buy credits if you don’t want to earn them. And through that simple concept, millions of offers are ‘exchanged’ daily on the many traffic exchanges.

What You Might Not Know… It’s useful to have a slightly deeper understanding of how a traffic exchange really works. Most people never need to think about some of these things but it’s worth spending a moment to consider…

Surf Ratio The first thing to understand is the surf ratio. Believe it or not, some people don’t even know what the surf ratio is on the exchange they’re using!! That’s like me asking you to work for me and you saying yes, but I haven’t told you how much I pay. The surf ratio is normally 1:1 for upgraded members and something higher for free members, like 1:2 or 1:3 credits per page surfed. To avoid spoiling the flow of the book, assume upgraded members get 1:1 and free members get 1:2. Surf ratio will usually be the primary reason to upgrade in a traffic exchange: as soon as you upgrade, you start getting one credit per page view instead of having to view 2 or 3 pages for 1 credit.

10/1/2009 Clearly this has a direct effect on your ROI – you pay x dollars a month but you get a better surf ratio. The more you surf, the more benefit you get from that upgrade. You’ll often get ‘free’ credits thrown in every month with an upgrade too. And there are other benefits that we’ll cover later. The free members are absolutely essential for a traffic exchange!! Without them, the economy would break down and the currency, the credit, would collapse because the exchange wouldn’t be able to supply all the traffic. Think about this for a second. If an exchange operated on a pure 1:1 basis for everyone, there would never be any surplus traffic. The exchange couldn’t sell credits. And there would have to be no ‘leaks’ in the system whatsoever or all the credits would gradually drain away. Having free members at a 2:1 ratio gives the exchange room for maneuver – they get ‘spare’ traffic that they can then sell as credits, use as rewards, even use to give upgraded members a better than 1:1 surf ratio.

The better surf ratio and (where applicable) reduced surf timer are the most important reasons to upgrade in a traffic exchange

The traffic ultimately has to come from members surfing. As long as that is happening and there’s the right balance of free to upgraded members, the exchange should run ok.

Surf Timer An important facet of an exchange is how long is the surf timer. This is part of the exchanges role in forcing the page exchange – how long you have to view the page to earn a credit. In many ways it doesn’t matter too much. A short timer means people don’t see your page for so long but conversely, you earn credits faster. Most people would consider 3 seconds to be too short and longer than 15 seconds to be too long (I don’t know any as low as 3 seconds – most will be 515 seconds)

10/1/2009 It’s personal preference but it’s something that people have tested and a long surf timer does create a higher response for your pages. However, when looked at in ROI terms, getting a 50% better CTR on a page is not good for your ROI if the surf timer is twice as long (meaning you only earn half the credits). All other things being equal, it’s better to show 1000 pages of 1% CTR than 500 pages of 1.5%

Delivery Rate I was duped by a traffic exchange some time ago. They had an incredibly attractive deal where you could buy a lot of credits for a very low price. Guess what? I guess a lot of people took them up on the offer because their delivery rate slowed to a crawl. What’s the point of having 10,000 credits in your account if you can only get 5-10 page views a day? (and this exchange was worse than that!) While there may be good reason for only having your pages delivered at 5-10 a day, you want that to be through choice, not through inability of the exchange to deliver. At the same time, only the biggest exchanges can deliver hundreds or thousands of page views for your page per day. There are bound to be exceptions but if you can get 50-500 views of your page a day on one exchange, that’s probably good enough.

Membership & Unique Views It’s good to know or estimate the number of active surfers on the exchange at any one time. If at certain times of the day there are only 10 surfers then (a) your pages aren’t going to get delivered very quickly and (b) if they do, they’re only going to be seen over and over by the same people. Now some people get hung up on ‘unique views’ and size of membership (or more precisely, number of active surfers) is tied in with that. Some people don’t want to think that the same people are seeing their page several times. They want to believe that every view of their page will be by a new pair of eyeballs. Success With Traffic Exchanges © 2009 VitalViralPro.com

10/1/2009 Some people have never even thought about it !! And some people realize that not all their page views will be by fresh eyeballs and realize that’s good !! You see, some people will tell you that people need to see your splash page 6.78 times before they’ll take action. Of course, these people just regurgitate something they read once and have probably never tested for themselves, me included – how can you? I test and measure a lot of things but analyzing and correlating that would be beyond me. But I agree with the principle. There’s no need to actively seek to have your page seen 7 times by the same people. But don’t get hung up about reading that such and such an exchange only has 70% unique visitors (people viewing your page). It isn’t going to do any harm. But I’ve seen exchanges with 10% unique views and I wouldn’t want my pages being shown there – that’s too extreme. Unless you frequent very small exchanges, this isn’t likely to be an issue for you.

Popularity There’s a popular site called AffiliateFunnel - if you’ve been on traffic exchanges any length of time, you’ll know them – they let people vote for their favorite traffic exchanges. Then they rank the exchanges based on votes so that you know which traffic exchanges to join. This is a great way to get started with traffic exchanges – look for the sites that have been rated highly by votes – they display a prominent ‘badge’ displaying their current popularity vote. While popularity is a good indicator, it’s not as good as…

Performance There’s another website that ranks traffic exchanges by doing their own independent testing. They are TrafficHoopla. Every week, they rank the exchanges based on their testing so again it’s a great source for choosing which traffic exchange(s) to use. Success With Traffic Exchanges © 2009 VitalViralPro.com

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Anti-cheat System Never use a traffic exchange that doesn’t use an anti-cheat system. Without an anti-cheat system, it would be very easy for someone to write a software program that surfed automatically to earn them credits. If that were happening on an exchange you were using to show your pages, your pages aren’t going to be seen by a human at all! The usual anti-cheat system is the images you have to click on when you’re surfing. Typically you have to match the shown image with one of four random images. This can still be cheated and any decent exchange looks at other things also to determine if someone is using a ‘bot’ – the usual term for an automated cheating ‘surfer’. Which brings me neatly on to…

Autosurfs I think of autosurfs in the same way I think of flies – why on earth were they invented? With an autosurf, you earn credits just by letting your browser sit there while the system automatically rotates members’ pages. Great. That’ll work! What people think they are gaining by earning loads of credits (albeit really easily) and then having their pages shown on autopilot to someone who’s probably not even in the room, much less studying the pages is beyond me.

Don’t waste a single breath on autosurfs. I’ve never met anyone with anything good to say about them

Referral Commissions This interests you I’m sure – earning money. I hope when you’ve read this book, there’ll be another non-monetary commission that interests you… Commissions are great. If you refer someone to a traffic exchange, it’s good and right that you earn commission for doing that and as you’ll see in another section, you can cover the cost of your own upgrade – and that is really cool and worthwhile.

10/1/2009 Don’t make it a goal to promote only traffic exchanges just to get commissions though – you’re unlikely to build a life-changing income that way. Some exchanges might pay a one-off referral fee but more commonly you’ll get a percentage of the monthly fee your referrals pay – residual income! Much more on that later!

Credit Commissions These don’t have the same sexiness as money commissions for many people but they do for me – and much more so! Many exchanges ‘pay’ you a small percentage of your direct referrals’ earned credits. So if they surf and earn 1000 credits, you might get 50 credits. Doesn’t sound a lot but if you have 20 surfers doing that every month, that’s a 1000 free credits every month. Have that going on in a few traffic exchanges and you can dramatically increase your ROI – to infinity and beyond  (aside: if you measure your ROI as percentage return on your investment and your investment is zero because you get free traffic – your ROI is infinite) Some traffic exchanges even have multi-level credit commissions – meaning you earn credits on the surfing not just of your direct referrals but 2, 3 or even more levels of your downline too! That’s really cool. I have one exchange that I get 1000’s of free credits a week because I have a multi-level downline of over 7000 people. That doesn’t happen overnight but I’ll show you how you can do that later.

Surf Breakers If you’re surfing to earn credits, there’s nothing worse than pages that spoil your surfing. Pages with audio that you can’t mute, pages with pop-ups that have to be clicked and the worst culprit of all – the frame-breaker. This is a website that ‘breaks-out’ of the traffic exchange altogether and means you have to log in again to start surfing. Even on a well-run exchange these type of pages will crop up occasionally and you should report them (most exchanges have a report button for that very reason). Success With Traffic Exchanges © 2009 VitalViralPro.com

10/1/2009 But if too many pages fall into that category and nothing ever seems to be done about them then you’re surfing on a not very well run traffic exchange and you might want to think about spending your time elsewhere.

Speed You want the traffic exchange to be fast at serving up the pages while you surf. If the surf timer is supposed to be 7 seconds then you should be able to earn close to 500 credits (at 1:1) an hour and that’s factored into your ROI. If the surf bar and timer don’t fully load and start the countdown for 2 seconds, that brings your hourly rate down to 400 credits. If the pages you’re viewing don’t fully load in the 7 seconds, don’t worry about it – that’s their problem, not yours. Don’t feel obliged to wait for the page – they should be ensuring their page loads quickly and guess what – we’ll cover that in this book too!!

Audio & Video If you put audio on a page, make sure that it can be stopped easily and that it’s obvious how to stop it – don’t have the pause button right at the bottom of a long page. If your audio is too annoying, surfers will report your page frequently and it may get suspended. Treat others as you would like to be treated applies here. Video with audio is obviously similar, make sure it can be paused easily. The jury is out on how worthwhile it is to have video on the surfed page so the only advice is to test. Since people will only see a small amount of any video or hear a few seconds of audio, that has to be enough to capture their attention (along with any headlines). I don’t like audio on pages but that’s just a personal preference and I’ll tend to mute them instantly (if I can). And as many surfers surf multiple pages in multiple tabs, audio can be a pain for them. Just be aware of the issues and test – if audio or video makes a positive difference, use it.

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Terms Of Service All traffic exchanges have terms of service that you need to abide by. That means primarily that the pages you put into rotation must meet their rules. Those rules are there to protect other surfers and the exchange so don’t try to flout them. The common terms that apply to the sites you add are no pornography or offensive pages, no racial or otherwise discriminatory pages, no gambling, ‘warez’ – illegal pirate downloads, and nothing that would in any way cheat the system. Doing anything against the terms accidentally with a minor issue might get you a warning but a blatant violation will get your account suspended without notice and you may well get banned from other traffic exchanges at the same time. That could include your email address, your name, your IP and the sites you tried to promote.

Pop-ups Anything that automatically pops up and needs the surfer to click to get rid of before they can carry on surfing is going to annoy the surfers and get your site reported. If you have a pop up, it shouldn’t HAVE to be clicked before the surfer can go to the next page. Be sensitive to the medium you’re promoting on. What might be fine as a link to send someone in an email may not be appropriate or welcomed on a traffic exchange.

Other Bits & Pieces What else? You should enjoy the exchange you use. Many exchanges have random reward bonuses, some even have games you play while surfing. As long as they don’t distract too much from viewing pages then that’s fine. But if you play games while surfing and don’t pay attention to the pages, other people will be doing it to you.

10/1/2009

ASSIGNING CREDITS When you add a URL to a traffic exchange, it doesn’t go into rotation straight away – it has to have credits assigned to it. You can assign credits manually; giving you control over how many times the URL will be shown. That’s useful if you want the opportunity to review results before assigning the next batch of credits. But it’s also a chore to have to keep logging in to assign more credits. It may also mean that you forget or aren’t aware that a certain campaign has stopped running. The other option is to have some of all your credits auto-assigned. That means that whenever you earn credits, some or all of those credits can be automatically added (assigned) to your chosen URLs. The system is flexible so you can have all your credits added to one campaign or added to different URLs in different ratios. Some traffic exchanges insist on a minimum percentage being auto-assigned to help keep their exchange running smoothly. Use these features to suit the way you want to work.

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EARN MORE CREDITS SURFING Another simple way to maximize your results is to earn more credits for your surfing time. You may already be doing this and you may have read about it elsewhere. It’s pretty common. There is a limit on how many credits you can earn per hour in each traffic exchange. This is because each traffic exchange has a minimum time that you must view each member website before you earn your credits. At 10 seconds per page, this limits you to a maximum of 360 pages per hour and in reality you’d be lucky to achieve 250 pages per hour because of page load times etc. On a 1:1 traffic exchange that means that in 1 hour you’ve earned enough credits to have your site seen by 250 other members. However, some of the traffic exchanges have 15 or 20 second timers meaning you’ll only earn about half that.

Beating the timer There is a way to beat the timer though and earn many more credits per hour (without cheating). The key is to surf multiple traffic exchanges ‘simultaneously’. Even if you only surf two traffic exchanges simultaneously, you’ve doubled your earning rate. The reason this works is that if you surf two traffic exchanges you can be reading one site on one exchange while the other exchange is loading the next site. A word about the fairness of doing this: Most people who are surfing are trying to earn credits and so even if they see a site they’re interested in, they normally bookmark it for later – not get distracted reading it there and then. So if that’s how you work then clearly it only takes a fraction of the timer time to decide that you want to bookmark a page for browsing later. Consequently it’s easy to surf 2 or more sites simultaneously and still bookmark

Many people do surf multiple exchanges but don’t want to think of other surfers doing it while they view their pages! So be reasonable and keep the traffic exchange community a happy and useful one! Make sure you have time to view sites and bookmark some for later viewing

10/1/2009 any sites you’re interested in to come back to later.

Using the right browser Most modern browsers are now ‘multi-tabbed’ meaning you can load multiple web pages in the same browser application. Firefox, Internet Explorer V7 onwards and Crazy Browser all support tabbed browsing and are all suitable browsers for surfing multiple exchanges simultaneously. Many people rate Crazy Browser highly for surfing multiple exchanges as it has a smart pop-up blocker and useful indicators on each tab about the status of the page loading. You can download Crazy Browser for free at http://crazybrowser.com If you try to use a non multi-tabbed browser, you’ll find it significantly less convenient so make sure you have a suitable browser.

Which traffic exchanges to surf simultaneously Clearly you can only surf the traffic exchanges that you’ve joined. What you want to do now is to create groups of traffic exchanges for surfing. Assuming that you want to earn credits in all the traffic exchanges you’re a member of then you need to split them into manageable groups for surfing. How you do this is up to you but let’s say you’re comfortable browsing 3 traffic exchanges at a time. Fire up an empty browser and on the first tab, log into your first traffic exchange and go to your surf/start page. Often this page will automatically open a new browser. What you need to do now is bookmark the surf page for that traffic exchange. Now do the same for the other two traffic exchanges. Because some of the surf pages will have opened in other browsers, you probably don’t have the 3 surfing tabs conveniently in one browser like you want. No worries. Assuming you have the surf pages bookmarked, close all your browsers and open an empty one. On the first tab, recall your first surf page from your favourites/bookmarks. Now create a 2nd tab and recall your 2nd surf page from your bookmarks and similarly for the 3rd page.

10/1/2009 All being well, you now have your 3 surf pages in 3 separate tabs within the same browser and you’re ready to go. Note: The above procedure is easier in Firefox and Crazy Browser because you can open a whole group of bookmarks in one go. E.g. If you’d bookmarked 3 surf pages in a group called group 1, starting with an empty browser you can go to group 1 in your bookmarks and click ‘open all in tabs’ or similar. Unfortunately, at the time of writing, IE7 doesn’t have this feature. Note also that if some time has elapsed since you bookmarked the surf pages, you may be prompted with a login screen before you can surf. Note: Under no circumstances try to surf the same traffic exchange in multiple tabs - you could lose your account. Similarly, don’t be tempted by software that promises to automate surfing. Traffic Exchanges can detect cheating and your account will be terminated without notice.

Surfing Assuming you have your 3 surf pages ready, it’s time to surf. It’s actually easier to do than it is to explain! Simply click from tab to tab, viewing the pages while the timer is counting down and clicking on the next button of any that have timed down already. Some traffic exchanges might require you to click numbers or symbols and the location where you have to click may change. You may be a little slower while you get used to the procedure but you’ll soon find you can comfortably surf, bookmark any interesting sites and not waste much time waiting for timers.

Setting up further groups Some people will say that to get the best results from the sites you’re promoting it’s probably better to be advertising them 100 times each on 10 different traffic exchanges than 500 times each on 2 because otherwise people will become familiar with your pages. There may be some truth in this but if the page you’re promoting looks reasonably professional then it probably won’t make a lot of difference how you spread your credits. Some traffic exchanges may be better for what you’re trying to promote than others. It all comes down to testing.

10/1/2009 However, I would recommend earning credits in 5-10 exchanges on a regular basis. This means that you need to set up an additional 1 or 2 groups of 3 traffic exchanges like the group we’ve been discussing. Then, rotate your groups so that you do one group today, another group tomorrow and so on. Or you could do group 1 for 1 week and group 2 for a week and so on. And on the subject of earning more credits…

10/1/2009

BUYING CREDITS Most traffic exchanges allow you to buy credits. Remember, managing a traffic exchange is like managing a mini-economy. Sometimes the traffic exchange will have an excess of traffic for the number of sites they have in rotation and will sell credits to encourage more sites into rotation. When they do, they often offer a special price – look out for these, they can be very good value. Many people don’t want to surf and buy credits instead. Most traffic exchanges have no real problem with that. Yes they depend on surfers to create the traffic but the number of people looking to buy credits is usually very small compared to the number of people surfing. If the traffic exchange has a problem, they’ll stop selling credits for a while. The fact is, traffic exchanges want all kinds of members, they want paid, they need free so as long as the exchange is managed well, there’s rarely a problem. Except for the example I told you where an unscrupulous exchange was selling silly amounts of credits for a very low fee and I was greedy (stupid) enough to go for it. I knew it wouldn’t work, I even told myself well they’re so cheap, doesn’t really matter if they don’t get deliver quickly. Just can’t resist a bargain. I just checked, at the current delivery rate there I think my page will be in rotation for about another 9,637 years and 43 days. Talking of delivery rate…

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DELIVERY RATE – ADD YOUR URL MULTIPLE TIMES If you do want your page delivered faster, you can add your URL multiple times. At any one time, your URL is 1 in say 1000 and that will determine your delivery rate (along with the number of surfers active at that time). If you add your URL 2 or 3 times then you’ll have that many slots out of 1000 and your delivery rate will double or treble. Be aware though that if the delivery rate is low because of a low number of active surfers, you may be showing your page more times to the same surfers, which may or may not be desirable to you. Traffic exchanges have no problem with you doing this – you’d be entitled to fill those slots with something – the exchange doesn’t care what you show.

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BANNERS I’m referring here to the banners you can put in the traffic exchanges. A tiny fraction of people ever bother to set up banners but we’re talking about maximizing your results – if you have banner credits, use them. They don’t generate huge results by any means but they can help brand you and create awareness of your campaign – depending on the design of the banner. Many traffic exchanges let you exchange credits for banner impressions often at maybe a 30:1 ratio – you get 30 banner impressions per credit. Typical banner response inside a traffic exchange is around 0.01% - 0.05% - 1 in 2000 to 1 in 10,000. That seems low and it is but the branding and awareness benefit is hard to quantify. Don’t obsess over it but if you have credits to use, make sure they’re doing something for you.

Creating Banners There are numerous online services that let you create banners, normally by dragging and dropping elements on to the banner – so they’re fairly easy to use.

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TEXT ADS Again, referring to the text ads you can add in the traffic exchanges. Again people tend to not bother to set them up – but if you have credits, use them. I find this is where it’s especially useful to track. If you show text ads and they just lead to one of your main sales pages, how will you ever know whether you got a click or not and whether that click led to a sale? After all, you’re often told you should use text ads but is there any point? Traffic exchanges will usually keep track of how many times your text link has been shown and how many times it’s been clicked, so that part of the tracking is done for you. Here’s a tip I’ve never seen anywhere else… There is a skill in writing and finding good performing text ads – and a good performing text ad can work well in other circumstances (see the section on specific traffic exchanges elsewhere in the book). Use the tracking Many people features (limited as they are) in traffic exchanges to forget or don’t help you write and test text ads and hone your skills. There is a huge difference in response between differently written text ads. This is nothing to do with the page the text ad leads to, just does the text ad interest the visitor enough to click? You’re not going to make a fortune and it’s not going to make a huge difference to your bottom line if you use your text ads or not – unless you hit on a winner.

bother to set up banners and text ads. Make sure you take full advantage.

And if you find the best performing text link on one exchange, it’s likely to be the best you can do on other exchanges too. So get testing some text ads for fun. Don’t make it a main part of your activity but aim to do the ‘beat the control’ as a background task to find the best text ad you can. Once you have that text ad, use it everywhere you can put text ads. Success With Traffic Exchanges © 2009 VitalViralPro.com

10/1/2009 Here’s another tip. Try to have 5 or 6 that perform reasonably well and rotate them. The effectiveness of text ads will wear off, just like splash pages. Especially if you rely on the curiosity factor to get people to click – they’ll soon remember what it leads to. You have very limited space so be creative. The word free will boost response. Free report, free download, free credits – make sure the text ad is not misleading though.

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CREATING YOUR OWN SPLASH PAGES It’s generally agreed that you should use splash pages in preference to sales pages on a traffic exchange (I’ll cover squeeze pages in the next section). The reasoning is simple: no-one has time to read a sales page while they’re surfing and a long sales page might not even load quickly enough on some of the shorttimer traffic exchanges. If you’re promoting a business for example then they may well provide you with various promotional materials, including splash pages. You should almost always use the splash page in preference to the sales page. However, there are three huge reasons for creating your own splash pages:   

If the business you’re promoting only has a sales page You will stand out from all the people using the standard splash page You can test

The first and second ones are obvious. The third reason may not be so obvious but typically, the business you’re promoting will provide some kind of back-office stats telling you how many signups (or sales) you got and maybe how many hits you had. But the flow is usually splash page -> sales page -> signup form. And all they tell you is the end-end conversion rate (at best). If you see an end-end conversion rate of 0.1% (1 in 1000 people that see the splash page sign up), is that a 10% CTR on the splash page and a 1% conversion rate of the sales page or is it 1% CTR on the splash page and 10% conversion on the sales page? Knowing this is crucial if you want to improve your ROI and I’ve never seen a business yet that provides that level of detail. By adding your own splash page, you gain control and you can use simple tracking methods to measure and then refine your splash page. I talk much more about the mechanics of improving your splash page in the full version of this book. If you mentally reject creating your own splash page then believe me, you are rejecting one of the biggest opportunities to improve your ROI !!

10/1/2009 Many people assume that they would have to pay someone to create splash pages for them and/or that they would need web hosting. In fact there are online systems that anyone can use to create presentable splash pages. The thing about splash pages is that they don’t have to be perfect. They just have to meet the usual AIDA rules of thumb:    

A – Attention I – Interest D – Desire A – Action

They certainly don’t have to look professionally created, though generally they shouldn’t look totally amateur either. I do many of my own graphics even though I am one of the least artistic people you could meet. But I do own PhotoShop and similar programs and it’s quite easy to buy stock graphics or photos and make them into something reasonable. And because you’ll know how to test, you can soon find a splash page that works as well as professionally designed ones. The most important point is to have the call to action. While many surfers know instinctively to click a splash page if there isn’t a specific ‘click here’ button, not everyone will. The prevailing trend right now is having a click here button with arrows pointing to it, leading the eye towards the hot spot. The best advice is to pay attention while you surf – see what grabs your attention and then copy the idea – not too literally. If you’re creating your own anyway then create 3 as I described before and test them. In all probability, one will stand out (in a positive or negative way) and you can refine it to two that you then split test over time and improve.

Variety – Stand Out From The Crowd The best part about creating your own splash pages is that they’ll be unique.

10/1/2009 If you’re promoting something that everyone else is promoting, you may get the clicks where the standard splash page that everyone else is using doesn’t. Also, it’s worth having several splash pages in rotation for variety. Or run 1 design for a few days then switch to another. Most people who test these things report a similar phenomenon – that the effectiveness of many splash pages goes down when it’s been in circulation a while. One could probably hazard a guess as to why – that many of the surfers are the same day after day and may tend to ignore splash pages they know they’ve seen before. There’s also a reported effect that sometimes a splash page needs to have been in circulation for a while before it begins to get a reasonable response.

Make Your Text Specific If you took on board one of the earlier sections about tracking, you’ll recall that by using tracking, you can split out the conversion rate of the splash page and the sales page from the end-to-end conversion rate. So a 1% end-to-end conversion rate might be a sales page converting at 33% and a splash page converting at (getting a click through rate of) 3%. You might easily be able to create a splash page that gets a higher click-through rate by making it less specific, intriguing, and curiosity-rousing. However, you’ll usually find that all that happens is the sales page conversion rate goes down. This is easy to understand. If your splash page is specific, you’ll get less click throughs but the people that do sure have an interest – they know what they’re expecting to find and there are no surprises. If the splash page says something like “click here to change your life” – sure people will click out of interest but then when they find out you’re selling an eBook on search engine optimization, they’ll backtrack just as fast. Much better (generally, but test) to make the splash page convey what the visitor can expect when they click.

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Open The Page In A New Window If you’re creating your own splash page, arrange for the sales page to open in a new window – it makes life easier for the surfer and they’re more likely to leave the page open while they carry on surfing.

Hosting Your Splash Page Another stumbling block for people thinking of having their own splash pages is hosting them. The splash page generally has to be stored on a server somewhere – known as hosting the splash page. If you use one of the online services, they take care of the hosting for you. So in summary, there’s absolutely no reason not to have a go at creating your own splash pages. Particularly if what you’re trying to promote only has a sales page and they don’t provide you with suitable splash pages. Even a half-decent splash page will do better than the raw sales page in most cases (but test)

The best online service for creating (and hosting) splash pages without doubt is AdKreator. It has readymade templates that you can just drag and drop graphics and text on and end up with a slick splash page. No need to host or know a thing about HTML.

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CREATING YOUR OWN SQUEEZE PAGES I said in the previous section that having a splash page is almost always preferable to showing the sales page on the traffic exchange. Well using a squeeze page is almost always better still. With a splash page, your visitor sees it and they either click or they don’t. If they click, they see the signup/sales page and they either take action or they don’t. If they don’t, they’re gone for good – you have no way of following up with them. If you use a squeeze page, the squeeze page (email capture form) is shown directly on the traffic exchange and has some compelling reason and/or incentive for them to give you their name and email address. It’s also ‘mysterious’ because they can’t find out more information until they do. Once they give you their name and email address, they go on your autoresponder list and you can follow them up multiple times in the future. So even if you get less signups to a squeeze page than you get clicks on a splash page, the ability to follow that person up way into the future far outweighs a lower ‘action’ rate. Again, if you’re promoting a business where they provide the squeeze page, that is preferable to not using a squeeze page but remember that ultimately, any leads are really owned by the business you’re promoting (in general). You’re generally not at liberty to email those people en masse. So it’s worth having your own autoresponder, your own squeeze page and then any leads you capture are yours. And done right, you can market not just this business but other things too in the future. For example if the business you’re currently promoting folds but you used their squeeze page, those leads are gone. Had you used your own squeeze page, you’d now be able to find a replacement business to promote and (within reason and subject to limitations I discuss later) promote that business to your leads. Again, people are afraid of taking the plunge into using their own squeeze pages. They know they need an autoresponder in addition to all the thoughts about designing and hosting the squeeze page itself.

10/1/2009 However, having a squeeze page is only slightly more involved than using a splash page. Firstly, a squeeze page must (generally) connect to an autoresponder of some description. Most people will use a 3rd party autoresponder though there are plenty of hosted autoresponders (see the autoresponders section) that you can install on your own hosting account. There are even desktop versions that sit on your computer and send via your own email account. Unless you really know what you’re doing, and even if you do, 3rd party autoresponders are generally the way to go (see the autoresponders section for why). That means you need an Aweber, GetResponse, TrafficWave or NPN autoresponder (or there are other smaller companies around). The big factor is deliverability and the handling of spam complaints. You can create squeeze pages using online programs, just like you can for splash pages and they’re getting more sophisticated all the time.

What Details To Ask For Almost always you should ask for the minimum information – create as little friction as possible to them signing up. Name and email is all you need. Personally I favor just a first name. You want the first name so you can personalize the emails you send – you don’t need their last name. But if you want it, collect it. And don’t (in my opinion) ask for them to confirm their email address (just in case you’re hand crafting your signup form).

Privacy Statement You most definitely should have the text “I will never sell or share your details” or something similar.

Be Specific About What They’re Signing Up To If they’re going to get a report and be on a mailing list, state that. If you know the frequency of your newsletter, state that. You need to be concise as you don’t have too much space. But the more specific you are, the better the quality of the signups and the less cause for spam complaints. Success With Traffic Exchanges © 2009 VitalViralPro.com

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NEVER Trick People On To Your List Don’t try and be clever to get more people to sign up by having a misleading squeeze page. It will come back to bite you. People are fed up with signing up to lists where they just get spammed with crappy offers all the time. They will give their details and give you a chance but you want to be absolutely squeaky clean and give them exactly what you said you would.

Otherwise, some of the same things about splash pages apply to squeeze pages too. The hosting isn’t necessary if you use one of the online services. And don’t forget; use the return page of the autoresponder to make them an offer. Even if it’s to sign up to a more specialized list. Check out the funded proposal section again. Use that valuable page that they see after they hit submit to offer them a really special product – it can do wonders for your bottom line.

You can create squeeze pages as well as splash pages with AdKreator.

You can also use VitalViralPro. VitalViralPro provides generic, hosted, customizable squeeze pages and you don’t even need an autoresponder – you can simply have the leads emailed to you. This makes it easy for ‘newbies’ to get started on the path of squeeze pages and lead collection while they find their feet. Of course, you would have to email the resulting leads manually and you are likely to want to get an autoresponder but you can do things a step at a time if you’re unsure.

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BRANDING YOU! Many people don’t do it but it’s highly recommended that you take every opportunity to brand yourself on traffic exchanges. But remember; if you do, make sure you only associate yourself with decent programs or products. If people get to know your face and associated it with promoting genuine, quality stuff, that’s the kind of branding you want. If you’re forever promoting different things of dubious merit with your mug on, you’re going to get the kind of recognition you don’t want. Adding your photo is obviously easy if you’re creating your own splash pages. And some traffic exchanges have features to let you add a photo to a splash or squeeze page created on that traffic exchange (see, there’s more options for creating your own splash page). People remember certain things quite well on traffic exchanges. They’ll almost always know they’ve seen a splash page before, even if they can’t remember exactly what it was promoting. In the same way, they’ll often remember your face and your name – use that to your advantage. If you’re promoting a business opportunity then this is a great way to stand out from the crowd. While everyone else is pushing the same old splash and signup pages, you can have your own personalized splash page, maybe offering personal support to anyone that joins the program. Stand out and you can almost guarantee that if someone sees the standard XYZ program loads of times and your personalized page, that if they’ve been hovering and one day decide to join, it’ll be you they remember. And they may well just look out for your splash page again! VitalViralPro allows you to brand yourself without any knowledge of HTML and without modifying your page. You can even brand yourself on pages you don’t own – like standard affiliate pages.

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DYNAMIC SURF RATIOS AND TEAM SURFING Some traffic exchanges have dynamic surf ratios to encourage more surfing. Be aware of which exchanges you’re a member of have this because you can use it to your advantage. For example, some will have it so that if you surf 100 pages, your credits per page surfed increases – so you may be better off arranging your surfing so you surf more pages in that exchange. Some exchanges have more unusual systems. For example, the surfers are ranked each day according to how many pages they’ve surfed. At midnight, that ranking is used to create teams or a hierarchy of surfers the next day. So the next day, you may have 30 surfers all contributing to your credits. I can’t go into every traffic exchange and explain the best way to use these features but look out for them and learn to use their system to your advantage.

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ROTATORS A rotator is a link that will randomly or sequentially show one of a number of pre-defined pages every time it’s invoked. One of the benefits of using a rotator is that you set up your rotator to show several pages and just put one link in all the traffic exchanges. Then at any time, you can add, remove or pause (suspend) pages from the rotator and all your traffic exchanges will instantly show pages from the new selection – no need to update lots of settings in lots of traffic exchanges. Not all traffic exchanges allow rotators and those that do often only allow approved rotators. Note that you can’t pause all your pages in the rotator to pause your campaigns in the traffic exchanges – the traffic exchanges will show the rotator link regardless, so you must always have at least one page active in the rotator. Also you have to be careful using rotators to plan your tracking strategy carefully unless you have a rotator that tracks automatically for you.

VitalViralPro allows you to create rotators that include tracking features unavailable anywhere else (premium members only). The rotator doesn’t need any tracking links to track pages being shown across multiple traffic exchanges and compiles all statistics into one place.

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VIRAL BARS Often when you see a page on a traffic exchange, you’ll see a bar at the top or bottom of the page. This bar may also be a rotator but it ‘allows’ you to add extra advertising when you show your page. Some of the advertising will be for the program that provides the viral bar and the viral bar may provide other features, like letting you add your photo. Typically the functionality depends on whether you’re a free or paid member. Since the viral bar will have one or more of your affiliate links on it, these can be an almost effortless way to get some other leverage from the traffic exchanges and maybe even generate a small additional income. Some people won’t use them because they may distract from their page – that’s fine. Use them if you think they help your cause. If not, don’t use them.

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MICRO-PROFITABILITY VS MACRO-PROFITABILITY Upgrading in a traffic exchange is the quickest way to get far greater leverage from it – so why do so few people upgrade? The answer of course is cost! Ask most people why they don’t upgrade and chances are high that they’ll say “I can’t afford it right now. As soon as I’m making enough money from [insert their business here] I will upgrade”. But I’m going to show you why this is flawed thinking and why an unwillingness to risk any outgoing is what ultimately makes many people fail to make any significant income. It’s like a farmer harvesting his field by hand because he doesn’t want to buy a combine harvester until he’s making enough profit – chances are, it’ll never happen.

Upgrading in key tools and traffic exchanges is essential. If you can’t afford it, you need to know that NOT upgrading is not the only alternative. But you DO need the right attitude and the right strategy.

I don’t want to dismiss any financial problems anyone might have. $10 a month might be a significant amount of money to some people. And often people think they couldn’t afford to upgrade in all their tools and traffic exchanges so they may as well not upgrade in any. This is also flawed thinking.

Macro-profitability Many people genuinely do think that the way to go is to upgrade in programs as and when they can afford it from the profits from the business they’re promoting. This view is what I term looking at the business as a ‘macro-profitability’ center. The diagram on the next page illustrates this…

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This is a simplified model of a typical online marketer’s business, either now or how they imagine they need to be. While just a single traffic exchange is shown, this could represent multiple traffic exchanges and/or tools such as autoresponders – another thing people say they will get ‘when they can afford it’. Any profit from the business, typically flowing into an online account, is reduced by the outgoings to the traffic exchanges and tools, leaving a smaller amount of net profit to flow back into the bank. The fees for the traffic exchanges and tools are just considered to be a normal and unavoidable expense to the business. So the business shown above is macro-profitable… But there is an alternative…

Micro-Profitability Attaining micro-profitability should be the goal.

10/1/2009 Imagine a parent company consisting of 10 individual businesses. If 8 of those were profitable but two made a significant annual loss, would you keep them just because overall, the business is profitable? Of course not! The 2 businesses need to be made profitable or disposed of (unless they bring some other worthwhile benefit that it’s ok for them to make a loss). That seems obvious. For the internet marketer, it’s not so obvious but you can treat each tool, each traffic exchange as its own micro-profit center. I.e. you use the fact that almost all the tools and exchanges you want to use also have an affiliate program and pay commission if you introduce other paying members. And as a general rule, if you introduce 2-5 paying members, the commission will equal or exceed your monthly fee. This is shown below:

Now, the traffic exchange is no longer an expense on your main business – it pays its own way (and can easily make more commissions than the monthly cost and make a micro-profit!).

10/1/2009 Clearly, this is a much better and healthier situation and all the profit from your main business can flow just where you want it – into your bank account. So really there are three situations:   

Either you don’t upgrade at all and you get much less benefit from the tolls and/or traffic exchanges You upgrade and the cost is a drain on your profit You become micro-profitable and you get the benefits of the upgrade at zero cost or even with a profit!

To achieve micro-profitability, you need one of two things:

Micro-profitability by back-end promotion For this method, you must be capturing visitors’ names and emails when you’re promoting your business. In the associated autoresponder follow-up emails, you’ll obviously promote your business but you can also promote the tools that you use, looking to pick up paid referrals. If your business is related to internet marketing then this should be quite easy and you may well pick up referrals even from people that don’t buy your product or join your business.

Micro-profitability using a downline builder With this method you can use a downline builder to help you grow your referrals in all of the traffic exchanges and tools that you use. Downline builders are the subject of the next chapter…

Whatever approach you use, you need to stop thinking that advertising has to be an expense. You should be able to advertise at little or no cost (or even profit from your advertising) once you adopt this philosophy The full version of this book goes into more detail on how to make your business micro-profitable and how to profit from advertising, including the neat concept of the funded proposal.

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USING A DOWNLINE BUILDER One of the most profitable ways to get a higher ROI is to get totally free traffic (until we get paid for receiving traffic that is!) Most traffic exchanges will reward you for finding them new members. Not just in $ commissions but with a percentage of that new member’s earned credits. Each time they earn 1000 credits, the traffic exchange will give you 50 credits (for example and it doesn’t happen in lumps like that, it’s continuous 5% e.g.) So get yourself 20 surfers as active as you and it’s like have another you surfing for you. There’s no limit to how many people you can refer and consequently how much traffic you can get. Some traffic exchanges even give multi-level referral credits – think of the traffic you can earn then!

How Do You Get Referrals? Well if you’re a member of traffic exchange A, you can’t use traffic exchange A to try to promote exchange A – they’re all already members. So you need to promote exchange A on exchange B and vice versa. And if you want to get referrals in more traffic exchanges, you need to promote A in B and C, B in A and C and C in A and B. I won’t spell it out for four and five exchanges or more – it’s tedious! There’s always a better way and of course this is no exception. The answer is a downline builder. A downline builder is a special program that lets you enter your referral IDs for a number of traffic exchanges and then instead of trying to promote all the traffic exchanges individually, you promote the downline builder. The people that join the downline builder will then (hopefully) join some or maybe all of the exchanges in the downline builder, but they’ll be using your links so they’ll be joining under you. In turn, they’ll replace all your IDs by their own when they promote the downline builder.

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What If They’re Already Members Of The Exchanges? Well you haven’t lost anything, you just haven’t gained any benefit from them joining. You can’t win ‘em all! But generally, you don’t worry about that. You just promote the downline builder and your traffic exchange downlines will grow and with it, a source of residual free traffic! Downline builders work particularly well with the multi-level referral credit exchanges – unfortunately there aren’t so many of those. Nevertheless, it’s easily possible to gradually build up your traffic exchange downlines so that you’ve got hundreds and then literally thousands of free credits a week that you can use to promote your main business for free.

Downline Integrity I hesitate to bring this up but there’s a term you may come across if you research downline builders – downline integrity. The term should refer to the ethical and proper act of following your sponsor in a downline builder where possible and practical – it will never happen 100% but given the choice between joining under some random person and joining through your downline builder links, you should use your downline builder links. This is because the more this happens (again particularly with multilevel exchanges), the more leverage everyone gets. However, it came to be associated (because some unethical people used the term) with an altogether different, wrong and abhorrent practice of preserving downline sponsorship at all costs – including encouraging people to quit programs and rejoin so they could be under a particular sponsor. NO NO NO…Under almost no thinkable circumstances should you EVER allow yourself to be talked into doing that. You should never change sponsor in any multilevel program, including traffic exchanges. Bad karma doesn’t begin to describe what will happen if you do. When you use a downline builder, use common sense. If someone you know refers you to a new exchange, join under them – don’t worry about the downline builder.

10/1/2009 But as a rule, pick your favorite downline builder and use that for all your downline building activity where possible. Try and join whatever programs you need to through your upline links in the downline builder. It’s common decency in many ways.

But There Are So Many Downline Builders? Not really. There are downline builders that are dedicated downline builders and then there are all the other places, programs that tack on downline builders. Every traffic exchange it seems has one. You won’t get the leverage by joining programs through random downline builders, through whatever link is presented to you at the time. Your main downline builder should be just that. Always go back to your downline builder to join a program then go to all the other downline builders and enter your IDs. As someone with thousands of people in traffic exchange downlines and who has helped others achieve the same, I know a thing or two about how it works. Besides, a downline builder tacked on to a traffic exchange offers you no other features. A dedicated downline builder does so much more because that’s their purpose.

VitalViralPro is an extremely powerful downline builder with many features not found in any other downline builder.

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CHOOSING THE RIGHT TRAFFIC EXCHANGES I’ve already touched on this earlier in the book but clearly, choosing the ‘right’ traffic exchanges is going to have a big influence on your ROI. And that choice isn’t just choose once and then forget about it. You need to be watchful because it will often be prudent to switch traffic exchanges for a while. There are many factors that individually determine the ROI you get from a particular traffic exchange so there is no single best traffic exchange. While it’s true that if traffic exchange A is ‘better’ than traffic exchange B then everyone should see better results on A than B, it’s not always going to be the case. And to make matters worse, the performance is far from static! For example, at any one time, there tend to be a lot of people promoting the same affiliate programs or business opportunities. If someone were to announce they were getting a phenomenal sign up rate on traffic exchange XYZ for program ABC and everyone flocked to that exchange, the response rate (as seen by individuals) would plummet. This is not a perfect analogy but imagine a pond with 10 fish in it. It stands to reason that if you’re the only fisherman, chances are high that if one of those fish wants to bite, it’s going to be your hook. If there are 10 fishermen fishing the same pond then some of them will probably not catch.

Promoting on traffic exchanges is like fishing in a pond. If the number of people promoting the same thing as you is too high for the number of fish then the chance of catching a fish is that much less.

Similarly, at any one time, there are only going to be a certain amount of people who might be interested in your offer on a given traffic exchange. So while it doesn’t mean you won’t be successful if there are other people promoting the same offer, your odds are obviously less.

10/1/2009 That’s because the ‘fish’ are a limited resource (in many exchanges) at any given point in time. If you’re fishing in the sea then it doesn’t matter how many fishermen there are because the number of fish is essentially unlimited. In case it’s not obvious, that’s like promoting on the big traffic exchanges. All of this is why testing what’s working for your pages at any given time is so important. While it’s important to get an idea of which traffic exchanges to use, you need to be prepared to swim against the current to get the best results. If your testing is indicating that you’re getting poor results from an exchange that everyone else is raving about, try some other exchanges and see what results you get. Of course if your results are poor generally, you may need to re-think your advertizing. But equally, you might find dramatically better results by moving away from the popular exchanges. This applies particularly if you’re promoting using the same promotional tools as a lot of other people. If your pages are relatively unique, you’re more likely to keep on getting good results wherever you promote.

Monitor While You Surf One advantage you have if you always surf for your credits is that you can see what’s being promoted at any given time. If you only ever buy credits then you lose this view and might not know that your exchange is currently flooded with people offering the same thing as you.

You Should Start With Popular Unless you already have some experience, you can do a lot worse than just using some of the popular traffic exchanges. These will let you earn and spend credits at an adequate rate and you’ll have the advantage of an exchange with a known large membership; this makes it not quite so critical to be promoting something unique.

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Then Migrate To Performance Once you’ve promoted enough to get some idea of how well your promotions work, then you can start testing on any other exchanges because you’ll have some kind of benchmark by which to judge them.

Track & Test Always There’s enough about this topic elsewhere in the book but I just can’t stress enough how important it is. Even if you think of your traffic is free, value it like you paid for it. You’ll give up the day job much quicker.

VitalViralPro will automatically tell you the best traffic exchanges to use from a wide selection. You can view which traffic exchanges are most popular (showing the most VitalViralPro pages) and which ones are creating best results for members. You will also be automatically testing your own pages on the traffic exchanges you do use.

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PART II – ADVANCED In this half of the book, I’ll cover many more advanced concepts for getting more benefit from traffic exchanges including:            

What to look for in programs you promote Keeping a swipe file Your business model – funnels and pipelines Segmenting your list The offer in detail The food chain The funded proposal Testing and tracking Optimizing a splash page Using autoresponders How to create follow up emails Viral promotion

The complete version of this book is available here You are free to distribute this book in any way other than selling it. You can give it away, use it as a free offer for signing up to your list. You can also rebrand it with your VitalViralPro links if you decide to join VitalViralPro. You can also promote the full version of the book whether or not you join VitalViralPro. This pays you 50% commissions instantly to your paypal®™ account. Rather than paying you 50% of each sale, it pays you 100% of every other sale directly and instantly to your paypal account – amounting to the same commission but better for you. To promote the full version of the book go here This document © Troy Wray 2009. All rights reserved. This document may be freely distributed and given away but may not be sold. The document can be rebranded by joining VitalViralPro but may not be modified in any other way or reverse engineered.