Jake from GallerySubmit.com is back with another information-packed article on maximizing revenues through the use of gallery pages. Follow along as he shows you how to use his free traffic cycling script to increase your bottom line by 10-15%
Maximizing Your Income
It must be quite frustrating to be a traffic broker...
In order to convert your traffic, the broker needs to ensure that each hit he is paying you for is a single, unique person. If the first ad didn't work on a surfer, it is unlikely that sending him to the same advertisement again will be beneficial. It is for this reason that exit brokers only pay you based on a "unique" surfer count, not a raw one.
The "Catch"
As you send traffic to your brokers, you will eventually find that ~15-20% of the traffic you are sending is non-unique. While most may deem this as "acceptable losses", you should remember that the exit sponsor does not only sell/advertise one item! The traffic sent is rotated to several customers and their own items. So when you are sending this non-unique traffic, the surfers will get rotated through their script to different locations. 10 hits from the same person pays you only 1 unique hit, however that traffic can earn them 1 unique hit to 10 different customers!
Don't get me wrong, I don't find this in any way in bad taste. However, I do feel that you can maximize YOUR income and fight the traffic battle by doing the exact same thing as your exit sponsor does – rotate the traffic! Your main weapon for doing this: signing up with several sponsors so you now have many places to send your exit traffic before sending a non-unique hit.
Cycling the Traffic
There are many ways you can set up a traffic cycling system. PHP would offer a simple array/output method, perl would have some benefits as well. Being concerned with efficiency/profit maximization, I was concerned with the speed of those two languages. Several hundred/thousand php requests per minute may increase server loads, drop connections or cause unpredicatble results.
To counter this, I felt that a C coded / compiled CGI script would be the most efficient solution. As well, it would be beneficial (Read: necessary) to have statistics availible about the traffic as well. These ideas soon became "Jake's Traffic Script". Grab a copy of it here: Jake's Traffic Script
To note: most people have a certain sponsor that they prefer over the others. Therefore, it may also be beneficial to incorporate some sort of weighting option into the cycle script as well.
Server Changes
Update your .htaccess file (we discussed this in my last article). You should end up with an .htaccess that resembles:
Options +FollowSymlinks
ErrorDocument 404 http://www.yourdomain.com/cgi-bin/out.cgi
ErrorDocument 403 http://www.yourdomain.com/cgi-bin/out.cgi
ErrorDocument 500 http://www.yourdomain.com/cgi-bin/out.cgi
This will direct all error traffic through to your traffic script, which will route it accordingly.
Conclusions
By cycling your 404 traffic you should see a definite improvement in your 404/blind link income. A few minutes setting this up is nothing compared to your long term traffic income gain (10-15%!
) Remember, you should always be concerned with long term earnings, it is the one surefire way to stay afloat in this business.
It is important to check with your sponsors to see if they accept using a script to direct traffic. Some may not - and you might lose your hard earned money.
Remember - you can also use this method to use your OWN advertisements / galleries / FPA's and determine their effectiveness. You will get an equal amount of clicks on average to each output, so you can investigate the productivity of each and weight/control the output accordingly. Be creative!
