A Whole Year has Gone!

Yesterday was my first anniversary on the traffic exchange called Traffic Era. Now, I belong to about 50 traffic exchanges or so, I think, but Traffic Era (or Tera as we normally call it) falls into a class of its own. It is owned by the same people who own TrafficPods, TS25 and Hitpulse. Traffic Era opened last year in January, and was the first of the Logiscape exchanges that featured team surfing with chat. They have team surfing on TS25 but there you are placed in teams, at Tera you request to join a team or you receive an invitation.

Team surfing on the whole is quite good fun. You get to meet a lot of different people from all over the world, and I have found it very interesting to surf with people who have completely different backgrounds. Most people I have surfed with have been very happy to talk about what they see, experience, feel and believe about different things. Also, because a lot of people are very experienced marketers or computer experts, I have learnt a lot from them about how to make money on-line, what not to do, how to sort out a virus on my computer and various other things (not all of which can be mentioned in polite chat!!)

However, there is a flip side to surfing in a team as well. You feel you have to surf, even when there are other things that need to be done. If you do not surf, you may be letting your team down, and they may not win the race. I moved to Spain to enjoy being in the sun and swim in my own little swimming pool, and I guess I spent most of last summer compulsively sitting behind the computer clicking numbers and letting the good weather go to waste. A day lost surfing because of bad connection (happens a lot in this bit of the world) is viewed as a complete disaster. I must admit I have become obsessed with Traffic Era, which for the team may be good, for my family and social life it has at times been less than ideal.

Surfing as a free (or silver) member on Tera is a disaster. The rate for free members is 5:1, why bother. Conversion rates on Tera can also be less than ideal, because most people surfing on teams will click on 11 seconds if they can, so I view Tera more as a semi-autosurf, in that people click to gets points and clocks - and you are really building brand awareness rather than looking for sign ups to programmes. (my personal point of view, I am sure there are lots of people who get loads of sign ups on Tera)

Surfing as an upgraded member is much better, and if you get sufficient loyalty points, you get invited to be a Club member, which gives a nice ratio for your click. Every week you can also sell a certain number of credits for 'logibucks', an imaginary currency which you can use to upgrade yourself either in Tera or one of the other Logiscape exchanges.

Since I joined Traffic Era there have been several changes in the overall set up of the exchange. There are a couple which are very annoying to me personally. One is that the overall limit in personal value that a surfer can contribute to a team is set to 5,000 daily and that the overall team limit for surfing has been capped. The other issue that really does annoy me personally is that Tera does not allow you to help other surfers, either team mates or downline members. You cannot transfer credits, tokens or logibucks. Now, in most traffic exchanges you can encourage your downline members by sending them tokens/credits, and it would also be helpful if you could send them superfluous logibucks as well. But this is no longer allowed at Traffic Era. This is a real shame, because it means that if you sponsor a silver member who surfs well, s/he will either have to spend real money to upgrade or spend months surfing as a silver member to earn sufficient logibucks to upgrade. I think this will eventually discourage silver members, who will leave TrafficEra rather than surf their fingers off to 'keep' the upgrade which their up-line or their team may have bought for them.

If you are not yet a member of Traffic Era you may like to have a look around, you can look around by clicking here , who knows, you may well like it, but warn your family before you join that they may not see so much of you again in future