My Experiences and Questions
 

Happy Christmas to everyone here.

Since I started in this business back in july I can say this has been a huge learning curve and an amazing amount of work, as well as somewhat addicitive.

When starting i was full speed ahead with Free Sites, but have seen minimal sales through these. I am not really sure why as i keep reading that FS are the way to go to make cash, but for me it has not been. I have tried a few different approaches with them, get a reasonable amount of clicks but just can't get the conversions.

So i decided that as i was getting somewhat pissed off with getting no where i would try and build up my fake TGP. Now this is where i have seen the sales coming, it's rolling in by the thousands but for me I can see that if i keep building and improving the revenues will keep coming. I have made a number of different niches and on my second domain have used some of the same niches, but promoted a few different sponsors. First question; Is this what is called mirroring of sites?

I also track all my banner clicks and have played with moving them around, adjusting the text with the ads until i can see what really works for me best. There have been a couple of suprises with Sponsors i thought would do well that just haven't and some i nearly didn't bother with pulling in sales.

My big concern though is the amount of time spent to grow the traffic and keep an eye on it. I was away for almost two weeks, my computer went down just before i left so had no laptop to take with me, in that time my traffic almost halved.

I also find that i have to return and force a lot more traffic than I am receiving. It seems like a "damned if you and damned if you dont" situation - i give away too much traffic and most likely lose sales, i don't give enough and the traffic slows down. What return rate do most of you guys use as i have found 150% gives me the best way of keeping the traffic coming in. However not all my sites have that kind of prod so i run into problems there and find i spend a lot of time everyday checking on what traffic has been sent and received.

It also has me somewhat baffled that for most trades when you sign up you send traffic and get nothing back. This is then dead traffic for me, how is the best way to get trades going. As often as i can i do try and send an ICQ to the webmaster to intorduce myself and let them know if it's a new site etc. Very few responses come back, I realise that we are all very busy, is this just becasue i am still fairly new in the game and my name is known as yet or is it the same for everyone?

Silly questions: Why do a lot of the sites not want a subdomain, but are ok with a second level site?
Why do a number of the sites say they will only trade with a particular niche, but i have seen them trading with a similar niche e.g. Ass niche and fat niche, I am always worried about being blacklisted for signing up to the wrong niche - should i be so worried if i already see them trading with these other niches?

Search Engines: Google I have found is extremely up and down, i have had good returns from Google at times but other times there is nothing. Yahoo seems to be the most consistent pulling in regular clicks, but as a percentage of traffic it is not as high as i would like it to be. I have even experimented with a site where i force no traffic and have tried to build it with relevant words that persons would search for, such as using a models name. That site gets very little traffic and because there is no script involved it took a lot of time to build.

I have been paying INeedHits.com to ensure that I am listed on search engines, is this really worth the time and money or would the search engines be picking the site up anyway?

When i started out i was actually tracking all the countires i was getting hits from (just from a curiosity point of view) - I was able to do this while i was at work without all the firewalls going crazy, but have now given up on that as there are only a few countries left).

I have been toying with the idea of Blogs, but surely these need alomost daily updates and are therefore pretty time consuming. Do they tend to pull in good clicks?

Should i keep building TGP's with a few Freesites here and there? Or is time i started to look at creating a LL or blog?

I am still getting some approvals for Freesites that were submitted 3 months ago - is this normal?

On a final note is pretty amazing what some people get off to, I guess thats why the world is such a wonderful place - we are all so different.

Enjoy your holidays ( and the In-laws if you have them over!!)

Shit that was longer than i had intended - i hope i haven't sent anyone to sleep!

Very interesting read samandian. It's always great to read about other peoples experience.

I think that you are doing the right thing. You are experimenting with different stuff.

You probably have read abouth how some things work for some webmasters and for some just don't. This is something I've been reading since last century. It's a general rule.

Things changed over the years. Experimenting seven years ago produced almost immediate results. Today it takes much more time to draw useful conclusions. You need to experiment more and be very patient.

Try everything you can possibly squeeze in your schedule. Don't change things that work.

I don't own a TGP so I can't tell you about trade ratios.

It is quite normal to have free sites listed long after submissions. Some people have huge submission backlogs.

Blog traffic is more productve then LL traffic in my case. On the other hand, it's much harder to drive decent amount SE and aggregator traffic to blogs. Check out blog forum on GG&J to get more info.

As for search engine "helpers", I believe they are pretty useless. SEs do their thing and there is little we can do about it.

Just keep working!

Yeah, that is a bitch with skimmed traffic. You need to have a very reliable server with down times kept to an absolute minimum. As your sites get older they will becomes much more stable.

That is very trade script specific and it depends on your internal prod and the prod of your traders. The is no one perfect setting.At first you really need to check your trades daily. Also a different trade script may help. I use ATX and it adjusts all the return ratios based on historical data.

Yep, getting started is hard. Most established webmasters with big TGPs don't don't want to be bothered by your small trade. You best off trading with TGPs your own size anyhow. If you trade with a big site you will get their shit traffic. The higher in a trades toplist you are the fresher the traffic is returned.

There is also the problem of widespread cheating. You are new, have no established history, and could be running a hit bot.

Don't know...
Generally speaking you trades have a tendency of being successful if you trade within your niche and with similar sites. A text TGP will not trade well with a thumb tgp. A thumb TGP with big thumbs will not trade well with a small thumb TGP. TGPs and MPG don't mix as well as tgp->tgp or mgp -> mpg.

Sometimes different niches can work... a successful trade is a lot like love - you can make a list of probabilities, but there is no exact formula. Traffic trading is a black art. The best way to learn is to do it and develop a "feel" for it.

Also, if you see two completely different sites trading with each other it might be that they are owned by the same webmaster.

Happy New Year to all.

Thanks for the comments posted, this board is so helpful.

I have another question: Could someone clarify what exactly constitutes a CJ site. My understanding was that it was one that never goes to content, however another webmaster was telling me that as i skim i have a CJ site. Also what is a CJ2 site?
I have my skim set at 40% to trades, 60% to content for the sites with better prod i have lowered that to 35% to trades.

thanks again

|yawn|

Just kidding samandian! Great post and very interesting!

As far as free sites go keep at it. It takes a while to make money off them but when you do it keeps coming. A lot of my income is from sites listed many many months ago |thumb Also free sites are a great way to get traffic to your hubs. I link to it on each page of the my free site which brings in sales.

As far as blogs go mine has been up a short time and I'm seeing results already. It is time consuming though, but fun for me!

Can't help you on the rest but good luck to ya|thumb

you were told right, anytime you send a surfer off to another site instead of where he thought he was going, your jerking him around |badidea|
That might even be the reason they call it a circle jerk :D

CJs are something I don't totally understand myself. I guess I could see a Cj that filters traffic and sends it off to a niche but what I don't understand are the 100% skim ones that send you off to another 100% skim CJ. I can't figure any point to this...

Seems highly illogical to me - if I was directed somewhere that I didn't want to go to I would not be inclined to hall out my credit card and pay for some porn|loony|

I've realy enjoyed reading about your experiences !

I'm still at the very beginning and this kind of threds are very helpful for me

Tanks for sharing your experiences with us samandian