Business Opportunity Leads Tips
Bill Brine
- by Bill Brine-Lead Generation Master
Traffic Generation Techniques: Using Traffic Exchanges
You have probably heard of, or have used, one or more traffic exchanges. Properly used, Traffic Exchanges can be another source of free traffic to your website, but you have to use them correctly. Here are a few tips.
The concept is simple. In exchange for you spending some time (usually 15 to 20 seconds) viewing someone else's promotional page, your page gets displayed to someone else who is using the traffic exchange.
Your Promotional Page
Keep in mind that people are seeing your page for only 20 seconds or less. That is barely enough time to read what's on the page. This time will be shortened if your page contains a lot of graphics or other things that make it slow to load. Also, if the page needs to be scrolled, your viewers will probably never do that.
For these reasons, you should never just insert an affiliate page or a long sales letter. Your page should be short and to the point, load quickly, and should be designed to fit within an 800 by 600 pixel screen, as this is the smallest screen that people can use.
Use a Traffic Exchange page as a lead capture page. Your page should contain a form to collect at least an email address for your autoresponder system.
When I design my pages, I always add 2 links to the page: Open This Page In A New Window, and Add To Favorites. Many times when surfing I have come across something that piqued my interest, and I often want to save that page in my favorites or open it in a new browser window so I can view it later. Many traffic exchanges do not provide these capabilities, so I provide them for the people who view my pages.
The code to open the page in a new window is very straightforward:
<A HREF="http://www.YOURURL.com" TARGET="_blank">Open In New Window</A>
where YOURURL is the URL to your traffic exchange page.
The Add to Favorites code is a bit more complex and usually involves adding some Javascript to the page. Do a Google Search for "Add to Favorites" and you will find some solutions.
Always make sure to consult your traffic exchange terms of service for what kinds of pages you can promote. Some do not allow pages with audio. Some do not allow page rotators. Many allow you to promote more than one page.
Using the Traffic Exchange
Now that you have set up your promotional page, it's time to start using your traffic exchanges. It is a good idea to join more than one traffic exchange. To save time and effort, when surfing, use a tabbed browser like Crazy Browser or FireFox. You can set it up to load multiple traffic exchanges, one on each tab, and then rotate through the tabs to surf multiple exchanges.
Before you start using a traffic exchange, make sure your computer is well protected from viruses and malware. Unfortunately there are many unscrupulous people who use traffic exchanges to spread viruses and other nasty things through traffic exchanges. Most of the traffic exchanges have protection in place to catch this, but there is always someone who managed to slip through the protection. It is best to be safe.
If you really want to be safe when using traffic exchanges, use a Sandbox. Sandboxing is a way of protecting your PC by corralling off potentially dangerous applications such as your browser from the rest of your PC. Sandboxing your browser means that your browser effectively runs in a virtual PC within your PC. Anything nasty that happens in this sandbox cannot affect your real PC. And when you close the Sandbox, anything that was placed on your virtual PC is gone.
You can find more information and suggested free Sandbox software here: http://www.techsupportalert.com/safe-surfing.php
Discipline
Discipline is very important when using traffic exchanges. Set yourself a daily goal of surfing a certain number of total pages across all the traffic exchanges, or set aside a certain amount of time to surf. Resist the temptation to respond to the promotional pages that come across the screen. Your focus is to generate hits, nothing more.
Most traffic exchanges will allow you to purchase hits so you don't have to spend time surfing. If you have the budget, I recommend this. Surfing can get very boring after a while, and you really have to discipline yourself to do it every day.
If you are not using a sandbox, then when you are done surfing for the day, clean out your internet cache and reboot your computer. This will help to clean out a lot of the clutter that is left on your computer from using traffic exchanges.
Keeping Track
It is very important to track whether or not your promotional pages are actually being displayed, especially if you are paying for hits. So I recommend adding a tracking code to each page.
You can set up free tracking accounts at Veretracking ( http://brincom.veretracking.com/ ), or at Google Analytics ( http://www.google.com/analytics/ )
Once you start joining more than one traffic exchange, it is a good idea to set up a text file where you track all the details of each exchange: Your login URL, your surfing URL, a short note of what kinds of pages are allowed, and the URLs of the page or pages you are promoting in that exchange. Whenever you design a new page and want to test it, this information will be invaluable.
In my experience, you will get the best results if you surf 5 or less exchanges at the same time. Any more than this and sometimes your web browser may become bogged down or even crash. I have joined 30 traffic exchanges, and I then assigned 5 of those to each day of the week and Saturday. Then I surf those 5. Occasionally, if one of the exchanges of the day is not working, I'll add one from another day. Over time I build up a lot of hits across all the exchanges.
You will find over time that many traffic exchanges will go out of business or just not deliver the hits you are looking for. That's fine - just drop that one and go looking for a new one. There are plenty out there!
Properly used, traffic exchanges can be a good source of leads. Use them wisely, and you will be rewarded.
Read More at http://ItsGoodBusiness.net
-------------------
Bill Brine-Lead Generation Master
PO Box 121,
Amherst, NS B4H 3Y6 Canada
Ph: 902.667.0798
Fax: 760.280.8685
Skype:
billbrine
http://business-opportunity-lead-generation.wavefour.net/
http://trivita.proboards83.com/index.cgi?board=businessopportunitylead
http://billbrine.linkscout.com/
Bill Brine
If you are building a work from home business on the internet, you most likely are aware that an important part of generating traffic to your website or blog is to rank highly in the search engine result pages (SERPs). Good, relevant content on your site, and lots of it, is important, but you also need high quality backlinks to your site.
A backlink is a hyperlink on another website which links to your site. The most powerful backlinks are one-way backlinks. This means that another website has links pointing to your site, but you don't have reciprocal links pointing back to theirs.
One good way to generate high quality backlinks is to use forums. Forums have the added advantage that they can create traffic to your site as well. If other forum members like your posts, they are more likely to click on your links to find out more about you and your business.
Be very careful when using forums for marketing. Do it wrong and you will be branded a spammer and most likely get your forum account closed. If used correctly, forums can be a very powerful tool in your business opportunity lead generation arsenal.
Here's how to do it correctly:
Step 1: Find forums that are relevant to your market
The
key word here is 'relevant'. You need to find forums related to your niche.
This part is easy: just search in Google for your niche keyword followed by the word 'forum'.
For example, suppose you have a blog about Jazz music. Go to Google and search for
jazz music forum
Why would you want to find forums related to your niche? Well, there are two reasons. First, the search engines will give more weight to links pointing to your site if they come from sites centered around the same niche as your site. Second, you'll get much more direct traffic from a forum where the members are interested in your niche and in what you have to say.
Step 2: Pick the best forums and join them
Now that you've
found some good candidates, visit some of the top ones listed and look at some
of the content. If you come across a forum that will not let you see the content
unless you join, move on to the next one. If only registered members can see the
contents, then the search engines will not be able to see the content and your
backlinks will be of no use.
The forum should have a good number of members, and should be fairly active. Poke around to see when some of the last postings were made; if there were a lot in the last day or so, this is a fairly active forum and you should consider joining. Search Engines love sites where content changes quite often.
Before joining, make sure the forum allows you to set up a signature. Look at some of the posts: are there signatures at the bottom of other people's posts? If not, move on to another forum. Without the ability to create a signature, you will have no place to put your links.
When you find a forum that meets the criteria, follow the steps to register and confirm your membership. If you find just three or four forums that's plenty to start with.
Step 3: Set up your signature
After you login to the forum
you should see a link to your user profile. Often this will be called 'User CP'
or 'User Profile'. In the user profile area you can edit things like your
avatar, your bio and preferences. Look for a link that says something like 'Edit
signature' and click that. You'll see a text field where you can type in the
text you want to appear beneath all your posts. This is where you'll put the
backlinks to your site.
Forums use a special kind of code to allow members to format their posts. It's called BBCode and it's quite simple to use once you get the hang of it. Copy the example below and change the URL to your URL and the text to some catchy keyword-rich text. Paste the code into your signature box and save it.
Link to your website or blog with code similar to this:
Learn all about [URL=http://www.jazzmuscicblog.com/]Jazz Music[/URL] at my blog.
There are many other things you can do with BBcode such as changing the fonts, bolding the text, changing the text color and so on. I won't go into them here. Most forums will usually have a link to a BBCode help page to assist you if you wish to be more creative.
Personally, I like to keep my signature as simple as possible. Less is more. If you make your signature look like you are marketing something, people will treat you like a spammer. You don't have to use up all available lines in your signature. Make it short, sweet and to the point. If you post great content and people are interested, they will click on your link.
Step 4: Participate
The first three steps were all
preparation. Now you get to start creating backlinks to your site. How? Just
participate in the forum. Post good content, ask questions. Try to help people
out by answering questions. Be nice, be helpful.
Be sure to have good content in your posts. A post should say something more than "Great post, I agree". You need good relevant keyword-rich content.
Every post you make will give you a backlink to your site. The higher the quality of your post, the more powerful your backlink will be. If you simply participate in the forum and try to be friendly and helpful, chances are your content will take care of itself.
That's it. Have fun. And remember, you can change your signature any time you want. Try changing the text a bit from time to time to find out what generates the most clicks through to your site.