Increase Web Site Traffic For Free

Traffic exchanges are programs that let other people view your website in exchange for your viewing theirs'. Most of them are absolutely free to join. Since you have a small budget or none at all, your investment will be in time.

When you view other peoples' pages to earn credits, there is a timer on the page. These timers vary from 5-30 seconds depending on the exchange. When the timer runs out, you are required to click somewhere on the page and you will be taken to the next site. The process is repeated over and over. That is how you earn credits for your site to be shown.

Obviously, this can be very time consuming, but it is the trade off you make for not spending any money! So when I say that you will increase your website traffic for free, I mean it won't take any money out of your pocket.

Now, there are some things that you want to take into consideration. You need to remember that the people that are using the traffic exchanges are mostly people in the same position as you are. No advertising budget!

Don't expect to make a lot of sales with an affiliate product or explode the down line in your network marketing program. Always keep your audience in mind. These people don't have a lot of money to spend. Granted, you will make the occasional sale or get someone to join your mlm, but this is pretty much luck.

Also, you will see a lot of the same affiliate pages over and over again. These are hundreds of people promoting web pages that look exactly alike. This is boring. After several days of surfing, you will find that you only pay attention to something new, something you haven't seen before.

See where I'm going with this? If at all possible, you want to create something that is unique. I have found that the best use for traffic exchanges is for lead capture. Build your email list. I'm sure you have heard the importance of this preached over and over again. It also optimizes the time you spend surfing by killing two birds with one stone.

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If you are an experienced Squidoo'er I recommend the "Super Kraken" upgrade if you want to take your lens to the next level and use the full power of Web 2.0 to drive your search engine rankings into those coveted top 20 Google positions.

That is because it is true! From the minute you begin your career as an internet marketer, you want to continue to build your email list always. We will cover some very effective ways to do this in another issue, but for now, back to traffic exchanges.

Build yourself a lead capture site. Give away something free to entice people to submit their information. This can be a free report, ebook, software, be creative! You don't have to create the report yourself. You can give away this article, you have my permission. Keep in mind that it may not be altered in any way and the biography must be included.(hint: another viral marketing tactic.)

There are a lot of products that come with resale rights that you can buy and then give away. Do a search on "articles" and you will find lots of sites that allow you to give away other peoples articles (as long as you don't change them). You can also buy PLR (Private Label Rights) articles that you can put your name on and call them your own. I suggest using the content and rewriting these articles to make them truly unique. You have to remember that if you bought them, so did hundreds of other people.

While we are on this subject, I am going to plug a membership site that I belong to. For $27 a month, you get access to hundreds of PLR products and articles. Each month a new ebook is added and multiple products are added that ownly members have rights to. You do not have to buy these. You also get a full cpanel hosting account with 5 domains, unlimited subdomains, and all the bandwith and space you need to promote hundreds of sites. You also get unlimited autoresponders plus all kinds of other tools that an internet marketer needs. Click Here to check it out.

Sorry for getting off track. It's just that sooner or later, you are going to want or need all of these services and you will be hard pressed to get the same hosting account for $27 a month, let alone all of the other stuff included. Ok with that said, lets get back to traffic exchanges.

Try to use things that pertain to your product or service that you wish to market to your list later on. Don't try to sell them on first contact. Design your site so that it grabs your prospects attention. You only have 5-30 seconds before they click on to the next site, so don't be long winded. It doesn't need to be fancy. Some of the best converting websites are simple text. You don't need audio or flash presentations.

The power of your website is in the written word.

Most of the free traffic exchanges don't trade traffic at a direct 1-1 ratio. They encourage you to upgrade for this to happen, don't worry about this. If you are going to commit to a monthly payment, your money is better spent else where. Stay with the freebies.

You do want to keep an eye on your email box for specials. Almost all of the traffic exchanges that I have used, run specials from time to time, where you can earn double credits for a set time period on a specific day. You want to make sure you watch for these and take advantage of them. Make sure you subscibe to their newsletters so you are informed as to when these specials are to take place. I set up an email account just for my traffic exchanges. By the way, if you use the PBP membership, you get a free domain name with your hosting and unlimited email accounts.

You also want to make sure that you participate in the little traffic games that they have while you are surfing. You can win extra credits this way. For instance, Traffic Swarm and Hit Magik hold a daily lottery. I have seen the pots as big as 25,000 credits.

Another way to earn extra credits is by referring others to the traffic site. When you join, you will be given a referral link that you can promote to get people to join under you. When people join with your referral link, you get a set amount of credits, plus you get a percentage of the credits that they earn.

If used properly, traffic exchanges can be an effective way to increase website traffic for free. It will cost you some time but that is the trade off for not spending any money. If you maximize the time that you do spend by building your list for free and building your downlines while driving traffic to your site, then it can be time well spent.

JT Martin is a home based business growth specialist and the editor of Marketers Mantras Ezine. You can join his newsletter Here.

Craig Haywood has put together a masterpiece. My Viral Pop Ads is modeled after Instant Buzz. You spend about 20 minutes setting everything up, put the code on your website, and then just go about your normal business surfing the web and earning credits.

The cool thing about My Viral Pop Ads is that you build your list at the same time. Craig also has a built in url cloaker and some other nice features. I have been using it for about a month and it is generating lots of free traffic for me.

The Pro version sends you about 20 times more free traffic but is kind of expensive. If you are going to upgrade, make sure you do it at the one time offer. You can save $100 if you do it there.