The number one problem new website owners have is, "How do I drive targeted traffic to my website?"

A significant amount of time and energy is spent on this single task. A webmaster will commonly focus on:

<ul><li>Ranking well in the search engines</li> <li>Pay Per Click (PPC) programs.</li> <li>Pay Per View (Banner) programs.</li> <li>Link Exchanges</li> <li>Directory Submissions</li> <li>etc.</li></ul>

All of these methods are viable means of getting traffic. In fact, if you're lucky or competent enough to rank well for your keywords in the search engines, you'll find that you get a very large portion of traffic to your website.

What do you do, however, if you rank poorly or, even worse, don't even show up in the first 1000 results on any of the search engines? What do you do if you don't have a budget set aside for marketing?

This is where people often turn to traffic exchanges. Quite simply, a traffic exchange is a program where you sign up and agree to surf sites in exchange for some credits. These credits are then used when other members of the exchange surf to your site.

Now, I'll be quite honest with you, this traffic is not highly targeted traffic. In fact, if this were your only method of advertising your website, you'd probably fail. BUT it is a great method of getting traffic to your site in addition to the other methods listed above.


So, why do people use traffic exchanges? Here are a few of the benefits:

<ul><li>Increase your Alexa rating! Did you know that some search engines factor your Alexa rating into their algorithms? More traffic means higher search engine placement!</li> <li>Increase your branding awareness. Any marketing expert worth his salt will tell you that branding is extremely important to stand out amongst the billions of websites out there.</li> <li>More traffic equals more sales. A percentage of people surfing will be enticed by your ads and click on them to find out more information.</li> <li>Another source of revenue. Many traffic exchanges will actually pay you money to surf. More importantly, as you refer other people to the network, you'll earn a percentage of the money that they earn! It may be small amounts but if you work the system it could amount to a lot of money.</li></ul>

Now, before you head over to Google and search for Traffic Exchange, I'd recommend knowing a few facts:

<ol><li>Some traffic exchanges are simply out to get money from you and will refer very little traffic to you.</li> <li>Some traffic exchanges have poor systems in place to stop cheaters from running programs to increase their credits faster.</li> <li>Finally, some traffic exchanges will allow popups, activex controls, site rotators, etc. in their network. Any of these can stop your autosurfing from working, or even worse, allow your computer to be infected with a virus.</li></ol>

The best part about Traffic Exchanges is that you really have nothing to lose and everything to gain. The worst thing that could happen to you is you get a little bit of traffic which increases your Alexa rankings and you don't get any money.

Of course, for the system to work, you've got to make sure that you do some surfing yourself. The makers of the exchange programs realize this and some of them even have an autosurf feature where you get a reduced number of credits while your browser happily loads page after page every 10 seconds or so.

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About the Author

Geoffrey Faivre-Malloy is a published author, speaker and owner of Make Money at Home Based Business Opportunities, one of the most popular home based business sites on the internet. His favorite traffic exchange is the InfoWizards Traffic Exchange.