By Dan

If you want your online business to succeed, you have to advertise. There is absolutely no way around it. Unfortunately, for most aspiring online entrepreneurs, advertising on the internet is neither cheap nor easy. Many types of internet advertising do not even guarantee that anyone will visit your site. If there is one form of advertising that will guarantee visitors to your site, it is traffic exchanges. The question is; can you use them to their full potential?

I will not waste your time explaining how traffic exchanges work. I am sure you already know how they work. That aside, when you use traffic exchanges to build up credits/tokens/etc., people are viewing your site, also building up their own stash of page views for their own site. Consider traffic exchanges, will they bring you site visitors who are actually interested and read what your site has to say, or will they simply ignore it and keep clicking, focusing only on building credits?

The truth is most people could care less about your site. It does not matter how it looks, what you are offering, or anything like that. If you want to promote some long sales letter, or a product from some affiliate program, you can pretty much forget about using traffic exchanges. Traffic exchanges have a certain time limit on how long you must remain on a site before you gain a credit. The longest time limit I have ever seen is 30 seconds. Most people will not be able to fully read and comprehend a long sales letter in that amount of time. Even if you are not promoting some sales letter, and instead you are promoting your home page, which has pictures and banners and all sorts of stuff, you honestly cannot expect to convince some random person to buy something from your site in such a short amount of time.

I think I have said enough about using traffic exchanges ineffectively. The mistake most people on traffic exchanges make is they try to sell right away with their home page/sales letter/etc. They also do not seem to realize that every person on a traffic exchange is somebody trying to promote their website, and that everybody is trying to earn credits for page views.

In my opinion, the best way to benefit from traffic exchanges is by having a splash page that features an opt-in lead form for your mailing list. Personally, I advertise a splash page that offers a free e-book when people sign up for my mailing list, and it has worked quite well in growing my list. If you do not have a mailing list, you should at least have some form of a splash page that will captivate the viewer's attention and curiosity in an instant. If successful, a splash page can lead to people checking out your true site because they are curious, not because they are click-crazy.

A splash page is small, so the visitor will not have to scroll much while surfing the traffic exchange, if at all. In addition, it will not take very long to load in the traffic exchange. It is quite possible that if you promote a long site, the timer will run out before your site even loads on the visitor's browser. They still get a credit for surfing, but you lose a credit, even though the visitor did not see your site.

Now here is where things get interesting. There will always be people who do not know what they are doing on traffic exchanges. They will be the ones promoting long sales letters that nobody will read. Therefore, it is to your own advantage to build a splash page that will be eye-candy for visitors, and relieve them from the boredom of clicking through sites they have no interest in reading. With this in mind, traffic exchanges can be very beneficial and profitable for you, if you use them right.

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