I have a challenge! I brought this up last night in SWAT Traffic’s training seminar and it seemed to spark quite a bit of discussion. As many people know, the best web sites to promote in the exchanges are either splash pages or lead capture pages.

But what’s even more effective, are pages that stick out like a SORE thumb. Which pages do that the best? The ones with audio and video on them. So I put this as a challenge for all the attendees and I’ll do it again today for all the Hit Exchange News readers.

Place some audio clips on your splash pages / squeeze pages and let’s see how well your numbers improve over the span of two weeks. I know, I know…I hate sound, I don’t like sound, I want to shut it off, I listen to music while surfing, etc etc…..

Guess what, that’s thinking like a consumer and not as a business owner. Yes, we should always put ourselves in our customers shoes to give them the best possible service or product, but we must also use the most effective tools to generate those customers in the first place. Like it or not, stats over the past few years have always proved that adding audio (and now video) to web sites, increases conversion.

But alas, do not take my word for it. test it, and track it yourself. Place a recording of your own voice on your squeeze pages and let’s compare the numbers in two weeks time. The challenge is out there, let’s see who will follow through…

Thank you very much for being a reader of Hit Exchange News and have a wonderful week!

Jon Olson
The Traffic Exchange Guy

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The News

- Hit 2 Hit celebrated it’s 3 year anniversary this past week. The exchange has well over 30,000 registered members these days and continues to place very well on ranked lists like Test Hoopla. I could almost guarantee this program would have more members if it got a complete new site design. For me, it’s the only missing piece of the puzzle.

- Where did Traffic Heroes go? After a note from Mr. Morris last night, the site still seems to be offline. The note read that things would be back to normal at 9am this morning, but still no signs of the Traffic Heroes program.

- The Super Surf Script had two big announcements this week, the first being the addition of StartXChange to the team of programs. Tim Linden is one of the pioneers of this industry and one of the most talented programmers in the business. StartXChange screams quality each and every day. It’s great to have him on board. The second big annoucement was….Read the splash page of the week!

- Want to win your own copy of the best selling traffic exchange book on Amazon.com, Hits, Clicks and Misses, (actually, it’s the only published book about T.E.’s on the planet), simply post a comment about this week’s issue of HEN! Congratulations to ‘Sean’ for winning last week. Be sure to send your mailing address to me so that I can ship you a copy (hitexchangenews at yahoo dot com)!

- Splash Page Hall of Fame – Like I alluded to, the Super Surf script got some brand new splash pages added to each of the participating traffic exchanges. Here’s the best part, there’s audio on it =) Note: Why do I focus on splash pages every week? Simple, you MUST be using them in the traffic exchanges to get results. Get a custom made splash page by clicking here!

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The Famous Hit Exchange News Top 10 (Disclaimer: These are my top performing exchanges for the past week. Alexa rankings and fancy numbers have nothing to do with how I rank my list. This is based on my results and my opinion, nothing more, nothing less.)

1. Traffic Swarm
2. Dragon Surf
3. Traffic Splash
4. Easy Hits 4 U
5. TS 25
6. StartXChange
7. Traffic At The Races
8. Lords of Traffic
9. Advertising Know How
10. Boot Scootin Traffic

Note: Analysis and Tracking by Hits Connect – The Official Link Tracking Service of Hit Exchange News! Sign up today and get your 30% Discount!

Question: Hey Jon, how come I Love Hits, SWAT Traffic and Click Crazey are never on the top 10 list? Since I own them, I feel it would be a conflict of interest to place it on any of my rankings. (But we all know how great they are anyways lol)

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Deep Thoughts – Jon’s Weekly Rambling

Thinking Like A Business Owner Helps Your Customers

Disclaimer goes here! I love my traffic exchanges, I love the people I meet, and I will go to war for my members. I try to put the best possible product I can in front of them, day in and day out. And while I maintain that I am still a traffic exchange surfer (I am, I still surf hours every day and have the carpal tunnel to prove it) I had a major revelation about 3 years ago at my first marketing seminar in Charlotte North Carolina.

I met a guy named Gary Ambrose at this event, you may have heard of him. He’s one of those ‘big guys’ you hear about all the time. Gary and I had a chance to chit chat one afternoon and he basically laid it on the line for me. He showed me how my thinking was wrong when it came to I Love Hits and more importantly, steps I could use to improve my business.

Without getting into huge details, the message in the chit chat was simple. Start treating I Love Hits like a business and make money from it. Simple enough right? Well it wasn’t, because I was trapped in the ‘non-program owner’ way of thinking. I didn’t concentrate and look for new ways to build my income from the massive potential which was I Love Hits. I was happy surfing, selling a few ad packages every day and gleefully skipping along.

Once my mentality shifted, I started to double, even triple my income by using this thought process. The more money this program makes, the better improvements I can make for my members and the better results they will get. It works and there isn’t an ebook on the planet that will help you with it, it has to come from your desire to change your business.

Again, I am still a traffic exchange surfer and always have ideas on how to improve the surfing experience. But also, I am now thinking on how to increase my income to better my traffic exchanges. Over 500 new members are joining I Love Hits every single week, and while there are many factors to this continued growth, it does start from Charlotte, Mr. Ambrose and a wake up call to a fledgling traffic exchange owner. Think like a business owner, and improve your service for your valued members!

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Things That Make You Go Hmmm…

- Why is it that ‘Freebie Force’ costs 9.95 a month?

- I’ve been checking out my best friend’s forum lately, and apparently people really don’t like me. Hmmm, It must be because I wrote SOAR instead of SORE a few weeks ago.

- Oh yeah….Football season starts today! Whoooo hoooooo.

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Related posts

• Issue 288 – Three Cheers For Creativity (8)
• Issue 286 – Surfing With A Purpose To Build Traffic Exchange Communities (9)
• Issue 284 – Are The Traffic Exchanges Too Complicated? (3)
• Issue 303 – New To Traffic Exchanges? Here’s Your First Checklist… (17)
• Issue 302 – Two Of The Best Weeks In Traffic Exchange Land… (6)

Last week was stressful to say the least. I got home on Tuesday night and had a text message from my host that Hit Exchange News and everything on that server was lost completely and could not be retrieved. Not a problem right? I should have just sent in my back ups and presto, site restored.

Not so fast Turbo! Jon relied on a script that he bought like 3 years ago that did automatic back ups. Guess I should have been paying attention because the silly thing hadn’t been working for like a year. Talk about a slice of humble pie!

Long story short, thanks to the amazing effort of Rich Taylor and the best host in the traffic exchange industry Jon Atwood of Zoot Host, the entire server and database has been restored.

Here’s a lesson to be had…Do weekly back ups, if not daily back ups of all your web sites. And even though you assume that your site is being backed up, get into the habit of doing one yourself!

Have a great week and thanks very much for being a reader of Hit Exchange News!

Jon Olson
The Traffic Exchange Guy

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The News

- I Love Hits and S.W.A.T. Traffic got a brand new blog this past week and it’s official, both exchanges will now deliver their weekly news on the ILH / SWAT Blog. It’s been a long time coming but I am thrilled with the turn out. I really hope everyone enjoys the new look and feel of the newsletters and this format was chosen because almost 70% of ILH / SWAT members voted to have a blog to read the news!

- Traffic Era released their ‘Club’ upgrade option to 100 of their members this week. It has been promoted in their system since the exchange launched months ago that this was coming, it’s still debatable if a $50 a month upgrade can sustain itself but it’s a good deal for people that spend a ton on advertising at the program.

- New Way 2 Surf is fulfilling it’s promise of being much more than just a ‘hover exchange’. While other ‘hover surfs’ have just added the ability to use the technology, the trail blazers of hover surfing have added a new ‘Create Your Squeeze Page’ feature that allows members to create attention grabbing squeeze pages within the system. Thumbs up from me for another great addition!

- Congratulations to ‘Crystal Martin’ for winning last week’s copy of Hits, Clicks and Misses. Want to win your own copy of the best selling traffic exchange book on Amazon.com (actually, it’s the only published book about T.E.’s on the planet), simply post a comment about this week’s issue of HEN!

- Splash Page Hall of Fame – Blue Surf is having a massive ‘surf promotion’ for the next few weeks and this splash page is sure to grab even more attention from the surfers! Note: Why do I focus on splash pages every week? Simple, you MUST be using them in the traffic exchanges to get results. Get a custom made splash page by clicking here!

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The Famous Hit Exchange News Top 10 (Disclaimer: These are my top performing exchanges for the past week. Alexa rankings and fancy numbers have nothing to do with how I rank my list. This is based on my results and my opinion, nothing more, nothing less.)

1. Dragon Surf
2. Traffic Splash
3. Traffic At The Races
4. Traffic Era
5. Easy Hits 4 U
6. Max Traffic Pro
7. Royal Surf
8. Traffic Swarm
9.Hit Safari
10. StartXChange

Note: Analysis and Tracking by Hits Connect – The Official Link Tracking Service of Hit Exchange News! Sign up today and get your 30% Discount!

Question: Hey Jon, how come I Love Hits, SWAT Traffic and Click Crazey are never on the top 10 list? Since I own them, I feel it would be a conflict of interest to place it on any of my rankings. (But we all know how great they are anyways lol)

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Deep Thoughts – Jon’s Weekly Rambling

How Much Does Jon Love The Web 2.0 Stuff?

I have to admit something, I’m as stubborn as a mule. Especially when it comes to this entire Web 2.0 stuff. I mean take a look at this blog for example, I knew that ‘blogs’ have been extremely popular for years, heck I remember my friend Rich Taylor talking to me about them in early 2003. On top of that, I had the guru of all Word Press blogs, Mike Paetzold BANG it into my head that I should be in a blog environment for all my newsletters. Well….years later it finally sunk in.

User generated content is essentially what 2.0 means, of course there are other things in the mix but basically the ‘community’ decides what the content will be. So in a nutshell, I guess you could say that the traffic exchanges are a form of Web 2.0. Oh wow, I can hear the nay sayers at the Warrior Forum already.

So I took the plunge these past few weeks and joined everything from Twitter to Facebook and even got a brand spanking new blog for I Love Hits and SWAT Traffic. So have I embraced this 2.0 stuff? Absolutely! And I do now feel for the first time in years, that this can do huge things for your business. Embrace it, it’s scary at first but well worth the learning curve!

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Special Guest Article From Soren Jordansen

I recently did a survey of my Dragon Surf members. While the main purpose was to get some feedback that will allow me to continue to improve Dragon Surf, I also asked some more general questions.

The results were quite interesting – in fact so interesting that I felt I had to share them with loyal HEN readers like you, along with my comments, conclusions and tips.

What Kind Of Internet Connection Are You On?
This one really surprised me, I thought a lot of people were still on dial up connections, as it turned out only 4% are. DSL and Cable connections made up 45% and 40% respectively.

So what did that tell us? It’s probably not that important to have dial up users in mind when you design your pages – however due to the nature of traffic exchanges you still want make your pages load lightning fast, after all you are probably on a 10-15 second timer and if you are lucky you have 3-5 seconds to catch people’s attention.

What Browser Are You Using?
No real surprise here. Internet Explorer may be the biggest browser world wide, but in the TE world Firefox wins. The score was almost 60/40 in Firefox’s favour with all other browsers fighting over scraps.

So, what can we take away here? First of all it’s extremely important that you make sure your pages work (and look good) in both Firefox and IE. Also keep in mind that a lot of Firefox users may be blocking scripts on your pages, so make sure you page makes sense even if the scripts are blocked. I’m not saying you should not use scripts, audio, video etc., you should consider using them because they usually increase conversion (remember to test and track).

Are You Tracking Your Results (Conversion Rates) On Dragon Surf?
Now this one was not surprising, but scary nonetheless. Only 24% are tracking their conversion rates, 37% are just tracking number of hits and a whopping 39% are not tracking their TE campaign at all. And here’s the fun part, a large proportion of the people who said they aren’t tracking then proceeded to say they got a better or worse conversion rate at Dragon Surf than at other exchanges.

You need to track your conversion rates… period. How else would you know if you are getting a good return from the hours you spend surfing or the money you spend at given traffic exchange? How else would you know whether you need to make changes to your pages and campaigns – Tracking your conversion rates, and taking action to improve them, is ultimately what separates successful surfers from the wannabees.

Are You Using Dragon Surf To Capture Leads For Your Own Email List?
53% said no, 23% said sometimes, and only 24% are using Dragon Surf to build a list. As with the tracking these numbers are truly scary. There is absolutely no denying that the most effective and profitable way to build an internet marketing business, is to always focus on building the list and then make the sales on the backend. Get people on your list first and then sent them to whatever it is you want them to join or buy. This way you can market to them over again (creating your own traffic on demand) – if you are not build your list you are just building someone else’s list – Yep that can be profitable but it’s a lot harder, you get stuck in a rut where the same amount of work creates the same amount of sales and very rarely will you be able to scale that up to a full time income.

Are You Promoting Your Own Splash- Or Squeeze Page On Dragon Surf?
The answers here were a bit more encouraging. 47% are promoting their own splash pages while the rest are stuck with a generic affiliate pages.

You really need to use your own attention grabbing splash page on the exchanges. You need to brand yourself and in order to get results you need to stick out as a sore thumb as
Jon usually puts in – a generic affiliate page will very rarely get you any results at all.

Side note: since more and more people are catching on to the splash page idea, your page needs to be even better than 1-2 years ago. The $15-$20 bucks it will cost you to get one professionally done is likely money very well spent.

And Now For The Golden Nuggets…

As you can there are still a large number of people who don’t know how to (or don’t know why they should):

* Get their own splash page
* Track their conversion rates
* Build a list

And with traffic exchanges being what they are, hundreds and even thousands of newbies are coming in every day – It’s a safe bet to assume that they don’t know about this either.

Fortunately that presents an unique opportunity for you. You can set yourself up as an expert and teach other surfers how to do all this, by…

1. Write a short report, make some tutorial videos etc. and the promote them on a squeeze page on the exchanges. You build a list, and by being the expert that teaches them how to use traffic exchanges you build an instant relationship with them. You can now send them to recommended resources and you have a list you can market to over and over again.

2. Take it one step further and create a product and/or service that will teach them how to do all or some of the things above. Even better create something that will hand it to them on a silver platter.

I know there are already products, services and newsletters out there doing this very thing – but judging from my survey stats this is still an untapped market, ripe for picking.

*** Note – Soren is the owner of Dragon Surf and one of the best guys I have met in this business. He has in just over a year developed one of the strongest performing traffic exchanges online and released some of the best products this industry has seen.

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Things That Make You Go Hmmm…

- See those cool little ‘plug buttons’ on each issue of Hit Exchange News? Don’t be afraid to click them, it helps us spread the word about traffic exchanges! =)

- I need friends! Be sure to add me as a friend on both Twitter and Facebook!

- I Love Hits has something big about to be released…

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StartXchange Owner Tim Linden is giving away 20,000 hits to a random subscriber of his blog! Subscribe by Sunday May 25th below!

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Related posts

• Issue 300 – Yup, That Means 300 Issues Of Hit Exchange News Since 2003… (16)
• Issue 297 – Social Networking On The Traffic Exchanges. Something You Should Be Doing More Of… (8)
• Issue 287 – The Longest Seven Days In Traffic Exchange History (10)
• Issue 285 – A Month Later…Hit Exchange News Is Back! (7)
• Issue 284 – Are The Traffic Exchanges Too Complicated? (3)