Thinking of using hit exchanges to boost your Adsense earnings?
Think again!
So, you've added Adsense to your site and you are getting a few
clicks. You could be thinking to yourself, How do I get a
massive amount of visitors to bump up my earnings? If you're
anything like me, you hear those stories about webmasters that
have added Adsense and are already earning five figure incomes
per month, and you start to see the dollar signs.
So you start brainstorming. You come up with a few ideas: email
marketing, ebooks, trial software, etc. The thirst for Adsense
dollars (and maybe a few affiliate dollars) is your main drive.
Pushing massive amounts of traffic through your site can give
you quite a thrill ride.
Then along comes the well known email that markets the traffic
exchanges. If you aren't familiar with traffic exchanges, it's
really very simple. You see, you sign up for their service
(which often times is free) and your website is put in a list.
The way the free traffic works is that you surf the web using
their browser, browsing sites that are in their directory (or
list) and every 30 seconds you can refresh to a new site. As you
continue to do this, it builds up credits for your account that
you use for other people who are using their browser to see your
site.
It's a cyclical service. You see their site, they see yours. And
since you can have as many browsers going (among the many
traffic exchanges) as your computer can handle, you can
theoretically build up a large quantity of hits on your site in
a relatively small period of time.
It seems like a great thing, and for many it fills a very
necessary niche, so I can't say that the traffic exchanges are a
bad service. I would use them in anything else that I am doing.
I would, however, make a very big distinction.
First, I know and respect the tech's at Google and I know that
when they make a new program for their visitors and webmasters
to use, they make it for the benefit of everyone. That is the
case with their Adwords and Adsense programs, both targeted to
helping webmasters make money through advertising (albeit the
opoosite ends of the scale).
So when I put an ad on my website, I know that I am offering a
service to the advertiser (through Google) to reach their target
market. And ethically, I should only be paid when I provide that
service (someone clicks through that ad to their site). There
are extreme ethical problems if you were to use traffic
exchanges with the Adsense program to try and cheat the
advertiser out of his hard earned dollars.
Plus, if you haven't figured out by now, Google knows what you
are doing. They have specific ways of knowing what is a
legitimate impression, versus what is a hit generated by a
traffic exchange. Your numbers quickly dwindle if you use a hit
exchange and you run the risk of being kicked off the program.
Plus, often times you have to go through two websites wasting a
full minute of your time before you get one hit directed to your
website. Building up over time, it eventually it all adds up.
Take, for instance, the "surf contests". This is where they tell
you who has racked up the most surfing in the week. These
numbers are huge... up to 10,000 page loads. When you add it up,
that's over 84 hours of one week that is taken up trying to earn
an extra 1,000 hits on your site. Not very worth it to me.
The best way to use the Adsense program is with a website that
you have that is established and has a constant stream of
visitors going through it. That's the goal of the program, make
money off of an existing site and its content.