William Brower

For me, its getting my ads seen. I am not motivated as much by tournaments, Stickers, or pennies during surf. I am motivated by sites that get results to my ads.

Hey Kenny, Thanks for this group. I have changed the way that I build a list, and maintain my list because of some topics that were talked about by Frank Salinas. I enjoy the way that he describes building a responsive list, and how to maintain it. One factor, is getting people to enjoy reading your mails, and getting them excited to read your next mail. This is one of the goals, which can be attained by many of the methods that you have described earlier. I also think that people follow others who provide three specific things. Entertainment, Information and Worth. If your articles or emails can provide these three, people will notice, and will start paying attention. Great one to think about.

Thanks Jim, This should serve as a reminder for people using any tracking software at all. Don't trust your business and future to any of them, without checking your links yourself. Personally, the only time I have ran into this, was on a site other than bitly. This was a site that is run by one of the largest groups of Traffic "gurus" in the field. They have the largest surf group, and the most following. Their site went offline (with no notice to me), and all of their links started producing blank pages. I am not using this story to defend bitly, but to let people know that they need to be weary of everything. This is their business, and they are the ones who are going to lose out if a site malfunctions or "turns off" some of their links.

Great Group, Great Question Paula, and Great Discussion. I think that a properly used autoresponder, is one of the most important things that you can use. There are some budget alternatives, but the question is..... can you risk it. With your autoresponder being your mainline to your customers, can you risk not having a large percentage of your emails not delivered? Deliverability is very hard to compute, and I am not sure the best method for doing this. I have used almost all of the previously stated ARs, TrafficWave, NPN, Pure Leverage, GetResponse, but there are a couple more that I have used. A free one is called ListWire, and a very low cost one is called ParadoxCash. Again, I do not have the numbers on the reliability of these. But, if you can't afford to use one of the "big boys" (about 10 a month+), then perhaps you should think of using one of the free or low cost ones. Even though this might not be your best choice, it is much better than not using an autoresponder at all.

Jim, there are several free tracking companies. I have used bitly quite a bit, and it gives you a decent break down of your stats. I like to promote free utilities, because there are portions of the marketing world who just can not afford to pay for utilities and services. These people need the free resources, because otherwise they would have nothing. Do I think that bitly is a great service, and the only one that you need? NOPE. Tracking your links is one of the most important things that a marketer can do. Without it, how are you going to evaluate if an exchange is effective or not. Tracking is crucial. Find something that works for you, and that is worth the money. As for any tracking site, you must always check your links. I was using TimTech's tracking site that they had before Trck.me, i believe that it was called TEToolbox. This site stopped working, and all of my links were coming up a blank page. This was happening for quite a while. There were many people using TEToolbox, who did not notice that the site stopped working, and so they were wasting advertising. You must be careful of this. I am not saying that you should not use Trck.me because of TEtoolbox. I am only saying that regardless what tracking that you use, make sure that you test out your own links weekly or daily. Even an industry leaders sites go down, and you must protect your own business.

Hey John, I really appreciate your input. People can not evaluate a traffic exchange based on only the free members benefits. You must also look at what paid members get, and how much it costs. Since you seemed to happily berate my ratio, competitiveness and effectiveness, I would like to refute these accusations. 1. I agree, I don't have a traffic exchange where surfers are clicking 12 thousand times in a single day. But then again, I don't have an exchange where the times that they can click is the only thing that they are worried about. 2. Competitive is all about pricing TOO! I would say that my upgrade price of one dollar a month is VERY competitive compared to your sites 9.95 a month. That is almost One Tenth the price. Plus, my users get a 4 second surf timer and a 1 to 1 ratio. 3. Effective? I do not know how you can claim effectiveness numbers when you have never been at my exchange. Or are you just trolling? I don't usually see you stoop to such levels John, but I am not surprised. Many could say that your site is not effective, as many are only interested in tournaments and surfing competitions, and not advertising. But then again, I am glad there are different viewpoints in marketing, and thank you for bringing all of them up. If anyone else is thinking about evaluating Exchanges for Competitiveness and Effectiveness, please do so for yourself. This is something that you need to do with your own tests and your own advertisements.

Hey, I agree with you about a few things. Any plain surf ratio of 3 to 1 would be very Difficult to advertise on for any length of time. We initially were going to give a 2 to 1 to free Members and a 1 to 1 to all upgraded members. As I stated in another post, this was changed back from .5% ratio to .33% ratio. What was added, was a dynamic ratio that goes up to .99% for free members. I also think that 30% commissions for free members is more than fair, considering you can upgrade to 50% ratio for only a dollar. As for blatant spam, I completely disagree. Spam is multiple unsolicited messages, and not Individual advertisements on a forum designed for that very purpose.

Personally, I have been following Darren for quite a while based on ListSurfing. To me, he was just another of the great owners of traffic sites that I enjoy. Then, everything changed and I found Prosperity Marketing System. I then followed Darren, because I appreciated the value that he gave to the marketing community along with the tools that he gave at the most reasonable price. I was surprised to find that I could join for less than 30 dollars Lifetime, and that I could make more than 20 dollars from each paid referral! This ratio was previously unheard of in marketing systems. I am not even beginning to describe the tools and values from Prosperity. This is the reason that I follow Darren. Matt I have "known" from various traffic sites. Actually, I have never met him, just have seen him around quite a bit. This is one reason branding always helps.

What brings you to this site? Are you following Darren or Matt from previous businesses or sites?

I lied, I apologize. My business partner decided to change from 50% for free members, to .33 ratio up to .99 with dynamic for free members. I did not mean to mislead anyone.

Another question ..... Is lower timers always better? Is there a point at when the timer is too low? Maryanne has a site where you are rewarded credits even before you view the page. In this scenario, how much advertising worth are you getting? Are you better off with a site that keeps people on your page for 10 seconds? I have heard the debate from both sides. Some say that if you don't grab their attention in 3 seconds that you never will, and others say that sometimes it takes longer. I find the sites where the timer counts down only on the active front page to be extremely useful advertising.

Paula, you bring up an interesting debate..... as Sean said "Oh no, not this again..." (paraphrase). There is some VERY different opinions when it comes to surf timers and traffic exchanges. There are some that like short and quick timers, and there are others that are more interested in the surf ratio. Sean brings up a good point about TrafficSwirl, this is one of my favorite TEs because of its level of captivity. You will find that people are more likely to be viewing your page when advertising on Swirl. This is because of the pure number of contests, tournaments and games that John has on his sites. There are people that click up to 11 thousand times in a day. This means that they have little time to multi-tab surf, so your page probably won't end up in a background tab. Having so many competitions and games does have its downfall. As Sean also pointed out, you need to find the middle ground. It does you no good if you are only advertising to people who are looking to win a surfing competition. This is where you just must track your results and see which sites work well for you. ----------------------------------------------------------- For myself, I am a multi-tab surfer. I surf at least 5 sites at a time, and many times more than that. When multi-tab surfing I am not neccesarily worried about the surf timer, but more worried about the ratio. For this reason I want to get as many page views per click as possible. This is one reason that EasyHits4U excels. Sure, it has a 20 second timer, but I only have to click it once to get one page view. I set my tabs up in order, so that I only go to EasyHits4u once every 20 seconds, and I have optimized my workload. There are many people that view multi-tab surfing as bad. What I mean is that they think that you are doing a disservice by not viewing every ad that pops up in every traffic exchange. I am sorry..... I am an advertiser and not a shopper. This is where surfers must determine what they are online for, and maximize their efforts thusly. I also tend to surf Groups of sites at once to get the most bonuses. My favorites is Power Surf Central which is comprised of RealHits4U, DragonSuf, HitsSafari, and Soaring4Traffic. The bonuses for surfing 200 a day for the majority of a month is immense. Also, the bonuses available for other PSC sites is great too. You can often find 100% bonuses when surfing a PSC site along with the main PSC sites. To do this, you need to keep the 4 main sites logged in and surfing to get the bonuses at the other sites, but then you can click the main sites only once every 10 minutes or so to keep them active, while focusing on the sites that have larger bonuses. Often the main PSC sites have good bonuses which makes them worthwhile, but sometimes its only 10% or so. In that case, I tend to focus on the larger bonus sites. If you are going to surf PSC sites, do it consistently for one month, to get the bonus credits. This will give you plenty to use for the coming months.

Jim, what do you mean by "they hit a couple of programs with bitly"? Are you saying that bitly turned off the link shortening for specific programs? This is the first that I have heard of this.

Maria, the problem that people face when starting Internet Marketing, is that they focus on a product that they promote. While this is good to have focus, what you really need to focus on is promoting "Worth". You want your articles to be worthwhile. You want the information contained in them to be worth something. You want the people who read your information to have learned something new. As for making something viral, this is not something that can be done intentionally (in my opinion). If you think of marketing like a youtube video, there are many companies that throw thousands of dollars away trying to make a viral video. The ones that go viral are the ones that are done out of fun, and are unique and entertaining. Just promote yourself. Make Yourself the brand. Only promote things that live up to your requirements. Create worth and be entertaining. People flock to success, but this does NOT mean that you should "Fake it until you Make it". I personally hate that saying, and take offense when people say it in regards to my actions. While I haven't made a million dollars yet, I'm definitely not faking anything, or do I think any part of business should be fake. As for what ads to use on what sites, this takes alot of experience. You must realize that people on TEs are looking for different things than people on social media. This is part of the market research that you must do to stay relevant. Know your audience and know your customers, and develop ways to turn your audience into customers. I would suggest NEVER using the splash pages that come with websites. These are over used, and marketers subconciously ignore them, because they have seen them so many times. Make something original, and you will stand out. Being noticed might not happen initially. Also, I would suggest a marketing system. Darren's marketing system is the one that gave me ultimate faith in his decision making system. This gives you a way to make your ads unique, and relevant. It is a low cost lifetime fee, and you make 90% commissions. This means that it doesn't cost much, and you reap the rewards for the largest volume of your work. You can check it out here: http://bit.ly/willprosp Good Luck, and I hope that you find the answers that you are searching for! William Brower 361-673-3129 CorpusMarketing@yahoo.com

Bitly is nothing but hackers and phishing attempts. You will get a virus if you click on any Bitly or Bit.Ly link. I have seen several links posted using Bitly. An example of one that was used in another discussion is: http://bit.ly/CsHeXp Many people will lead you to believe that BITLY is a scam, that you are going to get viruses. There are founded reasons that they say this, but I believe it to be untrue. It is a fact that people can use any cloaking or link shortening utility to hide viruses or other malicious sites for you to click. Bitly is not the culprit here. Many people who say that bitly is a scam are also promoting their own link-shortening tool. This means that they might not have an entirely unbiased opinion. I personally LOVE Bitly. I think that Bit.ly gets a bad wrap. The reason that people associate bitly with viruses, is that it was one of the first good free link shorteners. It is easy to use, and this made it easy for people to use it for the wrong things. But, marketers love Bitly. Sure, there are some other shorteners that you can use, but they cost money. I have not found a free shortener with as many features. How does a shortener work? You have a long URL, or affiliate link like: http://www.tripadvisor.com/Attraction_Review-g60927-d2553828-Reviews-SegCity_Guided_Segway_Tours-Corpus_Christi_Texas.html Unfortunately, this is too long and cumbersome for someone to type in, and if links are too long, they won't send properly over a text message or twitter message. The solution is Bitly. You can shorten this link to: www.bit.ly/SegReview Now that link looks beautiful. It is short, easy to type in, and it is customized. Wait..... you can customize links in Bitly? Surely that costs! No sir/maam. Link customization in Bitly is just another one of the great free tools at your service. After you create your link, click the pencil icon located to the right of your link, and that allows you to enter a custom one. There are some things that you must remember when customizing your link. You want to make it easy to remember and easy to type. This simple philosophy is part of the fundamentals of marketing. Every step that you take, you need to attempt to make the maximum impression on somebody, even with your links. Second, remember that capitalization counts. If you want to enter a link called "moneycow" but it is taken, perhaps Moneycow or MoneyCow is not taken. You do risk sending traffic to the original moneycow, but many people will simply be clicking your links. Captialization is also something that you can create redundancy with. You must remember that people are idiots (slight exaggeration). I'm not saying that to be mean, however you need to plan for them to make mistakes. Using the example of www.bit.ly/SegReview, I must point out to people that the S and the R are captialized. If I was proactive, and I took every possible combination of that word segreview (all lower), SEGREVIEW (all caps), then I am minimizing the chance of losing a customer due to them typing in the url incorrectly. Essentially, I would create 3 different links, with 3 customized URLs in order to have redundancy for mistakes. If your website or link is commonly misspelled, you should grab the misspelling also! This is a process of marketing to peoples mistakes. It is similar to having the website www.yaho.com. Knowing people's tendancies and planning for them, is just another small part of internet marketing. I hope that this little guide has helped you understand what Bitly is. I hope that I've shed some light on the issue, and solidified my stance that it is not a scam. More rather, it is a very valuable tool that marketers can use ... For Free! Thanks, William Brower 361-673-3129 CorpusMarketing@yahoo.com

I didn't join Herculist as a paid member, although I reap benefits close to a paid members benefits. My choice was to grab a paid membership into HookListMail. This allowed me to gain credits at Herculist easily, and gives me a weekly blast out to Herculist members. The main benefit of HookList, is that it was a lifetime upgrade, and I gravitate twoards those, because yearly fees add up after time. http://www.hooklistmail.com/corpusmarketing This also has a free membership, but I do not think that Herculist is included in the free section. I would also suggest HookListMail to anyone who is a TE lover, as it allows people to surf safelists, just like a TE. I have found that I can read MANY more mails per hour using the HookList method, rather than just reading mails through gmail. It is not for everyone, but I have found it to be an exceptional tool. As for the results of Herculist, I have to agree with Sean. I have not gotten many signups from this list.

These are two things that I look for when determining if a Traffic Exchange is efficient. Will I get the true value for all of my clicks? If I am working with a 33% ratio, then I have to click 3 pages, just to get my page seen once. If this also has a 10 second timer, then I spend 30 seconds for one page view. I can not do business with these types of ratios. This is why we are debuting a new low cost traffic exchange. http://www.OneDollarTE.com For One Dollar a month, you get a 1 to 1 surf ratio and a four second surf timer! Plus, many more extras are thrown in, including MRR and PLR master kits to help you with your marketing goals.

I would like to say that I agree heartily with Tony and with Sean. There are many TEs around that are giving surfers the wrong priorities. Games, contests and such are FUN, they are not business. I personally can't even pay for my internet with pennies, nor do I value my time at that price. I also believe that the term "Traffic Exchange" extends to all Safelists, Text ad Exchanges, List Builders and the such. They all do the same thing, some are email based, and some have additional features. To the people who say that they only like Safelists or TAEs and not TEs.... my response is that they have not used the proper TEs. It is difficult to compare safelists and TEs directly, because each credit on a TE becomes a page view, while each credit on a safelist is an email, but not neccesarily a page view. Both of these are assuming that the end user does not have the page in a background window. I also think that there are many TEs that do not have a high enough ratio per click. The optimal ratio, is as close to 1 to 1 ratio as possible. I have started a brand new traffic exchange. This article here is the first time that I will have mentioned it, and this is due to my strong support for Darren, and his philosophy twoards marketing. There is no better value for a marketing system as Prosperity Marketing System, and I took these ideals and fashioned them into a traffic exchange. What I have designed is a TE that gives a generous 50% ratio to free members, and a 1 to 1 ratio for paid members. The trick is that paid membership is only ONE dollar a month. This also creates a paid membership site where I can distribute MRR and PLR to paid members at no cost. What I have designed is a marketing resource that is not going to cost much. www.OneDollarTE.com As for the original question, I believe that without innovation TEs will die, and become antiquated. This is still a relevant field and a means of advertising, but as users and owners we must adapt our idea of a valuable resource in order to stay current. Matt, as for your comment about fast, on the go mobile technology... I couldn't agree more. If a traffic exchange is not able to be viewed on cell phones, then you have lost a good portion of your possible customers. I was surprised to see the amount of people delving into internet marketing through their phones. Fast, also brings to mind the argument over surf timers. There are many sites that have long and drawn out surf timers. I have heard both sides of this argument, and I am torn. While I agree that a longer timer gives more advertising time per page, I also understand the argument that a person is going to be attracted to the ad and click within the first few seconds. For my TE, I have set my surf timer low, with the idea that the reduced timer will create more page clicks over time, which results in better advertising for my customers. Thanks for the interesting topic.... you can see that it interested me. William Brower CorpusMarketing

Hello Paula, Thanks for your introduction here. I also agree with you that the use of downline builders is a great way to make your time online more efficient. I will look into your site in the future. Thanks, William Brower