Are There Too Many Traffic Exchanges?

Many people in the Internet Marketing sector use the services of Traffic Exchanges. But are there too many of them?

I was in one of the many Internet Marketing forums I bleong to recently and became engrossed in a discussion thread by a number of Traffic Exchange (TE) owners. The topic of the discussion was, are there too many Traffic Exchanges.

First, as background, let me explain the role of TEs to those who might not be familiar with them. Traffic Exchanges allow members to promote their products and services via their websites. As a member, you place a link to your site(s) into the Exchange "rotation". In order to obtain credits for other members of that TE to see your sites, you view (aka surf) the sites of those other members. The viewing of sites is on a timer, usually 10-30 seconds. While the timer is counting down, you are viewing the page of another member. If a particular product or service interests you, you click on that site to get additional information. If you aren't interested in the particular product or service being offered, you click "next" once the timer has counted down and go to the next site in the rotation.

Depending on the number of sites you "surf", or view, you accumulate credits. You then use those credits to have your own sites displayed to other members when they surf. Traffic Exchange members may purchase credits directly from the TE site if they don't want to spend the time surfing, but generally, the vast majority of TE members surf other pages to accumulate credits.

It's obvious that Traffic Exchange users understand their value based on the number of people who use them. Some of the larger TEs, which have been in operation for years, can boast membership roles totally over 100,000. The Traffic Exchange concept must be working if it can garner that sort of membership level. In the discussion forum I was engaged in, TEs were listed within the top 5 promotion strategies for Internet Marketers, along with article posting, blogs, Pay-Per-Click (PPC), and social networking sites.

Those who use Traffic Exchanges typically belong to more than one. I myself belong to about 30. Other people I know belong to many more than that. The whole idea in site promotion after all is to get the word out to as many people as possible. This is no different from traditional bricks and mortar businesses who advertise in multiple print vehicles (newspapers, journals, magazines, etc.).

The issue for the TE user becomes, are there too many of them, and which of the available TE services should they use? If you do a Google, Yahoo, AOL or other search for "Traffic Exchange", the result pages will return literally thousands of results. While some may consider this the TE industry reaching a point of saturation, my personal opinion is that it is the exact opposite. The sheer number of TEs in operation demonstrates two positive results: 1) TEs are obviously working for a large number of people, and 2) the potential TE user has many options to choose from.

Like any industry, some of these TEs are quite good and provide an effective promotion vehicle for you. Many others fall into a middle-ground. This can be compared to placing an ad in the New York Times vs. some lesser distributed newspaper. The Times will most likely result in greater sales, but it costs much more. Middle-of-the-road TEs may not result in as many sales (although they might), but you are also not competing with as many people for site rotation. And of course, there are those bottom of the barrel TEs that will most likely be defunct by the time you read this article. Such is the nature of business.

There are a number of things you can do to find the most effective TEs for your own promotion efforts.

As I mentioned before, do a Google or Yahoo search. See which ones come up in the first 5 pages or so. Those that are included in the "sponsored ad" section of the search engines typically signify a TE owner who is willing to spend the money to promote his/her own site, and therefore contribute to the members ability to display their sales site to the largest number of people.

You can also use TEs themselves to find the better TEs available to you. Join a few TEs. When you surf these, you will often see ads for other TEs. After a while, you will start to see a pattern of which of these show up the most in rotation, and which show up on the most other TE sites.. Why is this important? It means that those Traffic Exchange owners have made a committment to promote their service. It costs money to do that. They expenditure of funds to advertise a TE most often demonstrates the dedication a TE owner has made to developing a membership base. Of the thousands of Traffic Exchanges currently on the Web, there may be less than 100 that show that committment. Unfortunately, some people start their own TEs with the idea of making a huge profit. That is just not reality of the TE industry. It's a business. Like any business, it must be nurtured. If you join and surf a handful of Traffic Exchanges, you will quickly discover the those TE owners who are taking their business seriously (by seeing them show up over and over). Those are the ones you want to belong to. Those are the ones that will help your own promotion efforts and sales.

You'll also want to determine how well each TE you join is moving credits. That is, how often is your own site is being viewed by other members. There is no hard and fast rule regarding this, but my own experience is that the "typical" TE moves, on average, 30-100 credits (pageviews) per day for each of your sites. That doesn't mean the TE moving 100 credits per day is better than the one moving 30. If the one moving 100 is being seen by the same people over and over, that doesn't really help you. I belong to one exchange that moves maybe 50 credits a day. But I happen to know that TE has a membership of over 100,000. Essentially, that means each time my own site is viewed, it is by a different person. That represents massive coverage for my sites over time. On the other hand, the site that provides 400, 500, or more pageviews per day may simply represent the same 100 people viewing your site over and over. That won't help you. There are, of course, those TEs that are moving 300 credits a day or more to unique visitors, which is a good thing. But simply going by the credits moved per day doesn't necessarily translate into quality views.. The point is, a TE proclaiming that it moves 500 credits a day may, or may not, be providing a meaningful statistic.

Fact is, I have belonged to TEs that move 500, or more credits per day. That has become a red flag for me. All to often it means one of two things. Either the site only has a few members surfing and viewing the same pages over and over, or the site owner isn't being diligent in finding and removing cheaters. What is a cheater? Sad to say, there are those people out there with the technical skills to write scripts to automate the surfing process unattended. Basically, they run the script and then walk away from their computer while their script "views" page after page to accumulate credits for themselves. In essence, your sites are being displayed to empty air. That isn't to say that TEs that move 500 or more credits a day are doing it without cheaters. But as I said, it represents a red flag not to be ignored. The reality check is, there are some TE owners who give a "wink and a nod" to cheaters because it helps their credit movement.

You should also be somewhat wary of the total membership some TEs claim to have. Membership is a funny thing. As a TE owner, I can tell you there are two completely differerent numbers when it comes to membership. The total members represents how many members have signed up at some timer or other over time. For TEs that have been around for years, that can be an impressive sounding number in the 10s of thousands. BUT, total membership isn't the same as active membership. Active membership represents those people who have actually used the TE over the past 3-6 months. A TE that has been around for 4-5 years may have a "total" membership of 30,000 or more. But the active members may be significantly lower than that. Significantly. When members stop using a TE they don't typically go in and delete their account. Unless the TE owner purges his database of inactive members on a regular basis, that 30,000 membership level may actually represent only 5,000 members or less who are still using the TE. Some TE owners purge their roles of inactive members. Some don't. Keep that in mind.

So what do you do? The solution is actually quite simple. Get and install an ad tracker. These are easily available on the Web, just do a search. A tracker will provide you with statistics as to where your sales are actually coming from. A thousand hits from a TE won't do you a bit of good if it doesn't result in sales. And you may be surprised to find the TE moving 30 credits a day is actually producing more sales than the one giving you 300 views a day.

The last thing you can do is to join several of the Forums dedicated to Internet Marketing and Traffic Exchanges. Find out from other people which ones are working for them. Within a short period of time, you will discover the same 50 or so TEs are mentioned in reply to that question.

Now, there are a number of sites on the Web that will provide lists of the top 10, top 50, or top 100 Traffic Exchange sites. As both a TE user and a TE owner, I am not really a big fan of these lists. Why? Because much of that rating is based on Alexa rankings and other factors that don't really account for the effectiveness of the TEs on the list. For example, if a TE owner tends to look the other way when it comes to cheaters (cheaters do move credits after all), the Alexa rating for that site may be quite high? Is it actually resulting in sales? You will only know the answer to that if you use an ad tracker. Don't get me wrong, some of these TE ranking lists are a great place to start. But the dirty little secret in the TE industry is that they aren't actually scientific and they don't really measure sales conversion results. My fellow TE owners won't like me stating that, but it's the truth. Hits (pageviews) and sales are NOT the same thing. In my own tracking there are instances where I have received more sales conversions from TE sites not even on one of these lists than from those that are. Use your ad tracker. And ask people in the forums.

So, to get back to the original question: are there too many TEs? Absolutely not!! Are there too many Walmarts?? Some people might say there are, but be honest, when you need a new toaster or weedwacker, aren't you glad that Walmart is 1 mile from you rather than 20? And aren't you glad the price is cheaper than some other place? And isn't the competition great for YOU? If you comparison shop for TVs, cars, and the like, shouldn't you do the same with the TEs you use. Find the best value. It may take a little effort, but in the end it will be worth it. Traffic Exchanges work, if you make the effort to find the best ones.

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