Traffic Exchanges: A Testimony

The traffic exchange is a simple idea. You view my site, I'll view yours. The more sites you view, the more views you get to your own site. It sounds like an amazing way to generate traffic... until you realize the nasty shortcoming of the fact that it's a seller's market. No one who surfs is looking to buy anything or join anything. You'll get a lot of views, but pretty much no attention at all.

I never put much stock in traffic exchanges either, until recently. My first Clixsense referral was from a TE, but otherwise... I had nothing. And then I met Lucie. One day last month I was doing some spare surfing on a few traffic exchanges, and I was on the look for anything that could boost my online income. I signed up for several programs, but this training was different. Lucie was promoting a claim that she could teach me to get a good, steady income from traffic exchanges alone. It was free training, so I signed up, but I wasn't convinced that she was anything more than a desperate affiliate until a few days later. I was continuing to surf, and I recognized her profile picture on an ad for another traffic exchange. Under her picture she was credited with having earned over a thousand dollars on that site alone.

Do TE's even pay that much money? Some of them give out odd pennies for prizes or hold lotteries at regular intervals, but a thousand dollars is a lot. Lucie was not a desperate affiliate. She was doing very well, and she was offering me her system for free.

Did it work for me? Surprisingly, yes! I got my first signup within only a few hours after completing step one of the system. When I started active list building after finishing the training, I got two subscribers within the first couple days. It's slowed down since then. One subscriber was active and signed up under me on a traffic exchange, and since then he has been actively referring people under himself. I have quite a downline on that site now! Unfortunately, it's not a site that pays money for anything. Just credits.

This weekend, my free trial for Traffic Wave came to an end, and I did not renew it. I had set aside some money just for that purpose, but after researching and looking up options, I decided to put that money into SFI instead so that I could become an Executive Affiliate. I moved my list over to MailChimp (not an autoresponder, but when my list is too big to handle on a one-on-one basis I should have no problem signing up for a paid TrafficWave subscription. The good news is that I shouldn't have to wait long. Three paid TW referrals will completely pay for my own account, and so I'm hoping that within the next month I can return to that. In the meantime, I'm continuing to surf. I'm getting new referrals almost every day, with a click-through rate of about 3% (which is decent for a TE).

Do I recommend traffic exchanges to the average marketer? That depends. If you plan on only surfing on one site for only a few minutes here and there, then don't. If you are willing to put the work into it, joining a bunch of programs and surfing for several hours a day after designing your own splash page, then go for it! Because now I know--it works if you know how!

Interested in Lucie's course? I'd love to share it with you and help you out wherever I can! Just give me your contact info on my squeeze page here or my website here, and I'll send you the first step ASAP!

SFI: Affiliate Scam or Genuine Opportunity?

I joined SFI recently. I was hesitant about it at first, knowing that it's proud of its "affiliate opportunities"--which in the language of work-at-home scams means, "I bought into a scam. Please join me so that I don't have to feel so bad about it!" In fact, I probably wouldn't have joined at all if it weren't for my awesome sponsor... but that's for another article. Anyway, I joined SFI a few weeks ago, and here's an inside look at what I found:

First, the good. It's a lot bigger than I thought it was. SFI owns the online TripleClicks store, which I've been hearing about lately. It also boasts 100,000 ways to earn (though I still have to learn what most of those are). If you want, you can focus exclusively on selling things through TripleClicks. Even better, if you can't get anyone to buy except yourself you'll still find yourself earning through it by the end of the month. How does that work?

When you first sign up, you're encouraged to explore and participate in the SFI website. In return for visiting pages and reading popular articles, you can earn VersaPoints, which (among other things) translate as shares of TripleClicks. If you earned at least 1500 VersaPoints in the span of the month, you get paid according to your number of shares. VersaPoints can be earned very easily when you first start out with SFI, and also for every SFI member you refer. However... that also leads me to the bad.

The bad: No matter how much SFI brags about its many ways to earn and the importance of TripleClicks, it all comes back to affiliate marketing. If you can talk people into buying from "your" store as opposed to Amazon or Ebay, good for you, but the rest of us can only hope to earn by sponsoring more affiliates. It gets old fast. Also, the community is not nearly as close and tight-knit as it pretends to be. It's very hard to contact support, and if you just stick to asking fellow affiliates, there's a good chance that they won't be able to help you. Plus, SFI cuts corners. I joined in the end of March, and earned about 1000 VersaPoints in my first few days. I was excited to finally earn my first 1500 and be able to get paid for it... but that never happened. By the time I reached 1500 VP, it was April. It doesn't matter how many points you can earn, so long as you earn it within the same month. That being said, I confess I feel cheated compared to everyone who joined just a few days after I did and will get their money without having to refer anyone or sell anything.

My conclusion? Enter at your own risk. Even though there is decent business being conducted there, it's predominantly an affiliate scheme and it's hard to work around that. Can you earn from it? Yes. Is it a scam? Not really. Is it a good idea? I guess all that depends. I'll try to keep up with it for a while to see if it goes anywhere, but I'm not letting my hopes go up. You can make up your mind for yourself, and I do encourage you to check it out if you're curious here.