The Ramblings of a Moaning Online Old Git!

For a while now I have been surfing on traffic exchange sites & have come to the conclusion that although I am generating traffic to my site, I am not receiving targeted visitors, (what a surprise I hear you say) so I decided to have a little fun with them.

What I did first was to place referral links on each site to see which performed the best, what I found was very interesting!

One site advised me to join as I had referrals, (this cost me almost £20.00 – yes GBP!) after paying this MONTHLY FEE & logging in to my account I found I had NO REFERRALS! This monthly fee was cancelled before it was due to be renewed!

Another Traffic Exchange site did the complete opposite! I found that I had 4 referrals but they did not notify me about this. I will mention this site later as I believe they are a honest bunch.

Back to the fun stuff! I had been advertising my website for absolutely ages & not getting anywhere so I decided to have a laugh, I have a free ebook area on my site which IS FREE - no signups required, just download them & don’t even say thank you. So I decided to make a new text ad on these Traffic exchange sites – it reads, (and still does until they catch me) “ Fart Like an Angel & receive free Ebooks!” – what a laugh I had while writing this ad, I had tears streaming down my face through laughter!

I’m not sure if other people have the same idea, but I have come across two other websites which have a quirky squeeze page, one says “Nothing Here” & the other one says “Apache is functioning normally!” (I’m pleased to hear that!, saves a visit to the doctors!)

But what is the purpose of these Traffic Exchange sites? Are you building your own online business – or someone else’s? Are they only there to lower your Alexa Rank through hours of surfing?

Another thing I found is that all websites must be in English, but you can upload a URL to them and after it is accepted you could change the language and re publish the page which is normally hosted on your own site. Don’t get me wrong, I believe everyone should have the chance to make a living online, I just don’t like clicking on English written links & visiting a page I cannot understand.

Yet another thing – Why do people advertise a referral link on the same Traffic exchange site? Surly you are actually preaching to the already converted!

That’s it, I’ve got it out of my system & no longer feel stressed or have my dander up over advertising other peoples businesses. Thanks for your time for reading my ramblings, all the best,

Tiny, (ossface.co)

P.S. The HONEST Traffic Exchange site I found is Click Voyager – plus I like their games of Hangman & their slot machines!

Our Free Ebook Area, (don't worry - like i stated earlier - no sign-ups required)

Evaluating Your Email Marketing.

Email marketing can be a very effective way to reach a target audience around the world. However, your marketing efforts may not reach their full potential unless you invest some time, energy and money into evaluating your email marketing strategy. During this evaluation you may determine whether or not the email marketing is helping you to reach your goals. Likewise you can determine if the email marketing is having an adverse affect on your business. This article will discuss the importance of evaluating your email marketing and will also offer some useful advice on how to do this.

To say that evaluating your email marketing strategy on a regular basis is important is a tremendous understatement. Regularly evaluating your email marketing is not only important it is critical to the success of your business. Failure to evaluate your email marketing strategies can have adverse effects ranging from not producing results to causing you to lose customers to your competitors.

Consider an email marketing campaign which is not effective because it does not reach the members of the target audience. Some business owners make the fatal mistake of not taking care to ensure their email distribution list features recipients who are extremely interested in the products or services you offer. Business owners who take shortcuts by purchasing large email lists, often find their shortcut did not pay off because the recipients of their marketing emails are simply not interested in the products or services you offer. In this scenario the email marketing is likely to generate very few sales or website visits. However, reevaluating the email distribution list to include recipients who are interested in your products or services will likely result in significantly more sales and website visits.
Now consider a situation in which your email marketing is being construed as spam by the recipients. If you have taken precautions to ensure your emails are reaching members of your target audience but your emails seem like over the top sales pitches, the members of your email distribution list may view your emails as spam and not take your advertisements seriously. When this happens the member of your email distribution list may be more likely to seek out a competitor when they are in need of products or services rather than making a purchase from you.

Evaluating your email marketing efforts may be formal or informal in nature. If you have specific business goals in mind you might want to consider using whether or not you are on the way to meet this goal as an indication of whether or not the email marketing is working. If you're interested in reading more about email marketing check out www.jeremyburns.com/blog - Alternatively, you can evaluate your email marketing efforts by soliciting customer feedback. Asking customers for their opinions about the email marketing campaign and whether or not they were compelled to make a purchase because of the content, the advertising or some other element. Based on this information you should have a good indication of whether or not the email marketing is effective. If it is not effective you should consider making changes to create more interest in your products or services. The changes you make should reflect the feedback you receive though to ensure you are not making changes which will cause even less interest from the members of the target audience.