Are Traffic Exchanges Of Real Value?

by Rick Carbone

 You have decided to use one of the many traffic exchanges to get traffic to your site and still no sales. A traffic exchange program simply is not the most effective way to get quality traffic to your website. It's not my intention to knock the traffic exchange business but to point out to new web entrants that there should be other areas of concentration.

The basis of a traffic exchange program is simple: your site is shown to someone else (another network member) each time you view another site or two other sites. Some exchanges work on a 2:1 or 3:1 ratio that is for every three sites you view they will show your site once on their network. All of this is free because you are participating in viewing other member's sites as part of the program. The criteria for getting page views of your own site is that you must stay on each site you view for a specified time say 15-20 seconds in order to get your viewing credit. Each time you do this, you receive a credit. Remember though that you are viewing sites in a network and that those credits you are accumulating are being viewed by members just like you who are in just as much of a rush to get to the next site as you are.

What's the problem with this you may ask? Simply that the page views that you are working so hard to get are not being viewed by potential buyers of your products but by other members whose sole interest, like you, is to accumulate as many credits as possible. Not an especially great use of your time unless you consider getting high traffic to your site is your only concern. It could very well be that your only consideration is to have a high ranking in the traffic ranking sites. Then utilizing a click exchange will get you there with a lot of hard effort on your part.

Many traffic exchanges flourish because at the end of the day your site will get traffic, perhaps not the kind you were interested in.

The point I am attempting to make is that traffic exchanges are not the best value for getting quality views and potential buyers to your site. Spend your time instead on developing your keywords and META tags for the search engines, as they will be your best bet in getting the appropriate traffic to your site. There are some great books and sites available to help you get better rankings on the search engine sites.