Welcome to understandings_; My column here on Maverick Revolution. I'll be postin' about advertising, the user experience, and pretty much anything in between or out... between? ;)

This time we are going to be looking at how to get traffic without resorting to spamming and other crude methods that are frowned upon. All of these I have used myself for Maverick Revolution at some point and I will do my best to provide a comprehensive analysis. Enjoy!

The services Matt and I have tried include Blogsaic, AdsVert, LinkReferral, AdGridWork, AdGridWork Directory, liveinternetads, TrafficG, and Traffic Racer.

Blogsaic
This one is a rather new site by the looks of it and is really a great idea. I was fairly unsure of the effectiveness of this before I tried it but as of this posting it has directed nearly 50 visitors to Maverick Revolution.

AdsVert
It may look like any other advertising solution but this one is really great for those people who can not purchase impressions for their ads. The only real complaint I have about this service is the lack of custom sizes, or more sizes even, for the ads you place on your site. Otherwise it is a solid service for anyone who can not spend money on advertising online. We are currently rotating AdsVert adcode in our advertisments here on Maverick Revolution via Athena.

LinkReferal
A very traditional traffic solution is the directory. LinkReferal is just that, a directory of websites people add which allows for reviews and rankings. The more active you are on the site the higher up your site goes in the ranks. You have to login daily however to keep moving up which can be a pain to some people. Matt and I have not been doing this daily, every 3 days usually or when we have time, but regardless Maverick Revolution is still very high up in the directory, something like 20(?), and we have gotten nearly 200 unique visitors in the past 11 days. They also offer an adcode, which is rotating a little bit here, which is based on a mutual tradeoff between you and others using the ad service. Very useful.

AdGridWork
I have not personally used this very much, Matt did originally for Maverick Revolution, but I thought I would throw it in. It functions almost the same as AdsVert works. It is a great solution for someone who can not afford their own ads. What this does is you display an adcode on your site, which we do here through Athena, and for each ad you show on your site, your ad is shown on someone elses site who has the adcode. Great mutual tradeoff for both sides. About 100 visitors have come to us this month from AdGridWork.

AdGridWork Directory
Directories are not usually a good way to get traffic but since it is on the same site as AdGridWork I figured what the hell. I have not seen any traffic from this but it was simple to set up and it may prove effective in the future.

liveinternetads
This one is pretty much useless. I can not imagine that many people click on the links listed there. We only got 8 people from there in 5 days. Probably not worth your time the way it is set up now.

TrafficG
The same guys who do AdsVert run this site but to tell you the truth it is not useful at all when compared to AdsVert. You get some credits for joining but that is about it. After you burn those you have to use their "surf 4 credits" option to manually visit websites for meager credits or purchase them form them. Your money on credits would be better spent on ads on something such as Google AdWords.

Traffic Racer
I actually found this via the LinkReferral directory and it takes the least amount of effort out of any of these options. When you join you get a fair amount of credits and then from there you have a couple options. A. Pay them for more credits by upgrading your account, B. Do a manual surf option like TrafficG has, but with better credit earning, or C. using their auto surf option. With this you just can open it up in a new tab and let it run. Every 15 seconds it loads another website and you earn 2 credits. This adds up quickly especially if you leave it open for hours. You get 8 credits per minute, which adds up to 480 credits per hour, and if you are like me and want to leave it open for 12 hours out of the day you can easily get upwards of 5000 credits for doing nothing. One thing to note: Be sure to use Firefox for popup blocking and have some antivirus, I recomend Avast!, running because I have had one site which had some spyware it tried to download but was caught. If you really wanted to you could get about 100,000 a week if you left it open 24/7. With the credits you can then convert them to impressions for banners or text links displayed on their site. The next thing I would like to see them add is an adcode so it would function much like AdsVert does where you purchase impressions on other peoples sites. The traffic from this service has been around 60 people from the surfbar, which does not count as visitors to me since they probably did not do anything on the site, and a CTR of 0.02% on banners and text links off their site with something around 15000 impressions.

Overall my favorite services are AdsVert, LinkReferral, AdGridWork, and Traffic Racer because of the effectiveness of them all and relative simplicity. Know of any other services that you have tried and find effective? Post back in the comments about them and let everyone know!