The Dollar Factory

Traffic exchange programs are a waste of your time and money

If you are a new webmaster then I am sure that you are eager to start getting lots of traffic to your new site. After all, you did spend a lot of time to design and add content to it so it is only natural that you want people to visit and maybe generate some revenue for you via your affiliate programs or pay per click contextual advertising network. Your site is so young that search engines don’t send you any significant amount of traffic yet and you are starting to get desperate. You have come across many ads on the Internet that promise millions of visitors to your site if you join in a traffic exchange program. Before you waste your time and money participating in a traffic exchange you should read the rest of this article.

Traffic exchanges are popular online programs for webmasters. When you sign up with a traffic exchange, you promise to visit other subscribers’ websites and they promise to visit yours in return. One type of traffic exchange operates in auto-surf mode whereas a new website is shown to you every few seconds. A second type shows a number of text ads to you and you select/click the website that is of interest to you under the condition that you will not visit the same site more than once per day.

A traffic exchange sounds like a great way to get visitors to your website but the problem is that hardly any of these visitors will ever come back or bother to purchase whatever product you are selling. The truth is that most people participating in the program are webmasters just like you who don’t care about the other websites but instead try to earn as much credit as possible in order to get more hits for their own websites. In other words, traffic exchanges do not provide you with targeted visitors. This type of traffic is meaningless and it will generate zero revenue for you.

The only people who benefit from a traffic exchange program are the exchange’s operators. You see, eventually people find that manually surfing for traffic is rather time consuming. In addition, every webmaster knows that the click through rate (CTR) for pay per click ads is usually no more than 4%. That is at best, out of 100 visitors only 4 will click on an ad. If on average the cost per click (CPC) for an ad is say 10 cents then for 100 visitors you might make about 40 cents. If you want to make a good income from your website, then you would like to make maybe $100 a day. So you need at least 1000 visitors to click at 10 cents a click. At 4% CTR you would need to generate 25,000 visitors and for a traffic exchange with a 2:1 ratio, you must surf 50,000 websites every day! I don’t know about you, but I wouldn’t have the time or patience to do that. So, traffic exchange operators offer you the option to buy traffic. This is how they make money. You, on the other hand, since the traffic is not target as I explained earlier, make no money. Lastly, if you are displaying AdSense ads on your website then by participating in a traffic exchange program you are very likely to be violating Google’s terms of service and you are risking getting permanently banned and losing your AdSense account for ever. At the end of the day, by participating in a traffic exchange, you lose big in more than one ways!

So, I strongly advise you that if you want to have a profitable website, you should focus your energy on adding lots of unique and useful content for your target audience. You should employ proper search engine optimization (seo) techniques so that you get organic traffic from search engines. If you are willing to spend some money to attract traffic to your website then you are better off spending the money on pay per click advertising such as Google AdWords instead of buying credit in a traffic exchange program.