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!

Day 16.1: Confessions of An Optimist

In case you haven't already gathered, I'm a serious optimist. I can't help it. No matter how many times I've been disappointed (and it's been a lot), I can't help assuming that next time, it's going to work. That's what got me started on this experiment, and that's hopefully what will drive me to be able to earn at least a $100 a week from home. My innate optimism has been a mixed blessing for me, however, and for this post I decided to write about how much optimism is too much.

First of all, if you're going to be an entrepreneur either you're already an optimist or someone's holding a gun to your head and forcing you. (I doubt that's the case.) It's necessary to be an optimist if you're going to try new things. You have to have the vision to see your endeavors prosper, and you have to see a light at the end of the tunnel if you're going to chase it.

My problem is that I get so caught up in chasing the light that I don't realize that it's actually coming from an oncoming train and not the end of the tunnel at all. I get carried away with things. I obsess over something and then if it doesn't work out, I'm devastated. While being an optimist might be a necessary attribute to an entrepreneur, it's also vital that you be a realist. You can't simply walk around with high hopes and your head in the cloud and expect that good things will show up. You have to see how they will show up and what you can do to make that happen. You have to anticipate your own weaknesses and work out a way to combat them. That's an area where I really struggle. I'm a rotten salesman, period. Something could be cool and awesome and totally free, like Clixsense, but despite my own personal enthusiasm and even the fact that I'm going to get my first paycheck tomorrow, none of you will click on that link. And if you do, I'll be totally shocked and surprised and thrilled and incredibly grateful. Now see, you (almost certainly) didn't click the link. I love it, I'm excited about it and telling you... but I'm not getting any results.

So why is it that all of my plans hinge on referrals? Ok, true, Traffic Exchange Profits does have a way of working around that, but what about everything else? Why do I keep thinking I'll make it work, when it never does? I don't know. I guess I just can't stop.

Please follow me on Twitter for more updates and--please--check out Clixsense if you want to make your own cash online!

Day 14.2: Sweet Success

I've made a couple discoveries this evening that have given me reason to celebrate! First, I've been discussing lately the success I've been having with Clixsense. After looking up my stats tonight, I realized that tomorrow I can easily take out my first payment! Not even ten bucks, but it should be enough to reinvest in something that will help out my traffic even more. Or I might just decide to leave it in until I can upgrade my account.

The second discovery is equally exciting: mailing lists work. I've heard it time and again in my research, but never wanted to get too involved with it. It sounded too much like spam, and I didn't need to be working on putting together a "list" on top of everything else. I'm busy enough as it is! But I did join a few safe-lists a while ago just to experiment with it. I get hundreds of e-mails to that address every day now, and so can only read a few of them in a sitting. Each one gives me "credits" for reading the email and clicking on the link, and each credit is one more person that I can send my own e-mails to. For the past week or so, I've been sitting around reading e-mails whenever I have some odd spare time and collecting credits. Yesterday I finally decided to try it out for myself. I sent out emails to two different lists and promptly forgot about them when I didn't get any immediate referrals. I was honestly puzzled this afternoon when I was checking up on my sites and saw that one of them had gotten nine views in the past day! I tried to think up what I was doing differently when I remembered the e-mails.

To put this into perspective, I've been using traffic exchanges right and left, milling through hundreds of sites every day on seven different exchanges. It's gotten me two views and one referral (with nine referrals under her). I didn't get any referrals with the letters I sent out, but I got nine views in one day for copying, pasting, and clicking--about five minutes total of work.

What does this mean? It means I'm going to be reading a lot more e-mails and storing up credits. It wasn't as responsive as the traffic exchanges, but hopefully it won't take many more e-mails to do that! If this e-mail thing works as well as I think it will, my Free Internet Money plan will have another step to it: join a safe-list. Any safe-list, and preferably two or three. Read e-mails for a week or so before sending your own, and you will get results. Period.

So those are my two bits of excitement today, and now I'm super encouraged to keep at it! For more information on the Free Internet Money plan I'm following, please click here. To join Clixsense and start generating your own online income, click here. And please come back tomorrow for more!

Day 12.2: Begging vs. Selling

"Please buy this. Please? It's a great thing to have. Super nifty. No, wait! Don't go. Please? Come back!"

That's just about what I sound like whenever I try to sell things, both online and in person. Whiney, annoying, and all-around obnoxious. No one wants to buy things from a person like that! I can't sell, and that's a problem. Pretty much every industry requires people to sell something--skills, impressions, tangible objects. Some people are fabulous at selling. They can get anyone to do anything just by saying things in the right tone of voice. How do they do that?

I've tried everything I can think of. I've tried to be bold; I've tried to be subtle; I've tried to make it as friendly and personal as I can, but nothing works. What do I do?

 Perhaps I need a new approach. I've quite proven that I am useless a salesmen myself... but there are others who can sell easily. What I need to do is find someone--or something--who can do the selling for me. I get frustrated when I see that sites that claim to be able to help with advertising only give me the tools but not the knowledge of how to use them. So far Traffic Exchange Profits has been the only company I know of that actually covers that part of the business, and it's very clever about it--it does its own selling. You'll notice that I haven't mentioned it very much on this blog, and there's a reason for it. I don't need to. Actually, the site advises against it. It's designed to be advertised only through traffic exchanges, and that makes sense. I'm selling something to people who, by definition, could use it. But it is a useful system, and if nothing else I'd recommend joining it just to see the training videos.

But that's the approach I need... a product that is literally designed to sell itself, placed in front of an audience who will actually like it. I know my sites are all awesome and that you should all join, but I just need to find a way to communicate that without getting you to tune out.

Please feel free to follow me on Twitter (@onlineincome) for more updates and tips, and by all means check out Traffic Exchange Profits or Free Internet Money. I'm going to keep saying that even if you don't respond.

Day 11.1: What Kind of Online Worker Are You?

Eleven active referrals now for Clixsense. I decided to take money out of my Amazon Turk account to invest in an upgraded membership, because at this point I feel as if I'm practically losing money in not doing so. I didn't expect it to pick up so fast!

Anyway, this morning I've been thinking about all of the different approaches I've now tried to earn a profit online. As the list is getting rather long, I decided to jot it all down here along with my progress for each. Note that my own progress is affected very much by my personality, level of commitment and abilities. Feel free to try out any and every method here--people have been able to earn a substantial income from each of these.

1. Amazon Turk. A very dependable and controllable income, though it is hard to make more than a few cents at a time. You can do whatever kind of work you want, though, and new options are constantly turning up.
2. Writing freelance articles. Sites like Squidoo and Hubpages allow you to write articles without the responsibility of running a website. You can write about whatever you want whenever you want. However, your income depends on ads and selling products, so it's hard to earn a serious income from it.
3. Blogging. It's a lot of work to maintain a decent blog. I write three articles a day and then optimize them like crazy, and I've yet to make a cent. But the work is very independent, and you can focus on whatever area you want and specialize it. This blog has been as profitable as a college class in terms of education--as I maintain it and record my progress, I've learned a ton about online work.
4. PTCs. They felt like an amusing waste of time at first, but right now Clixsense is taking off like crazy, and a lot of the money is generated--meaning I'm literally making money in my sleep. It's nothing without referrals, but get even one person to sign up and it's very much worth it.
5. Online Marketing. I still feel like a little fish in a big sea here--so many people are clamoring for their ads to be noticed that it's easy to get overwhelmed when you're trying to market something yourself. I've had better success than most in this area--largely it just takes insane determination and long hours of work.
6. Joining an organized program. Free Internet Money and Traffic Exchange Profits are both programs that you can join on the side, promoting any business you want. This is my favorite form of monetization so far. You use plans made by others that have already proven to be successful. Wash, rinse, repeat. It's hard to find free plans, though, but it's a great learning opportunity as well.

I think that's it. I've had different levels of success with each one, and have actually had results very different than I was expecting. I honestly thought my writing would be the big moneymaker here, but it hasn't gotten me anything, whereas the silly paid-to-click sites are actually seriously paying. It's going to be interesting to see where I wind up by the end of the month!

Please follow me on Twitter for more tips and updates, and to see more of my personal strategy visit the Free Internet Money site. It's well worth your time!

Day 10.3: Traffic Exchanges: Do They Really Work?

By the end of the day now I have two direct referrals in addition to the two indirect for Clixsense. If any of you were the second, thank you! If not, you should totally join. Anyway, I was looking at where exactly my referrals were coming from. The second one I couldn't trace, but the first referral... wasn't from this blog. It shouldn't have been a surprise. My personal advertising stinks.

My first referral was from a traffic exchange. You might be familiar with them--Traffic G, Easy Hits 4 You, etc. You go from ad to ad, and for every one you look at someone looks at yours. I was a total skeptic at first. Even though I do sometimes click on ads to learn more about whatever program they stand for, I considered myself the exception. Who would really care to look into something that I posted? Seriously? And then decide to join it? But that's what happened.

Don't get me wrong, that was only one person (that I know of) who signed up, and it really was about time. I joined the top seven traffic exchange sites to check out a program called Traffic Exchange Profits. Every day lately, I've been pulling up all seven in different tabs and clicked through them nonstop for a long time. Hundreds of ads a day, and these are the best traffic exchanges out there.

So are they really worth joining in the long run? The answer is, that depends. If you don't have much time and don't want to sign up to more than one or two, I'd have to say no. You'd be better off asking friends and family instead, or posting something on Facebook. If you really want to get something out of traffic exchanges, though, it's possible. I'd recommend joining Traffic Exchange Profits first to get a list of the best ones out there and strategies for how to work them. Be committed to your work and set aside some time every day to do nothing but surf. It's not as boring as it sounds--many of the top sites offer rewards for surfing or allow you to play games or win prizes. And if you join enough, you won't have to worry about idle waiting time.

Traffic exchanges can work, but only with the right strategy, and only if you're very committed to making them work. Otherwise, I'd say not to bother. There are many ways to advertise out there, and there are bound to be some that would work perfectly for whatever you're doing!

To know more about my personal plan for earning money online (and it's working, too!) go to Freeinternetmoney.biz. To join Clixsense and start building your own money-making downline, click here. And for updates and more tips on online entrepreneurship, follow me on Twitter!