Traffic Exchanges - Are They Worthwhile?
If you have a home based business with a website, how do you get traffic? Traffic to your website is essential. There are various ways to get it, but this blog article (blarticle) discusses Traffic Exchanges and whether they are worthwhile in getting any traffic to your site. How do they work? Are they safe to use?
First of all, there are dozens of these traffic exchange services on the web. A partial list is found at the end of this article. They all have their own variations and twists, but they generally have one thing in common. They give you some way to visit other people's websites and in return expose your own site for others to visit. Most of them are free with lots of opportunities to spend money along the way (they make money through affiliate arrangements). Also many have paid options which (in theory) will give your site more exposure.
Let's look at DragonSurf for example. After you register with DragonSurf, you will see a 'Surf Now' button. Simply click that and web pages will be rotated for you, with about a 10 second pause in between each one. You can scroll down the displayed page within the frame of their surfing area. If you click on the site, it will take you outside the surfing area. When you want DragonSurf to display the next site, click the matching icon that shows up in the surf bar.
As you 'surf', you earn credits which you can apply to your own site. These 'credits' control how much your own site will be displayed in that surf rotation. Most traffic exchanges offer the opportunity to buy credits if you want to fast start your exposure. So it boils down to the fact that you can spend time, money, or some mix of both to leverage these exchanges.
There are two types of traffic exchanges: Manual and Auto. With Manual, people surf manually as described above. With Auto, you can set the surfing to automatic and walk away from your computer or leave it running in the background. Generally speaking, you'll want to use the manual ones. With the Auto traffic exchanges, the quality of traffic is very poor. That's because most people are running it without paying attention! Furthermore, with Auto traffic exchanges, there is a chance of a malicious website sneaking into the surfing mix and going unnoticed.
Traffic exchanges are best used when your home based business has some kind of capture page or splash page. The goal of spending time and/or money using traffic exchanges would be to get subscribers not buyers. I don't think they work very well for content sites or ecommerce sites. I also don't think you get any link building value out of them although you might over a long period.
One last tip for using traffic exchanges. Set up a separate email account for them using a free email service such as Google Gmail, Yahoo Mail, or Microsoft Live Mail. These traffic exchanges will generate a lot of marketing email that you may not want to see in your regular email box. Here are a few traffic exchanges to get you started.
Lords of Traffic
Here is a link to a traffic exchange rating site (which not coincidentally happens to be a traffic exchange):
Top Traffic Exchanges
