Participating in banner exchanges is supposed to be easy method  to drive traffic to your website. While I did it for first few weeks in my early days, I have never seriously used them for reasons more than one.

But marketers who want to take advantage on a limited budget may find banner exchanges to be quite useful.

Concept of banner exchange is simple. You do not pay for banner ads you want to place on other websites. Instead you strike a deal. You place someone’s banner on your site and in return your banner is placed on someone else’s site. This is achieved by banner exchange system which calculates the impressions and displays.

Thus, when purchasing advertisement space may be expensive, banner exchanges could be an affordable alternative.

Cost

Most banner ad exchange groups are free to participants.Most banner ad exchanges will find another website to post your advertisement without charging a fee but they will require you to post at least one banner ad, and sometimes more, on your website in exchange for having your banner ad displayed on another website.

The Problem

While they might claim and might sincerely work to attempt to match your banner ad to a relevant site, this may always not be possible and your banner ad may wind up on a website which is not relevant to your products or services. That could mean displaying in front of  not so interested audience and lesser response  from them. This will likely mean that the banner ads will generate very little interest in your products and services. Similarly the advertisements you are asked to post may not complement your website well. This will not give your user very pleasurable experience.

You do get a slight control like rejecting advertisements in particular categories you find to be irrelevant but will have little control beyond that.

Conclusion
I do not recommend banner exchange but that is my personal opinion. Banner exchanges do not provide you with massive traffic but they are a traffic source still. They offer banner advantage without involved costs and that might help with branding your website.

If you are interested  there is no harm in trying. Then you would be a better judge.

Traffic is lifeblood of any website. Without traffic, your website is meaningless, fruitless and worthless.

With build and they will come era behind us, a website needs to be promoted to make it successful.

The question that often arises in the mind of the marketer is

“Where to promote?”

The answer can be as imple as this question

“Where are the people that you are looking for?”

Just locate the people and everything else would follow.

For your business, you are interested in a crowd which might be interested in your business.

To find these people you need to think about habits of these people and the things that they do.

What Do People Do Offline?

Well! They gfo to offices, commute in public transport system, dine at restaurants, watch movies at cinemas, shop at malls and dance in night clubs. Few of them also go to gyms and fitness clubs or play games. You can of course add more habits to this list.

Everywhere they gather, people form a unique crowd with special interest. The crowd at cinema would have different perception than crowd in the bus though both may share the members.

What Do People Do Online?

Answer this question and you would find places to promote your website. Here is an incomplete list followed by an incomplete discussion.

Search Engines

Everyday people wake up to find new information by using search engines. If your site is poised to get a higher spot in search engine results, it puts you at advantage and you receive more traffic. Whole SEO industry is based on this idea – to get your website at top of the search engines.

Another option to take advantage of this crowd is by using paid advertisements. Adword is a good example. It could mean a lot of traffic when you place your ad on search engine results pages.

Social Media

Social media helps people come together, share thoughts and interests, form communities nd interact.

Facebook, Myspace, Twitter, and a number of other vertical sites can help you in your business.

You can work on pulling the crod by building a killer reputation or buy ad space.

Websites With High Traffic

Article Directories, forums, high profile blogs and other websites that receive huge traffic are places where you can find people. By posting, commenting or making guest posts you can leverage that traffic.

Another option is to buy ad space.

Ezines

Everyday many people receive their favorite newsletters in their inbox. You can take dvantage of this targeted traffic by either writing a guest article, ad swapping or buying ads.

People regularly visit their favorite places on the web. Getting them to visit your site requires effort…. a continuous effort.

The key is to see he crowd and take advantage of that.

Alexa has changed the way it ranks websites. The announcement regarding this was made on 15th April on Alexa Blog.

I missed the news initially. When I logged today on Alexa I was surprised to see a jump in my rank.

Whatever the new algorithm is, it is working for my site.

Alexa has not revealed what changes have been made but lists following points

Alexa ranking now based on more sources of data to give a better indicator of website popularity

It is normalizing the traffic from its global panel to provide consistently accurate rankings for all countries.
The rankings are now an even better indication of website popularity due to new and improved algorithms.

Why did Alexa change the rankings.It says it has responded to user wish list. It also hinted at new features in future.

In recent months we’ve heard from our Alexa users that understanding Internet usage beyond Alexa Toolbar users was increasingly of interest. Ask and you shall receive!

We listened to your suggestions, and we believe that our new rankings system is much closer to what you asked for. We now aggregate data from multiple sources to give you a better indication of website popularity among the entire population of Internet users.

You gave us many other suggestions as well, and we are working hard to implement them. We won’t tell any secrets just yet, but you can expect to see new features rolled out over the coming weeks and months.

It would be intersting to see in the coming months how Alexa has affected the websites. There are reports of rising and falling ranks.

Advertisers are quite keen to look at Alexa ranks when choosing website for advertisement. Surely, the new algorithm would unsettle many equations.

Whether new algorithm can be influenced like old one needs to be seen.

Traffic is lifeblood of your online business. More traffic means more business and higher profits and vice versa. However, within traffic there exists two kinds of traffic subsets.

One is highly focused traffic called targeted traffic. This traffic consist of people who are actively seeking information about the things that your product is related to. This subgroup of traffic yields more conversion in terms of sales and subscriptions.

Another subgroup is untargeted traffic and mostly consists of curious onlookers who happen to visit your site not because they want something but because they were intrigued somehow. Though not without conversions this traffic is less yielding than targeted one.

It is obvious that one should work on targeted traffic rather than untargeted one. Apart from increasing your Alexa rank, the other kind will not bring much profits.

Sources of Targeted Traffic

Good Search Engine Ranking

A good standing in search engine would send you a lot of targeted traffic. People come to search engines to look for solutions. Thus they make a very targeted group of traffic. Building a good search engine position takes time but is worth it.

Mailing list. Your own list is also a source of targeted traffic. However you need to keep it responsive by regular interactions and repeated communications with your list.

PPC Traffic

Again a good source of traffic. Idea is same as in Organic traffic from search engines. PPC is associated with very good conversions.

Some PPC networks like Google Adwords also publish your ad on content network ( Read Adsense). It has been observed that traffic from content channels may not be that targeted. You may want to monitor and choose to block few sites which are not performing.

Ezine Advertising

This is simply exposing your site to other people’s list. To maximize the benefit, you should choose n ezine which is in similar niche as yours.

Joint ventures

Joint ventures are good source of targeted traffic. The leverage is done by combining the circle of influence of two or more people who are involved.

Sources of Untargeted Traffic

Banners

Banners get occasional curious clicks and do not result in effective traffic at all.

Free For All Sites

Need I write this

Traffic Exchanges

While they can send you some traffic but it is not worth anything

URL Rotators, Web Rings

Again sources of non happening traffic

Social Marketing Sites

While they buzz a lot and can send you hordes of traffic, it generally does not convert to the desired extent.

In online business offline marketing is not given much thought. Offline methods are great and if done rightly can bring a lot of customers

Classified Ads

Classified ads are published in almost all newspapers.This method of advertising should be tested by each marketer. It works great for lead generations. A strong benefit-driven headline and a clear call to action gets a lot of attention. Free reports work very well with classifieds. My local paper, the Hartford Courant even has an ongoing deal of 3 lines for 3 days – for free! Even adding more lines only ends up costing a few bucks. With a price like that, there’s no reason anyone with a website should not be testing ways to draw traffic to the site with classifieds.

Direct Mail

It sounds old fashioned but direct mail is still very effective when it comes to results-driven proven advertising. You need physical addresses of your subscribers to use this option. But it would be wise not to ask for addresses at the time of sign up. Most of people are not comfortable with providing you their addresses at first instance.

Instead ask for the address after person has subscribed. Direct mail can be used to send special offers, complimentary gifts and new launches.

Postcards

Though a part of direct mailing, postcards have a different own category. Postcards are cheaper to produce and mail than full-blown direct mail packages or sales letters, and they are great for generating leads.

Yellow Pages

Another great resource that is often underutilized. Yellow page ads are great because when someone sees your ad, they are already in the market for your product or service. Yellow page ads need to be benefits-driven, with your Unique Selling Proposition stated clearly and boldly.

Trade Show

A great place to capture leads. Again, a free report or gift does a great job.

Banners and Billboards

Banners and billboards are good for branding your business. use them to let people knoe that you exist.

Fliers and Circulars

You need to recruit people to get this job done. Local newspaper vendor, friends, schoolboys are few options. Circular and fliers are great way to generate awareness.

Card Decks and Value-Paks

Card decks, “value-paks” are cards and little booklets with multiple ads which are mailed to people. They can be quite cheap because they are shared by many advertiser together. While card decks are used with business reply cards, value paks are mostly used with coupons, rather than business reply cards.Ad Magazines – Ad Magazines a collection of space ads, usually local. These magazines tend to be less niche-focused, so you would need to choose carefully.

Catalogues

A catalogue is used for making people aware about services and products you provide. You need not spend a lot of money in the beginning. You can build a simple catalogue first and distribute, get feedback and improve on that.

Radio Infomercials

If you try you would get a slot at chep price. Radio is not as expensive as TV.

Networking

Offline networking should be pursued in addition to online networking. Local Chamber of Commerce, trade shows, seminarst are all good opportunities for networking.

Telemarketing

I kept it last because it is not in everybody’s taste to call people. But if you can, you would find an opportunity to build good relations with your subscribers which are deeper and better than mails and emails.

Long back when I started my first website on this domain, I committed innumerable mistakes. One of them was not building enough traffic.

I put up a site and started working on building a decent traffic for it.

Everyday I would do something that was to increase the traffic. I wrote articles, I participated in forums, I wrote classifieds.

Traffic started building.

The day came when my blog visitors crossed 400 per day.

And I started checking my mails.

Nope! there was not a single sale.

I checked next day.

None.

But I should have sales by now. Going by rate of conversion I should have had 1-2 sales per day.

But there was none.

I started getting anxious. I started checking mails many times a day.

I never realized how much time I was wasting in that senseless activity.

I did not realize I was working less towards building more traffic and spending more on checking mails, reading about conversions and other things similar.

My sales never occured.My traffic kept dropping.

As a newbie we are more interested in sales than any one veteran. It is a phenomenon, an expectation that we keep waiting for.

Veterans know sales would follow. Newbies look for sales anxiously.

As a result we distract our mind from business building activities.

If we find that there are 2 sales per 300 visitors, we become extremely worried if that is not happening with us.

We start looking at our web copy, website template, backgroud color, font size etc.

Things which are secondary.

Main aim your website should be building traffic. If you have traffic sales and monetization would definitely follow. No matter how you plan to montize, the first requirement is the traffic.

If there is no traffic, you cannot sell a single item.

If you out there are starting with something then I would advise you to forget everything about sales and conversions, and build your traffic.

When you have traffic on your site, you have power to monetize.

Conversion rates are stats and are based on a large sample base. It may not be applicable to small subgroups.

You need to increase your web visitors and conversion would definitely follow.

To become popular your website should be get recommendation or links from other websites. But you cannot write an article and expect to get plenty of links.

You need to think beyond.

You must therefore create what I call usable resources for masses. It does not matter if that resource is already available on other websites. If you put it on your site, you would get your share of users.

Free Content & Tools

Downloadable e-books or softwares are great traffic links & traffic pullers. Online resources like mortgage calculators, page rank checkers, site data analysis are few examples.

Think and brainstorm the usable resources in your niche. There would be plenty of opportunities.

Resource Directory

If you create a directory on your website, people would be eager to submit their websites. Web 2.0 directories, article directories are few examples.

Review Articles

Looking to buy products would always look for review first. Identify the products that cater to your niche and write in honest review.

If people trust your reviews, they would recommend that to many others. An affiliate link in the review is another advantage but you must do it subtly. Focus on dispensing the information.

A similar approach can be taken for event reviews.

Top Lists

Top lists like best 7 software sites, top 10 article directories are also hot topics that would be referenced by others soon.

Humorous content

Everybody likes humor and wants to share it with others. It is a great idea to put humorous content pertaining to your niche.

Polls & Surveys

If you happen to conduct research on certain topics and publish the data, that would be seriously noted and recommended by other people searching for information.

Videos

How to do videos are quite hot among users because they explain things better. It’s easy to create a video on your recorder and upload to your site.

Expert Interviews

A interview of an industry expert is always a crowd puller. But interview should not be there for sake of interviewing.

It must contain useful information to visitors.

Do this repeatedly brainstorm & innovate.

Your traffic & popularity graft would surely rise.