You must be thinking “after blasting me with 10 emails, why would I listen to him talk about not spamming your blog subscribers!?“. Well the reason is simple.. It was unintentional, and I found the mistake, and want to show you how to prevent it from happening to your subsribers!

It really was a simple mistake. You see I was using FeedBurner to send out emails when blog updates were made. I then switched to Aweber to use the Blog Broadcast. With Feedburner you simply set the time you wanted it to send, and presto it would send an email once a day with all the updates.

With Aweber it’s slightly more advanced! As you can see below there are more settings available!

If you want to have one email sent out per day with all the updates in one email then use the settings above. Select your time, select On a specific day or days of the month and choose Every Day. Then check the Send Automatically button.

If you want a seperate emails sent out daily with individual updates then you’d select When number of new items is at least and select 1.

If you want an email sent out right away whenever you update then again you’d select When number of new items is at least and select 1, but also change Send broadcast to Immediately.

With these 3 scenarios you should be able to figure out any other methods you’d want to use. But the final word of caution is before you change feed settings uncheck Send Automatically! The reason Aweber thought it had new emails to send was my fault. I changed a setting on FeedBurner which changed all the URLs in the feed. To Aweber, those new URLs meant new emails! If I had unchecked Send Automatically, changed the feed, and waited till Aweber found the new URLs to re-check it, I could have deleted the duplicates and not sent them out!

PS. If you don’t have Aweber yet, you can try it risk free for 30 days. I know you’ll see how awesome it is and realize it’s waay worth the money!

This is Part 3 of the series “Spotting Bad Traffic Exchanges”. You can read Part 1 - “What does it look like” and Part 2 - “What’s it giving out”

Looking at the front page of an exchange can give you some indicators of how Good or Bad it’ll be. But sometimes it takes looking into the history of the exchange to get the full picture. Has the exchange gone down before? Did they lose their entire database? Will it happen again? Looking into the history of an exchange can give you an indication of the future.

Archive Information

First goto Archive.org and type the website domain into the “Way Back Machine”. Click “Take me Back”. You’ll now see a listing of dates (if it’s been around and important enough to get archived). Each day will have a different archive of the page over time. Click through a couple each year. If you see the website has errors like “Site Suspended” or a default “your website goes here” page after the exchange launched, this tells you they’ve had issues with their hosting. You can check the dates around it to see how long of a period it happened for.

Google Cache

If you goto Google and type site:startxchange.com you’ll see the pages as Google sees them. These don’t go back as far as the Archives do, but it has something I find more important.. Malware notices. If a website has or recently has hidden malware on their site, there is a good chance Google has found it and will display a warning when you view the sites they have in their index. If they don’t have any pages listed, that is also an indicator that the exchange is too new. It really isn’t hard to get at least one page listed.

Why this matters

This matters because it deals with reliability. If an exchange has dissapeared in the past, there is a good chance it’ll disapear in the future too. I’ve experienced a few exchanges where the owner bailed out, and then re-launched only to bail out again. Some problems can be out of the control of the owner, but sometimes you have to ask yourself if it really is out of their control when you see it happen repeatedly.

You are focusing on the past, my exchange is GOOD now!

Ok, so you can’t change your past downtime but you can change your future downtime. Pick a host that’s known to be reliable, don’t go for the cheapest one around.  Sign up to Alertra and get notified when your site goes down. Tell Google you fixed the malware problem and use a service like Hacker Safe to help you prevent it from happening again.  If you’ve had past problems you need to make it top priority to not have them happen again.

Email Apology: I’m sorry for the massive amount of emails sent out just now. It definately shouldn’t have happened and I’ll be sure to figure out why it happened and how to prevent it from happening again.

A big part in being a success online is all about networking. I like to keep in touch with others as much as I can, and one of my favorite ways to do that is through blogs. I’m also always interested in finding any kind of site related to traffic exchanges. Whether it’s reviews, rants, help, whatever. So help me out here and post about your blogs and/or places you find traffic exchange reviews on..

• If you have your own blog (TE related), post a brief introduction/description as a comment, and put your blog as your URL (I have a nifty plugin that’ll grab your last post and link to it with your comment now!)
• If you subscribe to a blog that is traffic exchange related, post a little review about it. What you like/dislike about it. (put the link at the bottom of the review, so I know it’s not yours)
• If you know of any traffic exchange review site, post a review about it’s reviews. It doesn’t have to be on a “blog” platform to count. (put the link at the bottom of the review, so I know it’s not yours)

OK so here is where it gets interesting.. Post a seperate comment for each seperate site you want to mention. Don’t mention a site that’s already been mentioned. Oh and make sure you enter your StartXchange username because once I’ve had enough I’ll pick a random commentor to give 1000 hits to. Didn’t see that coming did you? =P

1) How and when did your online business get started?

Around Feb 2006 I was diagnosed with cancer. I had always been quite active, and suddenly having to sit around and let my body recover from surgery and chemo.. and radio.. and more surgery - I had to do something to keep busy! (No sorry {awwww} faces here… or i’ll have to come over there and slap you!)

In August 2006 I fell in love with the idea of owning a website. I was undergoing chemothrapy at the time and had little energy for anything else… I had no idea about anything to do with creating a website - I actually thought HTML was an abbreviation for Hotmail…lol.

Well.. when I was thinking about what kind of site I would like to have, I fell upon a really lame traffic exchange (too lame to mention). I got to thinking that traffic really is something that people want and need - so… I started TrafficBunnies!

Like I said - I knew nothing. I found out about this forum, came in and abused a few people - got all offended and didn’t come back for 6 months. In the end, Paul Kinder stayed friends with me and nudged me back to NFM… lol. I met up with a few more people, apologised to the people I had been stupid to and actually started to listen to their advice! And.. what do you know? It works!!

Back when I was 29 and diagnosed with cancer it seemed like such a HUGE and difficult challenge, when in actual fact it proved to be the opposite. It gave me time to sit back and learn a new skill and find something that I am super passionate about - and now that I am cancer free (woot!!) I am enjoying running a business online, something which I would have never imagined I could do before all of this.

2) Which exchange(s) do you own or co-own?

I am the owner of TrafficBunnies, but I get loads of help from the fabulous Deedee Medcoff. She really is my hero :)

3) Do you currently work exclusively online?

As of Jan ‘08 I do :D It feels SO fine! I appreciate every person that chooses to use Trafficbunnies, because now I am able to do things that I never imagined possible. My husband and I are planning our first ever overseas trip to go to the Focus Seminar in DC (August) and it is the first time that we have ever allowed ourselves to dream and plan something this huge. Like Jon says, it really is an adventure! (aka Olson, paraphrased…lol)

4) How many hours per day do you spend on your exchange(s)?

Umm.. too embarrased to say! Roughly between 10-12 hours. Sometimes up to 14. Most of the time that I am home I am working - I hate housework… lol - this is more fun! Since I am working from home, I don’t need to be in front of the pc 24/7 - I can still spend time with my hubby and kids, do the hobbies that I enjoy and get to the gym.

5) Do you do support yourself, or do you outsource support?

Support? I am assuming you mean help with administrative matters? Well, like I mentioned before - Deeds is really my saviour. Doing the long hours can get a bit wearing - and maintaining a healthy balanced lifestyle is only possible because of her. I can’t rave about her enough.

6) How fluent are you with HTML, javascript, and PHP?

LOLOLOLOL! OK - I really have tried! I can do ok with HTML - only because I use Frontpage - so it’s kinda cheating. But, I can usually find things if I search hard enough, and have picked up a trick or two. I have a programmer who does all of the php programming, he is wonderful, but like most people will know - if you find a good programmer you don’t share the source, so my lips are sealed (I don’t wanna share him…)

7) Approximately how many members join your exchange a month?

Our membership has been exploding! We hit 5000 members end of December, and are now over 8000 less than 2 months later. In February so many wonderful people got behind our promotions and in one week we had 798 new members join - in one week! You smiling yet? I dunno - I thought it was exciting at least.. lol

8) Does most of your advertising come from members referring, or you?

Hmm.. that is a tricky one. It’s getting a little more even now. Up until the start of this year it has been about 90% me, 10% members. This year it has changed considerably, now roughly 60% me, and 40% members.

9) Are you subscribed to any blogs? Which is your favorite?

Umm.. I do more forums than blogs. I drop in occassionally to tescoop.com - I find that is always entertaining. I should try and be a good girl and do the blog thing a bit more.

10) What would be the biggest tip you could give to readers?

Only one? Gosh! I have two :)

a) FOCUS! The biggest key to doing well online is to sit down, away from the pc if possible, get a pen and paper and set some goals. Set a yearly target and then set monthly and weekly (daily if needed) goals to get where you want to go. Richard Taylor and Robert Puddy helped me a lot with discovering this. If you get excited about every new thing going around you will find it difficult to succeed in any of them. If you have a weekly traffic target to your (single) project, then you can work out what it will take to get you there.

b) Do what you love! For me, coming up with fun promo’s playing with pretty pictures and networking is my thing. I just LOVE it! You need to find out what you are good at, then work out how you can use that skill to benefit you - and set you apart in the traffic exchanges. There is a lot of talk going around about branding - but if it’s just a photo and your name, I personally don’t think it’s enough. Get your personality out there - don’t be shy, we all want to know that there are real people that we are dealing with!

c) Quit promoting standard affiliate links. Make them your own! And - what you can’t do yourself, outsource… lol - you are not expected to be supergenius! I keep hearing all of the so called te guru’s saying it like a broken record - and yet.. people are still promoting standard affiliate links! If you want your advertising to get noticed it needs to be noticable.

d) Brush your teeth. Yeah, sure - we work in our PJ’s… but that is no reason to forsake good dental hygiene… :P

Sorry! I thought up 4. Thanks for the chance to share this info :D It was kinda theraputic!!! haha.

All the best!
Cindy

Well this is pretty cool.  It’s a simple widget that lets you tell me what I should write about, and lets you vote on the other topics. I’m going to try it out. So on the blog sidebar #2 you can see it. Simply click the “What should I write about?” link to submit an idea, or click vote to vote on ones already done. So if you guys use it, I’ll keep it around. If it gets spammed or not used, It’ll go away.

Please read this entirely before commenting.

I’ve been thinking about getting into other areas of advertising, and trying them out.  So I’m looking to my growing readers for ways they are advertising their websites outside of traffic exchanges.  I’ve joined a safelist once (and never used it), and paid a bit in Adsense, but that’s about it.  The goal is to grow this blog to more than just traffic exchanges, but traffic in general.

So, if you’ve got some effective ways to get traffic please post URLs below.  Limit 3 per person!  Also note that this will trigger my comment spam system, so don’t try to refresh or anything if it gives you problems. I”ll see the comment and approve it.  Also if you could include a brief description to convince me to try it that’d be cool too.