In my last post I mentioned Linkreferral, a nice site that drives traffic to my blog. I want to tell you some of the features this site offers and how easy it is to drive some traffic to your blog.

Linkreferral is basically a traffic exchange, but it offers some more nice features. If you join the site you are able to visit other members sites, review them and post comments in a forum. All you have to do each day is visiting 30 sites, write 5 reviews, place one comment in the forums and, if you will, make one site your favorite. If you do so, you´ll get a better ranking in the huge site directory.

A better ranking means more traffic to your own site. As far as I personally tested it, I got around 40 pageviews per day, nice free traffic. The best part is the review system, where you can read what other people are thinking about your site/blog. This is extremely helpful if you want to know how good your site performs and if it´s really worth all the efforts you put into it.

Linkreferral also offers, as the name suggests, a referral system. The more people you refer to them, the higher your ranking will be. If you have enough referrals your site may even be featured on the front page, meaning you´ll get a lot more traffic than from directory listings. For referring people they offer some nice banners, you can see one on the top of my blog.

One drawback may be that the traffic you generate through this program will be no quality traffic, because everyone using Linkreferral will try to improve their rankings and so they click through a whole bunch of websites only for getting more credits. Most of them will only have a short look on your site/blog, but the number of reviews I got so far shows that there are some people out there, who really have a in-depth look on my blog.

All in all it´s a nice, and especially free way to drive some traffic to your blog. If you have good content it would be very likely that you´ll get some bookmarks or even backlinks. You can´t do anything wrong when joining this site! The work involved for getting a better ranking isn´t that much and so I will try to do my best for watching those 30 sites and writing 5 reviews each day.

I hope this may be helpful to you, if you have a “fresh” blog, try it out. You´ll see how your visitor counts grow. Be sure to choose the right category for your site/blog, try to find the category with the least number of entries, so you can reach top rankings in a short time!

See you soon,
Querblogger

As promised in my last post, here I´ll give you a short overview about Traffic Exchanges and promoting your programs with it. First I´ve to say that I´m not (yet) an expert within this field of online advertising, but I´ll do my best to give you some useful informations.

It seems that most people have a somewhat sceptical attitude towards Traffic Exchanges. As I first have heard about it, I also noticed phrases like “this is a pyramid scheme” or terms like “Autosurf” or “Ponzi scheme”. As I´m sceptical too, I thought “Just give it a try and find out by yourself”. So I joined my first Traffic Exchange site some days ago to test if it works or not.

So far it doesn´t work for me, but I must admit that I was busy last days and don´t had the time to fully concentrate on it. What I can say so far is, that it brought me around 200 pageviews for my splash page (at the moment I´m promoting Yuwie), but unfortunately I got no signups.

Pageviews vs. Credits

But I know the fact why it didn´t worked so far. The first problem is the number of views. With only 200 views you won´t have much luck within a Traffic Exchange, simply because of the fact, that everybody who views one of your pages is actually doing this because of generating their own credits. Most people won´t take a deep look into the content of the site you promote. So you must have at least some thousand credits you can turn into views to generate enough “buzz” for your own sites (big advertisers say, in order to promote a product effectively, a single person must view an advertising at least 7 times to even remember it!). But notice, for generating some thousand page views, you also must gain the same amount of credits and you won´t get these with a ratio of 1:1, but most times with something like 2:1 or 3:1, meaning you have to watch 2 or 3 sites to get one credit for your own traffic exchange. Btw, it took my around one hour to get my 200 credits.

Be creative!

So what can you do, to get more “quality” pageviews, meaning that people are looking at your content and even sign up? My first thoughts went to TV advertising and I got it really fast, be creative! Earlier I mentioned using a splash page to promote your content, and that´s your way for being creative (so my splash is as creative as dry bread in a bread-bin so far…)! I think, but I don´t exactly can say for sure, that a nice designed splash page with good graphics and text can be a key in effectively promoting your programs and helps you to stand out of the crowd. I have some nice plans for a new splash page design and I will tell you more about it within my next posts.

Conclusion

So far Traffic Exchanges didn´t help me alot in my efforts for promoting my programs, therefore I´ll experiment with Traffic Exchanges for the next days (or weeks). Maybe I test some banner advertising or text links. I will also do some advertising on Paid-to-Click sites, where I can place targeted advertising, which hopefully will work better. As I said at the beginning, I´m no expert so far and I´ve to gain more experience.

If you have some tips, you´re very welcome to write some comments to help me and my readers to understand Traffic Exchanges better and make the most out of it.

See you at my next post,
Querblogger