Do Traffic Exchanges Work for Start-Up Businesses?

What Are Traffic Exchange Sites?

The term 'Traffic Exchange' loosely covers a wide variety of sites, all geared to getting the business owner traffic in return for:

• opening emails (email exchange);
• viewing other business' sites (traffic exchange);
• clicking adverts or displaying banners (banner exchange);
• etc.

Often, these activities are twofold: traffic and building an email list or downline. For a start-up, traffic exchanges can be useful for a number of reasons:

• they provide a way to get some free traffic flowing;
• it's an opportunity to test an offer;
• validation of an idea;
• and so on...

A more obscure reason to use them is in testing various tracking mechanisms, rotators, or other installed services and features that rely on visitors to drive them (whether they carry out an action or not).

For a more comprehensive answer, see the "Traffic Exchanges and Downline Builders" article; the remainder of this discussion assumes that you are willing to look at adverts for people's sites in return for displaying your own on the traffic exchange network.

An Experiment with TS25

In order to try and figure out what kinds of business actually advertise on a typical high-quality traffic exchange site, I clicked through about 100 pages and noted down what the primary driver for each advertiser was according to their business model.

The one I chose for the experiment is called TrafficSyndicate25 and if you sign up using one of the links on this page, I will get some credit for having brought you and TS25 together.

The pie chart shows that the lion's share of the adverts are quasi-cannibalising; they are invitations to sign up to one traffic exchange programme or another. 

The next tranche (33%) relates to so-called Business Opportunities, including SFI* and ClixSense. 

This could be you, but I suspect that most readers are in the 11% percent of genuine adverts for products or services.

What's a little worrying is that this category is outweighed by the "Wasted" slots: those that no longer exist, or redirect for some reason, as well as the 2% of the total that are represented by viruses or other threats.

So, are traffic exchanges a waste of time for a start-up entrepreneur?

If you are promoting a traffic exchange, or related service, then clearly you'll be in good company. Whether or not your offering will be more persuasive than the competition is an open question.

One solution is to pick an exchange that has an exclusion policy for rival traffic exchanges but be aware you may miss out on some of the adverts for genuinely useful TX sites.

For example, of the BizOp category, 11% were for SFI* and 6% for ClixSense, leaving around 16% spread between other business opportunity sites, including affiliate schemes. If you're in this sector, then it could be a good fit.

In the genuine adverts for products and services, the offerings were split between hosting deals, a religious site, and personal blogs, including a couple of adverts for apps.

A final note: I am fully aware that without a comparative study, this research needs to be taken with a pinch of salt. If enough people are interested -- please comment below if you are -- then I will conduct research across all the traffic exchanges I'm currently using.

In addition, for those who want the full TS25 report as a one-pager, reach out to me in the comments section and I'll make it available.

(*You can see my analysis of SFI in the article about the SFI affiliate scheme.)

Traffic Exchanges and Downline Builders: Getting Started with Free Traffic

"Free traffic" are the two most seductive words to newbie online marketers.
In the olden days (like in the early-to-mid-1990s) banner exchanges were all the rage: for every time someone saw a banner on your site, you got to show your own banner on someone else's web site. These morphed into services like StumbleUpon, which allowed better control of the targeting, as well as feedback on the quality of the sites being promoted.
Banner exchanges were, however, passive. Stumble Upon was the first example of a more active approach, and this turned quickly into a system of trading surfing for page views. Surfers could now earn credits by visiting sites, and use those credits to have their site suggested to fellow surfers.
However, this gave rise to some level of abuse as people turned to bots.

The Rise of the Traffic Exchange Bot

Clicking is tedious, and so some clever programmer created the traffic exchange bot to do all the work for them.
Of course, this devalued the whole concept: rather than earning credits by actually looking at the content, bots were just clicking 'Next' every time.
These were just an extension of the old 'banner bots' that would click banners to earn impressions, but applied to the new paradigm of traffic exchanges.
To get around this, two things happened:

• Clever developers created a timed-click based on matching shapes or pictures to fox the bots;
• Networks grew up around similar offerings, and the ecosystem became one of sharing sites amongst entrepreneurs.

Making it harder for bots to automate clicking, and making it self-defeating by establishing a network of users was a smart move, but had some obvious drawbacks.

Traffic Exchange Networks

The problem with many traffic exchange networks is that since traffic exchange scripts are easy to create and sell, so many have sprung up that they just cannibalise each other.
In other words, most of the networks tend to have roughly the same membership profiles. In fact, a lot of them have the same participants.
Like banks just exist to swap money, traffic exchange networks just exist to trade clicks. Like banks, this is not necessarily a bad thing, but one has to realise that this is what they are for.
The thing is, all participants are at the same level, and all are looking for the same thing: business opportunities.
It works, but it tends to build temporary relationships. Only the owner of the exchange has immediate access to all the participants -- and can charge a premium to advertisers -- and so beyond the "opportunity swapping" that goes on the value stays at the top.
What was needed was a mix of an affiliate network and traffic exchange platform: the downline builder.

The Advent of the Downline Builder System

This is something I came across whilst looking at the SFI business model.

In essence, it's something like a traffic exchange network in that the 'heads' of each downline participate in an exchange where they cross promote with the express intention to build each other's downlines.

New sign-ups go either under the person who referred them, or, when the places that they are allowed to allot are filled up, the next person in the network.

Those that participate fully get more slots allocated, and therefore can build a deeper network, faster. The more they refer, the more spaces they get.

At the same time, those that put in just a small amountof effort will get some return: a smaller downline, but a downline nonetheless.

Where this differs from a classic traffic exchange is that the downline is available to the referrer, who has unique access rights to promote to her own downline.

Each member of the downline also has the ability to build their own downline, resulting in something called a 'matrix'.

However, a person can only participate in a singe downline 'downstream', so the network cannot cannibalise itself.

To entice fresh participants, and grow the network, as well as offer new opportunities to the downline, some form of automated advertising support is needed - an "ad rotator".

Yet Another Splashscreen Rotator

Ad rotators have been around for a while, but the rise of traffic exchange programmes and downline builders means that a new tool is needed. Known as the splashscreen rotator, it is a simple piece of software that displays a random splash screen each time it is requested to.
The benefit of this is that you can spread your traffic exchange credits across multiple projects, with a single URL. Most rotators are pretty basic, but YASR is different:

• Full click-through stats;
• Organise adverts into groups;
• Automatic balancing & split-testing (coming soon);
• ...FREE!

Check it out, and sign up here: YetAnotherSplashscreenRotator.