December 7th, 2008 Add Your Comments Bookmark and Share

I was looking at some stats yesterday to see exactly what benefits I got from being a member of Traffic Kahuna. My plan was to write about my experiences some time late this week when I had the time to get my thoughts together BUT those raw figures have been enough to get me very angry. I had an awkward nights sleep last night so without further a do, my real thoughts on Traffic Kahuna in rant form.

Inputs and Ouputs
FOUR months and nearly $600. The monetary cost of Traffic Kahuna. At least 40 hours. The time I spent preparing and changing content for this “automated” system. Around 550. The number of visits I received from being part of Traffic Kahuna. 2. The number of sites where I threw away my page rank.

What Is Traffic Kahuna
Traffic Kahuna is an automated system designed to deliver traffic. It is comprised of a number of tools, an article exchange, a blog feeder, a social community, a few sites to create new blogs on and a 3 way link exchange. The article exchange requires you to host articles on your site in exchange for your article being posted on others. The social community “swaps” stumbles, diggs etc amongst other members. You earn points which can then be redeemed by assigning jobs for other members. There is a blog network that allows you to create and post to blogs on subdomains of Traffic Kahuna owed domains. It’s an easy backlink. The last of the traffic tools is the 3 way link exchange which is exactly the same as any other 3 way link exchange you’ve ever heard off. You link to some sites, other sites link to you. There are a few other things but this is what is at the core of Traffic Kahuna. It’s a given that they use some basic IP checks to try and make all this linking look as natural as possible.

What They Don’t Tell You!
This is most attractive to lazy content producers. People who can’t write content that gains links and traffic naturally will be drawn to Traffic Kahuna like flies to shit So why should you be surprised when what you find is a community of crap content and crap blogs? The Blog Feeder system works by having other members making their blogs available for posts. I did this. Here is one of the posts (picked at random) that passed Traffic Kahuna’s strict quality controls and ended up live on one of my sites. I challenge you to see if you can read it to the end:-


Instead of the traditional needles and threads, on women’s hands nowadays are joysticks and keypads of the latest games. No, this is not a protest over the domestic roles they normally hold, but due to a number of reasons. Here is the list on why more women are playing video games.

Really all I use my computer for is my stock market software, but my wife likes to play games to that lead me to my question. First of them is the growing interest and involvement in technology. More women are into learning new fields whereas in the old days, only household chores are to be expected from them. When we say technology, not only washing machines, vacuum cleaners and microwave ovens are the things that women are involved with. The graphics and sound effects that the video games have are cool and girls seem to be as attracted to them as men are. They are not afraid to tinker with the buttons or make mistakes, so long as they are learning.

A big factor is financial stability. As they hold paying jobs, they can afford to purchase gadgets and be able to indulge spending a few hours into accomplishing the missions of the video games. That being said one can be sure that there are times when the natural thoughts will kick in along with a preference for more essential items before indulging in tech. This is a major reason why more girls are playing xBox as it is one of the negatives of achievement.

The third major reason is that game development has focused a lot more on women than it used to. A lot of games revolve around action and adventure, most common of which are set in the war field. There are a lot of women in the world (ha ha yeah 52%) so game developers are starting to see this large potential market, and so more games are being created for them. More games today are targeted at the female demographic with softer graphics and story-lines, even tho these games are also popular with many males.

Fourth reason is for entertainment, same as everybody else’s. Cross stitching, baking and cooking are not the only activities that a woman’s hobby is limited to as it has expanded along with the advancement of technology. Don’t be surprised to find a woman with a gaming console during her free time. One good game for women is buy the phantom hourglass.

Fifth reason why more women are playing video games is to be in a competition against the men. Although this is a friendly match, they do participate in the thrill of the game and at times would be heralded as the winners.

The way that society thinks has changed. Forgotten are the times when men didn’t like women to do things besides take care of the house and family. Indeed, when more women are playing video games, there is a new common point of interest that can be shared between the two genders, including competition. Video games give women one more topic for girls to discuss with men on dates alongside of sports, movies, politics, and other ventures that men and women can share. Apart from social benefits of women being able to play video games, the enjoyment probably outweighs any benefit by giving women a good avenue of expression and a place to vent their frustration. For christmas this year it looks like I’ll have to cheap legend of zelda.

The Blog Feeder instructional video shows you how easy it is to produce content for the system. No need to write content just copy and paste a few paragraphs from other articles and then setup alternative words so that each article is unique. Reads well doesn’t it? If you go to the bother of following the links from the 3 way link exchange as I spent a morning doing what you’ll actually find is that more than 90% of the websites are MFA. Whether it’s Adsense or Affiliates you’re linking to sites that are for the most part awesomely bad! It’s clear that it has been marketed to people with the idea that they build a junk page, point the “full power” of Traffic Kahuna at it and wait for the money to roll in. My traffic stats suggest otherwise.

The social community will probably work. As long as you are happy stumbling/digging pages that you just know are going to get buried in a matter of seconds. These communities love half arsed English and tonnes of ads right?! How long until your account gets associated with voting for junk? The article feeder system doesn’t have enough members to publish the articles that are already in the system. Again this relies on other members participating. The core of the whole system has to be the Blog Feeder network. It’s how they market it.

I handled Traffic Kahuna badly. I was writing or paying to have written unique, quality content and pouring it into the system. In return I was getting junk. Whether it be junk content posted to my blogs or junk links that had almost no referral traffic (none in most cases) and made little if any impact on the search engines, certainly not Google. My 550 visitors is what I worked out to be the approximate difference between the traffic my sites were getting before Traffic Kahuna and afterwards. Where a site was created after I joined Traffic Kahuna I counted all the traffic. I ignored the natural growth my sites were experiencing before Traffic Kahuna but even so 550 visits in 4 months is not a lot. It’s not a deluge by any stretch of the imagination!

Perhaps most alarmingly during my time with Traffic Kahuna was the example of one blog. For 2 years it held decent page rank, within 2 weeks of joining the 3 way link exchange and submitting it to have content posted onto it all page rank had gone. Coincidence maybe? I don’t know for sure, what I do know is that one of their own sites where they allowed you to create blogs as sub-domains also got penalized. They had to stop members from using it and offer an alternative instead.

Then there is the crux of the “system”. You are being asked to both host somebody else’s content on your sites and to have your content published on other peoples. So if you’re not good at creating content you are being sold on the idea of having auto “quality” (cough) content posted. On the other hand if you have a basic grasp of the English language you’re being sold on the idea of having your content syndicated across THOUSANDS of blogs (In reality 20-30 at most per post) Traffic Kahuna isn’t actually doing anything other than matching both elements together. $147 a month is a lot of money for that! YOU have to create the blogs, YOU have to create the content. YOU are paying for that pleasure. They know this, they need new members to provide more blogs for existing members to post on and new members to create content for existing members blogs. This limited number membership can never really be limited. They ran a competition where members were asked to create more blogs. They started a new free “get content service” called Content Kahuna where if you submitted your blog you’d get “fresh” content. In the time I was a member they opened up Traffic Kahuna 2 more times. Not only that but they took the core of the system (The Blog Feeder), packaged it up and have re-sold it as another service – Syndicate Kahuna

Important –> If you already are a TrafficKahuna or PortalFeeder member, then you already have access to this, so do not sign up again

It’s clever marketing. Keep on reducing the price point until you find a service that people will pay for. Portal Feeder for the mugs with way too much money, Traffic Kahuna for those in the middle ground who don’t mind spending a bit of money and then Syndicate Kahuna to pick up the new credit crunch marketers. Behind all of these the real part that has any potential is the Blog Feeder system. As a webmaster it is certainly the part that you’d believe “could” work.

Why I wouldn’t Bother With Traffic Kahuna
There is no doubt that the people behind Traffic Kahuna are very clever. They were clever enough to make a fairly serious investment in the MMO blogosphere by buying JohnCow, creating some great content to build a following before using it almost solely to push their Kahuna products. It was enough to convince me and probably many others to give it a go. All is fair in love, war and online marketing but for my money Traffic Kahuna is quite high up their on the list of bullshit things I’ve tried. You want back links and traffic? I had a lot more traffic in 4 months from 2 articles posted through e-zine articles than I did using Traffic Kahuna. It cost me nothing.

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Paul B