Snowed Under with Traffic Exchanges

In case you're wondering what this dog has to do with my Internet business, apart from the fact that he's snow-logged, like me, he's just here because I like him (and dogs in general).

OK, that much snow is a bit of an exaggeration, but I'm fairly snowed in at the moment, which has given me plenty of time to catch up on some of my work from paying clients plus time to reflect on ways of building up my Internet business.

So, apart from forking out for a taxi to take me to a friend's house on Saturday, I've taken advantage of the weekend to keep my head down.

As an aside, if you're surprised that I'm “snowed in” in the suburbs of London, the main roads are fine, but the drive up to my house is on a slope and I'm a real scaredy cat about either driving or walking on it in the snow 🙂

One of the tools I came across in my investigations was a new resource that should save me time and bring me more traffic in the future. I looked into a couple, but the most promising one is a paid resource for advertising in multiple traffic exchanges without surfing. I took the life-time upgrade offer as it was by far the best value.

Traffic exchanges are, in my opinion, very hard work for not a lot of reward. But I suppose that's because I haven't spent enough time on them. Some people make a lot of money on them – but they spend a lot of time surfing. And to be honest it bores me rigid.

Another problem is that there are literally dozens of them – far too many for any average person (like myself) to keep track of. And it's easy to get “snowed under” with traffic exchanges, as new ones spring up almost daily. How to tell which will deliver the goods, or even last more than a couple of months?

Having had my fingers burnt with a few here to-day-gone-tomorrow merchants my strategy has been to ignore the start-ups, and just stick with the well established sites. Most people will be members of those in addition to the start-ups.

However, despite my dislike of traffic exchanges, they are a good way to find people new to the industry as that's where they usually start off. And as “newbies” are my target market I do need to use the exchanges.

Happily I've found a way to spend just a small amount of money to save a lot of time in the TEs. In any business there are times when it's sensible to trade money for time, so I shall be trying this resource out over the next couple of weeks and hope it will have been a worthwhile investment.

While we'd all like to build a business for free, some of the DIY approaches we take are only free if you don't value your time. I suppose my philosophy is developing into: