Traffic exchanges and blog traffic exchanges are a way to expose your blog or site to traffic by visiting other blogs and sites. I have looked at many such exchanges and selected what I though to be the best of these to see what sort of traffic I could bring to my site.

I signed up with four blog exchanges and one traffic exchange. There are quite a few traffic exchanges out there but I found many of them to be, well to put it mildly a waste of time. These exchanges were mostly auto surf exchanges where amusingly enough the visitors were not encouraged to actually look at the sites they visited.

The idea behind the exchanges I chose to test where that you visited other sites and blogs in the network and in exchange the webmasters of other sites visited you. The idea is simple and should be an easy way to bring traffic in. The list of these sites can be found at http://www.blogtonomy.com/blog-and-traffic-exchanges.php

I have been using these sites for several weeks and I think I now have enough data to come to some reasonable conclusions about using exchanges in order to generate traffic to your site.

Does it generate traffic?

You can get traffic pretty much straight away as some of the sites give you some credits for joining, but most of the traffic needs to be generated by you visiting other sites in the network. How much traffic you get will depend on how long you spend visiting other sites, on average I found that you could get about 40 visits in return for about an hours surfing.

The catch

This is probably the easiest and quickest way to get traffic to your site or blog. After looking at the traffic being sent from these sites I noticed that not many of the visitors went beyond the first page. This is not really surprising as, like you, most of the visitors are webmasters trying to generate traffic to there own sites.

I would conclude that as a starting point for getting traffic and for testing new pages on your site then this can be a useful tool. The audience will be mostly untargeted and so probably not interested in what you have to offer and therefore probably the hardest type of visitor entice into making a longer visit or returning for a later visit.

If your site or blog is more targeted towards traffic generation and promotion then you may get a better response from the visitors. I would recommend setting up a landing page especially for the visitors from these sites so you can offer them something they are likely to be interested in. It would be worth investing some of your time in experimenting with this sort of traffic to see if it works for you. You can always dismiss it later if you find it is not working for you.

Allan is the webmaster at http://www.blogtonomy.com/ where I will show you how I am promoting my site.