Traffic exchange websites combine the ideas of banner exchanges and paid to surf schemes. You spend your time surfing members websites and in return other members will be directed to your sites to surf. 
What’s best is that it’s all free and guarantees you at least some traffic, but is it worth your time?
One of the most popular and established traffic exchange networks is the named EasyHits4U which this article will be focusing on.
How does it work?
You are given a ‘special url’ which will show you other member’s websites, you are free to surf them in the bottom of the browser window whilst the surfbar provides statistics including a counter and Captcha image. You need to view the each website for at least 20 seconds for it to count as a visit.
EasyHits4U Surf page
In return for surfing websites you are given credits which you can then use to enter your own websites into the system for other members to surf. You can also gain credits by referring new users, winning competitions and being in the top 10 surfers of the day.
Advantages
One of the advantages of the EasyHits4U system is that you get a 1:1 visit ratio, i.e. for every visit you make using the surf system your website will be viewed once. A further good point is that there is a lot of bot protection in place so the visitors to your website will be real, not bots or automated scripts.
Another thing I like about the website is the control over promotion you are giving. When adding your own website into the system there are a multitude of targeting options including the location of visitors you want, the amount of views you want each day and the days you want visitors on.
Targeting options
The referral program is also very in depth providing 5 levels for free users and 6 if you wish to upgrade to a premium account for a small fee. This allows you to increase the credits in your account if you have the ability and time to promote your referral link.
The disadvantages
Like anything in life there are disadvantages. Using such schemes to generate traffic is against the policies of a number of services you may use on your website such as Adsense. Another problem is the quality of traffic, whilst you can be sure visitors will stay around there is no guarantee they will actually being viewing or reading your website or be interested in your website’s content.
One question that popped into my head when I found this website was ‘Is it worth my time?’ If I wanted to get 1,000 visitors to my website I’d need to make 1,000 visits to other websites at 20 seconds a time, that’s well over 5 hours of constant surfing! Now I’m not sure about you but I simply don’t have that time to spare every day so in if you’re looking to get thousands of visitors using such websites you’re going to need to spend most of the day in front of a computer screen.
Conclusions
The core topic of this blog is the discussion of techniques of free online promotion. Will EasyHits4U and other traffic exchange programs provide you with an increase of traffic to your website? Yes. Is it worth it? I’m not too sure. There is no doubt if you are prepared to put a lot of time into the system you will be able to get a lot of impressions on your website but the quality of these impressions is not guaranteed by any means. The biggest problem is that for over 5 hours of work I’d hope for a lot more than 1,000 impressions and there are plenty of other promotion methods to achieve this. The deal breaker for me however is that such a system contravenes a lot of ad networks policies making it harder to monetize your website.
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