You do not need to have your own website or domain name to use a traffic exchange; you can display any link you choose, as long as it does not violate the site’s terms of service – be sure to read these to know which types of sites are allowed or not allowed. However, simply putting in an affiliate link is not the best use of traffic exchanges; I will address this topic in more detail in another post.

There are literally hundreds, if not thousands, of traffic exchange sites on the internet today. All are not created equal. There are definitely some which are a waste of time and effort, and others which are much more effective. What I mean by this is that some will always produce better response to your web pages than others. How do you know which are good and which are useless? You could test them all out for yourself by tracking every page visit and determining which site produced the best results, but think about how time consuming it would be to test every site out there – not to mention the headache of tracking all those statistics.

Fortunately, there are others out there who have already done the testing for us. They love this stuff, and devote all their time to testing advertising sites to see which are most effective. There is one site that stands out above the others as the most respected, independent testing site, and that is Traffic Hoopla. They maintain a listing of the top traffic exchanges and safelists (more on safelists later), and update their list weekly. This is not outdated information. This site would be a great place to read and learn more about traffic exchanges and how to use them effectively.

So, as I progress in this project, I will be mainly using the traffic exchanges listed in the Traffic Hoopla site. If I use any others I will mention them individually.

Hopefully this overview has been a help in understanding just what a traffic exchange is.