InsidBlog

Recently Explosive Traffic received a review from Don Snyder of Horror Movie Hits – I have tried literally 7 times to reply to his blog post however every time I have posted a comment it shows up, then a few minutes later is gone, I don’t know if there is an issue with the blogging platform or if the post is just being deleted, or what the problem is, but the issues clones the comments another person had made about the site and I wanted to address them here.

You can View Don’s Original Blog Post here.

To Don and others with similar concerns:

I appreciate your feedback and would love an opportunity to clarify some of the points you tried to make here. I have been programming features for Traffic Exchanges for several years now and have seen every attempt to cheat the system in the book, and I assure you that there is no conventional means to cheat this system to gain extra credits, and I continuously monitor it all day to ensure that remains the case.

Also I wanted to clarify that all sites actually ARE manually verified, not automatically approved. If you are an upgraded member (which you are as you clearly saw the value in this site as many do), there is a preliminary check, if it passes this check it goes into rotation, but is still manually verified at a later time. If you are a free member your site will be manually verified before it goes into rotation, ensuring that it is safe for a variety of viewers.

The reason you notice some TE’s that you deem as ‘bad traffic’ in the first place is because I have designed a site that is 100% transparent, unlike other co-ops, I show you where every hit you get comes from, and even allow you to opt out of any source you do not want your site shown on. Viewing this data you will also see that this ‘bad traffic’ issue is non existant. If people were cheating this sytem it would be apparent when you view this data as your traffic sources.

A Co-Op, by definition, is member controlled.  I would argue that traditional traffic Co-Op’s are not actual Co-Ops at all because they are controlled by an owner and that’s it.  Explosive Traffic is controlled by it’s members, they all share the workload, the results, and choose where it is shown.  If members get consistantly poor results, sites will be automatically blocked from the system, as you can see on your ‘My Sources’ page.

A member joining the site can simply add their site, and rest assured that poor traffic sites are constantly being monitored and removed as necessary.  Those of us who like to get our hands dirty and dig around will be pleased to see that autosurf and ptc sites make up less than 1% of traffic combined, most are blocked automatically by the system before they have even reached 0.01% of traffic delivered.

I invite you and your viewers to revisit Explosive Traffic, I think you will be pleased to see the results, add credits to your sites and see where the hits are coming from. You will quickly notice that it is not plagued with bad traffic sources as some would lead you to believe, but that in fact you are getting high quality traffic and results from all corners of TE land.

I take all feedback very seriously and have been pleased to see an overwhelming amount of that is positive but if you have any suggestions or concerns please contact me so I can address them, I am always available and I feel like if you were slightly more informed on the way the system works you would be 100% confident in recommending it to your friends (which it appears you did anyway since there is a referral link).

You not only get traffic from hundreds of different traffic sources, but I spend hundreds of dollars each week on the top performing traffic exchanges to ensure that in addition to the variety of traffic, you are also getting guaranteed hits to the top traffic exchanges.

Again I’d invite you to give Explosive Traffic a second look and more closely monitor your stats and results, I think you will find the issues you describe in this post are essentially non-existent, and that the price and variety of traffic can not be beat by any of our competitors. If after some time using the site you still have concerns or issues, please contact me any time and I would love to address your feedback and take any necessary action, as I always do with all of my projects.

Explosive Traffic can be found here.

In the land of marketing you may here people talk about the reach of your advertising.  Generally it’s not talked about so much in the Traffic Exchange land of marketing, at least not where I’m looking as much, but if you are involved in Social Media metrics and analytics you will have heard of it but probably don’t really understand.  Reach in marketing is essentially how many people see your message.  If it was a TV ad, how many people would see that commercial, or if you were in a traffic exchange, how many people will be exposed to your content.  Does it really matter though?  What’s the hype about?

One of the endeavors I went on before finding the career that I really wanted to do was booking.  I would find bands both locally and nationally and connect them with venues.  It was pretty fun I got to connect with a lot of new people from other parts of the country as well as those from right here in my hometown, I got to listen to some great music, and I got to make some decent money.  In plain English, I would find a bar or concert hall and find people to play there, make it happen, and take a % off the top.  Working with some of the bars and venues were awesome, and some were not.  Some would take a larger percentage of the profit from the show than others, and sometimes they would just be not really in it, little to no advertising, poor staffing, etc.  Likewise some of the bands were excellent, out there every day, some even had street teams that would promote their shows, and others would just meerly show up, no promotion on their own or advertising in anyway.  When these two things met it was a nightmare.  Since my sole income from doing this was simply a percentage of sales from tickets, I quickly discovered that I can have some influence over the outcome of these shows by my own advertising efforts, when what I get paid depends on how much money is made, which depends on how many people show up – I definitely want to get people in that place.  This was when facebook was first beginning to ramp up popularity, and you were now able to create events.  So I would go on Facebook and create an event, invite all my friends, then go to the University and put up posters and hand out fliers.  Now at first this was very effective, I started to have all kinds of extra people come in, then the place would be packed which of course drew in foot traffic, it was great, it was the answer to all my solutions.  So week after week, event after event, like clockwork I would create events, and hang up posters at the University.  I’m sure none of you will be that surprised by what happened, but attendance started to go down, after a while people weren’t even responding to the event invites on facebook and just walking past the posters as though they didn’t even see them.

In marketing we can compare this fall off as a natural part of the product life cycle.  The product life cycle is a fairly basic economic principle of the stages of a products life - development, introduction, growth, maturity, and decline.  The big problem that may be overlooked by people reading this though, is really – reach.

At the start the results were phenomenal, attendance was up higher and higher every show.  Why was this? It was because I had reached a new audience by marketing it on Facebook and with Posters on the University, people were not exposed to the content so they realistically did not even know it existed, or did briefly but forgot when they saw their dream car drive pass them.  This audience was very responsive, I kept changing the styles and types of fliers, which did keep things fresh and kept people’s attention on it, but I always used the same 2 places to advertise.  My product life cycle ended when I no longer had attention to this audience – but what if I had put fliers up on another street, or got some friends together to help me put new fliers up all over town, maybe those friends knew of places to put them that I didn’t even know existed.  I would be able to reach a much larger and fresher audience.  Now this audience hadn’t seen the fliers in places they go regularly so they didn’t know these events existed, it is, to them, a new fresh product.  So does Reach Matter? Absolutely.

This same concept can so easily be applied to online marketing with Traffic Exchanges.  The growth of popularity in the Traffic Exchange industry to include Interactivity and even full-blown social networking features has done a lot to build relationships in the traffic exchange industry.  Their are several communities who tend to follow the same flow of surfing habits.  This is awesome, don’t get me wrong, I absolutely love the communities that myself and other traffic exchanges have not only built, but also other communities we are part of.  It’s a beautiful thing to see us all be able to come together, but can it hurt business?  Do we tend to surf certain traffic exchanges more than others based simply because of a certain person or group of people or organization?  I love surfing at Traffic Swirl because I know the community there, and I would consider many of them my friends.  For this exact reason, I will surf there for hours a day and talk to everyone, check out their ads, and they are there so I can ask questions about their products, which is really the strongest sales tool you can have.  This is a very powerful experience, but looking at it from a business perspective, what about the dozens of other Traffic Exchanges where my ads have been sitting for months without being in rotation.

So I obviously love surfing at a couple of Traffic Exchanges and at the same time know I need to get my ads viewed at dozens more. What would be a real-world solution to increasing my advertising reach without going insane trying to keep up with surfing, or broke buying credits everywhere?

Well the obvious solution is a Co-Op.  A TE Co-Op is essentially you will buy credits at the co-op of choice and then those credits will get ads to your site, not just one TE but usually several. But If you know anything about me, then you know It can never be enough.  The Co-Op is usually run by a person or company and they are probably getting deals from a few TE’s, and although it is an increase in your reach, it’s not significant.  I own a tracking service as many of you know, and the members on that site have literally tracked Traffic from 113,620 different sources (at the time of writing this).  Now I know a lot of those are random 1 hit sites, so I won’t count them ALL, but over 19,000 of them have produced at least 100 trackable hits.  There is not enough time in the day or money in the universe to get hits at all these TE’s.

Ok so the Co-Op that shows your site on 10, 15, even 20 TE’s (I’m being generous here). There’s no way that will work for me.. that doesn’t even cover 1% of Traffic Exchanges, even on a good day, and yet they still charge high premium rates, many don’t even tell me where my traffic is coming from.

So how do you get your site visitors from those 19,251 sources?  Easy, you find surfers who use them all. I laid there thinking about how this would turn Traffic Exchange business model on it’s head. I thought  of an innovative new product that would get your sites viewed on – literally – thousands of traffic exchanges.  That all seemed somewhat complicated then I realized I could make it easy.  Two step easy.  You would just Add Your Sites to the Co-Op then you add your unique Co-Op URL into rotation at your favorite traffic exchange.  Could that be all you would have to do to get your Ads seen on Hundreds and even Thousands of different Traffic Exchanges?

I thought it sounded pretty cool personally, but it didn’t feel like it was enough.

What if I could take this to the next level with real time stats and content prioritization.  What if there was a way I could personally create a technology behind the power that would get your site seen on tons of traffic exchanges. What if I then created the technology that takes it a step further in putting your real time stats at your fingertips. What if you could watch as the Co-Op received tons of hits from a huge variety of Traffic Exchanges.  What if  you could have the power to Take Control of your Co-Op Advertising by seeing where your hits were coming from, and allowing you to see how many total and unique hits each of your sites had received, as well as where every single hit came from.  What if you had power to decide where your sites are shown giving you a complete list of every source and letting you literally choose where your traffic comes from, allowing you to actually create the value of the traffic you receive.

I thought it sounded like an excellent idea.

So I Did It.

Introducing Explosive Traffic.