When I first started in affiliate marketing and built my first site, I began to look for the golden egg – TRAFFIC! As always, increasing website traffic is at the top of our lists and so, I basically tried whatever was out there, anything and everything. After some experience and testing, I began to get a clear picture of what was working and what was not.

One thing that turned out to be the lamest waste of time is using traffic exchanges. Basically these are “incentuos” websites where members visit each others sites, in order to gain traffic. So you join, spend about 1/2 hour to 1 hour a day surfing other members sites, sometimes doing reviews, and they do the same for you.

Now, when you are new and you visit your Google Analystics account and see 50 visitors, this is really exciting, but very soon, when there are no sales, you begin to realize this is STUPID!

The reason there are no sales from traffic exchanges is because this is NOT targeted traffic and not exactly the best use of your time. So, yes traffic exchanges will increase website traffic, but this is just lame traffic for traffic sake.

We are here to make money right? So every valuable minute we spend working our asses off should be spent on the most effective Internet marketing techniques that will result in PAYCHECKS and eventually telling our bosses to shove it!

So, to summarize, traffic exchanges are a complete and total waste of time!

Now, there is one traffic exchange service, one of the ones I have used from the beginning, that is worth your time and that is linkreferral.com.

Now, the main purpose is to visit and review member’s sites and they do the same for you, but you don’t need to do that, again because traffic exchange is a pointless activity.

Sidenote: there is one exception to this, this blog received three subscribers from linkreferral members, but this is because most of those members are webmasters and Internet marketers who really liked the content and this blog was relevant for them and the traffic was therefore well targeted, and if your sites are about subjects related to webmasters and Internet Marketing stuff and your content is good the same may happen for you.

In general, I recommend Linkreferral for 2 main reasons:

1. Google loves them and crawls them often, member’s sites are listed in a directory fashion and their listings appear in search engines for respective keywords with your site name and description.

2. Most important, it is a powerful do-follow backlink. While Google is slow to show backlinks, the linkreferral backlink always shows up and stays strong month after month. So, for the 3 minute sign up and site submission that backlink is a nice payoff!

And, while most traffic exchanges require that you visit other sites to earn points or else your site does not even show up, with linkreferral your sites are always there, they will be last on the list if you don’t visit other websites and earn a higher position, but that does not matter for the backlink!

linkreferral.com, register a free account, and add your sites, (each site is added under the same user name but with a different password, I mention this because it is confusing on their site, so create an account add one site, log out and then add a new site, input the same info and user name, except change the password and add the new url).

Now go get a backlink at linkreferral.com

What do you guys think about this? Anyone disagree? Do you use traffic exchange? Has it worked for you?