What Are Traffic Exchanges?

Traffic Exchanges are sites where, typically, you visit other members websites. In return, other members will visit your website(s). Link Referral and Traffic Swarm are two examples of this type of traffic exchange. These types of sites are, however, against the terms of service for Google's AdSense program, so don't use them with any site displaying AdSense ads.

Link Referral

Link Referral is essentially another Traffic Exchange. Therefore, I wouldn't recommend using it on a site where you have AdSense ads displayed, as it's an artificial way of boosting traffic.

This is their explanation of the concept behind Link Referral:

Members directory traffic - By joining, you will be included in our members directory which is visited by our community of over 150,000 members, and thousands of outside visitors on a daily basis. You'll have the opportunity to earn a ranking at the top of your category, absolutely free! Receive valuable feedback from visitors of your website, network with your peers, and give your opinion on other websites in the directory. The more you participate, the more you get in return!

Referral based traffic - You are probably familiar with the concept of network marketing, well this is a free version of that marketing method - by registering and promoting your linkreferral affiliate link, an exponential growth of 5 levels of referrals can be created (ex. you refer 10 people who refer 10 people each who refer 10 each....), potentially 10,000s of visitors/day all viewing your link prominently in the top spot of our 'Featured Sites' section on our home page for your referral ID. It works because its free, fast to register, easy to implement and no risk. People that are referred from your site will have nothing to lose and everything to gain, just like you.

Search engine traffic - By registering, you'll benefit several ways, including,

1) having your webpage listing indexed more quickly - the major search engines continuously spider our site, and the sites listed in our directory.
2) Improved search engine rankings and SEO optimization.
3) Indirect search engine traffic via linkreferral.com. Pages such as your directory listing and your affiliate page listing feature your link and description, are picked up by all the major search engines. Your sign-up description, combined with our strong traffic base (a prime ranking factor for most major search engines) can pull in a significant immediate steady stream of traffic to your listing on linkreferral.com and then on to your web site.

Linkreferral forums traffic - By participating in our forums on a daily basis, you'll build relationships and your reputation within the linkreferral community and improve the odds of successfully converting visitors to your end goal. Promote your listing by asking questions and giving comments, each post you make actively displays your link, category and member profile.

Now, I've got this promoting Yuwie currently, but so far, no sign ups. It could be I've picked the wrong category to list the site in.

Traffic Swarm

Traffic Swarm is another traffic exchange, Here, you surf other members websites, and in return, you get credits to use to get others to view your sites. You also get a percentage of the credits generated by people in your downline.

I haven't got any referrals, even though I've been with the program quite a while; largely because I haven't tried to do any recruiting.

The quality of traffic is fairly low, going by the number of sales/signups you generate, but it's still worth surfing a bit every week. Some is better than none, after all.

Just be careful if you have AdSense on your site, as I believe Google frowns on this type of traffic. Best not to use it with AdSense just to be safe.

InstantBuzz

InstantBuzz is a traffic generating tool that has three main methods of use. The first are Bar Ads, a plugin for IE & FF that adds a toolbar to your browser that displays a small ad. The second is Hyperspace Ads, which are ads that appear as closeable pop ups in the upper right corner of the web pages. The final one is MailSpace ads which appear on the top of sent emails.

I've only used the first two, predominantly the Bar Ads, as they're pretty unobtrusive. Click through rates are pretty low, but I do get some traffic for no effort.

It's free to join, although there are payment options too. You can recruit a downline, but not from the Bar Ads. So far, I've only had one recruit from the limited Hyperspace Ads I've run (one page only on one site).