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The magic behind "Along for the Ride!"

by Mar Matthias Darin

For those that have EntreCard, BlogExplosion or any other type of Click Exchange on their blog, you'll find "Along for the Ride!" to be a refreshing way to suppliment your traffic. Click Exchanges requires a blog owner to interact with their widget to earn credits. Those credits can then be sold to purchase or exchanged for traffic. Thus Click Exchanges focuses on the blog owner. This is the wjat a typical traffic generating system works.

"Along for the Ride!" (AFTR) is completely opposite to everything you know about traffic generating. In fact, AFTR does NOT bring you any traffic at all. I'm sure that thew a monkey wrench in things, and probably the monkey too.

AFTR is a traffic SHARING system. Its sole purpose is to GIVE your traffic away. Confused yet? (smile)

It took me ten years to get this concept worked out and into something the computer could understand. I built AFTR on the following premise:

C. S. Lewis drew us a mental picture of Hell, everyone was seated at a banquet table filled with wonderful food. The problem arose in that the food was several feet away, and they all had three foot long forks and knives. They could just reach the food, but the utensil's were too long to get the food into their mouths. There was anger, fighting, screaming and unpleasantness abounding. Think of the expansion of Moreso's law for eternity.

Lewis also drew us a picture of Heaven, same huge banquet table filled with wonderful foods. The banqueters in Heaven with equipped with those same three foot long utensils. The difference was the joy, laughter, and excitement at the table; they were feeding each other, and enjoying a great feast. They had learned the joy of service on earth, and now they had eternity to enjoy it, only more so.

With C.S Lewis' picture in mind, Click Exchanges would be hell. You spend countless hours clicking on little boxes or numbers and get very little satisfaction. With the same picture in mind, you put AFTR on your blog and forget about it. People seem to just come.

If you are GIVING AWAY your traffic, how are you getting traffic?

That is the revolutionary thinking behind AFTR. Every time someone visits your blog and interacts with AFTR, the blog that is displayed in the AFTR widget receives a visitor or a hit. You receive nothing, not even a credit. AFTR was designed for the visitor, not the blog owner, completely opposite to Click Exchanges.

I will use the following example to show how this works:

We have five sites in rotation: A, B, D, D, and E

Each of these sites has AFTR on them, it could be and combination of the MouseOver, Click, XCLCK, or the EMBED, it doesn't matter which widget are used as they all work the same way.

Lets assume A receives a visit, the visitor interacts with the AFTR widget and C is displayed in the AFTR window. A just GAVE their visitor to C. The AFTR widget records the visit to C. For short hand, I will use this notation:

A -> C Ok, now lets consider this:

A -> B
A -> C
A -> D
A -> E

Thus the statistics would look like this:

A has 0 visits, while B, C, D, and E have 1 each. A is the "low man on the totem". Now lets look at a situation that happens quite frequently.

B, C, D, and E all have their own visitors, each of them interact with the AFTR widget at the exact same time. A now receives 4 visitors and the statistics look like this: A=4, B, C, D, and E=1. Because AFTR uses the "low man on the totem" is used to determine which blog is seen next, A will not be seen again in the AFTR window until it is at the bottom again.

It is important to note that you will NEVER see your own blog in the AFTR window, that meaning, if you go to your blog and interact with the AFTR widget, you will never see your own blog being displayed from your blog.

If the server logs from each of the above where to be examined, you would see that B, C, D, and E are the refferer listed an A's logs. With Click Exchanges, all traffic comes from Click Exchanges. With AFTR, all traffic comes from other blogs in the AFTR rotation. This is important because the referrer can be used against you in search engines, possible causing damage to your page rank and thus affecting your advertisability.

In essence, the more traffic you share, the more traffic you receive, C.S. Lewis' picture of Heaven. I suppose now would be a good time to ask why anyone still uses Click Exchanges?

Take a look, check Along for the Ride! out! Its free and certainly a lot easier then those other places!

Top tags: aftr, traffic, blog, click, exchanges, widget, picture, food, visitor, along

Comments from LAINY ^{119.94.198.135}

This is quite interesting, Mar. Would love to try it out for my blogs.

Comments from Mar Matthias Darin

Thank you.

Comments from Colin ^94.68.68.107

I think this is a great idea - pity there were not more people around to think in such a positive manner.

Comments from Mar Matthias Darin

Thank you.

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