There is no doubt Traffic Exchanges can provide you with lots of extra FREE traffic, and if you use the right strategies you can turn those start page hits into high quality targetted visitors

For those of you new to internet marketing who need an introduction to the Traffic Exchange world here a brief introduction

A Traffic Exchange allows you to join for FREE, register your site, and earn credits by viewing other sites. You can then use those credits to receive traffic from the exchange to your site. People must view your site for a minimum number of seconds before passing on to the next site

Here are 10 Top Tips to make Traffic Exchanges work for you

1) Spread Your Surfing Across Lots Of Exchanges

Many Traffic Exchanges have fairly small active memberships. This means the number of people who are actually surfing, at any one time, is limited. Even the larger exchanges may not have more than 100 people surfing in any one day. In addition most of the hits to the exchange are accounted for by a small number of determined, committed surfers i.e. a few people are surfing alot of sites

The way Traffic Exchange scripts work means, that people who surf, are shown sites which have credits remaining in their traffic account. So if you earn alot of credits on any one exchange the chances are your site will be shown repeatedly to the same people over and over

In order to combat these problems you should surf for a small number of credits only, on each exchange you visit. By surfing like this on many different exchanges you will pick up hits from all the small number of people who are "stuck" on one exchange or other.

By surfing for a small number of credits on a large number of exchanges you are likely to get far more unique hits, and, just as important, you will be "hitting" a large number of interested business opportunity seekers spread across many exchanges

By "unique", we mean that only one person has seen your site in a 24hr period

2) Surf Sets Of Exchanges At Once

One of the easiest ways to click up a really large number of credits and therefore generate a large number of hits, is to surf multiple traffic exchanges at once. If you use a tabbed browser you can surf each different traffic exchange in a different tab or window. This will work best if you have a reasonable amount of memory (RAM) on your computer and a broadband or fast internet connection

My own recommendation is to surf 7 exchanges at once in different windows or tabs. It is best to do this for no longer than 20-30min so as not to earn too many credits on any one exchange

3) Use Mozilla Firefox

Mozilla Firefox is an extremely good surfing browser, which enables you to have many "tabs" or separate windows open, but with only one main browser window open. This is a very clever browser which is far better than Explorer, and includes lots of extra features such as RSS Feeds and most important of all anti virus protection

Firefox enables you to disable websites downloading software by default. This means that everytime someone tries to download something as part of a web page - an all too frequent method for bad sites to get viruses/spyware onto your computer - an alert box will deploy giving you the chance to say "no actually I dont want your silly software thank you very much!!"

Mozilla is also much faster than other browsers at displaying the pages, especially if you install the "FasterFox" addon

There is also a very nice addon from Firefox which gives different colors to the different tabs you have open, making it easier to see where you are

4) Use Splash Pages

Splash pages are simply quick loading web pages, which are generally the size of a normal web window i.e. no scrolling down is required. There is normally a link which can be clicked to open the main target site in a new window

The best way to use splash pages is to combine them with a name/email lead capture box, so that you have the chance to follow up on leads later

Many splash pages are poorly designed or badly worded and therefore fail to achieve their full potential. You should remember that the "ad copy" in a page is the most important element. Poor "ad copy" will reduce the effectiveness of a splash page to virtually zero

You should also be careful with images, as images will always draw the eye away from your "ad copy". So its important that any images underline the message you are trying to put across on the page. An image should "say" in summary what the words are saying in the "ad copy". If the image is suggesting something different to the message, then its likely people will see the image - even remember the image - but have no idea whatsoever what the page was actually about!!

Avoid using the "STOP" sign in splash pages. Some people take up most of the space in the window by displaying some kind of "stop surfing" message. However this means someone then has to scroll down the page to see what the message of the page is. It is absolutely essential that people can "get your message" in no more than 5 seconds. You can do this by a great proven headline

5) Concentrate On Lead Capture Pages

The biggest mistake people make with Traffic Exchanges is signing up for some affiliate scheme, and then clicking for credits for the affiliate URL. This is a recipe for disaster!! People will rarely if ever respond to an affiliate URL or sales page - this is in part because they are concentrating on earning credits

However if the main purpose of your page is to collect names and emails then you can add these people into your autoresponder automatically and send them a series of email messages over the next few weeks. You will be surprised how many more people will respond to emails, than just visiting your site "blind"

6) Surf For Banner Impressions

One of the things you will notice about all Traffic Exchanges is that they have a banner displayed somewhere in the surf frame. When someone clicks on this banner - no credits are earned - and the page opens up in a new window. So when people visit your site, as a result of seeing your banner, they are of much greater value to you. This is because they are actually interested in visiting your site. They are not earning any credits and so there is no timer. These people are many times more likely to join your program or buy your product, than people who view your site while surfing

7) Use A Rotator

A rotator is a single URL which rotates the different sites you have added to it. So if you had 10 sites in a rotator, then every time your rotator URL is "called" then a different one of those 10 sites would display. This has the advantage on a Traffic Exchange that if repeat hits were sent to the same person, they would actually get a different site

8) Track Your Advertising

Its very important in any advertising to monitor your responses. Its much easier to do this with a Lead Capture page, than with any other page. You can simply add a piece of code into the HTML FORM code, so that when someone enters their name/email, an extra variable will be sent to you, to show which page or site they were on when the form was filled in. At its simplest this could be done by changing the subject line of the CGI email that is used when the details of the webform are transferred into an email. In case you are unsure about all this, CGI Email, is a program hosted on your web server, which turns the contents of a webform into an email and sends it to you

9) Concentrate On Exchanges With A Longer Count Down

It is simple common sense that the longer your webpage has to be seen by other surfers the greater the chance that your page will convert to sales or signups. If a Traffic Exchange has a very short counter then it could be that your page wont display at all - especially if someone has a slow dial-up connection

Traffic Exchanges with longer count downs also perform much better for banners i.e. you will often get a much better click through rate - the number of times a banner is clicked per thousand impressions. As banners provide you with the best possible traffic from start pages, its worth spending more time on exchanges with longer timers

10) Compare The Alexa Rankings Of Exchanges

One useful shorthand guide to how good a Traffic Exchange is can be achieved by looking at its Alexa Ranking. Obviously if a Traffic Exchange is not in the top 200,000 out of all sites then its probably best left alone

If you follow these strategies you will have an excellent method of getting the very best from the time you spend surfing traffic exchanges