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Title: Top Five Sins of the Startpage Exchanges
Author: Pamela Heywood
Article:
Right now, these exchanges are generating more traffic to my
site than any other single method ever has. They are a great
tool, as any, in the right hands. They may not work next week,
who knows, but that's the nature of the Internet.
What IS certain is that they can be made to work HARDER for you
right now. Just a few tweaks can make all the difference between
merely counting numbers of useless hits and using this great
*moving billboard advertising system* to effectively generate
real live leads for your business.
1. Broken Links
Goodness knows how many hits I have earned looking at *The page
cannot be displayed* or worse, *The page you are looking for is
no longer on this web site* or the even funnier, *you are not
authorised to see this* ...
OK, so once in a while it might be that a site is only
momentarily down, but that does not account for the large number
of error screens I see, day in, day out.
Hey, that might be YOUR credits I am using, so check that the
link you gave actually works. This has to be one of the dumbest,
yet simplest errors to correct.
Sign up for a free monitoring service so you know if your page
goes down for any length of time.
2. Third-Party Page Rotators
They are UGLY! They look unprofessional and it adds yet another
waiting time to the downloading process as the rotator page is
called by the exchange and the rotator goes off in search of the
*real* page it has to display ... etc.
Yawn! Yawn! Clickaway!
Yes, I know there are *experts* out there telling you to use
them as part of their system. Choose your experts wisely!
I've also earned a lot of my hits looking at the top and bottom
frames of the rotator thing with a BIG BLANK white space in the
middle. And LONG before anything actually appeared in there, I'd
clicked on my *NEXT* button.
By far, THE most important reason why you don't want to use one
of these rotators, is because you do NOT even need to serve up a
variety of offerings. The place for doing that is on YOUR unique
website and/or in YOUR ezine.
3 Java Applets, Flash, Banner Farms, Gratuitous graphics
Anything that is just there for aesthetics increases download
time. You don't need it here. You probably don't need it
elsewhere either, but that's a whole different article. I as a
surfer, certainly don't need it when it crashes my computer
because it sucks up far too much memory on top of all the pages
I have open.
Besides, it loads too slow for me to actually see it!
4. Popups, unders
They have their place, but it isn't here and it isn't going to
endear you to potential sign-ups or clients.
In fact, one exchange, ViralVisitors.com is now giving members
FOUR FREE PopUp & Exit Ad killers. They say:
"These can be particularly annoying when you are trying to surf
for visitor credits. Many will slow down your browser functions,
eat up your Ram and occasionally lock up your browser so a
reboot is necessary."
If it's an exit exchange or similar, you may use a credit
without getting an actual page view back.
5. Affiliate/Program Sites
I'm NOT going to sit there reading why XYZ opportunity is the
best thing since sliced bread and why I should sign up right
now. I'm certainly not hanging around long enough to consider
the pros and cons of actually spending money.
Besides, I've probably already seen that one 120 times in the
last hour alone. I've developed immunity!
I can hear you arguing that their site is more professional than
your efforts. It might be, but it was NEVER designed for these
exchanges: their pages are generally far too complex for the job
in hand and will load too slowly.
And what about if your program goes offline, stops taking
sign-ups even temporarily, closes for cleaning out their
database or, worse, goes belly up?
I see those every day too. That's someone's credits getting
eaten. Make sure they aren't yours.
Do it right: treat these exchanges as you should small ads and
ezine ads. Don't go for direct hits, just collect email
addresses: leads that you can follow-up later. Then you won't
just have hits today, but you'll have built contacts and
business that will last you forever.
About the author:
Pamela Heywood runs a successful Free Advertising Co-Op, which
is doing great on the exchanges, as well as publishing her own
ezine: mailto:eacz-subscribe@auto.pipelinemail.com The
Intelligent Approach to Surf Page Traffic!
http://www.tucats-design.com/rd/curiosity.html
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