Can you earn a living from traffic exchanges?

Until a couple of years ago, it was quite easy to earn a
decent living on traffic exchange commissions.  You needed
your own website; a "funnel" that drove people through a
single link and into several different traffic exchanges. Your
website needed to be good.  It needed to offer a service to
traffic exchange users - something like a ranking site,
or a system to help others earn commissions too.  Using a system like this,
you could get one person to join several different traffic exchanges through
your links, and if they were the type of person to upgrade or buy credits,
chances were they would spend money at all of them.

Ka-ching!

The trouble is, it isn't so easy any more.  Don't get me wrong; it's easy enough
to find new members.  Finding people who have the money to spend is
another matter entirely.  They are few and far between.

When I first noticed that my income as a traffic exchange owner (and the
amount of commission I was paying to members) was dropping, at first I
thought there was a simple explanation.

"Our economies are dipping in and out of recession."

"The financial climate is dire."

"Everyone has less money to spend."

I'm an optimist by nature, but even I have to admit the first two statements
are true.  The third, however, is totally incorrect.

I'll tell you a secret here.  This is something most traffic exchange owners
won't tell you, because they're keen to preserve the illusion that it's business
as usual.  In the last 2 years, the average monthly turnover at HitsBoosterPro,
High Hits and SkyScraper Surf (all traffic exchanges that I either own or am
closely involved with) has dropped by around two thirds.

This is industry wide.  You only have to look at what other people are doing to
see this.  Some, who have always been totally focused on traffic exchanges,
have branched out into other things, such as safelists, autoresponders and
paid-to-click sites.  Others have added Clickbank affiliate products to the list
of things they promote.  Some have launched more traffic exchanges to try
and recover lost income.  And a few have shut down or sold their traffic
exchanges, and gone back to work (or whatever else they can do to earn
an income).

That is the reason why you are earning less commission now than you were
2 years ago. There's less money coming in, so less money to be paid out.

But there's more to it than that.  As I said, the third statement above - "everyone
has less money to spend" - is totally wrong.

When I started looking closely at the figures at HitsBoosterPro, I noticed
something interesting. I had expected all the same members to still be
upgrading, and buying credits, start pages, etc ... but at a lower level, and
so spending less money.  What I actually found was a lot of members had
stopped spending money completely, while others were still spending at the
same level as before.

This told me something unexpected.  While most people were struggling, and
spending less money online, some people seemed totally unaffected by the
financial crisis.

I had found the crux of the problem.  Traffic exchanges make their profits, and
pay their commissions, based on lots of people spending small amounts of
money.  If most people don't have any money to spend, that system is going
to fail.  I needed to find a way to get the people who had money to spend more
of it.

That's difficult when your products and services are cheap.  You can only charge
so much for an upgrade, and there's a limit to how many credits, banners and
text link impressions a person can use.

I realised I had to go back to basics.  I had to take a huge step back, to the
time when I Love Hits and EasyHits4U were shiny new beacons in the world of
online advertising, when the purpose of a traffic exchange was to exchange
traffic, not to earn commissions.  I needed to find myself a primary product
(preferably one that paid big commissions, so I didn't need to make lots of
sales), and use traffic exchanges to promote it.

It sounded simple enough ... until I started looking around for something to
sell.  I headed over to ClickBank, where there were some interesting products
priced around the $100 mark.  At 50% commission, that's $50 a sale.  Not bad.

Until you start adding it up.  Your figures will be different, of course, but here in
Spain, the cost of living isn't cheap.  Once I'd added up rent, food, electric
(heating and cooling), running a car, tax and social security, etc, I figured I
needed to earn around $5,000 a month to be comfortable, and not have any
financial worries.  At $50 a sale, that's 100 sales a month, or around 3 a day.
Could I find 3 people to buy a $100 product, every day ... forever?

No.

I needed a higher priced product.

And that introduced a new problem.  There's no shortage of high priced
products to sell, but I have to be honest and admit I'm no saleswoman.
(My uncle is a natural salesman, and he tried to teach me some techniques
once.  We both accepted I was useless!)  While people might buy a $20, $50,
or even $100 product from a well-written sales page, it takes more than that
to sell a $500 or $1,000 product.  It takes sales skill.  It takes that art of gentle
persuasion, of showing the prospect that your product is exactly what they
need, and how it will solve a problem in their life that they didn't even know
existed ... until just now.

(OK, I'm exaggerating.  Selling probably isn't that difficult, but it doesn't alter
the fact that I - as well as 90% of the population, if official stats are anything to
go by - can't do it.)

The situation gnawed at me for some time.  I'd uncovered the problem.  I'd
discovered why my business was making less money, and my members were
earning less commission.  I'd even discovered a solution.  But I was still missing
one final thing - the key to putting that solution into practice.

That part took me a while longer, but when the solution did arrive, it was so
simple it was shocking.  Find a company with high priced products that will make
the sales for you!  Believe it or not, there are companies out there that will do
that.  Of course, you earn less commission that way (although $1000 on a $2000
sale is still a good amount of money) but it leaves you free to concentrate on
generating traffic.

Since signing up as an affiliate with one such company, I have seen my
income grow significantly.  In fact, I expect to earn 6-figures in 2014 just
from doing what I have always done - driving traffic.

If you think you can do this too, you may want to check it out:
My Top Tier Business