Archive for January 15th, 2009
Traffic Exchange vs Blog Exchange
As a blogger I understand the need to have my writing seen by a large audience. Finding a readership is important because it helps to get a ranking in the search engines. The question for a newbie though, is what is better – a blog exchange like Blog Explosion or a Traffic Exchange such as Lords -of-Traffic or Traffic Era?
For a blogger the blog exchange is probably best. People who surf traffic exchanges are usually not interested in reading blogs. As a newbie one needs to deal with a whole new language when surfing traffic exchanges – for example splash pages, banners etc. Bloggers do not normally have their own banners and so the whole thing can be quite confusing.
The two exchanges I have mentioned here offer a blog for use. The Traffic Era blog is not something that can be easily circulated. It is part of the member’s profile and it is lacking a lot of features that could make it a useful tool or resource. On the other hand the blog at Lords-of-Traffic, which has only been introduced recently, has many more features. The blog resource is only available to the upgraded member, so if a person wants to use the blog resource then he or she needs to be upgraded.
In the world of Traffic Exchanges a blog can be useful as a marketing resource but there are some limitations with most blog providers. The biggest limitation on bloggers has been Ad Sense and their rules which make it hard to circulate blogs from Blogger and yes even from WordPress. The obvious answer to the problem is to simply not allow Ad Sense on the blog. In that way one can circulate the blog at any exchange without breaching the TOS of either Blogger, Word Press or Ad Sense. Personally, I cannot understand why Ad Sense was cracking up over 10 cents in earnings which I never received.
So if you have an internet marketing business the best place to advertise in a Traffic Exchange, if you blog for personal reasons then the best place is a blog exchange such as Blog Explosion. If you want to read blogs then join Blog Explosion, not a Traffic Exchange.
Traffic Exchanges and spam email
The subject of too much mail coming from traffic exchanges is one that is quite controversial. When can such mail be called spam if a person has signed up to a site that has in its terms and conditions that being a member of the site means accepting that mail? You cannot really say that it is spam because you have agreed to receive the mail.
There are sites such as the safelists where you deliberately sign up and agree to receive mail from other members. Likewise this is not spam in the sense that there has been agreement to receive the mail. If people want to receive it, and they use the system, then that is fine. However, it is not a system that I like all that much. I prefer sticking with the Traffic Exchanges for the majority of my promotions.
However, there is such a thing as spam in this situation. I have personally seen where a few members of these lists use more than one user name – one of them uses at least 5 other names – to get around limitations upon sending out mail to members. Now this is the situation that I do in fact call spam. The fact is that I do not want the mail from that particular member because she is promoting the kind of things that I think are scams and would never join in the first place. Her promotions and her spamming are really very annoying.
To get around this problem I find that the easiest way is to block and delete immediately her mails. I am using Windows Live as my email client. I download my mail from the gmail site because it is easier to read than when it is online. I use the junk mail feature for this mail, and when I find these people have tried to circumvent the allowance for sending mails to members, I just add the new name to rules. Voila, no more mails from that person because it goes straight to the trash.
Anyone who does not want mail from a traffic exchange, especially the newsletters, then that person should make use of the option to delete the account for that particular exchange. There is no point in complaining about the mail because the TOS of most exchanges do include an agreement to accept this mail.
