When I last left you, I was discussing my introduction to and fascination with traffic exchanges. In February of 2011 something happened that changed traffic exchanges forever. When I use the past tense of the word “change”, I am not really using the correct tense because the event that occurred is changing now and it will continue to change and improve for years to come. Because of my lurking involvement in Traffic Exchange Live, I had an inclination that something different was going to happen. The event is really the combination of two seemingly separate events. First, Jon Olson, Tim Linden, and Justin Ledvina released Click Track Profit and second, the three announced that they were going to combine their separate companies into one company called Tim Tech. This new organization brought AdKreator, I Love Hits, Start Exchange, Sweeva, Dr. Traffic, and TE Toolbox under one single ownership.

The occurrence of these events coincided with the receipt of my annual tax return and when Click Track Profit quietly rolled out the public, I decided to make my first cash investment into my internet marketing business with a one time upgrade offer to Click Track Profit. The lifetime upgrade gives me higher commissions, free random referrals and other benefits. When Click Track Profit was rolled out, there was a lot of discussion/criticism in the traffic exchange community about the nature and/or validity of the program. Tim Tech rolled out a program that was not entirely complete, and I believe that they did this on purpose. I myself did not understand at the time what they were doing, but now I know exactly what they did and why. I invested in the program because I had spent some time listening to Jon in Traffic Exchange Live and I came to trust him and his ideology. What Tim Tech did is introduce what I call a “minimum viable product.” For the early adopters, there was some faith involved in their commitment to the program because it was just the skeleton of an ever evolving grand plan.

Jon would often explain that Click Track Profit was a drip feed program that would continually develop and offer its users something new and enriching slowly and consistently. The question is commonly asked, “What is Click Track Profit?” I answer that question on one of the pages of this blog in the Click Track Profit tab above, but I do have a more concise description.

From my perspective, the traffic exchange industry is a tangled mess of programs and opportunities that spin people in 100 directions until the centrifugal force of their spinning launches them out of the industry. Click Track Profit creates a clear pathway of focus to anyone that wants to create and promote a business with traffic exchanges as a focal point. The pathway primarily consists of step-by-step training program where you learn by doing after watching drip-fed training videos. The training will guide you through the steps of slowly building your business with longevity and stability as the key factors.

Stay tuned to the next episode of Internet Marketing Adventure to see what happens next.

Application:

The application for this episode is “trust”. Sometimes you have to have faith and trust someone. I had a great feeling about Justin, Tim and Jon from the outset. I truly felt that they were out to help me with my best interest in mind, and that initial feeling has held to be very true. However, there are plenty of people in the internet marketing business that will take your money and run, so be very wise, discerning and shrewd with who and what you trust. Sometime in the next few episodes, I will share how invested in untrustworthy programs and lost.

When I left you in episode 2, I was pointed to a traffic exchange as an option for promoting my paid to click website, yourptcguide.com. I found that if I looked at other peoples websites and advertisements, the traffic exchange would give me credits that would allow me to have my site shown. While I was viewing other peoples sites, I found another traffic exchange called Traffic Splash. Suddenly, I realized that there were hundreds of these traffic exchanges. I signed up for a few of them and really enjoyed viewing the diversity of advertisements in each of the different exchanges.

One particular traffic exchange, called I Love Hits, had a chat system at right of the website. In the chat, I could see a few different people having a conversation. I still remember the people in the chat on that evening nearly a year ago, Brenda Broyles, Randy Mason, Lynn Anderson owner of Celtic Clicks, and Tracy owner of Hit Assylum. Everybody in the chat was very helpful and I found that I could learn quite a bit about internet marketing from being acitve in the chats. Brenda really helped me out in my personal branding and Randy pointed me to great opportunities including Traffic Hoopla which is one of the top traffic exchange downline builders.

I Love Hits also has a game called bracket surfing were you are daily put up against other traffic exchange surfers. If you win, you move up the bracket. By the end of the week, if you place high you can win credits. I got really addicted to this game for quite awhile.

I am signed up for about 50 traffic exchanges and for awhile I tried to focus on using about 30. I guess you could say that I was really addicted to traffic exchanges and really enjoy the community aspect of traffic exchanges. In February 2011, something happened that changed the traffic exchange world, but you will have to wait till episode 4 to learn what happened.

The application for this for this episode is social networking. When I got up the courage to speak up in the chats, I had no idea or intention of becoming part of an online community. It is something that seemed to happen to me. Being social is not something natural to me. Being an introvert means that I primarily get my energy from having time alone and in addition to that, I am also highly task oriented which means that being social can often seem like a waste of time and draining for me personally.  HOWEVER, I said “seem like a waste of time.” What I have learned is that relationships and community are the building blocks for commerce in this new world.  Well, relationships and community have always been the building blocks for commerce, but I think that what we know as “internet commerce” ruined the community and relationship aspect of commerce through pitching, scamming and spamming. So, what is this “new world” that I speak?  It is a world where you can no longer “SEO” your way to the top of Google rankings. The new Google algorithms (Panda) are now searcher centric which means that it is searching to promote sites that are the most useful to the searcher. If you want to top the Google rankings, you need to offer value and relationship. In the “new world” of internet commerce,  we must offer value and a relationship to our customers.

So what does that mean for us? It means that we need to build relationships and the best way to build them is to either seek for or offer help to someone else. As we seek to learn or teach, we will create value base relationships and a commerce community that thrives. So go out and either seek for or offer help  someone new.