I care very much for the people that surf. If I didn’t I wouldn’t be trying to get them to think about things differently, and motivate them to do what will get them better results.

The majority of traffic exchange members are not having the success with exchanges they hoped for when they first start using them. Many are flat out failing, wasting their precious time, and some even their hard earned money.

I could be content to let them keep doing that, or I can try attention grabbing methods in an attempt to get people to rethink how they promote and help point them in a direction that will make a difference.

Sure there were prizes, and even cash prizes but these were infrequent (once a month or longer) and more often associated with referral contests to bring new people in. The contests certainly were not daily or even weekly events.

I don’t object to infrequent prizes to grow ones traffic exchange. Even infrequent bribes, or incentives if you like, I think are acceptable. The problem is the whole “Monty Hall” style daily giveaway bribes to surf.

I especially agree with you about the freshness of content. People are being bored into ignoring the ads. So many of the sites in rotation are the same affiliate pages promoted by hundreds of other people. Those who have created their own splash pages, regularly keep them circulating long after everyone has become use to them… and/or they never tested and tweaked them to make an otherwise poorly converting page to possibly a great one.

I think a big part of it is the socialization and interaction in the TE has brought people’s attention from the surf frame to the chat frame, and people are using contests and prizes in an attempt to bring attention back to the surf frame, but having prizes and contests is nothing new by any means..

The social is sort of a double edged sword, for people that use it, it yeilds them great results in that exchange because they have become familiar with the community, but for people who don’t use it, it really declines results because when they are surfing pages and seeing names they know, your page will fall to the bottom as no one recognizes your branding..

I think another major issue people have with results is the use of old media and not targetting or testing..

The way we consume media as a whole has evolved so much over the last few years, thinks that we saw that would peek our interest years ago don’t even phase us now, knowing your target audience and how to reach them is crucial for your marketing success, weather it be in a TE or any other medium.

Also from what I’ve seen very few people are really even tracking and even know their results, I see tons of people using tracking links, but so what? Now you know how many visits a te is delivering to your site, but you already knew that in your sites stats in the te? What about click throughs? conversions? I see sooo many standard pages that i know for a fact the user can’t be tracking – How does one intend to imrpove their results if they don’t even know what their results are? Split testing and target marketing are absolutely crucial to getting anywhere, and without them.. yes, your results will decline over time.

Freshness of content is a big factor too, displaying the same page over and over for months people start to become too familiar with it and don’t even pay attention anymore.

That’s my opinion based on my experience, nothing I say is the ‘right’ way nor is the counter the ‘wrong’ way .. do what works best for you, but make sure you have a method in place to be able to identify which way that may be..
John Bell´s last blog ..The social surfing debate in traffic exchanges continues

I think I’m fairly safe in saying that RoyalSurf was one of, if not indeed the first, mainstream TEs to implement chat. I find it interesting that many of the very people who first talked down surf chat at that time, are the very same people who now have it in their TEs and are claiming to have led the way.

I am honestly still on the fence about it after all this time. There have been times I have wished I never implemented chat and if I had to do it again, I’m not sure I would.

Used correctly, as I have preached from the beginning, chat can be a great way to build relationships. Though, from my observations at several other TEs, the chat feature is seldom used in a manner that does that. It is often used for nonsense that I really believe discourages others from joining the conversation.

I mean, if you open your chat and see a bunch of nonsense going on and you’re already busy with your life, and trying to make a go of it online, how likely are you to step into that?

In the grand scheme though, I haven’t yet seen surf chat utilized to a level in any exchange where I think it could have a significant adverse impact. Except in the case, where other owners try to use your chat for their own help desk and to recruit your members… GRRRR!

To those who actually use it right and develop relationships through it, I tip my hat.

Whether or not it should be in the surf session I think is a debate that still needs to be hashed out.

Maybe, chat socializing has its place in a TE but separate from the surf session, so that you cannot surf and chat at the same time?

I would like to note that no one is saying that there is no success to be had with TEs any more. To the contrary, used correctly you can still have good results as evidenced by some of the comments we’ve seen.

If this wasn’t so then traffic exchanges would indeed be dead.

However, because some people are having success does not dispute that traffic exchanges overall are not performing to the level they once did.

It makes perfect sense that some are having more success now than in the past, because they’ve been educating themselves and learning how to effectively use TEs.

If you start from knowing little about properly using a TE and then spend time learning how to use them correctly, and then put that knowledge to use, it stands to reason you will have better results than ever… even if the results for everyone overall are declining.

As Steve Ayling has previously pointed out on his blog, several marketers who use to have success using TEs are no longer seeing the returns they once did. If this was just one or two marketers, it could be argued their declining results are because they stopped doing what was working, or didn’t refresh their advertising; but that isn’t the case.