A couple times a week I get asked the same questions about traffic trading. It seems everyone has the same trouble, they can multiply the traffic but they cant make any money. So I am going to give some pointers in this area for you newbies who just started a trade site and cant understand why your pockets aren't full of cash after you first traffic buy.
First of all...Why Trade?
Well the math is easy. Lets say you have a site getting 100 visitors a day. If you sent all of them to site B and they sent 100 back you would have seen 200 a day. If you then send those visitors to site C and site C send back 100 you now have 300.
Now the math above is best case scenario of course just meant as an example. But with a good trade list you could easily turn that 100 a day into 300 or 500 each day. Meaning your site has more daily uv, and even though your page views drop from 5 to 2.5 you still get more page views.
I just started a trade site and bought 10.00 from Funklicks why am I not making any money?
For starters dont put all your eggs in one advertiser basket
You will never make your money back if you only use one ad company. Lets say you build a site, and you slap on your basic 3 adsense banners. Even if you get a 9% click through rate you are going to lose money. Why? Because your not showing enough ads thats why.
There is a delicate balance between too many ads, and not enough. You need to monetize your site any which way you can. use every inch of real estate you can get away with for ads. Remember if your trading traffic your not worried so much that you user may never come back to you site, your actually TRYING to make them leave!
If they leave through an ad click you get paid, if they leave through a game you get another visitor from a partner site. Giving your visitors a lot of outs is the only way you will be successful.
So Who Should I use for Advertising?
This is something you will only learn through trial and error. I like Adsense, VCM, CPMstar, VideoEgg, and a few others. BUT each persons site is different, and users will respond differently to ads on your site vs. ads on mine. So trial and error. Try a new ad company for a week or two and if its good, keep it, if it sucks replace it.
You can believe or disbelieve me, I started my first arcade in April of 08 with 100 bucks and no clue. through trial and error, and making some very helpful friends from this very forum I created in a year and a half a small network of sites that gives me profits in the x,xxx range. HOWEVER in the beginning I never took money out of my arcade fund, I reinvested every penny. It took me 6 months to get my first adsense check, it was for 110 dollars, now I always get a monthly payment from adsense.
So what does that mean?
That means this is actually going to be a little work. You cant just buy a script, slap some games on it, sign up to some trade sites, and then by the traffic and sit back. you will be constantly checking stats for cheaters, checking ad revenues to make sure they are steady, and contacting other website owners to discuss new ideas. UNLESS you have pockets full of cash to start with, in which case dont start an arcade.
OK so how much money should I spend on traffic?
If your just starting out be reasonable, your still in test mode. Make small purchases. Funklicks has a 10.00 click package you can buy as do many other banner exchanges that sell traffic. If you spend a 1000 dollars on a brand new site in just traffic alone, prepare yourself for aa 500 dollar loss. Once you get your ad networks in place and are profiting start increasing your advertising budget each month as long as you are profiting.
I made an early mistake in trading, I pushed too hard to fast and I wasnt ready. I spent one of the larger months of traffic only breaking even because I wasnt ready with the right ad networks. I was making money spending 20.00 a day on traffic, so one day I spent 100 dollars on traffic, and ended up losing money.
Traffic trading when you start out is practically gambling in my opinion. Dont bet what you cant afford to lose. If you spend your rent money on your arcade, you'll probably be homeless soon.
Who should I buy traffic from?
If I just had a nickel for every time someone asks me this...
You should try each and every source you can find that offers decent traffic at a reasonable cost. Try the minimum purchase. Never dive into a new traffic source with you whole wallet behind you. Sometimes over the course of weeks the traffic from a particular source will change and start to falter in quality. Sometimes a source that was sending 1000 clicks a day, can now only send 300. As a trader I always keep my eyes open for new traffic sources. You should too.
Yes but do you have any favorite traffic sellers?
Yes and you will too once you have tried them all. Next Question!
So who are the best traders to trade traffic with?
If you have a halfway decent traffic trading script, it will measure conversions for you. Meaning sites that send a visitor who makes an action on your site by playing another game after they are done playing the one they came to play. You can also add your adsense stats to your Google Analytics charts and measure them that way. The higheer the traffic converts the more traffic you should send that trader (provided they can return the amount you send)
My list of people not to trade with is much larger than a list of recommended traders. I try to keep on top of my conversion list and trade more with quality traders. You will be so glad you did in the end.
Why dont the stats match up? I sent example.com 1000 and they say they only got 873, and they only sent me 835 back!!!
You will always see a discrepancy with most any trader, this is because the stat programs are not perfect, sometimes users click the back button or cloce a popup before it loads. Sometimes a site goes down for a couple minutes. Many things could happen. As long as this discrepancy is not more than 20% the trade is most likely a fair one. I set all my trades at 120% to try and make up for this discrepancy in stats.
Any more pointers?
Not really, everything you are going to learn is going to be trial and error. I have had several trade sites so far and each one actually performs differently with different traffic. If you start a trade site and are successful from day one... well kudos to you. It took me many months to learn how to most effectively monetize my own traffic. With the knowledge floating around in these forums its likely you can start showing a profit much much faster than I did.
Just dont give up, and realize that if its worth something its worth working for.
Good Luck, and Happy Trading
Source : http://www.talkarcades.com/traffic-trading-theory/7507-newbies-handbook-traffic-trading.html
First of all...Why Trade?
Well the math is easy. Lets say you have a site getting 100 visitors a day. If you sent all of them to site B and they sent 100 back you would have seen 200 a day. If you then send those visitors to site C and site C send back 100 you now have 300.
Now the math above is best case scenario of course just meant as an example. But with a good trade list you could easily turn that 100 a day into 300 or 500 each day. Meaning your site has more daily uv, and even though your page views drop from 5 to 2.5 you still get more page views.
I just started a trade site and bought 10.00 from Funklicks why am I not making any money?
For starters dont put all your eggs in one advertiser basket
You will never make your money back if you only use one ad company. Lets say you build a site, and you slap on your basic 3 adsense banners. Even if you get a 9% click through rate you are going to lose money. Why? Because your not showing enough ads thats why.
There is a delicate balance between too many ads, and not enough. You need to monetize your site any which way you can. use every inch of real estate you can get away with for ads. Remember if your trading traffic your not worried so much that you user may never come back to you site, your actually TRYING to make them leave!
If they leave through an ad click you get paid, if they leave through a game you get another visitor from a partner site. Giving your visitors a lot of outs is the only way you will be successful.
So Who Should I use for Advertising?
This is something you will only learn through trial and error. I like Adsense, VCM, CPMstar, VideoEgg, and a few others. BUT each persons site is different, and users will respond differently to ads on your site vs. ads on mine. So trial and error. Try a new ad company for a week or two and if its good, keep it, if it sucks replace it.
You can believe or disbelieve me, I started my first arcade in April of 08 with 100 bucks and no clue. through trial and error, and making some very helpful friends from this very forum I created in a year and a half a small network of sites that gives me profits in the x,xxx range. HOWEVER in the beginning I never took money out of my arcade fund, I reinvested every penny. It took me 6 months to get my first adsense check, it was for 110 dollars, now I always get a monthly payment from adsense.
So what does that mean?
That means this is actually going to be a little work. You cant just buy a script, slap some games on it, sign up to some trade sites, and then by the traffic and sit back. you will be constantly checking stats for cheaters, checking ad revenues to make sure they are steady, and contacting other website owners to discuss new ideas. UNLESS you have pockets full of cash to start with, in which case dont start an arcade.
OK so how much money should I spend on traffic?
If your just starting out be reasonable, your still in test mode. Make small purchases. Funklicks has a 10.00 click package you can buy as do many other banner exchanges that sell traffic. If you spend a 1000 dollars on a brand new site in just traffic alone, prepare yourself for aa 500 dollar loss. Once you get your ad networks in place and are profiting start increasing your advertising budget each month as long as you are profiting.
I made an early mistake in trading, I pushed too hard to fast and I wasnt ready. I spent one of the larger months of traffic only breaking even because I wasnt ready with the right ad networks. I was making money spending 20.00 a day on traffic, so one day I spent 100 dollars on traffic, and ended up losing money.
Traffic trading when you start out is practically gambling in my opinion. Dont bet what you cant afford to lose. If you spend your rent money on your arcade, you'll probably be homeless soon.
Who should I buy traffic from?
If I just had a nickel for every time someone asks me this...
You should try each and every source you can find that offers decent traffic at a reasonable cost. Try the minimum purchase. Never dive into a new traffic source with you whole wallet behind you. Sometimes over the course of weeks the traffic from a particular source will change and start to falter in quality. Sometimes a source that was sending 1000 clicks a day, can now only send 300. As a trader I always keep my eyes open for new traffic sources. You should too.
Yes but do you have any favorite traffic sellers?
Yes and you will too once you have tried them all. Next Question!
So who are the best traders to trade traffic with?
If you have a halfway decent traffic trading script, it will measure conversions for you. Meaning sites that send a visitor who makes an action on your site by playing another game after they are done playing the one they came to play. You can also add your adsense stats to your Google Analytics charts and measure them that way. The higheer the traffic converts the more traffic you should send that trader (provided they can return the amount you send)
My list of people not to trade with is much larger than a list of recommended traders. I try to keep on top of my conversion list and trade more with quality traders. You will be so glad you did in the end.
Why dont the stats match up? I sent example.com 1000 and they say they only got 873, and they only sent me 835 back!!!
You will always see a discrepancy with most any trader, this is because the stat programs are not perfect, sometimes users click the back button or cloce a popup before it loads. Sometimes a site goes down for a couple minutes. Many things could happen. As long as this discrepancy is not more than 20% the trade is most likely a fair one. I set all my trades at 120% to try and make up for this discrepancy in stats.
Any more pointers?
Not really, everything you are going to learn is going to be trial and error. I have had several trade sites so far and each one actually performs differently with different traffic. If you start a trade site and are successful from day one... well kudos to you. It took me many months to learn how to most effectively monetize my own traffic. With the knowledge floating around in these forums its likely you can start showing a profit much much faster than I did.
Just dont give up, and realize that if its worth something its worth working for.
Good Luck, and Happy Trading
Source : http://www.talkarcades.com/traffic-trading-theory/7507-newbies-handbook-traffic-trading.html
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