If you are a new to web site promotion or an experienced campaigner, you should include Traffic Exchanges as part of your marketing plan.

When you join a Traffic Exchange you agree to surf other peoples pages and in return, they will surf yours.

Traffic exchanges have been around for a while now, with the largest ones numbering subscribers in the tens of thousands. So submitting your webpage to a Traffic Exchange will potentially give it exposure to a large number of people.

There are basically two types of exchanges, manual surf and auto surf. With the manual surf exchange you click through websites. The Autosurf site presents pages to you automatically without the need to click.

Some of the advantages of Traffic Exchanges are as follows:

1. A cheap and often free method of sending traffic to your website. This can help with your page rank

2. The traffic you generate arrives almost instantly

3. Some exchanges allow the surfer to choose an ad which is associated with pages they view. This is a good way of testing your copy before you spend money placing it in the outside world.

4. Most traffic exchanges allow you to build a down line by referring others to them. You usually get credit for their activity, and over time your traffic becomes almost solely generated by the efforts of others.

5. You will be exposed to a lot of products and services you wouldn't normally see, which means you will have a better appreciation of your market and you will pick up some good ideas about promoting your product.

There are some downsides too:

The people surfing these programs are mainly interested in promoting their own page – not looking at yours. This means that you will need to generate a lot more hits for each sale.

When you start out you can spend long hours generating traffic from your own surfing.

Here are some suggestions for getting the most out of Traffic Exchanges:

1. Join the big ones. You will get your page to a wider audience if you do

2. Join manual surf exchanges. Your page is more likely to be read.

3. Find one with a surf ratio of 2:1 or better. What this means is that for every 2 pages you surf your site is viewed once.

4. Join one where you get credit (clicks/money) for the activity of those you have referred. This allows you to generate lots of free traffic as you refer more and more people

5. Join one that's been around for a while. Your going to put a lot of work into growing your client base here, if they have been in business for a while (more than 2 years) they have a better chance of lasting the next two.

6. Join as a free member first, until you understand enough about the program to decide if the paid benefits are worth your while.

7. Join two programs (but no more) to begin with. This way you can allocate some of your traffic to promoting each exchange to the others customer base. In this way you will grow your down line and the amount of traffic you get for free.

8. Join at least one which allows the surfer to choose the pages they view by selecting an ad associated with the page. This will give you a valuable insight to the effectiveness of you ad copy. Trafficswarm is run this way.

9. Take advantage of your surfing time. Take note of the pages you view and the reasons that that made it attractive or not to you.

10. The pages you select to promote must convey their message at a glance and ideally should contain a free offer (Ebook, Ezine sign up). Your objective should be to encourage the surfer to find out more, setting up a future sale

With this information you will get the more visitors and customers to your website. Over time you Traffic Exchange program will feed itself to provide free traffic forever.

Here's to your success!

About the Author
Brian Pratt is a 46 year old New Zealander. He owns a Plug-In Profit Site at http://www.bestrealincome.com>http://www.bestrealincome.com. You can contact Brian at support@bestrealincome.com