Tyson-Faulkner.com
Online Marketing Training

So far I've tested my three crappy traffic methods for roughly 30 days, so it's time to wrap it up and post my final results. I've been testing traffic exchanges, list builder sites, and safelists to see if they are a viable means to grow my business.

Here's the total results after 4 weeks of crappy traffic:

Safelists:

Safelists have been my least effective form of traffic, averaging only 4-5 visits per day over the course of the month. They also converted extremely low, at 2.2% for a free giveaway.

I personally think safelists are for the most part dead because of all the automation and software that has come out to manage email accounts. For example, even though I was a member of all four of these sites for a whole month, the only emails I personally saw were the ones from the admin. The rest went out to email accounts that I hardly ever check or are automatically cleaned every day.

I suspected that it'd be hard to get anyone's attention using these things, and that seems to be the case. I don't believe that I will be pursuing safelist advertising any further in my business.

Traffic Exchanges:

Traffic exchanges are by far the biggest source of traffic that I've gotten from any of the 3 sources. The conversion rate of the traffic, however, is a different story. An overall .08% conversion rate on a free offer. Traffic exchanges were also my biggest time sink as well. I upgraded in 3 of the exchanges, which got me more visits, but as you can see it didn't do too much in the way of results.

On most days, I was spending an hour surfing 6-8 of these at a time, which I can now put to better use. But I think this is the main reason why these just don't work anymore (if they used to, I dunno). Today, with tabbed browsing available in most all browsers, I could have one window open and just plow through sites without even glancing at them. I can only assume the other people surfing these sites are doing the same thing.

List Builder Sites:

I would have to say that these list builder sites were the best out of the 3 traffic sources. They brought a little traffic, but it definitely converted the best. The only problem was the steep price to pay to be able to send emails out to their lists. And even then, the traffic and conversions were pretty poor.

One of the reasons these sites didn't convert real well for me could have been my offer. I'm not sure about ViralURL but ListJoe is comprised mostly of new marketers, and my ebook about squeeze pages could have been a little advanced for them. 

I would venture a guess to say that these type of sites might bring some decent traffic and opt-ins if they are kept up to date well and you have a great product for newbies to giveaway.

The Wrap Up

Well there you have it, the results from 30 days of testing 3 different crappy traffic sources. It was certainly a learning experience for me, as I now have a greater knowledge of what will and won't work for my business. From here on out, I won't be using any of these 3 traffic sources to build my business further.

Here's my biggest problem with these types of traffic methods: They aren't adding anything of value to the internet. It's just people moving back and forth exchanging pageviews and emails. So instead of spending my time surfing and trading views, I'm going to focus on content marketing from here onward.

This means that I'll be spending much more time writing and creating videos than thinking up clever email subjects that will draw people's attention and surfing the web. I think it will help my blog grow, as well as draw in new readers that are looking for information about building an online business.

I hope you enjoyed the case study, have a great weekend!

Tyson