So in the last piece about arcades and monetization, I wrote about the two kinds of arcades. While the first kind focuses on quality and is usually a long and drawn out process the 2nd type can be quick and does not require much investment.

Today we are going to focus on the 2nd type because well, its just more interesting to talk about than the traditional arcade which mostly relies on who has the most money to sponsor games.

In a debate at talkarcades.com, there was much discussion about the recent poor quality of traffic that trades produce. I almost laughed out loud when I saw this because the entire focus of traffic trading is not about maximizing user experience — its about maximizing the number of visitors to your site. The fact that you are bouncing visitors from site to site already makes user experience not so good. The reason this kind of arcade has such an advantage over the traditional arcade is because of its ability to multiply traffic. While the conversion rates on traffic do matter, these arcades should be so profitable that it doesn’t require meticulous tracking of how each trade partner converts. You just have to weed out the cheaters that are obviously sending you fake traffic. Now I traffic trade on some of my sites and in terms of money made to resources needed(servers and bandwidth) to keep the site running, the profit margin is 10:1 or even more. This should be the case with any traffic trading site. If you not at least garnering this much, your doing something wrong and need to re-examine your business model. This, however, does not include the costs of buying adwords that some sites in this category do.

I firmly believe that buying adwords is not the way to go in a traffic-trading site. You should focus most of your efforts on getting free search engine traffic by targetting specific keywords. You should target more than one keyword or phrase for site. For instance if your site is about ‘Car games’, you should target ‘car games’ but also create a section for ‘bike games’ and ‘truck games’ and target that specific sub-page to that term. A top 10 result in these terms will get you hundreds or thousands of free visitors per day. If you get good at SEO, its easy to make a 10:1 profit to costs ratio happen, regardless of what kind of traffic you are receiving on the other end of the trade, as long as its not fake.

Getting key link exchanges for your sub-pages is pretty critical to achieving large amounts of success as just focusing on 1 primary keyword or phrase will limit the room in which you grow.

You really don’t need a traffic trading script that costs thousands of dollars to be good in traffic trading. You just need a script that lets you keep track of how much you receive and how much you send out. The rest of the time should be spent on link exchanges, obtaining backlinks, and climbing up the SEO ladder.

Good luck.

Tags: arcade, money, traffic trading

This entry was posted on Monday, June 29th, 2009 at 3:34 pm and is filed under Misc. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.