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.)
