You've heard the term "Traffic Exchange", but what is it? Well, there's many different types. The most basic is a service that you subscribe to that asks you to surf some of their subscriber's website and in exchange for their subscribers surfing your website. Usually there's a exchange rate something like for every three websites you visit two people will visit yours.

For this excercise we will use Traffic Swarm. Now, most traffic exchanges have a specific page through which users need to surf and Traffic Swarm is no exception. They provide a framed page where the user clicks on a link (chosen from several) and the one frame shows the website and the other shows a counter of how many points the user still has available.

Now we'll deal with the pros and the cons. For this excercise we'll assume:

Assumptions

• an exchange rate of three views of other websites for two visits to your site. Reason why it is never 1 to 1 exchange is that the company owning the service ads their own ads into it through which they generate revenue to operate the service.
• you view 2,000 websites.
• your website does subscriptions to a newsletter through which you sell advertising.
• your website loads fast (and that is something that is critical with traffic exchanges as most views are time limited).

First the pros. If you follow their surfing rules and use their systems.

Pros

• You are guarenteed traffic to your website. +/- 1300 views to your website in this scenario.
• All the views will be unique.
• All these views of your website will up your Alexa ranking drasticallly.
• Depending on what your website is about (sales, marketing, subscriptions, etc) and your conversion ratio (how many visitors equals how many 'sales'), you WILL see an increase in your action (sales, subscriptions, etc). In this case, you will see an increase in subscribers.
• More page views equals higher advertising prices.
• More page views equals more chance someone will click on an advert on your page.

Well, those pros seem very nice, but now for the down side.

Cons

• Ai, it is soooo time consuming sitting behind your desk surfing other people's sites.
• These systems are not fool proof. People can cheat, meaning, you could have someone running a program that 'views' your site, but it's a program not a person, taking away ANY chance of a action happening.
• It kills the bandwidth, and for South Africans, that's a problem.
• Your subscription rate, even though you will receive subscriptions, is lower than through other advertising mediums, 'cause these users are users that want traffic for their websites in exchange and aren't necessarily interested in your products and services.
• Your increase in ranking only lasts as long as you're a member of the system. As soon as you stop using the system, the users disappear and you drop in rankings again.
• It makes it difficult to see what your sources of visitors are (OK, Traffic Swarm's easy, but others aren't).
• Not all traffic exchange systems have good reputations (Traffic Swarm is one of the better).
• You have no access to their backend systems to make sure that it's working as it should (but isn't that the problem with all these online systems, including or especially Google?).

Summary

So, that's basically Traffic Exchange in a nutshell. Consider it carefully. I do use Traffic Swarm on one of my article sites and receive over 100 unique visitors a week from it. And I can see the difference in ranking and income, even though it's not major earthshaking changes. What I do is surf in the background when I remember. I keep a browser window open and when I come around I just click and continue with my work. That helps bring visitors. Because my site is purely advertising driven, it's easy to make money through this method of getting visitors.

Remember, there is not harm in having more visitors to your site. The worst that can happen is that you get more visitors. The best that can happen is you receive some sales. So, weigh up the pros and cons carefully, try it for a month or so and see if it is worth it.

About Traffic Swarm

Traffic Swarm is quite a large traffic exchange system with free and paid memberships. It also has a tier system where you can receive credits for people signing up beneath you, meaning for every signup, you receive points on a continuous basis. For more information, visit them here.

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