Will Anyone Else Admit to Using Traffic Exchanges to Test Ads and Squeeze Pages?

I know, TE's are frowned on buy 'serious' marketers, but I've found them to be an excellent source of finding out what the "other half is doing".

Some of the stuff being promoted on the various 'surf for traffic' exchanges and safelists are just horrendous but very educational!

I'm in and out during the day so it's pretty easy to 'surf' several of these things, I just open a crap load of browsers and click on whatever catches my attention as I walk by...damn, these people are desperate for traffic and will buy in on almost anything!

It's a good education on what newbies will do or try to make a buck, but more importantly, it's a great place to try headlines for cheap. You can run several 'campaigns' at once and test your headline (typically limited to xx characters) and your 'body copy', also limited to a set number of characters. Kinda like the old classifieds we had to do in print advertising.

It's a cheap way to test if you don't fall into the trap of thinking you can build downlines and stuff, and pretty cheap even if you have to buy some traffic. I've found one good traffic source for my new site with only a week of testing.

I know it isn't the best, but I've been getting a lot more eyes on my offer by using these and I've had a few signups for my freebie (to build my list) and the page views and bounce rate has been pretty close to organic traffic for some of the sites.

disclaimer: I'm just down here in the trenches trying whatever!