More recently, a slightly different breed of traffic swap has emerged. These focus on generating ezine subscribers. The way they work is basically same as a normal traffic swap, however because they are directed specifically at getting subscribers, they don't create junk traffic. Every time you display pop-up containing ezine registration form, you earn an impression for your subscription link on another site. When visitors see pop-up with links, they choose to sign up for your ezine. There are still very few of them around, so they are very effective and produce good results. There are a few services that provide opt-in services for a fee (usually in range of $1.00/subscriber), but I prefer free ;-). I have had very good results with this service. It is 100% free and generates dozens of subscribers a week.

Ezine advertising

Ezine ads (both solo and classified ads) can be very effective if done right. They can also be utterly useless. The key is to get your ads in ezines that are very closely related to your product(s), and that don't run tons of ads. There are literally thousands of ezines out there that are essentially advertising rags. Their only purpose is to run ads for you and every other person willing to spend $15. Before you advertise in any ezine, get some information about ezine. A decent publisher will know their subscriber base and be able to tell you with reasonable accuracy how responsive subscribers are, how many ads they run, and if someone has recently run an ad like yours (similar products). If they can't do that, you might want to think twice about advertising with them. Realistically what you want is an ezine with a reasonably large subscriber base (1000 or more), that is closely related to your product, and only accepts limited advertising (e.g. 1 ad/issue). Stephan Peirce's book goes into great detail on how to find good ezines and what to look for and what to avoid - it costs less than a solo ad in a decent ezine, and will save you tons of money in avoided mistakes.

A final comment:

Anyone who claims they can provide you with 100,000 (500,000, whatever) guaranteed visitors is selling junk. Think of it this way, if it were so easy to get that many targeted visitors (and you only want targeted visitors), you can bet companies (scammers) wouldn't be selling them because they would be raking in millions in profits by directing those visitors to their own products and sites! Do a little math, 1% conversion (a very low rate) from 100,000 visitors = 1,000 buying visitors. Sell a $10 product and you have $10,000. If such a profit is possible, why hell is this kind of traffic sold for $50-$200? Quite simply because it is junk traffic, frequently created by piggy backing on traffic exchanges and FFA's.

In next section of series we will start to look at some of less well known methods of traffic generation, and how you can put them to use to generate a more stable and consistent base of traffic for your own sites.

--------------------------- Eric Koshinsky: webmaster and guide at Newbie-guides.com We aim to provide useful tips and guidance for those who are new to personal online marketing. Learn more about programs, techniques, and software that can help you reach your online marketing goals. Come on by and have a look. http://www.newbie-guides.com/?aa Join our newsletter: news@newbie-guides.com

There are two additional things to think about when you consider search engines. Well actually, there are many more things to talk about when it comes to search engines, but I'm only going to talk about two more: mis-spellings, and smaller search engines.

Taking advantage of mis-spellings can be a great way to boost your search engine traffic. People frequently type too fast, and submit their search before they realize that they have mis-typed word that they were searching for. As a webmaster, this can be quite good, as far fewer sites actually try to focus on incorrect keywords. Of course total number of searches made on mis-spelled keywords is much fewer than on correctly spelled keywords, but they can still generate a large amount of traffic with FAR less competition. Just as a quick example, as I write this, "web hosting" produces nearly 3.9 MILLION results, while "wbe hosting" produces 10,000!

GoodKeywords from http://www.softnik.com/ is a great tool that allows you to quickly and easily find out how many searches are done on any keywords you like (including mis-spellings). It's free, and an invaluable resource!

Lastly on search engines, is importance of smaller search engines. There are many benefits to smaller search engines, but most significant are that you get indexed more quickly, have fewer competitors, and can generate a solid amount of traffic for you. The huge engines (google, Lycos, inktomi) and indices (yahoo, DMOZ) can take weeks to add your site, if ever, and always put your site against 1000's of others.

While there is no guarantee that you will be included in a smaller search engine, you will be 'spidered' much more quickly. And while they may not have millions of searches a day, there is no difference between 1000 visitors coming from 1 source (say google) and 1000 visitors coming from 5 sources (200 from each of several smaller engines). An additional benefit of smaller search engines is that some (not all) have agreements with main engines so that their content is spidered by main engines - in essence giving webmaster a 'backdoor' into main engines.

I hope that this gives you a bit of direction and hope as far as search engines are concerned. As I mentioned earlier, based on my own experience using information, I highly recommend Stephan Peirce's book on traffic generation. He WILL make a difference in your website's success.

--------------------------- Eric Koshinsky: webmaster and guide at Newbie-guides.com We aim to provide useful tips and guidance for those who are new to personal online marketing. Learn more about programs, techniques, and software that can help you reach your online marketing goals. Come on by and have a look. http://www.newbie-guides.com/?aa Join our newsletter: news@newbie-guides.com