Pseudo-Free Advertising

I stumbled upon this today. It looked VERY spammy, and it's obviously a pyramid scheme, but it basically offers you a chance to earn some small advertising space. Basically you install a toolbar to display text ads and in return your text ads are displayed. it's called instantbuzz.com.

I'm not endorsing this service and I'm not sure if it's worth a shot in the long run, but I joined for the hell of it and wondered if anyone knew if this was even worth the time.

It's invite only, go-figure, but if you want an invite I'd be glad to send you one if you are interested in this sort of thing. PM me if interested, or share ur experience if you've been involved with this strange service before. I'm not quite sure what to think.

 

Who the hell would want to install a toolbar to view other peoples ads.... even if it does get you free adspace.

One of the major problems, is who ELSE will install the toolbar... I imagine only webmasters (and spammy ones at that) will install it, thus, your ad would only be seen by spammy webmaster types...

 

that's a big part of it. CPM must be absolutely dismal.

 

Well, I installed it...
I would think the clickthrough rate is horrendous but who cares..it's free traffic and every bit counts....I have received about 18clickthroughs so far since signing up a week ago...
There was a 4 day promotion drive last week whereby the "membership by invitation" was lifted and everyone was provided with a signup link to use. I received quite a number of emails from a few internet marketers during that period. The membership during that time really snowballed as you could see people posting on the forum and the post getting bumped off in a matter of minutes due to the huge amount.

 

mudnik you say "its free traffic and every bits counts" true, but if it's just traffic, then it's useless unless it's traffic looking for your targeted product or service.

 

in this case, I suppose it is only targetted if you use an accurate and non-spammy descriptor in your ad text.

 

... but then are you really going to be getting visitors who REALLY are looking for your product or service?

I suppose it depends on who will use the toolbar, and like it's previously being mentioned, it'll be limited to webmasters.

 

hmmm...is it limited to webmasters? Anyone can install it actually...The type of traffic that I get depends on what text I write for the ad. And if I word it properly, the people that click through will actually be people who are interested in what I wrote there since there is basically no incentive for clicking through to ads.

How the system works is that you get part of a credit every time your browser goes to a new page. And since I surf quite a bit, I do get a fair amount of credits. Imo, the best way to use such service is to offer a freebie and drive the traffic to an opt-in page for the freebie.

If anyone is interested in joining, you can drop me a PM. However, the personal invites that I can send is limited by quantity so please ask me for the invite only if you are interested. You can go to the website first to check out the details.

 

You get what you "pay" for.

 

is the number of clickthru's listed somewhere in statistics? My ad has been displayed 718 times, appearantly, but I see no clickthru stats.

 

It's not in there. You got to check your own weblogs.

 

Are you getting ANY conversions whatsoever with that program? The main problem I have always found with those "free advertising programs" is that the traffic is very untargeted and never converts into sales.

 

Depends on what you are trying to convert them with. I have no problems getting them to come to my page and giving them a freebie or 2...Any sales conversion will have to come later.