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Traffic Exchanges

OOOOh I REALLY have a gripe about these! They give all the appearance of working, with none of the substance!

These work on the "safelist", or "paid to surf" principle. You join a traffic exchange, and you get to "visit the sites of other members" to build credit and get return visits to your site. They work in a number of ways, some have a time requirement (you have to spend a certain amount of time on the site - say 30 seconds). Usually you get something like 1 click back onto your site for every 2-3 clicks you make on other people's sites.

Many of these have a multi-tiered setup. You can refer other people, and then you can earn clicks based on their clicks - a 5:1 or 10:1 ratio, or something like that. So if you can persuade other people to busily click away, then you get a few clicks back from THEIR efforts too.

People talk about how much their traffic raises from using these. And they will cite supposed benefits from them. But there are some fatal flaws in the whole concept:

• People who use them are not there to VIEW sites, they are only there to earn clicks. This means they are not at all interested in what you are selling, or in your site.
• Generating traffic is not the same thing as increasing your income. People who use these will usually sheepishly admit that they cannot see any real increase in income after using this type of system (yet strangely, they continue to devote half an hour or more per night rabidly clicking away to generate traffic to their site!).
• The purchase, or ad click rate (the things that actually make money for you) for these types of programs are abysmally low - we are talking like 1 in 10,000, compared to the usual of 1 in 200. This means that you are spending TONS of time to get negligible results.
• Some people will tell you that getting more traffic will help your search engine rank. While this is partially true, it is NOT affected In any significant way by traffic exchange programs. It is ONLY affected by traffic from the search engine that is doing the tracking, or by traffic that comes from their network, or which they can track through some kind of toolbar (which will weed out hits that come through traffic generators). They have neither the massive resources, nor the proper permissions to be able to track every single visitor to your site (that requires either code on your pages, or permission to place a tracking script on your server - they cannot do it without your cooperation, nor do they have the computer power to do something that will not help their bottom line). Don't let someone twist the truth to make it sound like traffic exchanges can affect search engine rank, they CAN'T in any significant way other than from a link to your site from their site.
• There are people who still promote these like they are the greatest thing since peanut butter. Don't you wonder why, if they are such a waste of time? Well, it is that multi-tiered aspect. If they can persuade YOU to click away, then they get traffic while not having to do the time wasting work. It makes their numbers look good anyway!

And that is the ONLY thing that Traffic Exchange, or Traffic Generation systems are good for - making your traffic numbers look good. They are useless for increasing your income. And all those numbers mean nothing if you are not earning.

Remember, if it does not help you earn more, it is NOT effective marketing! Traffic Generation programs do NOT help you earn more money. They just waste your time.

Contributors: Laura Wheeler