FEATURED ARTICLE

Set It and Forget It? NO WAY!
Eva J. Mah
Nexus Exchange Owner/Admin

We are all busy people. During the holiday season especially, we always seem to be crunched for time. Anything that can make life easier for us is a welcomed relief. Set-it-and-forget-it advertising sounds like a great time saver. It would be wonderful to have the task of advertising our business done and out of the way. You won't be doing yourself any favor, though. Rather than promoting your business, you will be running it into the ground.

Advertising needs to stay fresh to remain effective. Admit it. When you view campaigns in traffic exchanges, your brain goes on autopilot. What catches your eye, the pages that you have seen day in and day out, or the new stuff? You probably even notice new banners. For us at Nexus Exchange, when we put out a new splash page that works, the number of sign-ups do increase, but it doesn't last forever. After a couple of weeks, that new page is old news, and the sign-up rate drops back to normal. We have to tweak things then. Buy more traffic credits. Put the page on different traffic exchanges. Change the background color on the page. Or pull the page altogether and maybe bring it back in a couple of months. To keep our membership growing, we constantly have to find different ways to attract new members. The changes don't have to be extreme, but changes do have to be made.

How do we know when to make changes? By tracking our results. Results for us are new members and click-throughs on splash pages and banners. We use HitsConnect to figure out which ads work and where. It's a paid service, but it's also one of the best investments we make in our business. Our members can receive a 30% discount on the HitsConnect service. Login to your Nexus Exchange account to find our special registration link on the RPL page.

Even brick-and-mortar businesses do not create ad campaigns that run forever unchecked. New television commercials debut constantly. Spokespeople on infomercials change every so often. Radio ad spots will change jingles. Even newspaper classified ad space sells by the day or week. When do the changes occur? When sales drop. When wholesale orders drop. When opinion polls show a drop in brand recognition. Guess what! Even the brick-and-mortar world tracks results!

Serious business people do not "set and forget" any aspect of their business. Even the big business moguls have full-time marketing teams managing their advertising. But until you can afford to outsource your promotions, please do NOT set-and-forget your advertising campaigns. Keep your campaigns up to date. Track your results. Nurture your business and watch it thrive.

NEXUS EXCHANGE UPDATE

New Programs in the Recommended Programs List

• Tutorials4Newbies has been added to the Business / Training Resources section


• S.W.A.T. Traffic has been added to the Manual Traffic Exchanges section


• Tutorials4Newbies Safelist has been added to the Safelists / Safelist Submitters section

Login to your Nexus Exchange account, click on the RPL link, and add your IDs. You HAVE joined these programs already, right?

Conference Schedule Takes a Breather
The scheduled online conferences are on hiatus for the holidays.

FAQ page revamped
The FAQ page has been revised. The FAQs focus on questions that a prospective member may have. A link to that page has also been added to the index page.

Help Page revamped
For current members, the Help page has also been redone. We tried to include everything a member needs to know to use Nexus Exchange effectively and efficiently. The link for the page is in the Members Area.

We Made The HEN!!
We became newsworthy in Issue 153 when we hit 1500 members. That can mean only one thing: Jon Olson reads his email from Nexus Exchange!

PICK OF THE WEEK

Small Business Development Centers
Recently, we attended a local business expo. One booth was run by the local Small Business Administration office. We got information on what kind of help we could expect and how to make an appointment with a counselor. The next day, we called the person who does the scheduling of appointments and left a message. The call was returned within 48 hours. We grabbed the next available time slot. At the appointed time, we travelled to Fall River, Massachusetts for our meeting. It was a simple process, really.

The meeting itself was very productive. Our counselor, Melinda, was extremely knowledgeable. And organized. She still had notes on a meeting she had with Aaron three years ago about a different project. We gave her a copy of our business plan. We explained Nexus Exchange and Cache Articles to her in detail. That in itself was a wonderful exercise for us, having to explain the business models to someone who is not a part of our little corner of the Internet. Melinda asked lots of questions and took copious notes. She even got on her computer and looked at our sites.

Melinda took the time to explain her thoughts to us. She gave us ideas on what to do to move forward. She told us what she could provide for us should we decide to further pursue our plan. She even gave us specific tasks to complete before returning for another appointment. The trip was more than worth the time and effort it took for us to arrange it.

Do yourself a favor by checking out the Small Business Development Center in your area. There are many tools available online as well. A little knowledge goes a long way.

THROUGH THE EYES OF Eva ...

One of my biggest pet peeves about viewing campaigns in traffic exchanges is seeing outdated campaigns in rotation. I have seen web pages announcing the pre-launch of well-established programs, banners for programs no longer in existence, and affiliate pages with the error message saying that the ID is no longer active. It drives me nuts. Sometimes, I will take the time to click through to see who exactly is on the other side. I want to know who is using advertising credits and banner impressions on campaigns that have literally no hope of ever making money. Why do I want to know? I don't want to take any recommendations from someone who cannot keep track of which programs to promote!

FYI: We provide shared hosting to our gold members free of charge. What is shared hosting?