Top Five Sins of the Startpage Exchanges
by Pamela Heywood     [email version]

Right now, these exchanges are generating more traffic to my site than 
any other single method ever has. They are a great tool, as any, in the 
right hands. They may not work next week, who knows, but that's the 
nature of the Internet.

What IS certain is that they can be made to work HARDER for you right 
now. Just a few tweaks can make all the difference between merely 
counting numbers of useless hits and using this great *moving billboard 
advertising system* to effectively generate real live leads for your 
business.

1. Broken Links

Goodness knows how many hits I have earned looking at *The page 
cannot be displayed* or worse, *The page you are looking for is no 
longer on this web site* or the even funnier, *you are not authorised 
to see this* ...

OK, so once in a while it might be that a site is only momentarily down, 
but that does not account for the large number of error screens I see, day 
in, day out.

Hey, that might be YOUR credits I am using, so check that the link you 
gave actually works. This has to be one of the dumbest, yet simplest 
errors to correct.

Sign up for a free monitoring service so you know if your page goes down 
for any length of time.

2. Third-Party Page Rotators

They are UGLY! They look unprofessional and it adds yet another waiting 
time to the downloading process as the rotator page is called by the 
exchange and the rotator goes off in search of the *real* page it has to 
display ... etc.

Yawn! Yawn! Clickaway!

Yes, I know there are *experts* out there telling you to use them as part of 
their system. Choose your experts wisely!

I've also earned a lot of my hits looking at the top and bottom frames of 
the rotator thing with a BIG BLANK white space in the middle. And LONG 
before anything actually appeared in there, I'd clicked on my 
*NEXT* button.

By far, THE most important reason why you don't want to use one of 
these rotators, is because you do NOT even need to serve up a variety 
of offerings. The place for doing that is on YOUR unique website and/or 
in YOUR ezine.

3 Java Applets, Flash, Banner Farms, Gratuitous graphics

Anything that is just there for aesthetics increases download time. You 
don't need it here. You probably don't need it elsewhere either, but that's 
a whole different article. I as a surfer, certainly don't need it when it 
crashes my computer because it sucks up far too much memory on top of 
all the pages I have open.

Besides, it loads too slow for me to actually see it!

4. Popups, unders 

They have their place, but it isn't here and it isn't going to endear you to 
potential sign-ups or clients.

In fact, one exchange, ViralVisitors.com is now giving members FOUR 
FREE PopUp & Exit Ad killers. They say:

"These can be particularly annoying when you are trying to surf for visitor 
credits. Many will slow down your browser functions, eat up your Ram 
and occasionally lock up your browser so a reboot is necessary."

If it's an exit exchange or similar, you may use a credit without getting an 
actual page view back.

5. Affiliate/Program Sites 

I'm NOT going to sit there reading why XYZ opportunity is the best 
thing since sliced bread and why I should sign up right now. I'm certainly not 
hanging around long enough to consider the pros and cons of actually 
spending money.

Besides, I've probably already seen that one 120 times in the last hour 
alone. I've developed immunity!

I can hear you arguing that their site is more professional than your 
efforts. It might be, but it was NEVER designed for these exchanges: their 
pages are generally far too complex for the job in hand and will load too 
slowly.

And what about if your program goes offline, stops taking sign-ups even 
temporarily, closes for cleaning out their database or, worse, goes belly 
up?

I see those every day too. That's someone's credits getting eaten. Make 
sure they aren't yours.

Do it right: treat these exchanges as you should small ads and ezine 
ads. Don't go for direct hits, just collect email addresses: leads that you 
can follow-up later. Then you won't just have hits today, but you'll have 
built contacts and business that will last you forever.

Copyright © 2003 Pamela Heywood
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