Advertising your website - part five - Sharing Traffic
A common concept of advertising your site is to just improve it's visibility, pushing more people towards it rather than actively marketing yourself. So instead of paying for an advert you can just perform certain actions to improve your traffic - most commonly known as traffic sharing.
Traffic sharing
These places offer astonishing levels of traffic for seemingly little outlay, which is incorrect when you look at it. Typically these systems require you to register and highlight the URL you wish traffic to be passed to - nice and simple.
Getting users on your siteThe logistics are that you need to browse other members' sites in order to get people to browse yours. TrafficSwarm was one I looked at which required you to spend a certain amount of time on each site before completing a captcha to stumble to the next - all controlled by the TrafficSwarm header.
The catch
Obviously, to get traffic you need to spend time browsing through other members sites - earning tokens which can then be spent on getting visitors to your site. The catch is that to make any difference to your stats you need to spend HOURS browsing through members sites - which is an awful use of your time. Other systems claim to offer traffic at a 2:1 ratio, so 2 views of other people's sites = 1 for your own, which sounds Ok but think of what you need to do to make a difference. Want an extra 100 visitors? That means 200 visits to other sites, typically at 20seconds a go which is more than an hour of faffing around for 100 visitors.
Quality of traffic
It doesn't take a genious to work out that the traffic generated by this method of advertising is going to be of zero use. The benefit will be numerical if anything at all, the extra numbers on your server stats won't mean anything because your material won't have been read, users will land on your site, sit for a pre-deturmined period of time before navigating away. So the extra 100 visitors may as well be 0 and effectively is as useful as purchasing traffic (covered in part three) because all you'll get is numbers.
Worthless?
I think there is value to traffic sharing systems if approached sensibly. If you have a smallish network of people who seriously inter-read blogs/sites and post meaningful comments in order to get some in return - then that would be a good start. As "popular" systems such as TrafficSwarm stand you can either treat it as StumbleUpon with a pointless traffic bonus - albeit barely noticeable. You can use it as a method of finding sites you've never visited before but it's debateable what quality of content you'll discover, remember this is a scheme of desperate people - good content is normally recognised by the bigger networking players.
Conclusion
This concludes my investigation into traffic sharing, a nice concept that could perform well (not in terms of traffic but participation) in small communities but when you fill it with desperate people, the traffic increase is statistical and of no value to your site. If you want to traffic share, make friends with other webmasters/bloggers in your genre/niche and promise to contribute on each others' sites. After all, you're the only one who can see your statistics so 300,000 visitors a month and 0 new comments looks less busy than 3,000 visitors a month and 50 comments.
The Series of Articles
See below the published articles on the topic:
Introduction
Part One: Social Bookmarking
Part Two: StumbleUpon Advertising
Part Three: Buying Traffic
Part Four: Text-Link-Ads
Part Five: Sharing Traffic
Conclusion
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