I am massively stupid sometimes and last Friday I managed to ‘kill’ this blog…………..

Luckily, I am with Blue Host.  They were supportive, sympathetic and efficient.  After I had exhausted all my options (which really consisted of turning the PC off and swearing – well, a bit more than that, but not much) they stepped in and got the blog back in 24 hours.

I can not recommend Blue Host highly enough.

TEs, again. As I mentioned in a reply to a comment from Paul on the original TE post (see here) I am putting the finishing touches to a short report about making money from TEs. The working copy is here and I will replace it with the finished report ASAP.

BTW, as the provisional title is “The Whole Horrible Truth About Traffic Exchanges” you can tell that I have not changed my mind about them, but I am still open to persuasion.  In fact, this working paper shows you a way to make money from TEs, but does put a slant on the whole thing………

After my comments about Traffic Exchanges I am told by Tony that they are! (See my comments here).

He is registered with a number of Traffic Exchanges (TEs) and by using the Firefox browser (and highly recommended it is too) he can have tags open for a number of them at once. In effect, he goes from one TE to another so that he does not have to wait for the 10 second count down, or whatever.

I understand that this makes his surfing more efficient but my comments about the general worth of the traffic from TEs stand……….

This is the basic deal, although details will vary from exchange to exchange. You submit your site to the exchange. Going through the exchange you visit other sites. For every 2 sites you visit you receive 1 ‘credit’. A credit gives you one visit from another exchange member. The result if you vivist 100 sites a day is that your site gets 50 hits a day. Wonderful!

The trouble is, why were you visiting the other sites? To get people to visit your site. Did you really care about those sites? Did you revisit any of those sites? Did you bookmark any of them? Did you buy from any of them? Did you read the whole site or just tick it off your ‘to do’ list?

Why do you think anyone from the exchange should pay any more attention to your site than you did to theirs?

Just how valuable do you think traffic from traffic exchanges is, really?

There is a folk myth that the Adobe reader’s download page is the most back-linked in the world.  I am not sure about that but I know that Google ranks it as 10/10 for importance. Google’s algorithm is a mystery, probably including to those that work with it.  It is no secret that a good number and quality of of back links helps a site’s page rank.

The problem is to get people to back to you to create those juicy back-links without having to give out reciprocal links which are worth less in Google’s view. Here is an idea to increase back-links and so page ranking on search engines like Google.

Write a template, any template, and include your link at the bottom and then give it away.

Let me be more specific.  I can not write a decent advert template from scratch and so for my classified ads I use free templates that I got from Tracey Edwards when I bought her Auction Classified Cash book.  I am very happy with them.  At the bottom of them there is a link to Tracey’s site, and why not?  She may get people clicking on the link to see if they can use them as well.  More importantly, each classified ad that I run creates a back-link to Tracey’s site.  True that link only lasts 30 days but it is alweays replaced with another and will be as long as I sell on ebay.

Think about it.  Tracey has written a great book about selling on eBay using classified ads.  Say she has sold 1,000 copies (It will be many more but I am just illustrating a point).  Of those 1,000 people 75% are going to write at least 1 advert.  Are they going to struggle putting a nice advert together or use the convenient and attractive templates?  Instant 750 back links.  Say half of those 750 keep writing classified ads most will keep with the templates, human beings are lazy by nature.

Tracey has at least 300 back-links but as most people will run 2 or 3 ads at a time she probably has 600 – 900 back-links.  That increases her page rank so that more people find her site via Google’s organic search, she makes more sales, gives away more templates, more people use the templates, that gives her more back-links, which increases her page rank……….. Well you get the idea.

But YOU could do something similar.  Create a template for adverts, squeeze pages, web pages, create a free WP theme, whatever there are many possibilities.  Then give them away. Your site gets publicity, you are seen gain credibility and you build back-links. Neat huh? If only I could do it myself……………