How to Use Traffic Exchanges to Promote Your Website?

For success in any online business, getting a lot of traffic is the most essential ingredient. Whether you are selling your own product or doing affiliate marketing, you must drive a lot of traffic to your website. The higher the traffic, the higher will be your clicks and sales. There are different ways to drive traffic to your website -- PPC ads, article marketing, forum marketing etc. Traffic exchanges are very effective for driving a lot of traffic to any website. These exchanges work on a credit system. Here, the members earn credits by clicking and visiting other people's websites. For example, for visiting two sites you may get five credits. The credits earned can be used to show your own ads and websites to other members of the exchange.

Sometimes, when you register with a traffic exchange, you are given some bonus credits. In the members' area, you can submit the URLs which you want to be shown to other people. These URLs can be changed later, if required. You can also earn additional credits by referring other members to the exchange. In the members' area, you can keep track of the credits you have earned and those utilized for showing your site to others. Each exchange has it's own rules and systems which must be followed by it's members.

There are two types of traffic exchanges -- manual and automated. In manual traffic exchanges the members are required to surf the sites manually. They have to view each site for a fixed period of time -- which may range from a few seconds to a minute. After this period is over, they have to click a button to view the next site. But, in automated sites (also known as autosurfs), the ads come rolling in automatically, at the click of a button. Therefore, manual exchanges are much better than automated ones as in the latter, there is no guarantee that your ads are being actually seen by somebody. In manual sites, you can be sure that your ads are actually viewed.

The greatest disadvantage of traffic exchanges is that the traffic received is not targeted and the sales conversions are usually very low. A lot depends on the title and description of the ads which are put in. But traffic exchanges have been found to be successful with lead capture pages or splash pages and for promoting multilevel marketing programs.