The first important thing to know is manual exchanges work best when you are branding. If you don't have your own company name or logo, use yourself. Testing has have shown that using your photo on all your advertisements in manual exchanges dramatically increases results.
The reason is simple. Manual exchanges work just like the ads you see on TV. They are there for a short amount of time, and you'll most likely see the same thing advertised multiple times. Typically people will not act on an advertisement until they've seen or heard it 5 or more times.
With branding you can increase results by building trust and familiarity. If you are promoting 10 websites, and all 10 websites have your photo on them, surfers will begin to recognize you. Then it's not 10 random sites, but it's YOUR 10 sites.
Creating Splash Pages
The biggest downfall tomanual exchanges is load time. Unlike TV ads, where they load instantly and in full color and sound, manual exchanges require the user to load your website. Splash pages are just simple quick loading pages designed for manual exchanges.
The key to splash pages is simplicity and a call to action. You want the viewer to be focused on your site, not a mess of text. And you want them to click your link. So keep the page clean, and tell them to click your link or enter their email into your form!
Tracking Splash Pages
The most unused tool in manual exchanges is statistical software. Tracking the views to a splash page, and the number of clicks, will tell you which pages work best. Without tracking you'd never know that cool splash page is actually not producing results. You could be wasting lots of time and money advertising it!
Just remember, tracking is only useful if you react to the results. Kill the poor performing advertisements, even if they look good. Send more traffic to the high performing advertisements, even if they look bad. Your target audience may or may not think the same way as you, and so must let the tracking results direct your splash page designs.
Consistency
With manual exchanges people see many advertisements all the time. For branding to work you must be consistent with your surfing or purchasing traffic. If you are inconsistent then the benefits of branding will decrease the longer it's been in between views.
To surf consistently it's best to pick a small number of manual traffic exchanges and surf them every day. If you try to surf too many exchanges you'll lose track of them, and it'll be difficult to surf them enough to keep the page views high.
