No Cost Traffic--The Inside Scoop on Start Page Rotators
By Kevin Bidwell
Posted Tuesday, February 10, 2004
Everyone wants website traffic. Traffic is the key to getting sales and profits.
So, with the regularity of "Old Faithful," new ideas on getting traffic for little or no money sprout up every few months. A couple years ago someone came up with the idea of "Start Page Rotators".
A start page rotator (or SPR) is simply a way to display a different home page each time someone opens their browser. While the traffic is "untargeted," it does generate genuine visits to a site and, if the site is crafted properly, can result in sales.
Webmasters would join these SPR groups and, in return for looking at other people's pages, they would have their page displayed. Often at a ratio of 2 views to 1 display.
They could also earn additional page displays by signing up other webmasters.
At first they were very successful.
When All-In-One-Business.com began using them about 18 months ago, we were averaging one new student for every 800 or so page displays. In addition, we were receiving about 200 new subscribers.
So, we were very pleased with the results.
Over the last 18 months those numbers have dropped considerably. Now we receive one new student for every 4,000 or so page displays and about 5% of our page displays result in someone signing up for our newsletter.
This is considerably less.
There are a number of reasons why results have diminished:
1. There is much more competition for start pages, many new companies have joined the mix meaning that any one SPR has fewer page views to offer.
2. Many webmasters are members of several SPR's meaning they are seeing the same ads several times across several different SPR companies.
3. Many people have pop-up blocking on their sites making it more difficult to harvest email addresses using that method.
4. Cheating is common. One person may use software to open hundreds of pages each day in a variety of SPR's. Since no one sees the pages, no one buys the products. Also, one person may sign up with multiple accounts making each page view much less valuable.
5. Some larger users--like All-In-One-Business.com--have received so many page views that everyone in the system has seen their offer again and again. While that does not affect EVERYONE'S returns, it does affect the return that particular business will get.
Most of the better SPR's have done their best to help with the cheating, hoping to preserve the value of their product. Still, conversion rates have continued to decline making it difficult to have strong sales from a campaign supported solely through SPRs.
Are SPR's dead? No, but it will take some effort and many exposures to get good money from them. Here are some ways to increase your own site's chances of success using Start Page Rotators:
1. Build a page designed to simply catch the user's attention.
Instead of offering your primary product, offer something free in return for the visitor signing up for your list. Use that list to promote your primary product or service. Making the page specific to the SPR also has great value in capturing the attention of the web page "surfer." If once they subscribe, they are re-directed to your offer page, all the better.
2. Promote new start-page rotator programs to your current list.
Since you are going to need tens of thousands of exposures to be effective, the easiest way to get more page views is to recruit others. For instance, I have received over 200K in page views from one SPR--and made over $6,000 in profits. This would not have been possible without my referring about 200 people to the service.
The key is to get in early. When a start page rotator is new you are likely to get many more sign-ups than once it has been around awhile.
3. Target your email to people who have signed up through an SPR.
Using an autoresponder service like this one:
QuickTell AutoResponders
you can have a different autoresponder follow-up for each SPR you have ads running on. Because you know some things already about the recipient of the message (they have a website they wish to promote, etc.) you can better target your offers.
Are SPR's worth your time? Sure, but not too much. They are a good way to enhance promotions you are already involved in.
About The Author
Kevin Bidwell is owner of All-In-One-Business.com
Kevin is offering a FREE BUSINESS START-UP KIT to everyone who visits his site. If you liked this article, you will want to subscribe to his newsletter. Send a blank email to: nwslttr@quicktell.net
