While I’ve been using traffic exchanges for years, I didn’t really know how to use them “effectively” until recently.

In the past, I would post an ad using the typical AIDA formula. All of that traffic would be sent to an affiliate offer or my landing page that I created.

That’s what I thought would work back then, but it didn’t really work as well as I thought…and that was after months of using traffic exchanges.

My conclusion at the time – traffic exchanges suck!

Fast forward several years later, I pick up this free traffic exchange PDF. It pretty much went of the most common mistakes with traffic exchanges and how to solve them. The funny thing was that I was just like most people out there – doing the wrong things in the wrong place.

So if you’re trying to get traffic and profit from traffic exchanges, I highly suggest that you get a hold of this PDF to learn more.

However, that marketing model doesn’t work in every case. Not all offers have a mass appeal like the one I promoted.

In any case, you’ll need to figure out who your market is and how do you get them to view your offer.

Even if you did have an offer with a mass market appeal, there are strategies that you can use that are more effective than others.

What’s one of the easiest ways to find your market? What magazines do they read…where do they hang out online and offline, what products do they buy?

Chances are you can answer some of those questions from the top of your mind.

Put your offer in from of highly targeted prospects and you’ll be able to get results more efficiently!

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It seems really enticing, but are postcards the right solution to market your business?

Some may argue that if you can make a great profit from your postcard marketing efforts that it’s good enough.

However, if you’ve done marketing for a long time, you’ve probably heard of testing your strategies. You want to see which one works better, mail piece A or mail piece B. That’s the simple way to put it. Mail piece A might get triple the response of mail piece B.

You can test different postcards to see which one works the best. You can also test postcards against a sales letter to see what outperforms the other. Even self mailer/flyer can get great results as well.

So which mail piece is better?

You can ask your friends to see which one they like…but is that really the right way to find out? I used to do that and I can tell you, that was a huge mistake. I may ask a friend or family member just out of curiosity…but I always find the “true” answer by testing.

The easiest way to test is to test 1 version against another version. Just by doing that, you’ll be doing better than most of the people that are marketing out there!

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Does Marketing Really Have to Be Tough?

Looking back, I tested a bunch of “complicated” strategies because I thought that the more complex strategies would be better. I though that I would have the edge since less people were doing what I was doing. While that made sense at the time, I spent countless hours learning how to make the complicated strategies work…time that I could have used to actually build my business.

Do You Need to Be a Techie to Build Your Business?

While there’s a learning curve with any style of marketing, some learning curves are longer than others. TO add to that, just because you’re learning something more complicated or something that has a longer learning curve, it doesn’t mean that it’s the best strategy for your business.

What I’ve found is that you can build your home business using extremely simple and effective strategies.

So What’s Easier – Internet Marketing or Offline Marketing?

If I had to give you one strategy to build your business it would be offline marketing. Why? It’s worked for many years and it’s extremely simple. It wouldn’t be just any offline marketing strategy as there are many ways to build your business offline. The strategy that I would pick would be direct mail.

What’s So Special About Direct Mail?

With direct mail, it’s pretty easy to target a specific market. All you have to do is buy a targeted list and send mail to them (ie. a sales letter or a postcard). So if you can stuff an envelope or add a stamp, you’ve got the skills to grow your business…almost anybody can do this.

One of the reasons why I was attracted to direct mail is because I can easily outsource it and get a calculated response. I could be in China with the great internet firewall blocking my websites, but still make money by having a mail house do all of the work for me.

With the internet, I’m having to change my routine constantly. I’ve had to do more tweaking with web pages and that takes a lot more time than doing direct mail.

Internet Marketing – Why I Would Use It

I still like internet marketing and that’s because I can do it. Not everybody can do it and not everybody would want to do it.

One of the strengths of the internet is that you can start with a very small amount of capital (ie. you can build a big business even with a monthly budget of $10 a month). To be transparent, it would required a lot of time and effort in order to build a big business with that budget…but it can be done. If you’re using free websites, you can build an income without spending anything at all.

In Conclusion

While there are many strategies that you can use both online and offline, nothing matters unless you can actually take action and get the results that you want. I know that I didn’t go over all of the various strategies. However, I’ve tested out dozens of marketing strategies over the years and I hope that you’ve learned something in this post. If you’ve looking for ways to build an income, I highly recommend checking out my recommended work at home ideas.