An Interesting Development In Traffic Exchanges
It seems the new wave of chat in the traffic exchange has taken a turn.
Recently, Jon Olsen in Hit Exchange News went at the chat again with some interesting things happening afterwards. The posters mostly liked the chat; but, for some unknown reason, most of the traffic exchanges that have chat had it turned off. This included his own site I Love Hits. He had said in the comments that wasn’t something he was going to do with his sites.
Steve Ayling in his blog reiterated his point he made in the comments (which I agree with) that chat takes views away from people who are either spending their time and/or money for the page view.
Bill Carr of Traffic Hoopla has stated in the past (and I reported on this blog post) that he see results for traffic exchanges drop when the chat was installed.
There are many people who swear by the chat feature and says they have not seen any problems with there stats. Could this be that they are making up for the missed views by getting customers from the chat?
Who is right and who is wrong?
My story and take is this; I had started in traffic exchanges as a newbie with Traffic Swarm. It was part of a multi-program deal I had gotten involved with at the time. About a year later I tried a little program that introduced me to the real power of traffic exchanges. I didn’t get into Internet marketing to lose money or time. They were a fairly easy way to get traffic NOW and not have to wait for SEO, article marketing, and the rest to kick in.
I had a little more time then and spent a lot of time surfing traffic exchanges and through various things I am currently a member of almost 70. Obviously, I don’t have time to surf them all and usually surf as many as I can when I can. this is like most people who have a ‘real job’ and a family.
I didn’t really get heavily into tracking everything until a little before the chat hit the traffic exchanges. I was a a point to pick out exchanges to actually buy credits or upgrade since I was getting results at these exchanges enough to warrant paying for credits. Then the results started to go down at the traffic exchanges that had chat. At first, I thought it was just the economy and all the other bull that people spew. It then hit me when reading some blog posts and comments that it may be the chat.
So now I am back to square one in a manner of speaking. I am going back through all my exchanges and re-assessing which ones are worthy to get my money. Some of the results have been surprising as trying to evaluate which “TE Best List” actually is more accurate has been a quest for results tabulation. Now that many that have chat have it turned off, this will change the results I am afraid and I will have to re-evaluate those.
I have also been testing different tracking programs and methods (I will be posting those results in a future post). The gurus have a dim view of traffic exchanges, but for someone who doesn’t know straight up from straight down about Internet Marketing, they can get you some cash flow NOW as opposed to building the site, waiting for the DNS to kick in, waiting for the site to be indexed, waiting for the articles to start working, and all the rest.
Since I do have a good ‘real job’ I have the luxury of testing and playing with things. That doesn’t mean I have money to burn either. Results are still king. I use and play with many ways to get traffic and the ones that produce results are what I concentrate my limited time to doing.
The biggest headache I have when surfing the traffic exchanges is usually when a good prize page comes up; one of the pets (there are many), or children (there are many) or the missus, or the phone distract me and I click the cheater then realize I forgot to click the prize as the page changes. Arggh! The last thing I need is to have another distraction.
So reader, what are your thoughts? Have you seen the drop in results or have you seen the same? Do you like the chat or not? I would love to hear your comments!
