Even if you’ve never tried using a traffic exchange before, a pre-launch gaining momentum the way LinkCrews is doing shouldn’t be missed. An account is free, so you won’t lose a thing for giving it a try, and the launch tomorrow should be very interesting to watch.

Check it out here: LinkCrews

Not too long ago, I focused my traffic building efforts on the BIG sites.  I wouldn’t submit to a directory unless it got lots of traffic, and lots
of existing listings.

I wouldn’t submit tags to a site that wasn’t one of the top ten social bookmarking sites.

And then it all changed.

I asked one of my employees to do a little promotion for a new site,  and submit the URL to every related directory he could find. And he
did exactly that.

He submitted to sites that got maybe 1,000 visitors per year.  Directories that had only one or two other sites in their index. Sites I would have ignored completely.

A few months later, as I was analyzing my stats, I slapped myself upside the head seeing what I had missed by ignoring low traffic
underdog sites.

I saw that low traffic does not mean NO traffic.  I saw that many of those sites have a ‘recent submissions’ section on their
front page. Even with only 100 visitors a month, each and every one of those visitors were seeing my listing. And with not much else
to click on, a LOT of them came to visit.

In fact, one of those teeny, tiny underdog directories brings me more traffic each month than my listing in Dmoz/Open Directory
with all its billions served.

The same holds true for Tag and Ping.  I had a fine piece of software built for me that submits to social bookmarking sites automatically.
It submits to Digg, and Furl, and Del.icio.us. And those are valuable sites to be sure. As long as they don’t institute the nofollow tag
they’ll pass on some Page Rank too.

But I also had my programmer add some of the less popular sites, and that has made all the difference in my tag and ping efforts, and related
revenue.

A submission to Del.icio.us might bring one or two visitors, but a submission to my favorite underdog bookmarking site brings me
50 new visitors per day.

And all this brings me to a request.  I am going to be releasing my social bookmarking product in a week. I’d like to ask you to hold off
purchasing any other bookmarking software till you see what I’ve got to offer.

Here’s my promise:

• It will be affordable
• It will submit to the ‘big dogs’
• It will submit to the ‘underdogs’
• It will be fully supported and updated each and every month.

So, please hold on to your wallet. I promise it’ll save you money,
and bring more traffic.

I haven’t tried this yet, but it sounds like something that could turn out to be very useful..

Bambalam Php Compiler 

From the site:

Bambalam PHP EXE Compiler/Embedder is a free command line tool to convert PHP applications to standalone Windows .exe applications. The exe files produced are totally standalone, no need for php dlls etc. The php code is encoded using the Turck MMCache Encode library so it’s a perfect solution if you want to distribute your application while protecting your source code. The converter is also suitable for producing .exe files for windowed PHP applications (created using for example the WinBinder library, or with PHP-GTK). It’s also good for making stand-alone PHP Socket servers/clients (the php_sockets extension is included in the static build).  

I was skeptical, to say the least.

In fact, I was convinced these sites wouldn’t bring in more than a few pennies a day in Adsense revenues.

But I put a bunch of them online anyway.

The stats below show a domain where I placed 23 of Joel Comm’s Instant Adsense Templates. The domain, just to reveal all, has been around for many years, and has a Google PR of 4, so I wasn’t starting from scratch. Still, this surprised me:

I took this screenshot just after noon on Tuesday, and I see I’ve broken the $100 mark on those 23 sites.

So…. to what do I owe this success?

1) The pre-existing domain, and choosing subfolders instead of subdomains.
It would have taken much longer to get in Google’s SERPs if I had chosen a new domain for each site, or a subdomain which also would have gotten sandboxed.

2) The sites I chose were all tech/computer/gadget related, which make the best candidates for Tag and Ping traffic. I have been bookmarking one page from each site per day with 22 bookmarking services (the lesser known services providing the best traffic… but that’s a post for another day).

3) I was wrong, and these sites are particularly well designed to encourage AdSense clicks.

So, now that I’ve learned something, I’m going to apply it. The next few sites I build are going to :

• Be on tech topics
• Be hosted in folders of established and indexed domains
• Be tag and pinged regularly.
• Be modeled after these dorky looking templates.

Today, as I was trying to impress upon my son that it’s irresponsible for him to just expect his mom to replace every toy he loses or disassembles, I realized that my kid has everything. I mean everything.

And that made me feel a little guilty for not helping those with nothing.

So, I decided that the proceeds of this blog will go to sponsoring children who have far less than my very fortunate son.

I went to World Vision’s site, and saw Milton from Bolivia.

Bolivia is the poorest south american country, and one with a very corrupt bureaucracy and a government enamoured with socialism, which means it’s a really lousy place to be poor.

If $35 bucks each month will make his life better, I am glad. And if sponsoring Milton helps me teach my son how very fortunate he is, that’s good too.

Milton is the first Child of the Surf.

And if I start squeaking more revenue from this site, I’ll just sponsor more. And more.

I’m looking forward to this…

(Incidentally, I’m only about $10 shy of another child of the surf this month… anyone care to pick up a copy of GoTryThis or WP Themerator before you go?)