Luke's Review of the Advertising Reviewers

If you have come to the conclusion, like I have, that the only sure way to generate professional-strength traffic to your site is to pay for it, then you’re in luck! You have just found the one article that will save you more money on advertising than you could possibly believe.

Normally, spending money for Ads of any kind online is a very risky thing… You never know how fast the traffic will come, if the traffic is targeted well, if it is a blockable pop-up, a pop-under, or even just shown in a tiny 1x1 pixel frame! Buying solo ads in eZines can be just as risky, because there are tons of ‘forced-opt-in’ eZines, and worse, safelists posing as Ezines… And most safelists out there these days have many thousands or even millions of guaranteed recipients who are all receiving thousands or more emails every day… Not at all likely to get even 1 email opened, or even your subject line read!

Up until recently, you had to be referred to good traffic resources. If a successful corporation or a ‘guru’ didn’t tell you what they were using to advertise with, you had to find out the hard way.

The very, very hard way. By spending thousands on all the various traffic sources and eZine lists you could find until you give up and go back to AdWords at 30 cents a click… It is a tale as old as the net.

But today you’re in luck. Did you know that there are actually a couple of websites out there that review webmaster advertising resources? Just like Consumer Reports… When I saw the first one myself I couldn’t believe it, I thought I’d run across a complete scam. But it turns out that the two I’m reviewing here are both legitimate, and even affordable enough for any newbie to use!

So how do I know what I’m talking about? I’ve been advertising my businesses online since 1997. In 2004 I owned a Search Engine Optimization company called the Internet Optimization Network, but you may have heard of it referred to as “ION.” I used many forms of advertising for my clients there, on top of optimizing their sites for the search engines. I’m a very experienced Pay-per-clicker, viral marketer, forum marketer, blogger, traffic surfer, safelister, Ezine blaster, article marketer, and of course Search Engine Optimizer. In fact, I would venture to say that there are few people online who have spent as much time, energy, and effort on website advertising as I have over the last 5 years.

I know what I’m saying when I tell you that all of your future advertising decisions should be based on data found at these two resources.

Without them, or without one of those rare, golden advertising contacts that comes once in a couple of lifetimes, your chances of ever paying less for traffic than AdWords’s going rate is next to zero.

Not very optimistic, I know. I came to this conclusion after wasting thousands of dollars with various traffic generating companies, and I even threw in the towel for a while, absolutely convinced that the whole industry was a scam. I was sure that nobody but Google or Yahoo! actually could control any decent amount of traffic… So you had to pay dearly for it.

Then a friend told me about one of the two services I’m about to share with you. Once I found one, I Googled around and stumbled on the other pretty quickly… There seems to only be two out there in total, at least ones that are legitimate & worthy of a look.

Since then I’ve effortlessly made Ad campaign after Ad campaign without fear, absolutely KNOWNING what my conversion rate would be even before I put my money down.

The two I mention here today have both put up a substantial pile of cash to hundreds of online advertising sources each, and can easily tell you where you should be spending your ad budget to get the most bang for your buck. (We’re talking sub-sub-sub-penny, targeted visitors by the truckloads. This is the kind of traffic that makes people like you into super-affiliates.)

Their names are Proven Ad Secrets & Traffic Testers. I can’t say that one is better than the other, so I use them both for my general traffic needs, as they both have independent databases. Both have reviewed many hundreds of different sources, including eZine ads, expired domain traffic redirects, banner ads, pop-up traffic, pop-under traffic, safelists, list builders, guaranteed sign-ups & leads, and even those odd traffic exchanges that don’t fit neatly into a solid  category.  (Instant Buzz, Traffic Swarm, Desktop Lightning, etc…)

Naturally they both tell you how many people actually came to their site, how many bought their product, how much they paid, all the stuff you’d expect… They even let their members suggest advertising sources and they go and buy traffic there to review it within a few weeks. It’s great. 

That’s where their similarities end, however, because they are very different in how they present their findings.

For those who like an informal recount of the experience, you’ll appreciate how Traffic Testers speaks to you about their experience and how they felt about the communication delays or great customer support.

However, for those who want more technical data, and more of it, Proven Ad Secrets has done an outstanding job of showing us more data on each experiment. Here is an actual screen shot of one eZine Solo Ad they placed: (Naturally, I had to mark out the source company’s name & URL to comply with my membership agreement.)

They even went through the trouble of color-coding each one, green for profitable, red for a waste of money, and yellow for still in progress. Best of all, they show the actual ads they ran for each experiment, so you can judge for yourself if the Ad copy played a major factor in the success or failure of that campaign.

From first appearances, you might think that Proven AD Secrets (PAS) has Traffic Testers (TT) beaten on every level, but there are many other considerations. TT has reviewed many free traffic exchanges, PAS has not. TT also has a somewhat larger number of reviews for Banner Ad and traffic exchanges, whereas PAS excels in eZine Solo Ad placement reviews.

PAS also has many more categories of traffic reviewed, clearly trying to define every source of traffic in neat little boxes… Unfortunately for them, there are just too many types of traffic! Some of PAS’s many categories are almost empty.

Finally, TT went through the legwork of securing a good deal or two on traffic that you can purchase through the site at a great rate. Their $59 for 100,000 visitors in a month package sounds great and I look forward to using it for a few different reasons. Not only would that be $0.00059 per visitor, but it’s all coming from different types of traffic, which makes your site look really interesting to Alexa and Google!

In the end, you’ll definitely want to consider using one or both of these services and do further test on your own to any resource you find in them. It’s true that companies can change their policies or go out of business, so you can’t base your entire business strategy on any one source.

However, you can’t base your business on a strategy using expensive traffic, either.

Here’s the link to Proven ad Secrets, which currently runs $10 per month.

Here's the link to Traffic Testers, also running for $10 per month. They also offer a $48 per year option as well. 

Whatever you do, just don’t spend any money on advertising until you’ve checked at least once of these great services out.