Posted by Ray White on January 28, 2010 Comments (3)

There you are, surfing your best traffic exchanges, and on the surf bar pops up, “You’ve won 1000 credits!” You get all excited, dreaming of what you are going to do with the time it would take you to earn 1000 credits, when you click the link and see a page that has nothing to do with traffic exchange credits. How do you feel? Are you going to read that page? Would you buy from that page?

Text link ads on the traffic exchange surf bar can be great exposure since everyone must pay attention to the surf bar when viewing sites. Now, getting someone to actually click on a text link ad is a real art. Some people, however, are so afraid that no one will click on their link that they decide to be somewhat deceptive about it. Rather than entice you to view their offer, they decide to trick you into viewing their offer.

Now, some people might call that a brilliant marketing strategy. I mean, you need people to click the link to view your offer, and you got them to click, so mission accomplished, right? Well, maybe. While you do need people to click the link to view your offer, the main objective of your text link ad is to make a sale or gain an opt-in. How likely is that to happen if the link they clicked has nothing to do with the page that they are presented?

Advertising requires some creativity. There are creative ways to write a text link ad that makes someone want to click on it. There can be a very fine line between creative enticement and outright lying though. One can get you what you want, the other, maybe not so much.