The number one problem new internet site owners have is, "How do I drive targeted traffic to my internet site ?"

A significant amount of time and energy is spent on this single task. A webmaster will often focus on:

• Ranking well in the search engines


• Pay Per Click (PPC) programs.


• Pay Per View (Banner) programs.


• Link Exchanges


• Directory Submissions


• etc.

All of these methods are viable means of taking visitors . In fact, if youre lucky or competent enough to rank well for your keywords in the search engines, youll find that you get a very large portion of traffic to your page .

What do you do, however, if you rank poorly or, even worse, dont even show up in the first 1000 results on any of the search engines? What do you do if you dont have a budget set aside for branding?

This is where all the people commonly turn to traffic exchanges. Quite simply, a visitors exchange is a script where you sign up and agree to surf sites in exchange for some credits. These credits are then used when other members of the exchange surf to your site.

Now, Ill be quite honest with you, this visitors is not highly distingguished traffic. In fact, if this were your only method of branding your website, youd most definately fail. BUT it is a grand method of grasping visitors to your website in addition to the other methods listed above.

So, why do people use traffic exchanges? Here are a few of the benefits:

• Increase your Alexa rating! Did you know that some search engines variable your Alexa rating into their algorithms? More visitors means higher search engine placement!


• Increase your advertising awareness. Any selling expert assessment of worth his salt will tell you that branding is extremely important to stand out amongst the billions of web sites out there.


• More traffic equals more sales. A percentage of people surfing will be enticed by your ads and click on them to find out more data .


• Another source of revenue. Many visitors exchanges will actually pay you money to surf. More importantly, as you refer other all the people to the network, you will earn a percentage of the money that they earn! It could be small amounts but if you work the system it could amount to a lot of money.

Now, before you head over to Google and search for Traffic Exchange, Id recommend knowing a few facts:

1. Some traffic exchanges are simply out to get money from you and will refer very little traffic to you.


2. Some visitors exchanges have poor systems in place to stop cheaters from running programs to increase their credits more quickly.


3. Finally, some traffic exchanges will allow popups, activex controls, page rotators, etc. in their network. Any of these can stop your autosurfing from working, or even worse, allow your computer to be infected with a virus.

The best part about Traffic Exchanges is that you really have nothing to lose and everything to gain. The worst thing that could happen to you is you get a little bit of visitors which adds your Alexa rankings and you dont get any money.

Of course, for the system to work, youve got to contruct sure that you do some surfing yourself. The makers of the exchange programs realize this and some of them even have an autosurf feature where you get a reduced number of credits while your browser happily loads page after page every 10 seconds or so.