How to Promote Your Site For Free Part 6

Today I’m going to look at Traffic Exchanges, another way to promote your site for free.

Traffic exchanges are basically membership sites where members are taken to each other’s web pages.

The basic membership of most traffic exchanges is free, but you have to commit to viewing a certain number of sites each day in order for your site to be presented to other members.

This is done by logging in and clicking a command to browse sites (or view sites).  The traffic exchange then presents you with sites from a rotator which you have to view.

There are a number of ways that the exchanges incentivise you to really view the sites that are presented to you.  Sometimes it’s as simple as staying on the page for a pre-determined period of time – 20 seconds for example.

Some sites ask you to rate the site you’re visiting and provide some feedback to the author.  Others ask you a question, the answer to which you will only know if you’ve read the page.

Whatever incentives they use, you are required to visit a certain number of sites each day in order for your site to be entered into the rotator and presented to other members.

If you don’t want to spend time each day viewing sites (and it can become pretty time consuming if you have a number of sites in the system), you can pay a monthly fee, which will ensure your site is presented to others.

There are people who absolutely swear by traffic exchanges, but my experience has not been very satisfactory. I think there are a couple of reasons for this:

1.  Even though there are incentives for people to really read your site, most people find ways to meet the requirements in the shortest time possible.  This is particularly the case where the requirement is to spend a certain amount of time on the page. People can do this while watching TV, just clicking on after 20 seconds or so.

2.  The traffic that I’ve got in the past is not targeted, even though you can specify what industry or niche you want your site to be displayed in. It’s possible that the problem is not un-targetted visitors, but the fact that they’re not paying attention because they’re focused on meeting their obligations as quickly as possible!

In any event, while my stats did show a high number of hits coming from the traffic exchanges, the value of that traffic was very low.

It may also, of course, depend on the industry you’re in.  I was promoting business opportunities and that may not have been a good fit with traffic exchanges.

So for those reasons I don’t currently use traffic exchanges.

None-the-less, they are there and they’re popular with lots of people, so it may be worth trying them to see whether they work for you.

Here are a couple of traffic exchanges I’ve used:

Link Referral (This one asks you to rate each site you visit and provide feedback)

Traffic Swarm (This one is highly rated by a lot of people.  It asks you to view a page for 20 seconds)

Traffic Exchanges also usually have affiliate programs – both of the ones I’ve listed above do (although those links above are not affiliate links!).  These programs can be quite lucrative because there’s a large market of people out there looking for ways to get traffic to their sites!

Leave us a comment with your experience of traffic exchanges.

Other Articles You Might Like:

1. How To Promote Your Site For Free Part 2
2. How To Promote Your Site For Free Part 5
3. How To Promote Your Site For Free Part 3
4. How to Promote Your Site For Free Part 4
5. Ways to Promote Your Site For Free Part 1

Tagged as: free traffic, traffic exchanges