Promoting Your Web Site Part 1:
A Look at Three Web Site Promotion Tools

The key to a successful website is putting it in front of your target audience. The key to website promotion is generating traffic to your site, having potential customers review whatever it is you are offering, and hopefully make the decision to buy or join.

In this article, we will break down three site traffic tools and report our results. In Part 2, we will review the logic and strategies behind link partnering, and in Part 3, unravel the mysteries of search engine placement.

Free Site Traffic Tools

We found three different sites, with three different approaches to increasing your site traffic and put each to the test. We used the free option for each of these sites, and did not pay for any additional traffic.

Traffic Swarm (click here to visit Traffic Swarm)
Traffic Swarm uses a form of opt-in classified advertising to push traffic to your site. Here is the basic premise:

You sign up at Traffic Swarm and receive a unique ID. When you have verified that your email is valid (through the usual click and reply method) you receive 100 free credits. You then have the option to set your home page to the Traffic Swarm page, and earn additional credits each time your home page loads, and by selecting from short ads on that page. Credits vary from 1 to 1000 for each click. The highest we saw so far during testing was 50 credits for one click. The average seems to be about 5.

Pros - When someone clicks on your ad, they've selected it from a page of six other ads. Your ad had some special interest for them (unless they are just randomly clicking, not a very effective way of earning credits on Traffic Swarm as it has anti-cheat measures). If your ad text is compelling enough, and your site is compelling enough, you're going to capture some business from these click throughs.

You earn 100 referral credits for each new Traffic Swarm member you refer. You also earn credits for each credit they earn.

Traffic Swarm reviews all ads for content before activating. It takes less than a day for activation and your ads will start appearing on other Traffic Swarm pages.

Cons - Your audience is other members of Traffic Swarm, who are also promoting their own businesses.

Results:
We generated just over 1000 credits for testing. 100 from signing up, 100 from a referral, and 800 through browsing the links on the traffic swarm page for just a couple of minutes each morning.

We created four different ads for rotation on the Traffic Swarm pages.

Over a two week period, we tracked 112 click throughs from the ads we created.

Traffic Multiplier (click here to visit Traffic Multiplier)
Traffic Multiplier uses something called "PoliteAds" to put your page in front of prospective customers. Polite ads work through a bit of java script that goes into the end of your page. (You need to have a web page of your own for this to work). When someone leaves your page, a new page appears under the browser with a member page that is in a similar category to your own. In return, your page appears under the page of other sites that are in a similar category.

Pros: The tracking when you log in to Traffic Multipler is excellent. You see all of the credits you have earned, the last 25 pages where your page was displayed, all referral credit.

If you have active referrals, you can remove the PoliteAd code from your pages and still receive new traffic.

Cons: Your page will definitely be seen and that definitely has a value, however, you need to remember that the people viewing it did not surf there on their own. Your page needs to be compelling, grab their attention, and make them want to know more to convert them into a customer.

Results
Your results in this program are based completely on your own site traffic and on the site traffic of anyone you refer. The ration is 3:2. You earn 2 credits each time someone exits your page with the PoliteAd code. You "spend" 3 credits each time your page is displayed. There's really no delay. As quickly as we accumulated credits, our page was displayed elsewhere. We received exactly the results promised. For every three pages we displayed, our page was displayed twice. There was a definite and significant jump in site traffic.

Holy Hits
Holy Hits requires you to click on five links in order to become a free member. You are presented with the five links when you click on the referral link that takes you to the Holy Hits page. This was the weakest performer of all.

Pros
Your page will be viewed by anyone referred by you, or four levels of referrals.

Cons
People must click the five links presented to them. They have no choice, they don't select your information from a group of choices, they are a captive audience clicking just to qualify for their own page.

Results
Our results were dismal. 14 views. 9 of those were us testing their tracking system.

(We tried to check the page as we prepared this article, but the link was no longer active and redirected to an advertising site).