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

May 12 – May 18

This post will be the results of Week 4 of my Crappy Traffic Case Study – A quest to see if I could get results from "crappy traffic." I set out this case study with high hopes that something could be gleaned from these traffic sources, but truthfully after looking at my results, they do seem just a little…crappy.

Let's dive right in and see if anything changed with the different traffic sources I was using. First up, safelists.

Safelists

This whole week I did pretty good sending out my email blasts every day to the various safelists that I am signed up to. Let's see how they did:

As you can see, again I didn't even get 1 subscriber, and out of all 4 safelists I got a whopping 33 visits to my squeeze page. This could be that my whole marketing process isn't tuned perfectly, but my squeeze page usually converts at 40%. So who's to say? Let's keep going…

Traffic Exchanges

While this traffic method has spiked my traffic stats, they haven't done much for my conversions or conversion rates for that matter. I think I got 4 or 5 good surfing days in this week, so it wasn't every day, but close enough. Let's see how my traffic and conversions were this week.

Well…for me anyway, this last week definitely sealed the deal. Traffic exchanges are NOT a method that I will use in my business. Almost 3000 visits to my splash pages and not 1 new subscriber. This final week seems to be gearing up to be my worst yet =P I think the list builder sites are the only method that gave me some results this week, let's see…

List Builders

As a quick reminder, I previously signed up with 2 different list builder sites, List Joe and Viral URL. I took the one time offer upgrade on each so I could email 3000 people every 3 days at each site. This week I got 2 mailings out, so technically I sent 12,000 emails this week. Here are the results:

Visits were down quite a bit at List Joe this week, while visits were up at ViralURL. Listjoe of course is set up to give people credits when they click your link, so that is the reason for the 0% conversion rate. Those people who clicked my link likely just wanted to get credits, not see my site.

Viral URL, however, seems to convert fairly well, at 33% this week. The only problem is…it is extremely unresponsive. If I sent an email to 6000 people I would be very concerned if I only got 15 to clickthrough on my link. But at least they are real people who show interest.

Wrap up

Well as you can see this final week was the one that showed the least results out of my whole case study.

Tomorrow I plan on posting a final review that shares the total visits, subscribers, and conversion rates from all the traffic methods I used over the case study month. I'll also share my opinion of these traffic sources and where I plan on heading next with my business.

See you then!

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

Well another week has gone by and it's time to update the progress I'm having with the 3 'crappy' traffic sources: safelists, traffic exchanges, and list builder sites. This is the second update after 2 weeks of using these traffic sources. So 2 more weeks to go before I tally up all the results and see how they did for me. If you want to read the initial case study post, check it out here: Crappy Traffic Case Study.

So I left off last week with less than stellar results, so let's see if anything has improved with my testing different pages. Here's the scoop:

Traffic Source #1: Safelists

I've got to admit that I'm not really into the whole safelist marketing thing. I can't really figure out why it's hard for me to keep consistent, but I find that I have a hard time logging in and sending my ad out every day.

So I'm making it a goal this week to login and send out my ad EVERY DAY for the following week, to see if diligence will get me some better results.

So over the last week I got 3 less visits than the previous week, and 0 subscribers compared to 3 last week. Again, these safelists are free to join (with the exception of Ipostad, which ironically has the least results) so the only thing I'm really losing is time. So if I can get these to work for me, it's free advertising.

Traffic Source#2: Traffic Exchanges

The traffic exchanges are definitely bringing in the bulk of my traffic. But as expected they don't have the best conversion rates. However, since the traffic is so cheap and easily generated, any results at all are worth noting. You'll also notice that I added in a new exchange called Traffic Taxis. I did that on monday in order to get extra credits for surfing the 'top 5.'

Let's take a look at how we did this week:

This week my visits from traffic exchanges were up by 579 and I got 5 new subscribers as opposed to 3 during week 1. So my results actually went up by 66%! If I could manage this every week it'd definitely be worth it, but we'll see about that…

I got some banner ads created yesterday, so we'll see if they bring some extra traffic and subscribers too.

Traffic Source #3: List Builder Sites

This week I have 3 mailings to show results for, though one went out last night so it will probably bring some more visits today and tomorrow. Anyway, technically I was able to send an email to 18,000 people this week through these two sites, lets see how they did:

This week my visits were down slightly, but my results doubled. I'm going to keep trying different subject lines and body copy to see if I can find a winning combination. Since these emailings are somewhat like safelists, the email subject matters immensely.

I've been doing my best to employ the Zeigarnik Effect in my emails, which may be the reason for the slight increase in response. I'm fully convinced that mixing curiosity with an unanswered question will pull the best results, but it's just a matter of me doing it right.

Total Subscribers this week: 11 up 22% from last week.

Stay tuned to see if I can keep increasing my response rates! Feel free to grab the RSS feed if you haven't already.

Have a great day,
Tyson
 

Ever wondered if there's any money to be made with all the so-called "crappy" traffic there is out there?

I'm talking about safelists, traffic exchanges, list builder sites, FFA sites, etc

I know many marketers stray away from this kind of traffic because it's seen as worthless and not worth devoting any time to. In large part, I've taken this same stance, but now I'm going to put it to the test.

Over the next 30 days, I'm going to test the heck out of all these "crappy" traffic sources. And I would challenge you to come along for the ride!

Here's my plan:

I'm going to be testing 3 main sources of "crappy" traffic.

1. Safelists – These are double opt-in email lists where you get to blast out tons of emails to thousands or millions of inboxes. Does anyone ever read these things? Let's find out.
2. Traffic Exchanges – This is where you view other sites to get your site seen by others. The catch is that your visitors are just viewing your site to get their site shown, they aren't really interested in what you have to offer. So it's my job to catch their attention and grab the opt-in.
3. List builder sites – You've heard about them before, ListJoe, Listdotcom, ListBandit, ViralUrl, etc. You sign up for a free account and build your list by referring others to the sites.

I'll be updating my blog with the results I get roughly once every few days or week.

Now I know that these types of advertising get put down a lot. But think about this…Who is using these types of traffic generation methods? Mostly newer marketers trying to get started right? What better prospects can you target?

They aren't experienced marketers who know everything, and they aren't just discovering the internet and know nothing either. The people that use these things are the perfect target market, it's just a matter of getting their attention.

So here's the gameplan:

THE OFFER

My whole goal with this case study is to build my list. To get the opt-in, I am giving away my ebook, "13 Profit-Killing Squeeze Page Blunders" as seen in the sidebar of my blog.

Since the people that use these types of advertising are looking to get traffic or to get more out of their current traffic, I think this is a pretty good fit.

I've got a simple squeeze page that I'm sending traffic to. For the traffic exchanges I am using a combination of squeeze/splash pages since they need to get attention quick.

After opting-in to my list, new subscribers are taken to a one-time-offer where they can buy a huge package of MRR and PLR products at a super-discounted price. This is where initial costs will be made up.

THE TRAFFIC PLAN

Source #1 – Safelists:

So far I've joined 3 safelists for free:

1. Your Ad Blaster
   
2. Bulk List
   
3. Ad Tactics
   

And paid to join one safelist submitter: I Post Ad

I'm using these every day to blast out an email to their lists. To join Ipostad it's only $12.95/ month so 1 sale will more than make up for it.

Source #2 – Traffic Exchanges:

Traffic exchanges are a little more involved than safelists. To get the most out of them you really need to spend some time everyday to earn credits and get your ad shown.

This is the controversial part…is it worth spending the time surfing these things to get the traffic from them? Well that's what I plan to find out…

I've found 8 traffic exchanges that have a high member count and compliment each other pretty well. In fact, by surfing some of them at the same time you can get bonuses across all of them. So this seems to be the best way to earn credits fast.

Here's the list that I joined:

• I Love Hits
  
• Traffic Splash
  
• Dragon Surf
  
• StartXChange
  
• Traffic Punk
  
• Traffic Witch
  
• Hit 2 Hit
  
• Easy Hits 4 U
  

I've found that I can surf all of these at the same time and keep up with the timers fairly well.

I upgraded my account with the one time offers at I Love Hits, Traffic Splash, and StartXChange. These had the best deals and will give me instant credits to get my site shown, as well as banners and text links (which I will be testing down the road). Plus they make my surfing time much more effective.

My plan is to surf these 8 exchanges every day for about an hour or so. This should provide a constant stream of visitors to my splash pages.

Right now I'm testing two different splash pages, one with an opt-in box, and one with a link to my squeeze page. We'll see which one performs better. Check em out below.

1. Page with link: http://tyson-faulkner.com/splash.html
2. Page with opt-in box: http://tyson-faulkner.com/splash1.html

Source #3 – List Builder Sites

These sites work a little differently, and are basically a glorified safelist. The members of these sites get much less email from the sites so they are more targeted and more likely to perform better. The only problem with these sites is that if you join for free you can't really email anyone because you haven't built a downline yet.

To get around this little problem, I did a little research and found two sites that are very popular, and decided to take the one time offer upgrade in each of them.

The two list sites I joined are:

• List Joe
  
• Viral URL
  

By upgrading my account, I am allowed to send out an email to 3000 of their members (each) every three days, so in one month I will be able to reach 60,000 people between the two sites.

I think the biggest key to using these types of traffic is testing everything. And that's exactly what I plan to do so I can cut the losers and work on the winners.

So that's the plan!

I'll be testing different emails, subject lines, landing pages, throughout the month, and explaining the results I get here on my blog. So keep updated and we'll see how it goes!

If you have any questions or comments feel free to leave a comment and let me know.

-Tyson