Are Traffic Exchanges Too Good to Be True?

On the world wide web, the biggest indicator of success of your online marketing campaign is getting more traffic. How many hits you can bring to your web site, blog, or home page means a lot, and people longing to get more hits and real traffic usually start looking into different methods of web site marketing. One marketing service that has become popular is traffic exchange. But are these traffic exchange services worth the effort and money that you put into them?

Let's say that I have a snazzy web site with lots of cool free dark fiction stories. I want to get people to visit my site and read my stories, but both my banner ads and my Google text ads are being ignored. My posts in forums are hardly looked at, because I'm not a regular poster. I post in the newsgroups, but I'm competing with 1,000 ads for herbal viagra and "free" porn. None of these methods get more than one or two people over to my site, and I really need some way to get new people onto the site to see what fiction I have to offer without having to be their BFF first.

In theory, if I'm willing to sign up with a traffic exchange service, I can get traffic for my site by first visiting the sites of other people. For every two pages that I surf to, one person will be directed to my web site. If I'm willing to pay a membership fee, then the ratio becomes one to one, and I'm given other supposed perks, like "free banner ads." But! I can skip surfing other people's sites and just buy impressions, forcing people to look at my stuff without having to share or read anything. Sweet! By paying a fee, I can guarantee that 3,000 readers are going to visit the main page of my web site. I can also surf other people's sites and add even more visitors to my site. This sounds fair and cool, and maybe it could even be a way to pick up some new blogs to read.

This is the idea behind traffic and link exchange services, but the promise of tons of traffic sounds too good to be true almost from the start of the pitch. After all, I've been through the surfing for cash routine, only to make $36 for a year of surfing, and that was using three different services all at once. I was also paid to read email, but it took six months of reading to make $5. I could make more money in an alley in five minutes. Er, not that I have before.

But setting aside the fact that the deal sounds rigged, I chose to bravely sign up for several of these services to see how they work.

Other people who have written articles reviewing these exchange services have mentioned that the traffic coming from the services is pointless, because it isn't focused traffic coming to see your page anyway. Which is to say, I want people to come to my site in the mood to read free dark fiction. If they come in the mood to shop for clothes, or to hunt for crafting tips, then my site is useless to them. They will not spend much time anywhere but the main page before fulfilling their required time limit to stay and earn another "click" for their own site.

This is a valid point, but I might add that with most of the services I tried, I rarely saw a site with real content. I spent many hours looking at badly cropped royalty-free clipart and messages like "Hey U, web site Joe! You lonely for hits? I bump you traffic! I bump you long time! I earn U thousands in days!"

Okay, but the deal is, if I can sit through enough of this SPAM, I'll eventually get my own site into the viewing queue, right? Er, maybe not. No matter which service I tried out, what I didn't see a lot of were real web sites or blogs with actual content to browse. Most of the sites were just ads, ads, and more ads. In fact, there were some pages that were link exhanges full of affilated "downline" referrel links. What that means in layman's terms is, there was a full page of nothing but banner ads, and you are forced to sit and stare at the blinking ads for ten seconds before you can hopefuly move on to a real page with your next click. But you almost never do.

By the time that I'd stumbled onto a real blog about combat knives after three hours on one service, I read that page gratefully from top to bottom, even after my timer said it was safe to move on. I was so tired of every site being a full page ad promising me that my traffic would soon be exploding. In between ads for other traffic and link exchanges, I saw cures for cancer, cures for diabetes, and cures for gullibility. There were MLM scams from the 1980s, but redressed with newer clip art from the 1990s. Worst of all, after the knife blog, I never again saw any real blogs or web sites on that service. I did start to see a lot of repeat SPAM, however. From the point of finishing the knife blog, I started surfing expectantly after that, hoping for any other real sites.

This kind of scam supersaturation was true no matter which service I tried, and it's obvious that the people in charge of these traffic exchange companies don't really care who is asking for traffic. There is no moderation of what you'll see, and most of the sites all end up looking alike. Even if my site somehow makes it through this noise to reach a reader, there is still a very good chance that they aren't interested in my style of prose anyway.

Traffic exchanges might work if you could surf through a list of other peoples' blogs and web sites, and then read their main pages to decide if you liked them. But most of the people participating in these exchange services are people running other exchanges, or affiliate programs, or MLM scams, or...the point is, you won't want to spend much time looking at the sites that you have to browse, and your site isn't going to make it through this mess more than once or twice per day, while the scam ad sites will loop repeatedly throughout the same brief surfing session.

The old maxim still holds true here. The deal for traffic exchanges is too good to be true, and you're better off spending your time writing more articles instead of surfing junk advertisements from the kings of SPAM.