Plug the leak before it’s too late!

Are you still just plopping your affiliate link into your favourite traffic exchanges?  Well, you may have lost hundreds or even thousands of dollars today and not even realized it!  Stop losing money and plug the leak before it’s too late!

In my previous article, I discussed the only two ways to really promote in traffic exchanges.  The first method involved direct promotion of a program/product/service through the use of a “splash page”.  The second method of promotion was the indirect method of using a “squeeze page” to gather contact information – in short, building a list.  Today, I will discuss the first method – splash pages.

Let me first say (yet again!) that if you are doing direct promotion in the traffic exchanges, you NEED to be using a splash page.  If you are using the standard affiliate link that displays the main website, then you are totally wasting your time and/or money.  Now that we have that out of the way, let’s get into what you need to be doing.

I will start at the very beginning.  A splash page is simply an advertisement for a program/product/service that you are trying to sell.  BUT, there are a lot of little things to consider when making a splash page that will be the difference between success and failure.  Before we get into the little things your splash page needs, you have to ask yourself two VERY important questions:

1. What am I trying to sell?
2. Who will want what I am trying to sell?

These two questions seem really simple but a lot of marketers fail to answer them and this could result in failure before you even get started.  The first question is really important because it gets you to focus on the absolute essence of what you are trying to sell – in other words, when you strip it right down, what is it? Knowing the answer to this will help you with the next question – “who is going to want this?”.

It is absolutely critical that you understand what you are trying to sell and the audience that would want it. If you try to market something to the wrong audience, then it won’t matter what your splash page looks like, it will fail.  Once again, this seems obvious and yet there are thousands upon thousands of people using traffic exchanges to promote things that will never sell because they are pitching to the wrong audience.

Now that we have determined that we are selling to the right audience, we need to decide how we are going to catch their attention in such a way that they can’t help but take action. Notice how I said “catch their attention” and not “sell them on the product”.  You see, in traffic exchanges you only have a few seconds which is not enough time to sell them on all the great benefits of your product, so starting in on a sales pitch is NOT the way to go.  And remember, you are just trying to get them over to your main website where you will do the selling.

So, what exactly should your splash page have on it?  As little as possible! What you are trying to do is catch their attention, so you need something that stands out and makes them spend a few extra seconds on your page.  You can accomplish this with a particular graphic, sound, or a few well chosen words.  If you are using words to grab their attention, then you need to keep it VERY SHORT!  Do not try to sell them on all the benefits, just catch their attention.

To sum it all up, your splash page should have very little words on it and should grab their attention is less than 3 seconds. In total, it shouldn’t take any more than about 5 seconds to “read” EVERYTHING on your splash page.  So all of you people out there that are building splash pages with these huge blocks of text, STOP IT!  Remember, you are just trying to grab their attention enough that they will click on your link.  As soon as they get to your website (where the product actually is), this is where you will really sell them on the benefits.

Here is a quick reference of the main things to consider when building your splash page.

1.) You have to grab their attention and make it so that they really don’t have any other option but to click on your link.  One of the best ways to do this is to be a little vague – curiosity is your best tool.

2.) Keep the number of words to a minimum. Huge blocks of text are a serious NO-NO.  I would say if your splash page has more than about 15 words in total, your effectiveness with go down considerably.

3.) Keep the graphical content to a minimum. Yes, I know I said that graphics can be good at catching attention, so they are definitely important, but you need to keep the size of this splash down so that it loads fast … which brings up the next point

4.) Your splash page needs to FULLY load in 2 or 3 seconds – max! If your splash page takes longer than this, then your visitor is likely already gone and they won’t see your page.  To ensure this, you should keep your splash page to UNDER 100k and preferably under 50k.

5.) Get straight to the point! You only have a couple seconds to get their attention, so get straight to it.  Do NOT fill up your splash page with a bunch of distractions, but rather keep it easy to read and NON-intimidating.

6.) Make your call to action obvious. Remember, your goal is to get the visitor to click on your link so that they are taken to another website where you can sell your product.  So, make it obvious what you want them to do – don’t send your visitor on a treasure hunt of your splash page for the “CLICK HERE” call to action.

7.) Your splash page needs to fit nicely on the page WITHOUT scrolling of any kind. I have seen lots of splash pages that are so loaded with nonsense that the visitor has to scroll down to see the whole page … and the call to action is at the bottom of the page totally out of sight!  YIKES!

8.) One thing per splash page only. Your job is to grab their attention and get them over to your main website, so stick to that ONLY!  This means you should NOT be trying to sell multiple things on your splash page, and NO banners either!

9.) Make sure your call to action (the “click here” button) opens the website in a new window and make sure you are tracking this link.

Well, that about takes care of the basic items you should be considering when building your splash pages.  As for how you actually go about building a splash page – well, if you don’t have any technical skills, then there are a number of programs out there that will allow you to build splash pages on their hosted platform.  These programs are usually fairly intuitive and allow a reasonable amount of customization.  I won’t go over any particular program here, but a quick search will pull them up.

Good luck with your splash page building.  I know it may seem a little daunting right now, but the time you invest into this will be paid back multiple times over.  It’s time to plug the leak and stop losing money!

Splash Pages DO make sense

Author:  Tyler Huculak – President/Co-owner Logiscape Technologies Inc.

Related Blogs

• Is It Possible To Make Millions On Forex In Short Time « How to Become Web-Wise
• How much money do I give for a wedding gift? | Wedding Questions.net
• Two Ways Of Submitting Articles « Your Road to Success
• Learning Effective Time Management Skills
• Job market in a tight squeeze » Investment Postcards from Cape Town

This is what you should really be doing

As you read in my previous article, there are two ways to effectively promote in the traffic exchanges. One method involves promoting a particular program/product/service directly and the other method involves promoting indirectly. Depending on what you are trying to promote, one method might work better than the other, but my obvious bias (as you will see) is towards promoting your programs indirectly.

What exactly do I mean by promoting directly versus indirectly? Well, if you are promoting a program directly, then you are trying to “sell” the benefits of this program to the visitor right there on the spot (just like a TV commercial, etc.). With indirect promotion, you are trying to catch their attention so that they will give you their email address, which allows you to “sell” to them later on when they aren’t so focused on moving along to the next site.

Regardless of the method you choose, you will need to make your “sales pitch” short and sweet because with traffic exchanges you only have about 5 seconds to load your web page and catch their attention. This is one of the reasons that promoting a referral link directly doesn’t work. You see, most referral links simply lead back to the main page of the website which is loaded with content and links. When you only have a few seconds to grab their attention, there is no way that a long web page is going to work – especially since thousands of other people are promoting the exact same thing!

Let’s first look at the easier of the two methods – direct promotion. Although I prefer the indirect method (and I’ll tell you why in a moment), the truth is that most people are not going to be willing to take the time to set all of that up. Direct promotion, on the other hand is something that EVERYONE can do fairly easily – and the ONLY way you should be promoting directly is through the use of a “splash page”. Although it will take you a little more time and effort (versus just throwing your referral link in there), your results will skyrocket!

The concept of using a splash page is nothing new and has been diligently preached by many for a long time. And yet, the overwhelming majority of people still use the lazy, ineffective method of promoting their referral links directly. Well, if you want to get great results, then splash pages are the ONLY way to go.

So, what is a splash page? Simply put, it is a very short advertisement that grabs the attention of the viewer and gets them to take action by clicking on a link in the page. There are a number of elements that go into making a great splash page and I will cover those in my next article, so stay tuned.

Then what do I mean by “stop chasing the money, and start chasing the people”? Well, this refers to the other method of promoting in traffic exchanges – indirect promotion. Using this method, you are not focused on trying to sell something directly in your ad, but rather to grab the interest of the visitor so that they will give you their contact information (name and email address). Anyone who is serious about making a full-time income as an internet marketer needs to be using this method – end of story!

Now, once you have their email address, you can contact them about your program/product/service in a more relaxed environment (rather than a mad surfing session) and therefore you can take a little more time to go over the benefits, etc. In the case of promoting a complex product or service, this method is really the ONLY way you will gain any success. And the best part of using this method (which is why I like it so much), is that you now have a list of responsive people that you can contact again in the future.

The big question is “how do I get people to give me their contact information?” This is a rather large topic on its own, and so it’s something I will go over in my upcoming articles. For instance, there are several ways that you can go about this, from creating a very simple “squeeze page” (that you can put directly into the traffic exchanges), to creating a splash-squeeze combo which is more involved. I will cover all of this in detail as we go through it.

Whether you choose to promote directly or indirectly, the same theme rings true for both – you only have a few seconds to accomplish your task, so you need to stand out from the crowd and do it quickly!

Traffic Exchanges CAN make sense

Author: Tyler Huculak – President/Co-owner Logiscape Technologies Inc.

The next article in this series has been posted >> CLICK HERE

Related Blogs

• The truth about stress and Cat idiopathic cystitis in cats | Celebrity news, photos, videos
• Two Ways Of Submitting Articles « Your Road to Success
• DesignUnder » Basic Web Page Background Techniques with CSS
• (Blue Voda) – Easy Web Page Design With BlueVoda | 1000 Collection
• There Are Two Ways To Propagate Information On The Internet

Don’t stop using them … just use them differently

My last article ended with me telling you that the one thing most people are doing wrong is that they are promoting their referral links directly in the traffic exchanges. But since most of the people reading this are probably doing exactly that, where does that leave us? Am I saying that you should stop using traffic exchanges if you are promoting your referral links in them? ABSOLUTELY NOT!

Let me be perfectly clear; I am not telling people to stop using traffic exchanges; I am telling people to start using traffic exchanges differently. The traffic exchange model is still a very powerful advertising tool (or else I wouldn’t have spent 10 years developing them!), but the trick is knowing how to use them properly.

You see, the driving force for someone to start internet marketing is usually to MAKE MONEY! But, unfortunately, this mentality is what will doom you to fail in the traffic exchanges.

Don’t get me wrong, making money is why you are here and there’s nothing wrong with that (in fact, I am trying to help you make MORE!). But when it comes to traffic exchanges, you really need to change the way you do “business”. If your main focus is to join the “latest and greatest” every few weeks and promote your affiliate links directly, then you are NEVER going to succeed and you are truly wasting your time, energy, and money.

So, where do you go from here? Well, there are two paths you can take when it comes to promoting in the traffic exchanges. You can promote your favourite programs directly (but NOT using affiliate links!) or you can promote your favourite programs indirectly. I will go over each method in my upcoming articles, so stay tuned.

For now, I am simply presenting you with the challenge; the challenge to change the way you are using traffic exchanges so that you can get the best possible results from them. Now that I have presented you with this challenge, you have two options. You can choose to let it defeat you (ignoring a problem is the same thing as giving in to it), or you can choose to attack the challenge head-on and change the way you are using traffic exchanges.

So, what will it be? Are you ready to make the necessary changes to improve your success and increase your profits? GOOD! Then I will see you in a couple days.

Oops, I almost forgot! I told you I would share a little piece of history with you, so here goes.

When my brother and I (we are business partners) first started out online (back in 1999), we focused our energy on building an “information-based” membership site. It was your typical “loaded with ebooks, tutorials, tools, tips, tricks” kind of site and it achieved moderate success. In reality, we were just starting out and our marketing skills weren’t all that sharp! Anyways, we got to thinking and figured that we should be able to come up with something really great if we applied ourselves.

Then we thought to ourselves – “how are we going to market our new ‘great thing’? … and where are all the people going to come from?”. And so we figured we should start to build a list of contacts right away so that we would have a lot of people to “pitch” our new idea/product to (even though we hadn’t developed it yet). “But how are we going to convince people to join our list?” We figured the easiest way to get people to join a list is to give them something for free. So, we built a little program …

This little program was perfect! It was free to join and offered great value. It was also geared toward internet marketers which meant that our list would be highly targeted. It was perfect! We launched the program in 2001 and very quickly drew a large audience – which means we were getting a nice big targeted list. And the name of this program? Hitpulse.

Although it has been 8 years, and it still goes strong today, hitpulse was started as nothing more than a way to get a list. In fact, there wasn’t even a way to pay for anything on that site when it first launched because we never intended it to be an income generator. It wasn’t until several months after it launched (after numerous requests from members) that we decided to offer traffic for sale. Our first 24 hours, we made a little over $600 selling traffic!  Not bad, considering we never intended to make a dime from this program!

And so we got to thinking … What if we took this “traffic exchange” concept and really commercialized it? Could this be the product we were looking for? Fast forward to 2009 and our company (Logiscape Technologies Inc.) continues to develop this excellent model of traffic delivery and promotion. With four extremely successful traffic exchanges under our belt, it’s safe to say that we found what we were looking for.

Traffic Exchanges CAN make sense

Author: Tyler Huculak – President/Co-owner Logiscape Technologies Inc.

The next article in this series has been posted >> CLICK HERE

Related Blogs

• Internet Marketing And Your Kind Of Business « How to Become Web-Wise
• How To Make Money Online Using YouTube Videos Get Paid By PayPal Work From Home Jobs Part 1. : : make money today
• Why You Are Wasting Your Time Without Your Own Internet Domain Name | Find Free Domains
• Stop Wasting your Time Trying to Do Tasks that VLOOKUP Exact Match doesn’t Support – Excel Spreadsheet Authors
• Blumenthal Letter #15: No ‘One-Size-Fits-All’ in Building a Nationwide Health Information Network « e-Healthcare Marketing

Prepare yourself mentally … this could be a bumpy ride!

In my introduction (if you haven’t read it, go back and read it first), I made some rather pointed statements. You see, I have never been one to sit on the fence and when it comes to helping people, I shoot straight from the hip. As I said before, my style might ruffle your feathers a little, but at least you’ll know I am always being honest and truthful. Now, let’s get started!

But, hold on! I first have to know; are you mentally prepared? Good, because “the stuff you didn’t want to know” might sting a little. You see, chances are that you are wasting your time in the traffic exchanges. OUCH! I can say this because I have seen hundreds of thousands of members come through our doors over the years and the incredible majority of them aren’t using them properly.

Now that we got that ugly little bit out of the way, we can get right to the part where I help you. Obviously, nobody likes to be told that they are doing something wrong (hence the part about telling you “stuff you don’t want to hear”), but the truth is that the sooner you can come to grips with the fact you are doing it wrong; the sooner you can get to doing it right. So, are you ready?

The first major “brain hurdle” that you will need to get over is that it takes TIME to do things properly. In the fast-paced internet world where everything is “instant”, this might be a hard pill to swallow. And it’s even harder when you are bombarded with endless promises of great wealth in short periods of time. The truth is that the only people making huge amounts of money quickly in those programs, are the owners. For everybody else, it takes a LOT of time to get it right.

I know what you’re thinking … “but I have spent years doing this, so I have definitely spent enough time and yet I am still not successful at it”. Although you may have spent all this time, the big question is “where did you spend your time?”. You see, most new internet marketers will join the latest and greatest program every few weeks. For the average person just starting out, this is a sure way to fail.

Let’s assume you are new to affiliate marketing. This would be a typical scenario. You join program “A” and you drive traffic to your affiliate link. You don’t make millions overnight like they promised (big surprise!), but that’s okay, because another program (“B”) has just launched so you join that one and start sending traffic to your affiliate link. Your time has now shifted to program “B” and on and on the cycle goes. Within 6 months you have joined 10 or more programs and haven’t spent enough time to make any of them work.

From the example above, you can see how somebody can spend a huge amount of time and end up with virtually nothing in return. This will lead to frustration and eventually giving up on everything altogether.

So, what does all this have to do with traffic exchanges? Well, traffic exchanges are a nice cheap way to get traffic to those affiliate links and so this is often where new internet marketers end up. And using traffic exchanges to send traffic to an affiliate link is exactly what you DO NOT WANT TO DO!

In my next article, I will start to dive deeper into what a traffic exchange should really be used for. Plus, I will share a little story with you on how my company (Logiscape) got started about 9 years ago.

Traffic Exchanges CAN make sense

Author: Tyler Huculak – President/Co-owner Logiscape Technologies Inc.

The next article in this series has been posted >> CLICK HERE

Related Blogs

• Wasting your time « funan-egaming.com
• Why You Are Wasting Your Time Without Your Own Internet Domain Name | Find Free Domains
• Look for short periods of financing port financing | Student Loan Consolidation Rates
• U.S. MONEY SUPPLY PLUNGES, DOUBLE DIP NEAR? | PRAGMATIC CAPITALISM
• Know About Avanti Flat Iron | Little Bit of Green

Everything you wanted to know … and some stuff you didn’t

This section of the blog will focus on traffic exchanges in general, but will have a strong emphasis on the trafficera program. In reality, trafficera goes well beyond a simple traffic exchange which makes it an invaluable resource for ALL internet marketers.

By combining a powerful traffic network with a robust social platform, trafficera is well positioned to grow for many years to come. With nearly 50,000 members already joined in the first year alone, trafficera has become a cornerstone for internet marketers from all over the world.

So, what exactly is a traffic exchange? Simply stated, a traffic exchange is a place where members “exchange” traffic. In other words, it is kind of a “you come see what I have to offer, and in return I will check out what you have to offer”. The concept itself is simple, but getting good results from a traffic exchanges can be a little challenging … unless you know HOW to use them properly. We will cover that here.

So, if traffic exchanges are good, why do some people say they suck? Let me answer that with a scenario. Let’s say that you give 10 people the exact same plasma TV. Five of these people simply unpack it and plug it in, while the other five go through the menus and options to tweak all the aspects of picture and sound according to the lighting of their room, etc. Obviously all ten of these TVs will “work”, but the five that simply plugged it in might say that the picture and/or sound sucks and that this TV is lame. While the other five that took the time to figure it out and set it up properly would have a totally different opinion of it.

You see, unless traffic exchanges are used properly, they are essentially worthless. Sure they will get your hit counter flying, and you might get “some” results, but you will never tap into their true value and power until you learn to use them properly. You would be no different from the person that purchases a great TV and never bothers to learn how to set it up properly.

The good news for you is that my company has been building these programs for nearly ten years now and we definitely know what works and what doesn’t. Stick around as I go through all the ins and outs of what makes a traffic exchange work for YOU.

Of course, experience has shown me that for every 100 people I try to help, only 10 will really listen … and about 5 will actually take the necessary action. The other 95 people will sit around together and try to figure out why 95% of internet marketers fail.

The bottom line is that I might tell you stuff you don’t really want to hear. I might even ruffle your feathers a bit. But if you have been working at this for a while now and you are not successful, then your feathers NEED to be ruffled. If learning new things and administering changes scares you, then I know of about 94 others that you can hang out with.

Traffic Exchanges CAN make sense

Author: Tyler Huculak – President/Co-owner Logiscape Technologies Inc.

Related Blogs

• Lighting firm Luminus expands into white LEDs — purses
• Fiber Creations – Innovative Fiber Optic Lighting Solutions | Efficient Energy
• In Praise of Natural Light: Examples and Discussion. | LIGHTING ESSENTIALS For Photographers
• Hi Tech answers » Why does my plasma tv display fizz out and disappear after 5 minutes of watching?
• Advantages Of Internet Marketing Products « Era of Smart Things and Great Ideas