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Traffic Exchanges Are They Worth It ??

by MrMoore
39 replies
I've been online marketing for about 1 to 2 year's ! And i have been hearing a whole lot about traffic exchange sites . So i went and took a look at a couple of them! But the only thing they look like to me was spam HQ . So my :confused: is . Are they worth the time and effort clicking and clicking away. Just for the email adds of someone else that is just clicking away to get you to look at his? I'm not for sure so i am leaving it up to you guy's ...:rolleyes:
#exchanges #traffic #worth
  • Profile picture of the author donnan
    Well Mr Moore,

    There are good TE's and there are bad ones.

    One thing for sure is people will see your ads and they have to visit your page that is how they work.

    It's really a case of if you have something of interest then you will attract those surfers on the TE.

    If you are trying to get sign-ups to similar programs they are promoting they are a very slow way to make progress. IMHO. Look below for something a little different.
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  • Profile picture of the author luma2
    I have used traffic exchange but only when I just start a new website, to get the first traffic and people get notice about it! I dont recommend you to put all your time on this type of advertising
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  • Profile picture of the author MarkWrites
    Traffic Exchange isn't something I'd put any money or very much effort into.
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    • Profile picture of the author ZNICK
      I think it depends on the type of exchange... some are so hokey.

      Z
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  • Profile picture of the author webpromotions
    If you are selling shovels to make money online (IE; almost anything in the WSO forum), they are absolutely worth it, as long as you know how to use them.

    Promote a splash or squeeze page and nothing else, and keep in mind that this is incentivized traffic. Just keep in mind that you'll need anywhere from 100 to 1000 hits from this kind of traffic to equal 1 'targeted' hit, but its cheap, easy to get, and can add up really quick.

    And most important - don't bother with any traffic exchanges that offer any kind of 'cash for surfing' rewards. This is the main reason why people give TE's a bad name. The te's that work would never even think about doing this.
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    • Profile picture of the author mki
      Originally Posted by Doug English View Post

      If you are selling shovels to make money online (IE; almost anything in the WSO forum), they are absolutely worth it, as long as you know how to use them.

      Promote a splash or squeeze page and nothing else, and keep in mind that this is incentivized traffic. Just keep in mind that you'll need anywhere from 100 to 1000 hits from this kind of traffic to equal 1 'targeted' hit, but its cheap, easy to get, and can add up really quick.

      And most important - don't bother with any traffic exchanges that offer any kind of 'cash for surfing' rewards. This is the main reason why people give TE's a bad name. The te's that work would never even think about doing this.
      I agree with Doug, TE's worked for awhile but everything I tried failed miserably excluding a few old clickbank products, sending them directly to a squeeze page sort of worked (the time invested was not justified, at the time clickbank products were still sort of new and converted better then they do now.) The amount of time invested to generate one sale was horrendous, the main reason TEs are bad is because as much as you want to believe there are "real surfers" the fact is that they are incredibly rare, I'm sure the vast majority is just "doing it for the hits" and doesn't even actually look at your site. I also had some success with free webmaster services, if you have a unique service that's free and will draw a webmaster's attention back to the site on a regular basis, then you do get some results, but the conversions are still terrible compared to targeted SE traffic.
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  • Profile picture of the author Andrea Wilson
    I was a fan of traffic exchanges before but it is not really a good way to attract quality traffic. There were others who are saying that they made their list using TE's and some that made referrals from it. Results varies from person to person and it depends on how attractive the page you are promoting is. So far the best traffic exchange is easyhits4u. Andrea
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    • Profile picture of the author webpromotions
      Originally Posted by Andrea Wilson View Post

      So far the best traffic exchange is easyhits4u. Andrea
      Sigh.

      Hopefully Robert Puddy will see this thread before it falls to page umpteen.

      That exchange you mentioned offers a cash value for a certain amount of pages surfed, which means the traffic is of very low value, and definitely not a good measure for what 'real' TE's can deliver.
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      • Profile picture of the author MichaelParsons
        Originally Posted by Doug English View Post

        That exchange you mentioned offers a cash value for a certain amount of pages surfed, which means the traffic is of very low value, and definitely not a good measure for what 'real' TE's can deliver.
        I find that most TE's, like Doug mentioned, are incentive based and good for a HIT.

        Just a hit, and rarely anything more. If you want traffic, they can be OK, but they are not targeted and certainly not interested in what you're selling,though it does vary by TE.

        I'll take some TE drive-by traffic, why not, but I'd rather be found by someone interested in what I'm selling as opposed to somone just hanging on my site for 20-30 seconds to get a "credit" and moving on...:rolleyes:
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      • Profile picture of the author Robert Puddy
        Originally Posted by Doug English View Post

        Sigh.

        Hopefully Robert Puddy will see this thread before it falls to page umpteen.

        That exchange you mentioned offers a cash value for a certain amount of pages surfed, which means the traffic is of very low value, and definitely not a good measure for what 'real' TE's can deliver.
        I tend to stay away from these threads Doug, let them stew in thier own ignorance <wink>

        If they did a search of the forum for this subject they would get a whole slew of info on TE's but they dont, they just go on ASS U Ming they know best.

        Though i couldnt let this one go without commenting

        Originally Posted by mki View Post


        Have fun, it works but it takes forever. About 2000 hits sounds accurate. (and you could do better with 10 hits from google...)
        I can get a new subscriber for every 80 to 100 page views which is better than any PPC campaign
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  • Profile picture of the author Dash Evra
    I was involved in traffic exchanges many many years ago and wow... what I waste of time it was. Good thing I never invested money in buying their credits.

    Every one there is busy trying to advertise their site to make a sale or whatever. It's highly unlikely they will take a good look at what you are selling.

    When you were surfing through those sites, how many of them did you actually pay a close attention to and bookmark for a later visit?? Exactly. Everyone else does the same thing.
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    • Profile picture of the author Josh Abbott
      Originally Posted by Dash Evra View Post

      Every one there is busy trying to advertise their site to make a sale or whatever. It's highly unlikely they will take a good look at what you are selling.
      This is exactly why traffic exchanges are so powerful. You have an entire market of people who all want the same thing. If they aren't interested in what you are selling, then you are trying to sell the wrong product to the wrong market.
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  • Profile picture of the author donnan
    If you are considering spending any money on a TE. DON'T DO IT!

    Unless, you have a super dooper unique offer or opportunity that people will not resist. Then the cost of buying the credits will be worth it. But if what you are offering is along the similar sorts of lines of what current TE users are promoting then you will just kiss that money goodbye.

    IMHO, TE's were great in their time, but it's no longer a viable way to get sign-ups or sell products in a majority of cases. I am speaking from experience as I am a TE owner and I have used TE's now for quite some time.

    I believe links sharing is the way to go now. Take a look at all the links selling ads on this site alone. This is where good traffic can be generated at this stage. So... That's where I am heading!
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  • Profile picture of the author BudgetSEO
    The are good if you're looking for traffic and not conversions.
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    • Profile picture of the author donnan
      Originally Posted by BudgetSEO View Post

      The are good if you're looking for traffic and not conversions.

      Great point!

      Another advantage with TE's are they are very good Page Rank fodder for Alexa and Google analytics. A great way to get your hits up very quickly. Pageviews go through the roof of a good TE that passes that onto their members sites.

      This would be very usefull for those Warriors that like to build sites get them a good ranking and sell them on. Instant traffic so quicker you are able to sell.

      So there are definately some benefits to them.
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  • Profile picture of the author clever7
    Traffic exchanges are very dangerous for your pc. You need a very good anti-virus, and even though… I used them in the beginning but my pc had problems. I stopped using them. Use automatic traffic exchanges if you want to try a few, because they send you more traffic than the manual ones. However, the people of traffic exchanges only want to expose their website. They are sellers; they are not buyers. They are just people who may visit your website without any intention to purchase anything. They mainly want to sell their own products. Therefore, this is not the kind of traffic that can help any business.

    The best free traffic generating method is article writing and marketing. If you are not a good writer, purchase articles written by a ghostwriter and submit your articles to ezinearticles.com with a link to your website in your resource box. Articles are better than ads. They provide interesting information. When they are well written, they keep sending you traffic for years.

    If you are a good writer, write your articles alone. Visit ezinearticle’s blog because they give you many article writing lessons.

    Another excellent traffic generating method is answering questions at Yahoo Answers and Quora.

    Create Squidoo lenses and hub pages, promote your link in forums and leave blog comments.

    Take care!
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  • Profile picture of the author webalytics
    Banned
    Traffic exchange is good for inflating numbers if you are trying to flip domains. But in terms of generating revenues from exchanging traffic we haven't found it to be effective.
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    • Profile picture of the author SeanSupplee
      As a traffic exchange owner and one that has used them for over 10 years now here is a honest answer.

      The thing is there are way to many traffic exchanges out there. You need to make sure you select a few of the top ones and stick with those. Theres only a few thousand active users in all of these exchanges combined so don't expect huge amounts of opt ins. However with a decent advertising budget of about $300-$500 or about 20 minutes of surfing a day you can expect to rake in around 200 + opts ins from your squeeze pages.


      Worth it? Yes if you need leads fast and some decent conversions you can never go wrong with pluggin your squeeze pages into a few traffic exchanges
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      • Profile picture of the author imagene
        Originally Posted by SeanSupplee View Post

        As a traffic exchange owner and one that has used them for over 10 years now here is a honest answer.

        The thing is there are way to many traffic exchanges out there. You need to make sure you select a few of the top ones and stick with those. Theres only a few thousand active users in all of these exchanges combined so don't expect huge amounts of opt ins. However with a decent advertising budget of about $300-$500 or about 20 minutes of surfing a day you can expect to rake in around 200 + opts ins from your squeeze pages.


        Worth it? Yes if you need leads fast and some decent conversions you can never go wrong with pluggin your squeeze pages into a few traffic exchanges
        Yes, agreed fully! Just a squeeze page on TE's is a great way to increase lists - and if you have a very affordable VA that can surf for you, all the better!
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  • Profile picture of the author petevamp
    Originally Posted by MrMoore View Post

    I've been online marketing for about 1 to 2 year's ! And i have been hearing a whole lot about traffic exchange sites . So i went and took a look at a couple of them! But the only thing they look like to me was spam HQ . So my :confused: is . Are they worth the time and effort clicking and clicking away. Just for the email adds of someone else that is just clicking away to get you to look at his? I'm not for sure so i am leaving it up to you guy's ...:rolleyes:
    First thing you need to realize about traffic exchanges is that unlike other methods to gt traffic. You might be lucky to get 1 out of every 2000 to convert to a sale or offer on your site. Also keep in mind depending upon you plan to monetize your site it can be risky. Forinstance if you plan on generating income from adsense well by using traffic exchanges you are violating googles policy and if and when they find out you will lose your adsense/google account all together. Now if you are doing a very small squeeze page with an optin offer you could do rather well. For many of the users using those tes are just starting out. So you need to offer them in terms of getting free traffic.

    It can work for you but it can also be bad for your business. Just remember not to even bother if your means of income is through adsense.
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    • Profile picture of the author mki
      Originally Posted by petevamp View Post

      For many of the users using those tes are just starting out. So you need to offer them in terms of getting free traffic.

      It can work for you but it can also be bad for your business. Just remember not to even bother if your means of income is through adsense.
      Exactly, so if you have an ebook (for newbs) that's about how to get free traffic, then you have a chance. You can easily bait them onto a list by providing a few free "sample techniques".

      I would actually consider trying this (now that I think about it) if I didn't have better things to do.

      Edit: Here you go; make a simple page about generating free traffic, the site should contain an optin form for an offer about a paid ebook about generating traffic for free. You can create an offer like "Receive our best technique and free access to our members only area for free! only available to the next 25 xyv-free-traffic-xchange.com members." The free report should be legit and be mainly a promotion for the featured paid ebook. To create the "members only" area of the site we can just use an htaccess file and create a user/pass like "free:traffic" then pass the login out via email to our subscribers. The actual members only area should just contain some reviews about ebooks we actually recommend with our affiliate links, with some additional details about our "feature book" (a great way to test another sales letter if we are split testing.)

      Have fun, it works but it takes forever. About 2000 hits sounds accurate. (and you could do better with 10 hits from google...)

      PS: the experience I had was up there with free for all link sites, it was as close to a complete waste of time as you can get except that there were results eventually, so it was not a complete waste, but I'm willing to bet you could make a post on the general section of these forums and do better with the technique I just described.
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  • Profile picture of the author SolomonHuey
    How can anyone honestly say it doesn't work if you don't know how to use traffic exchanges properly?

    Practically my entire list (22,000+ subscribers and growing) and income was built largely in part thanks to traffic exchanges and similar sites.

    Actually take that back, it doesn't work... More for me.

    Solomon Huey
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    • Profile picture of the author Jon Olson
      Wonder if people think Stumble Upon is 'worth it' to advertise in...

      Different model? Sure. But it's still the basic concept of looking at websites, rotating through them.

      Alas, traffic exchanges have been here for over a decade. While internet marketing jumps from 'hype to hype'...Traffic exchanges have been there.

      But then again...There's no hype and buzz in the T.E.'s. We just quietly do our thing. And get great results, year in and year out.
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      • Profile picture of the author Jeff Henshaw
        Traffic Exchanges are like every advertising medium. If you don't know how to use them they will not work for you.

        If you learn about them, join the right ones and use them effectively, then they will deliver results. If you don't know how to use them and don't want to learn how to use them, stay away and use forms of advertising that you are comfortable with.

        Please don't post about what you either know nothing about, or something that you have tried 'on the fly' without bothering to learn how to maximise its potential.

        Just my thoughts,

        Jeff.
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        • Profile picture of the author Barbara Eyre
          I've been involved with Traffic Exchanges for the better part of 6 years. Through failings that are solely my own, I haven't been as profitable with TEs as I should have been.

          When used correctly, Traffic Exchanges can be extremely beneficial.

          DO

          - Use splash pages, specifically an opt-in form ... funnel people to your sales page and onto your mailing list.

          - Use quick loading pages as you only have 6-30 seconds to entice the viewer.

          - TEs are typically geared towards the Make Money Online (MMO) crowd, so make your offer focused on that. Not to say you couldn't try to advertise your hand made jewelry site, especially around key holidays, but don't expect it to result in the bulk of your sales.


          DON'T

          - Use your generic mile-long affiliate sales page.
          - Use the home page to your website (too long to load).

          There are obviously other Dos and Don'ts, but those give you an idea. TEs are a numbers game. The "it takes an average of 7 viewings of an ad before someone responds to it" is typically true.

          Plus, you'd be surprised at some of the gems you find advertised on TEs - free reports to help with advertising and marketing and programs that I may not have heard about elsewhere.
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  • Profile picture of the author WebPen
    Like everyone else seems to have said so far, only use TEs to build a list.
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  • Profile picture of the author Takuya Hikichi
    I no longer use Traffic Exchange today, but when I did, do you know what worked great??

    I published a report focused on resolving issues people faced while using Traffic Exchange (Download link below) -- I read threads like these over and over and people complained how it never worked so I wrote a report showing how to funnel Traffic Exchange users. The report told users of traffic exchange to focus on OTHER traffic exchange users and funnel them into other promos using your list.

    Because I knew people using Traffic Exchange were having hard time how to get them to work so I thought there was an opportunity there. Lots of opt-ins daily just displaying that report with a splash page (shown inside the report).

    And they were on both Robert and Jon's exchanges and I just changed the title of the report to each exchange. And the profit I would gain from these sales, I'd reinvest it back into exchange credits, so it was kind of automated.

    I need to restart this again!

    Here's my 2007 PDF that I used for Jon's Traffic Exchange. I can't believe I still had this report. If anyone wants to private label the report, I am going to give you basic PLR rights to it to use it for your own campaigns. But I can't find Word Doc for it, so you'd have to download and convert it into Doc from PDF to do that. Just don't claim copyrights and try to sell the PLR on my behalf or anything.

    It's 4 yrs old report and my English isn't perfect, but I'm sure it'll help someone reading this thread.
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  • Profile picture of the author Fazal Mayar
    This is what ive been wondering as well, if anybody has had succes do u have a link
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  • Profile picture of the author Fresh Ads
    Save your money
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  • Profile picture of the author sowerby
    For me personally I had no joy at all with TE, so do not use them.

    This was my experience with them.

    You sign up and have a page to promote, preferable a squeeze page with a free offer then market to your subscribers through email marketing. If you even get any sign ups

    You click, click, click and click some more to gain credits so you can mail out your offer. Half the time you are not interested in what is brought to you as you just want the clicks.

    You then repeat the process and you end up wasting so much time and not getting a return for all the time you have put in. Also what you are doing is probably what everyone else is doing so nobody really looks at your offer.

    I have not used this method in a long time and will not being doing so in the future. Maybe I was doing it wrong or they have improved over time, but there are far better ways to get traffic than this.

    Craig
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  • Profile picture of the author JasonParker
    "Traffic Exchanges Are They Worth It ??"

    If you want to generate the lowest quality traffic imaginable that will never buy anything from you, then they are definitely worth it.
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  • Profile picture of the author FriendlyRob
    There are many traffic generation tactics that are frowned upon that work well when used in conjunction with other traffic generation methods.
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