"How do I get more traffic to your site?" That's
eternal question. Or to be more precise, "How do I get more targetted traffic to my pages, people who are going to be interested in what I have to offer?"Afterall, there's no point, or rather little point in getting a steady stream of boxing fans over to your site, if its main theme is bread making. I said little point because I'm pretty sure that there are some boxing enthusiasts who are also avid bread makers, but what would be likelihood of getting that many over to your bread making site at any given time?
One method of getting targetted traffic to your site is through hit exchanges. Now despite what you may have heard about them, I urge you to give me a chance to explain, why, if hit exchanges are used in a certain way, they can be a great souce of targetted visitors. Warm responsive prospects who want to know more about your site and/or business.
Put simply, a hit exchange is a facility that you can use to get hits to your site in exchange for viewing other people's sites. Not all exchanges are created equal and two of main things to look out for when picking which ones to join are:
A) anti cheat controls: top hit exchanges have tight anti cheat security which prevents use of auto surf software. Whilst use of such programs is very tempting and attractive, it kind of defeats point of hit exchanges. There'll be more on this later on!
B) exchange ratio: just how many sites will you need to view in order to get one visitor to your site? The smaller amount of pages you have to visit in order to get a hit back to your own site, more productive your surfing time will be. The traffic that comes from hit exchanges has been called a number of things, none of which are particularly savoury - cheese burger traffic (well, I guess that's pretty savoury in one sense of word!), a waste of bandwith, a cheap gimmick.
Well, inspired by another internet marketer's experience with them, I decided to advertise an ebay auction on one of top hit exchanges and ended up getting a much higher winning bid than I would have done otherwise.
The thing with hit exchanges is that you've got to know how to use them, otherwise your results will be disappointing. But if you apply three tips that I personally use when advertising on them, you may be pleasantly surprised.
So let's go straight to....
No1: Create a special page for traffic exchanges.
The maximum amount of time that your site will be given to load is 30 seconds and last thing you want is a slow loading page. It needs to: a) load quickly which will mean being very sparing with graphics and animation. b) put across greatest benefit for visiting you site very clearly. c) have a quick and easy way for surfers to bookmark your page. This is very important. When surfing for hits, you get into a kind of flow, one you don't really want to interrupt. Having a favourites button will ensure that people who are pushed for time can always come back and view your page later. If you have links to other sites on your special page,it's best if they open in new windows. That way your visitor doesn't have to leave hit exchange. It's also a good idea to have some form of email capture facility on your page. Offer surfers something free in exchange for their email address or use a subscription box to get sign ups for your newsletter. No2: Choose hit exchanges that allow you to select which category your site falls into. This way, it will be viewed by surfers who've also chosen this category or similar categories. So your search optimization site won't get shown to surfers interested in action/adventure games! Some exchanges also let you pick type of sites you want to see. No3: Use hit exchanges that don't allow cheating
