Some people would perhaps even go so far as to consider traffic exchanges a Black Hat type of activity, or a pyramid scheme.  I have even been told by people  who think they are in the know that affiliate programs are pyramids schemes.  When in fact nothing could be further from the truth, both traffic exchanges and affiliate program provide legitimate products and/or services. 

A traffic exchange is more focused on provided a service than a product,  and so a traffic exchange web is a like the middle man the facilities the trading of traffic.  Yes they do take a cut of your traffic and/or charge a fee.  However, they provide a large infrastructure with many complicated algorithms and mechanism to facilitate a better trade.  It is sort of like taking out an ad in an auto trader magazine or using a realtor to sell your house; only traffic exchanges are online and work much better for selling services related more to online ventures and programs.    

Furthermore, traffic exchanges do not usually assume liability for fraudulent sites, even though they do implement many preventive measures.  Also they do not usually directly endorse most of the products and services advertised in their exchanges; just like a TV station does not endorse or assume liability for infomercials. 

That being said , many traffic exchanges use referral programs in order to help encourage people to spread and they used layered referrals similar to an Amway type of program.  Therefore, the greatest benefit from traffic exchanges is often obtained through building deep referral.  Although there is some limited benefit to direct surfing often if you calculate the time it takes for you to earn credits by spending time surfing directly it is not very many dollars an hour if that. 

Therefore many traffic exchanges are moving away from the manual traffic exchanges towards more automated process and employing CAPTCHA (Completely Automated Public Turing test to tell Computers and Humans Apart) more sparingly and other methods of preventing click and impression fraud.

The two general categories of traffic exchanges are manual and automatic, but within these two general categories there are many sub categories which can cause some ambiguity when drawing the distinction between the two.   One example of a traffic exchange model that is blurring the line between manual and auto-surf exchanges is the hover.  The main thing to remember when choosing a traffic exchange and designing advertising for one is to try and gage your response to others sites advertising and at first just try and imitate things that catch your eye.  

Since traffic exchanges are more visual eye candy is much more important than on other sites where content often draws in the potential consumer; for this reason many people often use specifically designed splash pages which draw the user’s eye in with a good photographic composition, or some less effective ones with a bunch of random objects, or expensive flashy items and women which will supposedly soon be yours.  I believe that nicely composed images which convey a specifically intended emotion are the some of the most effective flash pages.  This leads people to associate your brand with the imagery which will hopefully stick out in their mind.     

If you found this article helpful please consider supporting helping to support this site by joining StartXchange. StartXchange is one of the few traffic exchanges which I feel I can personally endorse as one of the better exchanges out there even if I stood nothing to gain by recommending; I still would just because they are that good:    

http://www.startxchange.com/?referer=nkingstown

There are two types of Search Engine Optimization (SEO) as referenced by industry insiders.  These are White hat SEO and Black hat SEO.  As you might imagine, Black hat is to be avoided and is generally undesirable.

However, black hat tactics can often appear very attractive in the beginning, after all you could build a site full of a lot of incoherent content (spamdexing) that would likely bring some search engines to index the site quicker and rank it higher.  However, this is rarely sustainable in the long run, because even if the incoherent content which is jammed full of keywords and such does receive a good ranking for a short while you are not likely to have many returning visitors, and will probably be blacklisted by many search engines in the long run. In short black SEO is to be avoided as much as possible. 

White hat SEO on the other hand is highly desirable and is characterized as writing for people first.  By doing this you will be much more likely to build a positive reputation as opposed to negative and unsustainable and often disposable domains used by those in the black hat community in the long run your name or brand will become associated with valuable information or high quality products.  

So to summarize the 3 trimetrical points for achieving High quality sustainable SEO are:

1. Write for people first then search engines always try to provide useful content or services.
2. Make sure the site’s architecture is crawlable and the metadata is opitmized for your keywords by adding things such as XML sitemaps and ensuring that you are opting into search engine indexing by making sure your robots.txt file is set to allow bots to index your site.
3. Look for smart, sustainable, and innovative marketing techniques.  Try and think beyond the current trends, think about things that maybe are not currently available which you have wished for, and then go and create them.  Also don’t be afraid to mix tradition with some untradtional techniques.  Just like in pays to have a diversified portfolio in the stock market it pays to employ a large variety of marketing tactics as part of a good overall marketing strategy. 

Accordingly, I will show you the publisher/advertiser how to both be found and to make your site something worth finding.  Along the way I will also add some tips for you the consumer on how to effectively find the best products/information and how to quickly identifying legitimate from illegitimate opportunities or information.   I will evaluate many strategies and opportunities strategies including but not limited to traffic exchanges, splash pages, SEO (search engine optimization), affiliate groups and advertising, pay per click advertising, viral marketing, branding, online networking, etc; the ultimate end goal being a truly synergic web.