No Cost Traffic - The Inside Scoop on Start Page Rotators
by Kevin Bidwell


Everyone wants website traffic. Traffic is the key to getting 
sales and profits.

So, with the regularity of "Old Faithful," new ideas on getting 
traffic for little or no money sprout up every few months. A 
couple years ago someone came up with the idea of "Start Page 
Rotators."

A start page rotator (or SPR) is simply a way to display a 
different home page each time someone opens their browser.
While the traffic is "untargeted," it does generate genuine
visits to a site and, if the site is crafted properly, can
result in sales.

Webmasters would join these SPR groups and, in return for
looking at other people's pages, they would have their page
displayed. Often at a ratio of 2 views to 1 display.

They could also earn additional page displays by signing up
other webmasters.

At first they were very successful.

When All-In-One-Business.com began using them about 18 
months ago, we were averaging one new student for every 800
or so page displays. In addition, we were receiving about
200 new subscribers.

So, we were very pleased with the results.

Over the last 18 months those numbers have dropped considerably. 
Now we receive one new student for every 4,000 or so page 
displays and about 5% of our page displays result in someone 
signing up for our newsletter.

This is considerably less.

There are a number of reasons why results have diminished:

1. There is much more competition for start pages, many new
   companies have joined the mix meaning that any one SPR
   has fewer page views to offer.

2. Many webmasters are members of several SPR's meaning 
   they are seeing the same ads several times across 
   several different SPR companies.

3. Many people have pop-up blocking on their sites making
   it more difficult to harvest email addresses using that
   method.

4. Cheating is common. One person may use software to open
   hundreds of pages each day in a variety of SPR's. Since
   no one sees the pages, no one buys the products. Also,
   one person may sign up with multiple accounts making each
   page view much less valuable.

5. Some larger users--like All-In-One-Business.com--have
   received so many page views that everyone in the system
   has seen their offer again and again. While that does
   not affect EVERYONE'S returns, it does affect the return
   that particular business will get.

Most of the better SPR's have done their best to help with the 
cheating, hoping to preserve the value of their product. Still, 
conversion rates have continued to decline making it difficult 
to have strong sales from a campaign supported solely through 
SPRs.

Are SPR's dead? No, but it will take some effort and many
exposures to get good money from them. Here are some ways to 
increase your own site's chances of success using Start Page 
Rotators:

1. Build a page designed to simply catch the user's attention.

Instead of offering your primary product, offer something free 
in return for the visitor signing up for your list. Use that 
list to promote your primary product or service. Making the 
page specific to the SPR also has great value in capturing the 
attention of the web page "surfer." If once they subscribe, they 
are re-directed to your offer page, all the better.

2. Promote new start-page rotator programs to your current list.

Since you are going to need tens of thousands of exposures to be 
effective, the easiest way to get more page views is to recruit 
others. For instance, I have received over 200K in page views 
from one SPR--and made over $6,000 in profits. This would not 
have been possible without my referring about 200 people to the 
service.

The key is to get in early. When a start page rotator is new you 
are likely to get many more sign-ups than once it has been around 
awhile.

3. Target your email to people who have signed up through an SPR.

Using an autoresponder service like this one:

http://www.all-in-one-business.com/qtr.html

you can have a different autoresponder follow-up for each SPR 
you have ads running on. Because you know some things already 
about the recipient of the message (they have a website they 
wish to promote, etc.) you can better target your offers.

Are SPR's worth your time? Sure, but not too much. They are a 
good way to enhance promotions you are already involved in.  


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Kevin Bidwell is owner of http://www.all-in-one-business.com

Kevin is offering a FREE BUSINESS START-UP KIT to everyone who 
visits his site.  If you liked this article, you will want to 
subscribe to his newsletter.  Send a blank email to:
nwslttr@quicktell.net
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