Your experience with traffic exchanges?

Don't waste your time. Most of the traffic is either done by robots, or it is non targeted traffic. This will be from people are are enticed to click on something just to get to the next page. They will be directed to your site even though they didn't really want to be there in the first place. You will get lots of hits but not many sales. Rather go for PPC is you have the money, or even better organic traffic from Google. You would be better off investing your money in a keyword research tool in my opinion.

Darn, that's what I suspected. As nice as it is to see 50+ hits in a few minutes (and with a bounce rate of 40%? Fishy!), looks like I'll be throwing out this traffic method.

I have tested the waters with easyhits4you and found that it is especially a big waste of my time. I am now concentrating on getting organic traffic from Google. I would rather have no traffic then just a bunch of people clicking and not doing anything.

Traffic exchanges can be good if you are targeting them correctly. First thing to realize is you most certainly have to have a very small squeeze page for this method. If you can keep it above the fold with either an optin or a click over the return traffic should stay pretty well. Also keep in mind as someone else stated they are simply looking for 2 things. 1.How To Make Money and 2.How to Increase traffic or sales or 3. How to increase signups/optins.

Now keeping it above the fold is also a bit tricky since you need to remember that the sites like easyhits4u use a frame at both the top and the bottom of the browser which really limits the viewing area. Your main goal in designing your page is to make it so that the view can see everything your offer has with out having to scroll the page at all.

Now it also helps to stick with the larger ones for you will get more eyes at once then you would with the smaller tes. However that also can be a bad thing as well. Since normally it would take someone to see your page 5 times before they will even consider what your offer is. Other then that though traffic exchanges really do not do any good for anyone for the most part. I actually got a nice laugh out of a site owner at one several several months ago. Who told me the only reason why they surfed the traffic exchanges every day was to maintain their rank i the serps. Using a traffic exchange does not and will not give you any extra weight in the serps. The only thing it does it bring in visitor to your site. If you have a good offer it may convert but the conversions will be far and between to see any good results from them.

I definetly think that keywords are very important...if you truly understand how keywords work and how to use them correctly, you can get some serious free traffic

Your post just made me look at my traffic swarm account. Haven't checked in for months and months.

In the mid 90's we recruited around 1600 people into TS, and was the top referer, I just looked and we are number 18 (ID = 92317).

We still get $100 to $300 a month and its good for recruiting into free services, products and programs.

I only use traffic swarm only to increase my site views. I know I can only get traffic from them and no sale. Just an advice don't purchase any traffic exchange credit and only use them by manual surfing yourself.

Its not good for advertising a whole webpage but can be quite effective for advertising splash pages. I get several opt ins from easyhits4u everyday.

Andrea

I agree with most here that traffic exchanges are for the most part a waste of your time, there are a few examples of using a splash pages, but still if your trying to convert a bunch of people who will not buy anything and for the most part are only interested in trying to sell, you have what I call a huge ant hill where everyone is running around trying to sell this or that, and no one is interested in looking at or buying anything, it is sad that on top of all this.

Traffic coming from the (frame) which is what is used at just about all Traffic exchanges is going to show up as what ever that exchange is, example, traffic4yourwebsite.com (example made up name) if you get like 1000 hits from there google sees this as 1000 hits from a traffic exchange and believe it or not, they do not even count on google analytics, so in reality the traffic exchanges are even less useful than you imagine.

I did an experiment a short time back and tested this out, using four different tracking methods, most of the hits were robots, and or from places where the populace were so poor that they could never afford to buy anything, I know a little sad but that is what this stuff is about, there are even some places where people sit in a room and click all day long and they get paid to do it, but none of them can buy anything,

From my tests, one in 400 is a real person, which means that you could do much better with other methods, for the most part traffic exchanges are going the way of the old FAA pages, (now that is a trip back in time)

This was NOT the case for me - they all showed up on Google Analytics just fine (and I'm talking about five or six traffic exchange sites). They show up as referrals from that site.

I loved using traffic exchanges and if you spend the time to learn how to use them then you will get great results if you have a product that you can sell to people who are starting out.

If you just put a salespage in these site then you'll get no sales, but if you put up a squeezepage then you can generate leads, and leads = sales.

You have literally thousands of sites to choose from, and only 1% are worth joining. To find the best sites join a ranking site like traffic hoopla or affiliate funnel where only the sites that actually deliver a decent level of traffic are listed.

Finally here's a top blog that will keep you updated with all things relating to traffic exchanges - HitExchangeNews.com -- the Pulse of the Traffic Exchange Industry

Jon and plenty of others make a full time living online, so if the exchange is doing well enough to allow the owner to live then it's worth joining.

There may be a few that are worth the effort, but they are far and few between while I was developing a product last year, that showed the mouse movements of a shopper in a shopping cart, (yes it was sneaky) I decided to test out several web pages, to see what interaction I could get, out of a user, and only one in 250 actually moved the mouse during the 30 seconds the webpage was presented to the user.

Out of those users they moved the mouse to click on the next button, it was clear that no matter what there was no motivation to do anything, this was even when I clearly posted the following, line of text,

If you are a human, and you are reading this webpage, be the first to click this button and get 10$ instantly into your paypal account.

Nothing happened, the mouse never moved,

So I tried it again and this time I upped the Cash Reward to 20$ nothing.

I did this on two different very popular traffic exchanges, either the website visitor was not human, (robot traffic) or they could not read English, either way the result was clear, the lights are on but no one is home.

I get more traffic and better results writing an article, and back-linking with social book marking services than I ever got with Traffic exchanges, they are almost worthless as a real value to the Internet Marketer, it is sad but true, everything that glitters is not gold.