How to Use a Traffic Exchange

Difficulty: Easy

Instructions

Things You'll Need:

Join a Traffic Exchange. The best one is listed in the Resources below.
Web sites to promote, you can even promote your eHow articles and affiliate links.

Step 1

Join a traffic exchange. The one I'm talking about here is free to join. They let you test drive it for as long as you want to see if it will work for you. (See Resources below.)
When you join you can activate your account by accumulating 50 credits. You do this by surfing, clicking on the ads that are provided in the surfing link. This link will bring you to a page of different ads you can click on to view. You must view a page for 20 seconds, or wait until the counter counts down to GO! before you can view another page. You get credits for each page. These credits are used up (1 per view) when other people view your sites.

You'll want to input some sites of yours for other people to view as part of joining as well. When someone views your site, or one of your pages the system will take 1 credit. This is good because you get approximately 1 to 5 credits for each site you view. The help says 1-1000 credits per view, but getting more than 5 on your account doesn't happen a lot. I saw 250 credits for one page twice in a month and got 500 credits once. That was exciting. If you upgrade to pro level you will get 2 to 6 credits for each site you view. I wouldn't recommend upgrading until you figure out exactly how things work and if they are going to work for you.
Step 2

The really great thing about this traffic exchange is you can test your ads. You can word your ads for the best results. Its not just about viewing, but its about wording your ads so you can get the best results. You can run up to 10 ads, or 10 sites, at a time with a free account. Create 2 ads for one site and then test them against each other. The one that has the least amount of views you can rewrite, or reword to try to get more traffic. Keep doing this every so often until you have an ad that can really draw people in. If you're thinking about doing adwords, or some pay per click programs this can be a great testing ground for your ads.

This is the only traffic exchange I've ever seen that has this ability. There is also the extra added bonus that your site, or ad, will be targeted when someone does a search in the traffic exchange search box. This search box is placed on various member sites where people can do searches on Traffic Exchange member sites. These people don't have to be members in order to do these searches, or to see your ads.

Another bonus is you have another link to your site in Traffic Swarms database and is susceptible to search engines. So your ad, or site, will get that much more exposure.

If you don't have a site to promote you can promote affiliate links. You don't have to own a site to promote it.
Step 3

Surfing for credits. The only bad thing about surfing for credits is your credits can go really fast, especially if you set the max number of credits to use for your site views to 0. 0 means you'll take as many views as you can get. I had to surf for a couple of hours a day just to try and keep up. I finally figured out I needed to throttle a few of the sites back. You'll find, over time, that your sites will use up more and more credits. I'm not sure why this happens, but if you don't put a cap on the number of credits then you'll probably run out of credits rather quickly. If you don't want to surf for long periods of time you have the option to pay for credits. I looked at this and thought it would be far more feasible to upgrade my account to pro because when I surf I get more credits and I also get a lot of free credits each month. It seemed cheaper than buying credits outright. But, we each have to make this decision on our own. You have to use the traffic exchange for a while to figure out what good it is doing you. If its doing you some good then make the decision and go to the next level. If its not doing any good then you've lost nothing keeping the free account. Some people buy credits because they make more money back from the credits than they spend. I'm not quite there, but that would be nice wouldn't it?!
Step 4

Don't use Google ads on your sites that you want to put into a traffic exchange. Google considers this bad form because they give you a small amount of money for a lot of traffic. They want legitimate traffic, not traffic generated from a traffic exchange. Also, Google can ban you for it. If you want people to get to your site through the traffic exchange set up a page on your site that gets people to click on the link to your main site. A splash page, or launch page that introduces your topic and gets the people who want what you are promoting to click into your site. Everyone who clicks through to your main site will be traffic from people who are interested in what you're offering. This is good traffic as far as Google is concerned.
Step 5

You'll see a lot of things that you can sign up for while you are surfing. Don't sign up for everything or your email account will get flooded with email, some of it questionable spam. Make sure you're very interested in everything you sign up for. Watch how people try to get you into their web sites, or into their programs. Some of them are good enough to emulate. You can take note of the methods and use them for your site as well. Just make sure you promise what you can really deliver. Set up your splash pages to entice certain people. You'll notice, I believe, that there are a lot of different types of people surfing the traffic exchanges. Some of them will be interested in what you have to offer. Using the free account is a great way to test things out. If you need help with your splash or launch pages there's a lot of help out there. Sounds like another good article for eHow.
Step 6

Build your lists. Another thing that Traffic Exchanges are great for is building your email lists. You can build your page to entice people to sign up for your email list and gather a following. You'll see a lot of examples of people doing this as you surf, so you'll get a lot of great ideas on how you can build your own lists.
Step 7

How do you get more credits? You may notice that credits can get hard to keep. You can surf for a long time and accumulate them, but this takes a long time. I tried to keep it at 1000 credits at one point and couldn't keep up. I found myself surfing for hours at a time. It's difficult to find the time to keep up. There are a number of ways you can make it easier on yourself to get credits. You can upgrade your account. Upgrading will give you a lot of advantages, especially as far as credis go. The bad thing about upgrading is its $30 a month, so the free account starts looking pretty good. You can buy credits, but like I said, upgrading is probably cheaper then buying credits.
One other way that will get you more credits is to refer people to the traffic exchange. You get credits for signing people up. If you get a lot of people to sign up you can slow down your personal quest for getting credits. You may be thinking, how can I sign people up? The best way to do it is blog about it, send your referral link to your friends, etc. I think that blogging about it is probably your best bet. There are 1000's if not millions of people out there who have never heard of a traffic exchange before and are looking for it to promote their blogs, sites, etc. Just some ideas.

Good luck in your Traffic Exchange surfing!!