Traffic On The Cheap
Apr 20, 2007 Business & Marketing
Lately I’ve been finding myself missing the days of SurfWake.com, a popular manual traffic exchange that I once owned (and is now defunct). It was a good supply of constant, cheap traffic. When you have a surplus of visitors in the millions each month you find ways to monetize that traffic no matter what the quality. In my database there were over 100,000 members and I’d say a good 30% of them were active at any given moment. It was great to be an exchange owner whenever a hot new marketing site or affiliate program rolled out. I’d just use my leftover inventory and promote the new program to the point of infiltration. Nowadays when a new program rolls out and I need instant an instant boost, I have to rely on other brokers to buy website traffic.
So here’s the news: I partnered up with a friend in the industry and we decided to have another go at the traffic game. We’re in the planning stages of developing a unique traffic exchange now but will launch in the next month or so.
What is interesting is that I went back into my records and found a lot of my other accounts on traffic exchanges that are still enabled. Back in the early day of manual surf sites, owners would often swap left over inventory with other manual surf sites in attempts to boost each others memberships in a co-op effort. It appears that the residual effects of these previous swaps have been sending thousands, perhaps millions of impressions to a bunch of URLs that are no longer around. I’m in the middle of recovering a few of these accounts and salvaging any remainder traffic so I have some inventory to launch my new network.
This site will be a part-time effort. That’s the great thing about traffic exchanges. Once they are setup, they are very easy to maintain. I know I’ll be spending a lot of evenings and weekends enhancing the scripts with my partner, but for the most part our dev time will focus on new features and not on tedious tasks.
I’m pretty excited about this new effort. I’ve been thinking about it for a long time before I was approached with the offer. So as soon as I heard that my friend wanted to try this business out, I was primed and ready to jump in.
Want to know when we launch our new network? There are two ways to get notified as soon as we do launch it. The first way is this blog. Subscribe to my RSS feed and watch for the announcement. The second way is to subscribe to the industry watchdog newsletter at HitExchangeNews. We’ll be either taking out an ad or doing an interview there once our site is out of beta. Either way, stay tuned and watch for the big update!
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