Are traffic exchanges worth your time?
March 25th, 2009 by 
John Dilbeck
For the last several years, I’ve spent quite a bit of time joining, using, and evaluating various ways to promote the products that enable me to earn a living as an affiliate marketer.
Among the things I’ve tried are traffic exchanges and downline builders.
I got to thinking about this earlier today as I was revising a couple of my Squidoo lenses: traffic exchanges and downline builders.
It seems that some people have strong opinions about them, both positively and negatively. Some are well-informed, others aren’t.
I’m somewhere in the middle. I think traffic exchanges have their pros and cons. I’m neither a fan, nor an opponent, of them.
Let’s look at a couple of things quickly, just to get the ball rolling.
What is a traffic exchange?
The simple answer: You look at my site and I’ll look at yours.
That may have been true a few years ago, but no longer accurately reflects the changes and innovations they have undergone.
Now, I think of them mostly as advertising sites.
I don’t try to show my websites on a traffic exchange. Instead, I try to promote myself and make an impression (hopefully positive) on the people surfing the exchanges. That’s one of the reasons I use the photo holding the steel rose. I’ve been told more than one time that it stands out.
Whether that adds to my professionalism or detracts from it is a different discussion.
Still, people remember that picture and recognize me on other sites as a result.
So, I’m promoting my personal brand.
Secondly, instead of showing my sites, I promote using fast-loading splash pages with the goal of getting someone to click the link and go to another site where we can build a relationship and maybe work together down the road.
Truthfully, I’m not doing as well at that as I should be doing.
I know what needs to be done, but haven’t gotten around to doing it yet.
For the last couple of years, as Mom’s health declined and I spent more time caring for her, there were many days when I was just too tired to do anything that required much work or creative thinking.
However, surfing the traffic exchanges was something I could do, and I actually enjoy seeing what others are promoting and then deciding for myself what I think about them - both the product or service and the person doing the promotion.
Since I still wasn’t all that sure what I wanted to promote on the traffic exchanges, I spent most of my time building downlines.
What’s a downline?
I’m not sure, but I think this term comes to us from the multi-level marketing business. Also known as MLM and network marketing.
The idea is that you get paid for making sales of your own to people who are not involved in the particular company and you get a smaller commission on sales made by the people you “sponsor” into the company.
In other words, your efforts are divided between selling products and services yourself, and building a team of others to do the same thing.
This is called leverage.
In actuality, for most of us, it becomes a time sink that does not produce the results we want.
I’m not very interested in MLMs and I only promote two of them. I’m in the process of deciding whether I want to continue with either of them and will make that decision by my birthday on July 1.
I won’t link to either of them in this post, because I don’t want to get side-tracked.
So, a downline is a group of people you have sponsored, plus the people they have sponsored, going down some number of levels as determined by the company.
Let’s move away from thinking about MLMs and downlines and turn our attention to traffic exchanges and downlines.
Do you have to build a downline in a traffic exchange?
Of course not.
You can spend your time surfing and reap the benefits of your own efforts.
Or, you can introduce others to the traffic exchanges that work best for you and help them get results, too.
I seem to be much better at introducing people and persuading them to join than I am at helping them get results. I’m not proud of this and it’s something I’m working to change.
Why spend the time and effort to sponsor someone in a traffic exchange?
There are a couple of reasons.
In most traffic exchanges, you become an affiliate and can earn commissions from any purchase made by the people you sponsor. I regularly get commissions from several traffic exchanges, and the people who sponsored me are also earning commissions based on my purchases.
In addition to monetary commissions, I also earn credits based on some percentage of the pages the people in my downline surf at that exchange. The more people in my downline and the more pages they surf, the more credits I earn.
These credits can be applied to showing websites (or preferably splash pages or squeeze pages), banner ads, and text ads.
In other words, the more people I sponsor, and the more pages all of us surf, the more advertising I can do on the site.
Of course, that applies to the people in my upline as well as any of the people in my downline. Each of us has the same opportunity to build our network of people and gain the benefit of the work we all do. When I spend time surfing, the people in my upline earn credits, too.
But, will the people who see our sites read them and click on the links?
Now, there’s the crux of the issue.
If you are showing your website or blog - especially if they take a long time to load - you’re probably wasting your time with traffic exchanges.
Years ago, that was the whole point: showing your website to someone. I’d show you my website and you’d show me yours.
That has changed over the years.
Traffic exchanges now have timers that frequently run under ten seconds, and only a few now require you to look at a site for 20 or 30 seconds before you can click on the next page.
If you have multiple links or an involved page, it will rarely be read and you can’t depend upon anyone clicking on any of your links.
Well what’s the point, then?
The days of putting up websites and/or blogs and making easy sales as an affiliate are pretty much over. Sure, you can earn some money doing it - maybe even a few hundred dollars per month - but you really can’t build a business just by doing this.
Now, you have to build a sales funnel and carefully plan your marketing activities.
Traffic exchanges no longer lead to direct sales - they are just part of the picture.
Think of a funnel.
There is a large opening at the top and a smaller opening at the bottom.
Traffic exchanges have their place at the top of the funnel. Sales take place somewhere between the top and bottom of the funnel.
The conversion percentage for any given offer you show on a traffic exchange is rather low, and can be very low for banner and text ads. So, to make it worthwhile, you have to show not just a few dozen views, but thousands per month.
That’s why most of the exchanges (all that I know of) have the option of paying to upgrade. With most upgrades, you get several hundred credits, which means that you can show your ads (splash or squeeze pages) by buying them rather than surfing for them.
Additionally, most of the traffic exchanges offer credits for sale. So, if you have an offer that converts well enough to earn a profit from it, you can theoretically buy as many credits as your budget allows and continue to grow your business until the offer no longer converts at that level. When it becomes unprofitable, it’s time to change the offer.
So, now, we’re entering a completely different type of marketing.
The savvy marketers use the traffic exchanges to introduce themselves to the surfers and offer something in exchange for a valuable item: the email address of someone who is interested in what you offer and permission to contact them using that address.
Instead of trying to make the sale directly, the goal is to have someone sign up to your mailing list. All reputable marketers who do this use some form of autoresponder service to manage the emails and comply with the CAN-SPAM laws.
When someone opts in to receiving your autoresponder series and/or newsletter and/or blog post updates via email, you now have not just one opportunity to make the sale, but multiple opportunities to build a relationship, pass along useful information, and hopefully make a few sales down the line.
If you do it right, you can meet hundreds or thousands of people who value your opinions and the information you pass along. Offer good information and many of them will look forward to hearing from you.
On the other hand, if you do nothing but sell, sell, sell and think of them in terms of email addresses with credit cards, then you’ll fail, fail, fail.
We are people and if you respect us and help us get what we are wanting, we’ll be happy to hear from you.
If you disrespect us or take us for granted or don’t do what you promised when we gave you our email address, then we’ll click on that link at the bottom of your messages and unsubscribe from your list.
So, it’s a two-way street. We’re building a relationship, and that takes time and real effort.
Also, as you know from in-person relationships, some are long-term and others are quite short. We may meet you on your splash page and get one impression, but learn to know you better on your mailing list and see a completely different person.
Perhaps we’ll grow to like you better or we may learn that you don’t offer as much as we originally expected.
Effective marketers build a list.
The people who don’t do well with traffic exchanges are those who try to do direct marketing through them.
The people who may do well are the ones who use traffic exchanges to meet new people and build a relationship over time.
I understand this and appreciate it. In fact, I’ve subscribed to hundreds of mailing lists over the last few years, and continue to subscribe to twenty or thirty that I look forward to reading. In this case, I’m also including blogs that I can subscribe to via email.
What I don’t do as well as I plan to do is to write newsletters on a regular basis and share what I have learned with others who are interested in the same things.
I’ve taken a lot of steps in moving in that direction. I have built a couple of forums that are ready for user participation. I have a couple of social networking communities in place, as well.
I have an Aweber account to manage my mailing lists and I’ve learned how to use it.
Now, I just need to focus on building my lists, and keeping each of them focused on the information I promise when someone subscribes, and providing a place where my readers can interact with me and other readers.
To do this, I’ve had to change a lot of things I was doing so I can move in the right direction.
This blog is one example. I moved it from its old site to a new domain and now it’s powered by WordPress, which makes it much easier to manage the discussions that build as you comment on what I write about.
Other examples include static websites that I’m rebuilding over time. When I first built them, I didn’t know all that I know now and they aren’t built to be part of my marketing funnel.
So, as I have time and energy, I’m converting them into sites that offer good information and each page will also be rewritten to invite the readers to respond to one offer.
It takes a lot of time and effort to do this correctly, but I’m convinced that it’s the way successful affiliate marketers, and network marketers for that matter, will continue to be successful in the future.
It’s hard enough to get someone to visit a site, let alone purchase something on the very first visit.
It’s much easier to offer free information to a first time visitor in return for subscribing to a list. Even if the conversion (subscription) ratio isn’t all that high, it’s still better than trying to sell when you first meet.
I still have a lot to learn, and even more to implement, but I’m making the effort to do so. Are you?
In some ways, bright people who are new to online marketing will have it a bit easier - if they follow the good advice that is out there. Learn how to build a marketing funnel, focus your efforts, and do what you say you’re going to do.
When someone signs up to your list, help them learn what you originally promised.
I wish I’d known that when I first started online marketing way back in the 20th century.
I’ll say this. If you don’t want to be part of the internet marketing niche, then it is probably true that traffic exchanges are a waste of time, because you’re not advertising to the right people.
If you work in a different niche, then you’ll need to find a way to attract other people who are interested in that niche. Probably the best way to do that is to build a site with information that can be found when people search on Google or other search engines.
Even if you do market to a niche for which traffic exchanges are effective, you have to remember that you have to do a lot of advertising on the traffic exchanges to get the results you want, because of the low conversion rates.
So, what do you think about downline builders and traffic exchanges?
Are they worth your time and effort?
Do you have a different, and better, approach?
I look forward to your thoughts and opinions.
Act on your dream!
JD
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Category: Advertising, Affiliate Funnel, Downline Builders, Soaring4Traffic, Squidoo Lenses, Traffic Exchanges | 13 Comments »
