Traffic Exchanges

Restored from the Empower Network archive (2011–2017), lightly edited to meet our current advertising standards. Views are the original author’s.

My Review of Traffic Exchanges

First before I give my opinion of traffic exchanges I will go into some information obtained from Wikipedia.

Concept

A traffic exchange website receives website submissions from people who join the traffic exchange network. The person who submitted the website then has to browse other member websites on the exchange program to earn credits. This enable’s their sites to be viewed by other members through the surf system. This increases the number of visitors to all the sites involved.

Traffic exchanges enforce a certain credit ratio, which illustrates the amount of websites the surfer must view in order to receive one hit through the program for their promoted website. Many sites offer the ability to upgrade one’s membership level for a more equal credit ratio.

The viewers are all website owners or affiliates, thus it is possible that some might find certain member sites interesting and thus make a note of them on their own sites, sending more traffic their way. These  traffic programs also impose a time limit for surfing ranging from 10 seconds to 60.

Almost all traffic exchange programs are free to join, although many of them offer special features to paid members and offer credits for purchase. Just about all traffic exchange programs encourage users to build their own referral networks, which in turn increases the referrers amount of credits

The traffic generated  in a traffic exchange can be leverage by using a downline builder to assist the user in building a referral network in many different traffic exchanges

In practice, the traffic exchanges are generally used by small business owners or marketers, who either want free advertising or to use for a low-budget advertisement campaign.

History

Traffic Exchanges date back to the beginning of the web and were primarily used by organizations to share sites between employees. Viewers would rate pages in a fashion that is now the popular social bookmarking phenomenon. When interesting  websites were hard to find a traffic exchange for an organization new to the web proved an invaluable tool.

Circa 1994 traffic exchanges moved from corporate intranets to the web. In an effort to build communities the concept of rating pages was replace with rewarding members for viewing.

It was 1996 before traffic exchanges began to charge for traffic and it was then that the concept changed from a tool for locating interesting sites to a commercial one. This change in direction resulted in increased popularity at the expense of the content which is now almost exclusively commerce.

Traffic Exchange vs. Bounce Rate

Traffic Exchange programs are used by most people to increase their site visit rate. The main reason behind joining a traffic exchange program is to promote products and services to like minded marketers. A factor which may negatively influence the ranking is the Bounce Rate. If a website or blog has a high bounce rate then it will be considered that people are not interested in the content. The bounce rate is calculated by the average rate a visitor stayed on the site. So whereas the traffic exchange sites increase the site visit rate, on the other hand they also increase the bounce rate.

Using Traffic Exchanges Effectively

The key to using traffic exchanges is understanding that the person will only be viewing your site for 10-20 seconds. Rather than sending the person your website, you should be sending them to a specific advertisement designed for traffic exchanges. Use this advertisement to create curiosity about your site. The most effective are squeeze pages or splash pages, which have a simple headline, description , and opt-in form for an autoresponder. Then the surfer can easily type their email address in and receive more information about your product or services at a later time.

The main goal of using traffic exchanges should be to build your personal list of prospects for now.

Now lets get to my opinion of traffic exchanges, I knew of them but while I took a break from blogging I discovered that these sites as well as click to profit sites are all over the place.

I have viewed some of these sites while I too surfed for credits via emails I received from free advertising sites that I was using. Click Track Profit is one of the big ones and they actually have training on how to use there site as to how to get benefits from the traffic exchanges.

I embarked on a small journey into  this area and discovered that their are a lot of people that use them to make money.

Similar to what we would do to market the Empower Network via a link, when you join a site you get a referral link as well for that site and the way that you make money is to promote your referral link in all of the other sites that you join.

I know now what it takes to promote my links for the Empower Network, and I find that doing so for all of the traffic exchanges can be quite a daunting task. I myself joined over 20 of these sites and only found 1 or 2 that I thought worthy of promoting.

So in conclusion of this rather long post, I got bored surfing very quickly and yet when you really do not have a budget to purchase credits you are left with no other choice but to surf it you want to promote your site. Traffic exchanges are a great way to promote your site but they are also very time consuming. That is my opinion.

Well I hope that you managed to read this whole post  and if you think that you would like to use this system to go on about whatever topic you wish please join me.

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