“Inside Info To Help You Use Traffic Exchanges More Effectively”

Since the main purpose of a Traffic Exchange is to get your website seen by as many other people as possible, you will want to set up your website or sites correctly inside the TE. (I’m going to assume you know how a Traffic Exchange works.) Over the years, I’ve been told by different people several different methods to accomplish this. All of them have their merits because it depends on which TE you’re using. Not all TE’s are built on the same application.

Even though they may allow 3, 5, or 10 links to be displayed, I always thought that if I only entered one link, it would get all the traffic I generated from my surfing efforts. It does, but…

At one of the most popular TE’s, I always noticed that my accumulated credits, or page views, were taking a very long time to be used. It didn’t make sense to me, so I asked the support team about it, and here’s what they told me: “You should go ahead and enter the same link as many times as allowed, but put a different description for it each time. That way, your link will actually be viewed more often as we rotate through the webpages. By putting it in just once, it doesn’t get seen as often.” I did that, and it worked.

Here’s a written explanation of how that works. (courtesy of a very helpful member of the StartExchange support staff)

Let’s say there are 5 members in the TE, and each member is allowed 2 urls each – that means there is a maximum of 10 urls in the system (5 members X 2 urls)  Now if all the urls have credits assigned to them, most traffic exchanges will do something like the following:

site 1.  Member A Url A
site 2.  Member B Url A
site 3.  Member C Url A
site 4.  Member D Url A
site 5.  Member E Url A
site 6.  Member A Url B
site 7.  Member B Url B
site 8.  Member C Url B
site 9.  Member D Url B
site 10. Member E Url B

Now you can see that if your Url A and Url B were the same, you would see your site 2 times in every full rotation of sites available. Cool, huh?

Wait. We’re not done!

Some TE’s uses a RATE function which allows you to give your site a ‘weighting’ – basically the higher the RATE (ie the more hits per day you want it to receive) then the more times it will be selected where possible.

Other TE’s also allow you to set a target number of hits per day for your sites, so the ‘add it as many times as possible’ idea is flawed in that respect.

And in summary:

With an exchange that does not allow you to prioritize sites, in order to get more hits per day you are better off adding it as many times as permitted and spreading the credits across them. (This means more work for you if you have to keep manually assigning credits)

With an exchange that allows you to prioritize or adjust the frequency of hits to your sites, you are better off adding it fewer times, and maximising the viewing frequency. (You may find you get better results with 2 or 3 copies at maximum rather than 5 or 6 at average)

Now you know more than 90% of all the people using TE’s about how to maximize the benefits of using Traffic Exchanges to build your list. (I just made up that statistic, but it’s probably close to being right.)

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