When you saw the title of this article, you probably either clicked on it out of outrage or out of curiosity. If you are a proponent of the traffic exchange, then I totally understand! Please save your hate mail until after you read this entire article. Traffic exchanges are a huge part of some people’s business, especially for the people that own them. I am not debating whether they can help bring you visitors or make you a little money. I am simply gonna state my observations.
I am not gonna sugarcoat my views, so I hope you don’t get easily offended. Please appreciate my honesty!
On your quest to drive traffic to your site, you probably started with the best free options you could find. The most obvious place to start is someplace where people can visit your site daily without the use of your credit card. Introducing: traffic exchange websites. What an awesome thing! You can get hundreds of views to your page and all you have to do is click away for 10-30 minutes a day! Pretty sweet!
Someone either told you about them: build a website and join a handful of traffic exchanges and add that site, or you stumbled across them on your own and decided to put them to work for your affiliate links. However, no one probably warned you about the pitfalls of traffic exchange use. That is where I come in!
Whether you click to get credits or use an array of auto surf sites to gain credits for views to your sites, you are paying for your credits. Whether it’s in time or money, nothing is ever free. I used traffic exchanges for years because I was told they produced results. I could get referrals to free programs and even get some people on my email list, but they rarely translated to anything other than a name and an email address. If I was doing all of this for the social aspects only, I would have considered myself very rich!
One thing I have tried to make my readers understand is there is always a trade off with anything you do. If you want free traffic, then you will have to spend a lot of time to set up that free traffic. If you want higher quality traffic and/or you don’t have a lot of time, then generally you will have to spend some bucks. Either way, you are paying for what you get – the currency is just different.
Sometimes I feel like I am the only one that stands against this method of traffic generation. Scott Newkirk agrees with me on his blog here. He actually echoes some of the same things I am saying here!
Okay, hate is a strong word. I still have traffic exchange accounts that get views to random sites
So here are five very good reasons for you to avoid traffic exchanges:
Traffic exchanges are comparable to running a marathon in the desert with no finish line. You might get a little thirsty, but water is scarce in the desert. Still thousands of people surf daily and that will never change as long as there is an internet and people sell stuff online. You are not building a high-quality business by using traffic exchanges. You are just wasting your time on tasks for the sake of staying busy. You will only end of frustrated in the end!
I hope you learned a thing or two in this article. Hopefully you will accept my advice at face value and you will consider your options. Facebook traffic and other forms of PPC traffic are excellent ways of targeting the people who see your ads. Let me sign off by asking you a serious question. If you were promised a dream vacation if you simply went to prison for a few years (maybe several, no one is very specific) would you do it? I didn’t think so.
That is what a traffic exchange does.
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