Traffic Exchanges
One thing I have been particularly interested in over the last few months are traffic exchanges. At first glance, they seem like simple systems following a ‘you view my site I view yours’ mentality, but there is much more to them.
The exchanges themselves come in two main forms:
- Manual Traffic Exchange
- Auto-Exchange
My interest is purely with the manual traffic exchanges, where the person ’surfing’ the system must actually look at the websites themselves and click a certain button once a timer has counted down. With an auto-surf you could set it going, minimise the window and not look at it for days on end, which would means that they are not actually looking at the websites being displayed.
For now, I will list my favourite exchanges. I’m hoping to go into them in much more detail and focus many of the posts on here around them in the future.
Traffic Splash
StartXchange
Easy Hits4U
These three are some of the most popular in the industry and achieve great results for many people and by surfing in these three exchanges you are guaranteed massive exposure for your websites.
End of September Update
The whole idea of this blog was to promote myself online and in the process learn for myself the best methods of generating traffic for blogs. Looking at my site stats for the last two months, I am not achieving my goal. I know this is down to the lack of new content and my seeming inability to focus on just one project at a time.
July brought in 504 hits, 226 of which were unique.
August brought in 666 hits, 276 of which were unique.
September brought in just 317 hits with just 158 being unique visitors.
As you can see from the stats above, the number of visitors has dropped quite considerably and I attribute this to my lack of participation within the community and also my lack of motivation to post. Along with the lack of visitors, this has had a negative effect on the sites income - which was minimal to start with, I hope to be able to attract some new advertisers in the near future.
I started with some negative points about this website, but I also have some good news. With the latest Google Page Rank update, Darren Singleton is now a page rank 2!! Yes, the site had jumped a full two ranks! There is also an Alexa ranking of 414,573 which looks much better than before.
If you are interested in what I have to say, please subscribe to my feed and bookmark me in every way possible!
July 2008 Review
Well, I’m now back from my holidays and ready to get back to work on both this website, and my many others that are currently in development. First of all I would like to update everybody on the websites statistics for the month of July:
504 visits, 226 of which were unique and my top three referrers are the Nicusor Do-Follow List, Tucson SEO Do-Follow List and Entrecard.
I am not currently tracking how much money the blog is making each month as it is not a major priority. Until the blogs traffic increases the adverts will remain on the blog un-tracked. On the note of advertisements, I have added two 125×125 button advertisements to the side-bar, these are powered by Performancing Ads and you can display your website for as little as $1 per week!
That is all for today, I know it is short but I have a lot to do! I am planning a detailed report regarding Performancing Ads later this week along with a full update of my Mint statistics along with a list of the Peppers I find useful.
Stats for Week One
I began posting on this blog on the 26th June (last Thursday) and have made 12 posts so far, within 7 categories and 34 tags. In this week the site has received a total of 148 hits, 58 of which were unique.
These statistics are very low, but I am happy with them, for now. Although I have been posting much more regularly than on my (now non-updated) ‘1 Man’ blog, I haven’t done all that much in the form of promotion. I have discussed using directories and Entrecard as means of generating traffic but haven’t used them to their full potential myself.
There is one place in particular I want to mention, who at the moment has brought more visitors to my site than any other and that is the Nicusor Do Follow List. Thanks. If you own a do-follow-list of your own, either let me know, or feel free to add my blog to it.
Checking FeedBurner, I also have two people currently subscribed to my feed. I’m quite happy about that, as I haven’t actually gone ahead and subscribed myself (as I’m sure many people have in the past).
Please don’t forget the small Entrecard contest I have going, drop your card to win - it’s that simple. Full details can be found here.
Submitting to Directories
One way to drive traffic to your blog involves submitting your link to directories. Directories themselves come in many shapes and sizes, much like blogs do and it is recommended that you only submit to quality directories so that you do not harm your blogs appearance in the long run.
An example of one of the most respected directories on the internet would be Aviva Directory. They review each website that is submitted and decide wether or not to accept it into their system. It currently costs $49.95 for your link to displayed for a year which is a relativly small sum of money compared to the $299 Yahoo! charge for a listing in theirs.
As this blog is still very small, spending money isn’t a viable option at the moment. Luckily, there are directories out there that will allow you to submit your link for free. In order to gain backlinks from these directories, you could just go along and make your link appear in every single one of them. Not only will this take a long time, as I mentioned previously, it could harm your website in the future.
Google doesn’t tend to look to kindly to directories, unless they are well established and have a stringent editorial policy, which ensures that websites with low-quality content or ones that are MFA (made for Adsense) are rejected.
I’m going to begin by listing two places where I have submitted this blog so far and then expand onto resources that will list further places for you to submit your blog for free.
http://www.blogged.com/ (Google Page Rank: 5)
http://www.abcblogdirectory.com/ (Google Page Rank: 3)
http://www.ablogin.com/ (Google Page Rank: 4)
http://addmyurl.info/ (Google Page Rank: 3)
I am still waiting for my listings to be approved in the above websites and I am going to continue my submission process and carefully select directories from the following resources based on both their editorial policies and their Google Page Rank (if they have a high Page Rank, they have a better chance of being acknowledged by Google as a quality resource for links).
http://www.adivs.com/
http://info.vilesilencer.com/main.php?rock=niche-blogs.php
If you know of any other quality directories, or directory resources please comment and let me know.
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