If you are familiar with advertising on Internet, you will certainly have heard about so-called Viral Traffic Generators or Startpage Programs. What do these expressions mean ?

It is a very easy concept: It makes use of fact that you can set any website as your start page. So every time you open your browser, you will be automatically forwarded to your favorite web page, you don't have to enter anything.

How You View Other People's Websites

You can set a startpage program as your startpage and a script from this site delivers hits for you. Within a frame, you view other people's websites. With most programs, you have to click on a button to view next site. You have to stay 20-30 sec. at every site before your account gets credited.

If you sign up with such a service, you have to name a site to which people will be forwarded to, once you've earned credits by viewing other sites. Usually, this will be your main site or site where you want to sign up new referrals for programs you run.

It is important that you have a members area, where you can login to make some changes to your account e.g. setting another site as your main site.

Which Traffic Generators Should You Sign Up For ?

There are several points which have to be considered when signing up for such a service (in order of importance):

============================================= 1.) Which ratio does service offer ? =============================================

You should only join programs that give you at least a 3:1 ratio. This means, for every 3 websites you view, you'll get one hit to your own site. Anything less than that takes too long to deliver hits. It goes without saying that a 1:1 ratio is best you can get.

============================================= 2.) How fast does service deliver hits back to your site? =============================================

If you have to wait days or weeks before you get hits delivered which you've earned, it would not make any sense to join such a program. It should not take longer than a few hours to deliver hits to your site.

Be sure to check statistics of your website often to be able to recognize speed of startpage program or if they deliver any hits at all. You have to look in section "referrer" of your statistics.

============================================= 3.) How many credits do you get from new referrals ? =============================================

Viral Traffic means traffic from you AND from people who join under you. So, if you sign up other people, you get hits delivered from their surf-sessions as well (usually about 10% of hits they generate).

Multiple levels guarantee that you not only get credits from persons you personally signed up but you'll also get credits from people THEY sign up ! This can be, with some programs, up to 6 levels deep...

But What If You Decide For The Wrong Tracking Method ?

In order to be able to decide what tracking methods you can choose from, here's a short reminder :

1.) Using a tracking service like ROIbot, AdMinder or Hyper- tracker.

With this method, original links are disguised with a link like

http://www.roibot.com/w.cgi?R45487_dhgtr .

If you click on such a link, you are automatically forwarded to web site you have specified. You can see number of clicks in your members' area of tracking service.

2.) Setting up mirror pages/multiple autoreponders

Setting up multiple autoresponders for tracking e-mail responses e.g. report1@getresponse.com report2@getresponse.com report3@getresponse.com etc.

You can easily see, how many times each autoresponder has been hit and you can determine how successful each of your ad campaigns was.

Mirror pages are duplicates of your main pages. If you create different directories for your promotions, you will be able to see results in your logfiles.

e.g. http://www.internetmarketing-success.com/promo1/

and in this directory you just have a copy of your index.html file. Or you can set up a redirect which leads immediately to your index.html without having to copy it into this new directory .

3.) The ? - method

This is a method that can be used for e-mails as well as for web sites. If you write an e-mail link, you can set subject after question mark. It would look like this :

mailto:abcd@host.com?subject=report1

The e-mail would would go to abcd@host.com and subject line would automatically contain subject "report1" without having it to enter manually. You will certainly have seen this many times already.

If you use this method with a web site, you can create a link like :

http://www.internetmarketing-success.com/chap1.htm?position6