If you have a newsletter or ecourse about making money online or internet marketing in general, a good way to get relatively targeted visitors is using traffic exchanges. Why? Traffic Exchange users are people that are striving to drive visitors to their websites in order to make money. Many of them are still simply promoting generic affiliate pages and could use some help to learn how to market more successfully.

Traffic Exchanges, what are they? To put it simply, Traffic Exchanges are sites that allow you to watch other sites to get your site viewed in return “I visit your site, and then you visit mine”. That means that if you have a website this is a good way to start getting visitors fast. Usually TEs operate with credits, which means that you earn credits for viewing other people’s sites, 0.3-1 per view usually. Then the credits can be spent on banners(ratios up to 100 views per credit), sometimes text links(ratios up to 100 views per credit) or simply visits(1 credit per visit usually).

The thing about traffic exchanges is that the visitors usually stay on your site for a very little amount of time, unless they came from a click on your banner/text ad. This is because they want as many visitors as fast as they can, that means that you have to grab their attention, and fast. Which is why the people that succeed with them all use lead capture or splash pages made for the purpose of generating leads or sign ups in a specific program.

I’m going to go through quickly how you can build your list with traffic exchanges below.

Part 1, It’s all about the splash page.

Okay so the first thing you’ve got to do is, if you’re not promoting an effective splash page on traffic exchanges, delete the sites you are currently promoting from the “Websites” section of all Traffic Exchanges.

You’ve probably heard this a lot of times, to succeed using TEs you need to have a splash page, now I’m not talking about the splash pages or lead-capture pages that follows with a free program where you submit your email and get spammed, nope, I’m talking of you succeeding using your own, unique, splash page. I guess you’ve probably heard that too quite a few times, here is whats different, I tell you how a splash page that works looks like. What makes a successful splash page a successful splash page you might ask?

1. You need to grab your viewer’s attention fast. Why? Because the viewer gives your page 5 seconds before he/she starts looking intently at the timer to earn more credits.Solution: use a short and simple but nevertheless catchy headline.

A few tips on how to do this: Use sound or video, I’m currently not using any but that is because I am in the middle of developing a “speech” to put on my splash page.

Make a large headline that screams out a couple of words that make people read on. I purposefully wrote “TEs are Useless!” To make you read the explanation of why I’m using them, almost anything works as long as it stops the surfer in his tracks. There are two general tactics here, you can either write what people want to hear, like “Grab this free report that will change your life” or what they don’t want to hear “What you are doing is useless” along the lines of that. You can also go for something that’s not quite as controversial as what I did but something attention grabbing like “Hey Traffic Bunnies Surfer!” or “Stop surfing RIGHT NOW!”.

The sub-headline should let them know a little about the benefits to keep them reading/listening to more. If you are confident you can make them interested enough by just putting your name,picture headline, sub-headline and opt-in form on a page, do it and test it, if it doesn’t work or if you don’t have the confidence, read on for suggestions on adding a bit more to entice them on your page.

2. You need the page to be short and to the point, Why? Because who bothers to read 3000 lines of salescopy from someone they don’t even know.. How? Only mention the TOP BENEFITS of the program or newsletter or the membership site you are promoting. Being good at keeping to the basics comes in handy here.

This is Very Important, place your name and face on it, you really want people to see you more and more and more until they feel like they know you and feel more comfortable about the idea of giving you their name and email. Also make sure you not only mention the details of the program/newsletter/ecourse/membership site/report but also what benefits the surfer if he/she signs up.

Add a few bullet points to your splash page, I suggest 3 or 5 as Mike Patzeold has tested it and odd numbers get better conversion rates. Like I said earlier you need to tell the surfers what’s in it for them for every feature of the program. Let’s say your program offers free visitors. “Discover how to get free visitors to your website that will generate more leads and more money.” This is not a very catchy line so do not copy it, but the general idea is the same, list what you offer and why it is good for you.

3. You need your viewers to do what you want them to do. Why? Don’t you want them in your list/downlines/buying your products/etc. ? Solution: Add a link to the webpage you want them to go to, or a form to sign-up for your list.

Having troubles with the splash page part ? Don’t have any programs to make it easier for you to design or don’t know html? Don’t have anything to promote?

Get some helpful info and resources at the TE Rescue blog that is about Free Traffic and List Building

4. Tracking, you need to track and see if there is still room for improvement, to start with you should aim for around a 0.5% conversion rate, and then aim for 1% and above by constantly tracking and improving your splash/squeeze page.

Part 2, Getting quality traffic, to your Quality splash page.

There is plenty of discussion going on about which traffic exchanges to use to build Your list, but from personal experience, there are a few time saving and quality exchanges that work for me: Can be found at the blog that I mentioned earlier. If you feel like you are already a member of several good traffic exchanges that suits your needs, then there is no need to join my recommended ones. After that, there is still a few things you have to do before you can start receiving quality traffic to your quality splash page.

Of course, add your splash page as one of your websites in each traffic exchange you are planning to use, setting the auto-assign to a high percentage so that you won’t have to assign credits all the time, and of course, surfing. (No Traffic exchanges are not magical traffic providers that you can “set-and-forget” like some of you believe!) To succeed using Traffic Exchanges, there is one main factor you need: consistency. Cause the longer you keep surfing regularly, the better your results will become.

So a good idea is to create a schedule for when your surfing “duties” will commence, I recommend surfing a little every day instead of spending an entire day surfing and then take a “week off”. This allows you to check in on your results more often, so that you can make minor edits and check results on a day to day basis instead of perhaps wasting an entire day’s worth of surfing on something that obviously is not gonna work. With that said, just make sure you stick to your schedule once you’ve made it, cause if your site is viewed by the same viewer regularly, in many cases he/she will fall for the temptation of clicking your link or joining your newsletter.

As your goal here is to build your list and make money online, as you start actually getting a conversion rate on your splash page and a sales conversion rate that makes you about 15 or so bucks per thousand hits you should start buying credits.