Tyson-Faulkner.com
Online Marketing Training

For the week of May 5 to May 11, 2010

If you've been following this case study then you know what I'm up to. If not, here's my plan…

I am testing out 3 different sources of traffic that have gotten the reputation of "crappy traffic." These are traffic exchanges, safelists, and list builder sites. My goal has been to test these pretty thoroughly for 4 whole weeks to test and see if there's any results to be had from them. I've always been somewhat skeptical, so I decided to test it out for myself and quit listening to everyone else.

The first 3 weeks have come and gone already, and this will be the update for week 3 to see my results. To see the previous weeks, follow these links: Case Study Start, Week 1, Week 2.

One more week then I will conclude my test and give my opinion on each source and the final results of the test.

Let's dive in and see how week 3 went!

Safelists

During week 3 I did pretty good with my safelist submitting, I think I only missed 1 day. I've been testing different headlines to see if they pull results better than others, but the traffic has been so low that there's nothing really to go off of. As you can see below, I only got 26 visitors all week from the 4 safelists…and 0 subscribers.

So far safelists have been my lowest performing group of the 3 traffic sources.

Last week I had 34 visits total, but still 0 subscribers so I wouldn't consider this week much of a change. Though I did get a whopping 3 visits from I Post Ad, up from 0 last week =P

Traffic Sources

These, as expected, have been my highest source of traffic. Conversions however are a different story. My alexa ranking has shot up because of this, but that's about it.

I missed quite a few days of surfing for an hour last week, as it's been hard to force myself to do this 'busy work' with the results I've been getting. For the 4th week of my study, I'm going to hit it hard so I can end my test with a bang.

Let's check the stats:

If you recall from last week I changed out Traffic Taxis for Traffic Punk to get the extra bonus from the three exchanges that I'm upgraded with. As you can see those are the ones that have been sending me the bulk of my traffic. This is a good reminder to me too that I need to assign credits to my sites to be sure that they actually get visits =)

Despite the fact that I didn't get around to surfing the free exchanges so much I only had 400 less visits. But I also went down from 5 subscribers to 3. Again these conversion numbers are so low that it's making it really hard to test anything and get worthwhile results. This week I'm making it a goal to surf a little more so we'll see if that helps.

List Builder Sites

I believe this weeks stats from my list mailings are from 2 mailings to each of the sites lists. That means I emailed 12,000 with my offer, so let's see what happened.

So even though I had one less mailing this week it seems the end result stayed about the same. I got a little less traffic from Viral URL from the week before, and a little more from List Joe. As you can see Viral URL's conversion rate is much higher, but that's mostly because List Joe gives an incentive to click their links. 

I believe I get my next mailing on friday, then monday, so again I'll only have 2 mailings to show results for in the next update.

Total Subscribers this week: 9 down from 11 last week.

Next week's update will be the last in this case study series, then I'll be posting my review of these traffic source and give you my opinion of them. I'll also be sharing the next route that I'm going to take with my business.

Have a great day!

Tyson