It’s sweeter than candy!  I just finished a new mod for LJScript exchanges which I call the ‘buffs mod’.  If you’ve ever played an MMORPG, then you’ll know what a buff is, but if you haven’t they are basically a spell, item, or similar object that will increase a particular stat in the game.

The buffs mod offers similar rewards while surfing.  These rewards affect the duration of the surf timer, the surf rates for credits, banner impressions, and text ad impressions, and a special buff that allows a user to ‘possibly’ receive random referrals for the rest of the day.

Buffs are fully configurable from within the admin area, where you can set how often they show up, just how much the buff effects, and how long it lasts for.

Users can recieve instant buffs which become immediately active, or collected buffs which they can save and use later for when they want to get their powersurf on.

Buffs disappear when a user logs out/logs back in, so if they leave they will lose any buffs they currently have.

The mod comes with 6 buffs ready to go, and others can be programmed in to work with any unique features your website may have.

It is my hope that this mod will increase the activity at your website as well as the quality of your traffic, but it can only do that if I can install it.  I’m offering this mod for $60 + $15 for any additional buffs you’d like programmed into it.  It can be made to work with any feature so long as you have an idea for how you’d like the buff to work.

You may see a demo of this mod in action by surfing at my LJScript sandbox.

Purchase the buff mod today!

A new generation of traffic exchanges was launched last week, called Thumbvu from a long term veteran John Guanzon, which allows you to surf sites you’d like to see based on a thumbnailed screenshot of the website.

Thumbvu also takes a leading position in merging social media with traffic exchanges, integrating Facebook, Twitter, and even Youtube into an exchange. This leaves Thumbvu with a lot of room to grow.

This is a new breed of exchange that this industry has been waiting for. So today, I finally got a chance to try it out and surf a few sites and I must say it is an excellent concept. But I see a lot of the members falling into the same old website promoting rut that they’ve used for the past ten years. I see rotators and splash pages galore.

It’s too early to tell whether splash pages will be effective in Thumbvu, but I’m inclined to think not. What people want, in this type of exchange, is content. There is a very old saying online, and I’m sorry for such a horrible cliche, but ‘content is king.’ In this case you are using a social media platform to promote your business, and nothing would work better in Thumbvu than a purely kickass website.

This site uses a fairly large thumbnail, but it is still only a small window into what you are promoting and you must use it as effectively as possible. Since the thumbnail is a screenshot of the website you are promoting, you must have a decent offering and a splash of style.

Splash pages aside, the main problem I’m seeing here is rotators. Rotators will not work for this site, period. End of story. Your results will be significantly less for a rotator than with a static website.

I see so many thumbnails with the tag at the bottom saying rotator, and that’s an immediate turnoff. Do I want to take a girl on a blind date? Why hell, I don’t even know her name. Who’s gonna answer that door when I go clicking.

In older exchanges, it didn’t really matter. Every click was a blind date, but now we have options, and there are two other girls to choose from. I even know their names, they’re written at the bottom.

Rotators fail on Thumbvu because the website you are clicking to see is probably not the site you will find.

There are three things I would recommend right off the bat for promoting in any traffic exchange, Thumbvu included.

• A good concept website

  This could be as simple as your blog. In fact, put your blog in there. Do that. If you don’t have a blog, then what are you doing? It’s 2010 now. At the very least a decent offering would be social media profiles like your twitter page, your facebook profile, and anything that promotes you, your business, or your website long term.

• A hook

  You want to provide something users will be interested in, so if your site is a photography site with lots of pictures, you’d want to promote your most interesting pictures. In this way, other surfers would be inclined to view more of your gallery. In the case of a blog, promote your most interesting posts and thoughts. You need a hook to grab them with.

• A good design on said website

  This will be key when surfers are provided the thumbnail options. You want that thumbnail to stand out as much as possible to get more hits. So it’s important, absolutely important, that your thumbnail provide the bait for your hook.

Thumbvu is the new gen and long waited for, and I congratulate John on what I expect to be a successful website, but I hope he can overcome many of the old habits of traffic exchanges to bring Thumbvu to it’s fullest potential. My advice, John, would be to ban rotators immediately. When it comes to Thumbvu, they will only hurt you and the people who are using them.

Tim Linden of StartXchange wrote today about Traffic Exchange owners who aren’t complying with the CAN-SPAM Act of 2003.

Article: The Big Bad List

This law, in a nutshell, was signed by President Bush in 2003, sets forth requirements for businesses sending commercial email, and did absolutely nothing to reduce the amount of SPAM sent over the internet. It states that “any electronic mail message the primary purpose of which is the commercial advertisement or promotion of a commercial product or service (including content on an Internet website operated for a commercial purpose)” must have the following.

1. An unsubscribe link, that works, in all emails sent
2. Requests to unsubscribe from a list are honored within 10 days
3. Opt-out lists are only used for complying with the law (and not sold to someone else so they can add them to their list)

Tim listed 20 traffic exchanges that sent him emails without an unusbscribe mechanism in place to comply with the CAN-SPAM act, most of which are LJScript exchanges. In order to opt out of an LJScript you would typically need to delete your account. The script itself does not supply an easily usable link to simply unsubscribe/delete the account.

Until now.

I’ve recieved two inquiries in the past couple weeks about a mod that would do this, and after reading Tim’s post I decided to push it out quickly. The Easy Unsubscribe mod is ready for use by LJScript exchanges. It will cost $25 and could be installed in a matter of minutes.

The mod allows users to click a link, which will be in each email sent out by the Admin, and unsubscribe. At the page, they will be asked for their password for security purposes. After they provide the password they click unsubscribe and their account is deleted.

Update Tim informs me that asking for a password isn’t CAN-SPAM compliant either, and while not as secure, the mod is updated so it will request their email address instead.