Hi Pat,
Surfing, as it's being discussed here, is essentially a traffic exchange system. The basic system of a traffic exchange is fairly simple. After you join, you input your URL, then surf a rotator to earn credits that can be assigned as hits on your URL. Each credit you earn is worth one view of your website in the rotation viewed by another member.
Most free traffic exchanges have a ratio greater than 1, so you have to view, say, 2 websites to earn one view of your own site. Some may offer the opportunity for you to build a downline where you can earn a percentage of hits from those you bring in, increasing traffic to your website.
There is another level of surfing where people do bring in a lot of extra money just from the surfing they do. In general, I don't recommend this unless you have an advertising budget you're willing to part with. With these surfs, you earn a percentage of your purchase back for viewing a minimum number of sites each day (say, 10%), and your purchase will last for a set number of days (say 12 days). In this model, you can earn anywhere from 120% to 150% of your purchase in a fairly short time...but it is addictive and quite risky. You can (as I have in the past) become obsessed just with getting these high returns and end up neglecting your primary business.
So let's stick with the free traffic exchanges and go from there.
The question you want answered is "can this build my Jerky Direct business." The answer is "maybe." It can work for you, but like all advertising you have to know the tricks to get the conversions.
Here are some realities we have to deal with:
- all of the surfers who will be viewing your site already have businesses they're trying to sell to you;
- your company's landing page has too much information on it to be absorbed in the 20 seconds it will be on the prospects monitor;
- other surfers will very likely be surfing more than one site at a time, and so are less likely to really be reading the whole sales message.
- MLMs and other network businesses are harder to sell in this format, because they require a focused prospect to make the pitch.
So what you need is a more compact webpage that's direct and to the point. Unfortunately, with a product and business as organized as JD, this could be difficult. This is where having a newsletter, autoresponder course, or blog would come in handy, as you can use the traffic exchange to bring you prospects that are interested.
Imagine putting a flyer on a magazine rack that rotates constantly. There are 20 people standing around the rack, looking at all of the flyers that spin by.
Now, if your flyer is like your company's prefab page, it would be like asking each of those people to walk around the rack as it spins, carefully reading and scrutinizing your whole flyer to get your whole sales message as they walk, hopefully ignoring all the other flyers.
If you do it right,however, your flyer will be a "Take me home" page, photocopied on a single sheet. The people standing around the magazine rack can simply pull the flyer off the rack and take it home with them. They can look at it on their own time. They can contact you for more information. Even if they ignore it, at least you've got the advantage of them taking it home. This is the kind of website you should have.
My suggestion is that you join a free exchange and figure out how it works. Our friend John Partington has such a site, and the traffic quality is quite good: http://www.autosurf247.jpbp.com/?ref=1 Just use the URL you have and feel it out. But I think you'll see as you do your surfing for credits that having a lot of information isn't to your advantage in this type of advertising.
I hope this helps. There seems to be a lot of interest in this kind of advertising, so I'm getting to work on a report that will make these things a bit clearer. Hopefully I haven't confused things even more...but feel free to ask me more questions if you need a hand; it'll help me decide what info needs to be included :)