Nice...even more feedback
Hiya Emma - I flat out agree 100% with your premise. I've spent the last ten years or so building free traffic out of elbow grease. In this case I'm not looking to point it at our own paysites. It's for a new project so I'm considering alternative traffic sources. When you send purchased traffic to a toplist, do you send it directly to the toplist url or to your own page(s) first? I'm asking since it seems that some traffic sources are choosy about where they'll send the traffic.
Babymaker - That's pretty much what I'm thinking would happen. You stop jerking them around and they decide to hang out for awhile. I agree on not sending purchased traffic direct to sponsor's tour pages. At least not unless you can use a text link which says "Pay $35 And Up EVERY Month for Porn Site Memberships!" to generate the traffic. Otherwise you're correct that it would most likely throw off your ratios. Even worse would be to send skimmed clicks from thumb tgps direct to no-trial join pages with no images on them. Can you say "back button?" (Plus, no sense getting yourself shaved before you can afford it (fuckers)).
Mr. Blue - Thanks for more good comments!
I appreciate the tip about trying to buy text links on established tgps. I thought some traffic sources/brokers get the traffic they resell that way, but going direct might be good too, if they don't already sell their links through a broker.
Your feedback on traffic-out sounds good, since slow is fine if the quality is there. You mentioned FPCTraffic. I signed up there awhile ago when someone mentioned them but looking around inside, all I could see were ways to sell my traffic to them. It was only when I went there today that I looked through the faq page and found a link to where they sell traffic. Sounds like it's worth checking out now I've found my way.
Meanwhile, what doesn't sound so good are the test results from Choker. If you have galleries you've tuned to convert at 1:300 for tgps, then I could see them doing maybe 1:1,200 until you figured out how to retune for whatever kind(s) of traffic you were getting. But 1:5,000 seems excessive.
You said that with choker traffic you "still turned a profit but not enough to keep me interested in trying it." So one question for anyone who cares to answer. How small does the profit have to be before you aren't interested in continuing with something you're testing?
I'm asking because my background before moving to the adult online business included some time spent running a direct response marketing business that I started when I lived in NYC. (David Ogilvy was my hero.) My rules were old school simple. Test, retest, and test again. Basically ABT - Always Be Testing. I had campaigns where the idea was to literally "make a buck" on a test. Any test which made a buck would be retested with bigger numbers to see if the test results held. The target was to refine an offer so you could make it to 1,000 times the number who were offered the first test and make $1,000 instead of one buck. Ideally you'd want to be able to rollout against 1,000,000 times the tested retests and make a million.
So how small a profit do you have to make to consider a test a failure on something like the choker traffic test?
MonsterPartners - Thanks for jumping in.
The points you brought up are definitely on my list of why I'm considering trying some purchased traffic. Sounds like your experiences with choker traffic are good enough that you're continuing with what you're doing there.
Hiya Dr B - Thanks for dropping by!
And thanks again to everyone. Still plenty of room for more good ideas, comments, and warnings, so if you have some, come post 'em.
Simon