There are a lot of negative comments made about traffic exchanges, but is it all justified?

Probably the most common negative people give about using click exchange, or traffic exchange programs is that the traffic from them is useless. In many cases this is due to the way people try to make use of the traffic from these exchange programs.

Most of the webmasters who sign up for traffic exchanges are trying to use a direct sales page and consequently make no sales from the traffic they get. When you look at how these exchanges work it's not hard to see why.

After you have surfed to earn your credits, or paid for your page views with cash, your page will be shown to other people in the program. When your page is shown though, you will only get a short time to make an impact on your prospect, and many of them are going to be only scanning for something of immediate use as they will be trying to get as many views as possible to get their site seen. Many of them won't even be looking for the information your site offers either although some of the better traffic exchanges like Traffic Swarm ( http://www.cashinonline.info/recommends/ts.php ) will have categories so you can target the audience who will be most interested in your site, so these are the best ones to make use of.

So how can you make better use of the traffic from traffic exchanges?

As we already stated, the use of more targeted exchanges is a good start, so that the people seeing the pages you put up are actually interested in them to start with. That will improve the chances of action being taken in the first instance.

The second thing you can do to make people notice your site, among the hundreds they will surf during a traffic exchange session, is to be different. Many of the users of the traffic exchanges will be in the same programs and using the same pages to display. You can get more even from these same sites by making your own leads page for it.

Your pages in traffic exchanges will also need to be fast loading, as if it isn't loaded in time, it can't be seen before the prospect moves on.

So you need a fast loading, unique page with a short reading time, but what to do with the prospect on the page is the main issue.

Get them to sign up for an email list, be it a course, newsletter, announcement or whatever just capture their email address while they are there. This way instead of getting one shot at the prospect you will get as many as you can email them. Instead of just the time they pass through your page while they surf a traffic exchange, you can send them to your page several times, and also to other pages later. As always a fr.ee offer will make the deal more tempting to sign up for too, so offer a bribe to get the email address.

Summing it all up, there are negative points to traffic exchanges, but by using them in a different way to most other users, they can be made to work in your favour.

You can get useful traffic from traffic exchanges.

Douglas Titchmarsh is the owner of several websites including http://www.cashinonline.info and http://www.thediscountebookstore.com He also publishes the CashInOnline Chronicle e-zine which you can subscribe to by sending an email to douglastitchmarsh@getresponse.com