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Seems the point got missed yesterday
By Mike Paetzold | May 30, 2008
At least by some. The point of the post was that there is more value in creating your system and building the monetization. More importantly, without this traffic is pointless.
Let’s go back to basics.
Traffic + Conversions = Sales or $$$ in your pocket.
You need both traffic and conversion. The problem with a lot of people using traffic exchanges is that they spend all their time on the first part.
I know from experience and the worst part is if you generate enough traffic even with poor conversions you can make a few dollars. Then you just start surfing more to make a few more. Sound familiar yet?
But…
If you took some of the time that it takes to surf and generate traffic that time would be much more valuable. See once you improve conversion you make more per thousand visitors.
Lets look at some number examples. (You can add in your actual numbers as I have made things even for example purposes.) For arguments sake we’ll say you generate 100 page views in 15 minutes or 400 an hour. Your page gets one signup every 400 page views for an affiliate program for this example I’ll use Affiliate Funnel. They have a $67 one time offer that pays 50%.
With this example every time you surf an hour you generate a signup. Every 20 signups someone buys the one time offer I make an additional $33.50 plus whatever other signups Affiliate Funnel has generated me.
So 20 Hours $33.50 plus additional down lines. Made $1.67 an hour.
Now if I had taken two of those hours and worked on improving the conversion and nothing else changed except to improve my offer by using a different page to 1 in 200 the next 18 hours (I lost 2 working on systems) would show these results. 36 signups versus 20 for 2 less hours- Would have been 1.8 oto sales or $60.30 in income versus $33.50 or over $3 an hour. (Yes I know you can’t get fractional sales 
)
If you spent more of your time doing that you could get your hourly rate up to something worthwhile but how many actually will?
Now if I had used that and built a list and monetized it the way that I do it would be even more.
The other big question was how much does it actually cost to be in an exchange 24/7. Here are some examples from 3 that I use regularly. On average they try to deliver 150-200 hits per url per day. Figuring you would need 6000 credits for a month here is the cost.
I Love Hits - 5600 credits $30.00 $32.15 a month
Traffic Spalsh - 3000 credits $19.99 $39.98 a month
Dragon Surf - 3000 credits $19.97 $39.94 a month
So 24/7 for a page in all three exchanges would cost $112.07. If you are surfing to do the same thing at 400 credits an hour it would take you 45 hours. Surfing for those credits would mean your time is worth $2.50 an hour. Working 45 hours on improving your process will definitely make you more.
Finally running my actual numbers shows that at 1 subscriber per 120 page views this cost of $112.07 would generate 150 subscribers at $1.30 per subscriber for $195 return.
You can get your results there too but not if you spend all your time surfing instead of improving your system.
Thats my view - What is yours?
Your comments decide whether or not this is a topic that should be expanded. This will be the last one on this topic for a while unless people are commenting.
Mike Paetzold
Topics: Information | trackback
May 30th, 2008 at 6:15 pm
Hey Mike,
Two very good post on a much under represented subject. Though I partially disagree with the whole buying traffic V’s Surfing for traffic premiss, I do whole heartedly agree that you must first have a system in place that converts traffic to list members no matter what method you use to generate your credits.
Now don’t get me wrong here, If you have built your business to a point where you can afford to buy traffic credits, then by all means have at it. I enjoy a little income each month from downline members buying traffic and upgrades, but if you have not started to generate this kind of income, then an effecient surfing system and a regular surfing schedule is the way to go.
For those that are just starting out with online marketing and have traffic budgeted in to their plan of action, I recommend google pay per click, as this has converted much better in my experience over TE traffic.
I hope that I don’t get a bunch of angry emails from TE owners on that last statement(actually I would be flattered), because I have effectively used TE’s for a few years now and I still believe that they are among the best tools on the internet for newbies and guru’s alike to grow their list.
The point you made on spending your time building or tweeking your system to convert better in the traffic exchanges, is the part that I got wrong for many months when I first started out.
In my personal experience promoting anything in the TE’s other than yourself (your blog,your minisite with your products,your name,your face etc) is a total waste of time, money, and or surfing effort.
Even programs that offer branded squeeze pages with your name, picture, and autoresponder code, are subject to surf blindness, as they are being used by Hundreds or even Thousands of other members. After a short amount of time I believe that most surfers become blind to them, and I have had very little success with them.
What works for me consistantly on the TE’s is building my own personal squeeze pages, that offer a quality, viral product in exchange for a surfers name and email address. This is what I preach on my blogs and every artical I write on the subject. Unfortunatly this involves an investment of time,money and effort, not to mention the learning curve.
Most people don’t want to here the words learn,work, effort,etc, but this is what works like gang busters for me and has many hidden benifits if done right. You can still promote all of your affiliate products,downline builders, and any other product that you choose in your free offer(ebook,report,video,etc) and on your blog,Thank you page, or where ever you direct your traffic after they sign up to your list. Its the sign up that is most important to building a business.
Its much less expensive to do this today with all of the quality tools that are available, that were not around when I started out like hosting, HTML editing software, etc. Even the learning curve has been shortened considerably, as many of these free tools and services come with excellent support in the way of video tutorials.
Even though my squeeze page building skills are still in the stinky phase(they are getting better everyone I do)They still convert surfers to signups better than anything else I have promoted on the exchanges, and they are well worth the time and effort it takes to build them.
Ron
May 30th, 2008 at 6:46 pm
Very good comment Ron. My only disagreement is that if you can’t make a purchase of traffic pay for itself then you really need to be spending all your time building a system before you even consider spending time surfing.
I am not against surfing although for me it is a poor use of time. My time spent on an email series will generate me 100 times the same time spent on surfing.
Creating a product, writing an article, tweaking a sales letter - all of these hold a greater return on my investment. Anyone looking to build a business should find that to be the same.
This series will only ever be embraced by at most 5% of the surfers and thank goodness for that. If no one surfed there would be no credits to buy and traffic exchanges would die.
This is meant for those that really have an interest in building a business, being able to quit their job and constantly grow.
I have seen quite a few people do this but it is almost impossible to do this without the mind shift.
It usually comes in stages but…
for me it wasn’t until I saw and accepted this that I could work from home despite all the downlines and other things I had built for years before.
Now I quite truthfully never surf because at my conversion rates buying traffic is free and I can make much more working on my next product or improving my current systems than the money I would save.
Even if I could generate 500 credits an hour at a cost of $10 or less a thousand I can’t possibly justify working for $5 an hour. Even at 1000 credits an hour from surfing would you work for $10 an hour? I wouldn’t. (And I truly doubt you could do that rate.)
Mike
May 31st, 2008 at 7:35 am
Mike, once again, you are dead on. I too have found tweaking the email series and optin pages, thank you pages and writing copy do more for the bottom line than surfing.
Jerry Reeder
July 20th, 2008 at 11:21 am
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