Traffic Sage Review

In July 2009, after careful research and consideration, I employed a service called Traffic Sage run by Mike Ambrosio and Ron Douglas to assist with traffic generating activities for my membership site, which is in a very specialized (non-IM) niche. 

I had never heard of either of these guys before I stumbled across Traffic Sage, but it was clear they knew their stuff, had a good reputation and their service seemed to offer everything I had been looking for over the past 18 months.

I signed up to the Professional Plan which costs $497 per month and gives me 40 - 50 hours of dedicated site promotion each and every month. Because the service is not inexpensive and because it requires an ongoing financial commitment, I felt it important to share my feedback along the way.

I hope this Traffic Sage review page will eventually serve to help others who are considering using this service to make their minds up, one way or another.

http://www.TrafficSage.com


August 11th 2009

At this stage it is far too early to give a fair appraisal of Traffic Sage and measure it's performance in terms of traffic (and hopefully sales) generated. However, rest assured, I will be updating this page with my honest thoughts and feelings about this service and whether or not I think it has been a worthwhile investment.  I will also include screenshots from my Analytics account to show any marked improvement in traffic to my site since the service began.

Based only on the regular communications I have received from my Account Manager, so far the initial impressions are encouraging and give me confidence that I have made a good decision. However, the bottom line is all that really counts and only time will tell. 


August 18th 2009

So far the Traffic Sage team have created one video and one press release for me and have also given me some good advice about optimizing my site for the search engines. It's clear they know their stuff.  I also know they've also been doing other traffic generating work behind-the-scenes, but until I get my first monthly report I won't know what that is.

Video
The video was simple, but effective and I was pleasantly surprised. We're not talking studio quality productions here. Far from it. It was more a compilation of photos, a sound track and a few chunks of carefully chosen sales copy taken from my website; strung together into a 60 second video (probably done using a piece of software like 'Storybook').

It worked and I was happy for it to go out.

In fact, these types of videos really do work. I created a couple like it over 18 months ago and posted them to a few video sharing sites and they still continue to drive gobs of traffic to my site. Why didn't I create more? Who knows? But I'm happy for the traffic team to keep churning out this type of  video, month after month.

Press Release
The press release on the other hand was a different story. There's no other way of putting this; the first version sucked.  For one, it just didn't make any sense; it didn't explain my website very well and it was confusing to me, let alone an outsider. Plus, there were a couple of spelling and grammatical errors. Overall it was pretty obvious that it had been written by somebody who did not have a particularly strong command of the English language.

I could not let this go out and represent me or my business and I was pretty disheartened at this point.  My first thought was, how soon should I cancel this service?  However, I quickly thought back to the email I got when I first signed up, about starting things off right:

"When you get your first press release, please read it carefully, and give us as much detailed feedback as you can. This represents your business, so it is important we get it to your exact expectations early."

And:

"Don't be shy - we expect and NEED your feedback to ensure we deliver what you paid for (and more). We can't make improvements if we don't know."

Seeing as though they were so actively soliciting my feedback and combined with the fact that I was paying them $500 bucks a month, I gave it to them straight!

Within 24 hours I received an email back from my account manager, Divya, apologizing for the inconvenience and assuring me that this issue would be rectified.  48 hours later I received a brand new, completely re-written, and I'm pleased to say, well-written, press release that I was very happy to give the "thumbs up" to.

Whew!  To my relief they had redeemed themselves, but perhaps more importantly, they had been true to their word about wanting to get things just right in order to make this service as hands-off as possible. 

Going forward, if they do manage to keep these quality standards up and continue their dedication to pleasing their clients, then I'll be a happy customer and very happy to recommend this service.


August 22nd 2009

I have just received my first 4 articles from the Traffic Sage team and I'm pleased (and relieved!) to say that I'm happy with the content.

Apart from one or two very slight grammatical errors in two of the articles (which probably had more to do with me being overly picky) they were well-written and I'm happy for them to be distributed. 

According to the TrafficSage.com website these 4 articles will now be spun to create 12 articles in total and used as follows:

--> 100 Article Submissions (Unique, Manual)
--> 1,000 Article Submissions (Unique, Automated)
--> 2,000 Article Submissions (Automated)

I've used article marketing for the last 3 years and it has worked very effectively.  I'm excited see what the results will be from this aspect of my monthly package.

http://www.TrafficSage.com