Let’s hope they arrive in large numbers.  With my recent launch of Computer Tech News, I was looking for a way to generate traffic.  Any traffic at all would be fine, just to show advertisers that there were pageviews coming from somewhere else other than my WordPress admin panel.  My first thought was Adwords, but I’ve become more and more annoyed with them lately.  I’ve caught them using a proxy server to click on my adwords, all in the spirit of “checking for violations”.   In fact, the main source of traffic for my affiliate page is other affiliates.  Maybe they click my adwords for spite, checking out the competition for ideas, looking for violations, curiosity, or whatever.  All I know is Google employees should not be doing what they are doing if it costs me a click.  To add insult to injury they wanted to charge me .20 a click for the keyword “tech.turnipofpower.com”.   Enough ranting on the two-faced Do-No-Evil company.

In this civilized day and age the proper way to generate traffic is to pray at the alter of johnchow.com.  While gazing at his site agape in awe and admiration, I spotted an article talking about the “johnchow effect” and how it raised their site’s alexa rank off the chart.  A $400 review by the master is tempting, but first I wanted to try my own hand at things.  The company featured in the review was an Australian firm called AdToll, who assists you in selling ad space on your site in a variety of formats.  Being bored with Google, I decided to give their advertising a shot and put a 125×125 ad spot on my site.  I added the code and was quickly approved.  Their customer service was very quick and informative. 

The profit model was very interesting.  They pay you 75% of ad revenue.  In addition, from referrals you can make 20% commission on profit made from Advertisers (90 day period); and 10% commission on profit made from Publishers (365 day period).  Using the “auto-pricing” structure I was surprise that running an ad for a week would only generate .20 in revenue.  However, you can run up to 30 ads in that spot, and have multiple ads.  In addition, you can set your own pricing to anything you want.

By now bells were going off in my head.  I didn’t give a damn about twenty cents profit.  I wanted to learn about how to buy traffic from them.  For my twenty cents, I could have my ad viewed by thousands of visitors.  Unlike Google Content, there was no incentive for click fraud, since the website already got their money in advance.  I searched the net and found a coupon code for AdToll.  There are a bunch out there with the same deal of $3 bonus with $20 deposit, try “WHT01″.

One really nice thing about advertising there is the variety of ad formats.  Sometimes you can find a bargain.  A site that sells 768×90 ads for $3.00 a week might only charge 20 cents a week for a 200×200 pixel ad.  I was like a kid in a candy store, wanting to sign up for everything for a day, drop what didn’t work, and keep the rest.  With AdToll you can. I decide to risk a dollar each on multiple 125×125 ads, 200×200 ads, and a single text ad for a week.  Then I hand picked my sites based upon page views.  At first I stuck to English only sites with traffic mainly from the U.S., then moved further out into the world from there.  By the end of the night I was advertising on Chinese and Korean sites.  For twenty cents, you really can’t go wrong.   At the end of the week I will remove any sites that didn’t return a single click and probably renew those that had traffic.

Now for the negatives, or in this case a single “negative”.  There weren’t that many English Language sites with mainly U.S. viewers featuring decent traffic.  If you had no standards at all you could find 70 such sites, but that quickly narrowed to 4 sites if you wanted 50 or more clicks per week.  For that reason I decided to have some fun and see how many Chinese visitors I could entice.  I passed on all the “free chopsticks” offers that crossed my mind and decided to run my normal ad just to see how it did.  Two of the sites turned out to be complete duds, generating no pageviews or traffic.  My adtoll manager Dan took care of the problem immediately and issued a full refund.  The other six sites have been generating pageviews and traffic working out to .03 per click so far.  For cheap traffic AdToll has met my expectations.

Even better, adtoll is a big fan of entrecard and are sponsoring a contest for 13,000 credits.  This contest will end on the 31st January 2008 at which time 3 random entries will be drawn and the winners announced on the 1st of February 2008.

Prizes are as follows:

1st - 10,000 credits
2nd - 2,000 credits
3rd - 1,000 credits

Good luck to everyone that enters!