Today, the biggest problem that new website owners have is: How they can get traffic to their website? Significant amount of time and energy is spent today on this single task. You or your webmaster needs to commonly focus on:

- Get ranked well on the most important search engines (Google, Yahoo, Msn, Ask.com, etc.)

- Pay Per Click (PPC) programs

- Cost Per Click (CPC) programs

- Link Exchanges

- Directory Submissions

- And more

All of these methods are valuable for getting traffic to your website. If you are not competent enough to rank well your keywords, you can obviously hire a SEO (Search Engine Optimizer) for this work. From search engines you can get a very large portion of traffic to your website.

Today, everyone wants to know the big secret to driving traffic to their website. Every day I see an article or an ad talking about driving people to your website; driving traffic to a website has become the holy grail on the Internet. People are realizing that if you build it, they won't come... unless you give them a reason. Website traffic just doesn't happen by itself. Your website is just one of many millions on the web and people rarely just stumble upon your site by accident.

There are many ways to drive traffic to your website.

You can buy traffic from vendors that will pummel your website with hits from automated programs. This will increase your hits but will it increase your bottom line? Probably not. You can set up blogs that spider (connect to) your website increasing your traffic count. Does this drive users to your website? Only if your blog is so interesting that people are reading it. There are thousands of blogs posted on the internet and your blog is just a needle in the internet haystack.

Another trick is to create RSS (Really Simple Syndication) feeds for your website and subscribe to other RSS feeds. This again will increase your hit count but will do very little to drive potential customers to your website unless you're providing valuable information. Tricks will increase your hit count but do very little todrive potential customers to your website.

People often turn to traffic exchanges. Quite simply, a traffic exchange is a program where you sign up and agree to surf sites in exchange for some credits. These credits are then used when other members of the exchange surf to your site. This traffic is not highly targeted traffic. In fact, if this were your only method of advertising your website, you'd probably fail. BUT it is a great method of getting traffic to your site in addition to the other methods listed above.

So, why do people use traffic exchanges? Here are a few of the benefits:

- Increase your Alexa rating! Did you know that some search engines factor your Alexa rating into their algorithms? More traffic means higher search engine placement!

- Increase your branding awareness. Any marketing expert worth his salt will tell you that branding is extremely important to stand out amongst the billions of websites out there. More traffic equals more sales. A percentage of people surfing will be enticed by your ads and click on them to find out more information. Another source of revenue. Many traffic exchanges will actually pay you money to surf. More importantly, as you refer other people to the network, you'll earn a percentage of the money that they earn! It may be small amounts but if you work the system it could amount to a lot of money.

Now, before you head over to Google and search for Traffic Exchange, I'd recommend knowing a few facts:

- Some traffic exchanges are simply out to get money from you and will refer very little traffic to you.

- Some traffic exchanges have poor systems in place to stop cheaters from running programs to increase their credits faster.

Finally, some traffic exchanges will allow popup, active x controls, site rotators, etc. in their network. Any of these can stop your auto surfing from working, or even worse, allow your computer to be infected with a virus.

The best part about Traffic Exchanges is that you really have nothing to lose and everything to gain. The worst thing that could happen to you is you get a little bit of traffic which increases your Alexa rankings and you don't get any money.

Of course, for the system to work, you've got to make sure that you do some surfing yourself. The makers of the exchange programs realize this and some of them even have an auto surf feature where you get a reduced number of credits while your browser happily loads page after page every 10 seconds or so.