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Are you using traffic exchanges to try and get traffic to your website? Well if you are, you need to read on.

Traffic exchanges can be good and bad. Knowing how to use them is really the key to getting anything from them.

First off, don’t use your affiliate page that was given to you when you signed up for your new money making venture.

Use a splash page to get your prospect to click to your affiliate page simply because, most or at least some, affiliate program pages load to slowly and are trying to sell the whole programs idea on one single page.

The main idea to a splash page is to grab people’s attention with a knock down, leave them foaming at the mouth sensation that creates a must click your link to see what it is you have to offer. Nothing else, period! Don’t get hung up over graphics, cute stuff or other unneeded junk that might take away from your main objective. Stay focused.

Always, and this is extremely important, make sure your splash page link opens in a new browser window. I see this happening all the time while surfing traffic exchanges and when the timer runs out, I’m on to the next page. If the page had opened in a new window, I would have come back to surfing while leaving the other window opened if I was interested in whatever they had to offer.

The most preferable type of page for traffic exchanges, in my opinion, is the squeeze page. With a squeeze page you, squeeze your prospects information out of them, thus the name squeeze page. By getting their name and email you can add them to your list. Then you send them useful information along with a link to your program.

The squeeze page approach is much more desirable because if they don’t sign up today, they may sign up in the future. Statistics show that people have to see your offer sometimes as much as seven to ten times before they will bite on what you’re offering. By using this method and collecting their information not only are you setting yourself up for future contact with them, you can up-sell them other things as well.

Your squeeze page should be set up almost exactly like the splash page. Attention grabbing headline with a page that is to the point without all the cute stuff that takes away from the main objective of the page.

The only other difference is you need your form for your auto responder that captures their information.

Put these tips to use with your affiliate program and see if your results don’t improve.

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Pay-per-click (PPC) advertising is becoming an essential marketing tool for any business that uses the Internet to drive sales. With PPC, the traffic that you receive can be extremely targeted depending on your choice of keywords. The major PPC platforms that you should familiarize yourself with are Google AdWords, Yahoo Search Marketing and MSN AdCenter. There is a learning curve associated with each one but if you master them all, it can be financially rewarding.

As with any business decision, once you decide to utilize PPC you should have a solid strategy in place. Before you start spending a single advertising dollar, you should set up metrics to gauge the success of your advertising campaign. Do your homework and find out what your break even point should be. Knowing this number will help you determine what will be an acceptable cost per conversion or cost per click.

Suppose for a moment that you make $50 per sale. You have to first assume what your conversion rate is to find out what the cost per conversion will be. Suppose that your traffic converts at 2%, so every 100 visitors will result in 2 sales. That means that you can afford to pay up to $100 or $1 per click for 100 clicks to reach your break even point. Estimating the conversion rate will help you decide how much you can afford to bid per click.

The better you know your target demographic, the more you will save on PPC advertising costs. Therefore, it is imperative for you to do your market research. If you know that your customers are mostly from the United States and they are shopping online during certain hours of the day, targeting the right countries and turning off your campaigns during certain times of the day may save you a lot of money.

Be sure to test and track to see how your ads are performing. Always split test your ads. Keep the better performing ad and write a new ad to try to beat that one. Incremental improvements in the click-through ratio (CTR) can help you improve your ad position while preserving your cost per click. In the long run, continual improvements in your ads can help you beat your competition. You should also invest time into researching keywords related to your market and keeping up with the trends associated with your product.

In order to manage your campaigns more efficiently, you have to plan well and set up your ad groups properly. When you are doing your keyword research, try to group related keywords into separate ad groups. Then write different ads for each group. The more targeted your ads are, the better their quality score. A high quality score will help you lower your bids.

These are just a few suggestions to get you started. There are plenty of resources out there to help you learn PPC. Be sure to set aside a budget for educating yourself. There is a steep learning curve for PPC and you have to be prepared to lose some money in the beginning. However, once you master the techniques, you can drive targeted traffic to any website on demand.

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One of the easiest and most cost effective ways to generate leads to a product or service is to participate in the use of traffic exchanges or TE as they are sometimes referred to. There is however a right and a wrong way to use them. In this article we will discuss the various components required to get the most out of advertising through traffic exchanges.

Before we begin it is necessary to go over a few of the most common components of a traffic exchange that are related to product advertising. There are typically five key components that every ad campaign must have to be successful.

1. Splash Page - A splash page, or sometimes called a landing page, is a short attention grabbing ad page meant to attract the TE surfer to investigate the pages offer in more detail. Generally this page is very low on content containing usually an eyecatching graphic of either the product or a spokesperson displaying the product, a headline, and a link to invite the TE surfer to click for more information.

2. Lead Capture or Squeeze Page - A squeeze page is another short splash page like advertisement for a product or service but offering the TE surfer the opportunity to enter their name and email address to get more information about the product via an email. Often times the splash and squeeze pages are combined in ad campaigns.

3. Free Giveaway Item - This is an item related to the campaign’s product that is offered on the squeeze page to entice the TE surfer to enter their name and email address to get more information via email. This free item is most often a smaller ebook type report or piece of software related to or directly taken from the main advertised product.

4. Autoresponder - An autoresponder is a program or service used to send a series of emails to the email addresses gathered from the lead capture or squeeze page. Most marketers call this a list of subscribers. An autoresponder program or service is essential to the success of an ad campaign.

5. One Time Offer - Often called a OTO, a one time offer is used with the autoresponder to offer the list subscriber a special discount on part of the product’s extra features or even the product itself at a reduced price. Usually this OTO is shown to the list subscriber just once during the list subscribing process.

Now that we know the five key components to an ad campaign lets look at a proper flow for these items in the campaign. Most often new marketers will be advertising a product that they are an affiliate for. Being an affiliate means that they have registered with the product or service owner to try to get sales for a percentage of the sales price when someone buys the product or service.

The biggest mistake that most new marketers make is trying to advertise the main sales page of the product or service on the TE. Doing so will rarely get any sales. The reason being is that each page shown to the TE surfer is only on their screen for a few seconds, usually less than ten seconds.

That is why the use of splash pages are more effective. The TE surfer can quickly scan the splash page in just the few seconds and decide whether they are interested enough in the product to warrant clicking through to the lead capture page.

Once the splash page has captured their attention and they click through to the lead capture page it is up to the squeeze or lead capture page to persuade the TE surfer to request more information. This is where the free giveaway item usually seals the deal in getting the name and email address from the TE surfer.

Provided that the surfer has completed the subscribing process to the list for more information it is now the job of the autoresponder to deliver a series of emails with product information in specific time intervals. Generally the most effective intervals are three days apart with a series of five to seven emails.

So to recap the basics of a successful ad campaign on a traffic exchange the advertiser must:

1) Use a splash page and not the direct product sales page
2) Offer a free item to get the potential customer’s name and email address to their list of subscribers
3) Use an autoresponder to send a series of five to seven emails in three-day intervals to the list subscriber

If you use the above basic strategy with your advertising on a traffic exchange the ad campaigns will be much more successful. Also, as a side note, make sure the splash pages load quickly. Remember there are only about five to ten seconds on the average to get your splash page in front of the TE surfer and every second counts in making that first impression.

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Driving traffic to your website is one of the most important activities that you can do as the owner of an online business. Without traffic, you are guaranteed not to get any sales. Therefore, no matter what your business model is, traffic is the first thing to be concerned about. In this article, we will focus on Google AdWords pay per click (PPC) advertising which is a way for you to get targeted traffic to your website. For the uninitiated, however, there are many pitfalls that await.

The first tip has to do with proper structuring of your ad campaign. When you create a new ad campaign, it is better to create a number of smaller ad groups within that campaign. One of the big mistakes that newcomers to AdWords make is creating a single ad group and filling it up with hundreds if not thousands of keywords. It is far better to come up with a few different categories that describe your business and focus on creating groups of tightly related keywords for each group.

Secondly, learn how to write an ad that will draw the readers’ attention and get them to click on it. With the limited number of characters allowed for the ad copy, one of the best ways to come up with attention grabbing copy is to learn from the classified ads in newspapers and magazines. Browse through the classifieds and take note of any ad that really captures your attention and ask yourself what makes it work. When you write ads that get more clicks, you will increase your click through ratio (CTR) and as a result you could lower the minimum bid that you pay for each click.

The third tip has to do with testing and tracking your ads. Be sure to create multiple ads and rotate them evenly to test which ones result in the best CTR. You will need to run the test so that each ad gets at least 50 or so clicks. Otherwise, the test will be invalid if you base your decision on just a few clicks. When you set up your campaign initially, be sure to select the option to rotate your ads evenly because the default option is to allow the system to automatically optimize showing your best ad more often. If this is the case, you will not be able to run an accurate split test.

There is a steep learning curve for becoming proficient at Google AdWords. If you do not give up, however, and master the system, you will be rewarded with targeted traffic to your webstite.

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First, I want to say that I have been very laid back when it comes to updating this site lately. I guess I am getting a little tire and lazy. Sorry about that.

But I have had this lingering question keep flashing through my mind. Should we create sites that are primarily dependent on search engines?

I know what most of you would say.. A very long YES….

But what if for 6 to 7 months the search engines like you and after that they search engines drop you. Leaving you with no traffic. How do you insult yourself?

I think the whole primise of advertising a website should be on everything but the search engines. Don’t get me wrong, you should continue to do all the SEO page updates that you continue to do, but count on things that you can control.

The more control you have over your traffic, the more control you will have with your income.

Search engine traffic should be a bonus to everything else that you are bringing in.

What do you think? I would love to hear your experience…

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