Several months back I wrote a hub about Traffic Exchanges and how to use them to help your business. I have now taken a new step and purchased my own traffic exchange. I feel like the guy from the commercial, I think it was for razors who said, "I like the product so much I bought the company." but I must say I really do believe in the power of a good Traffic Exchange or I never would have purchased one.

For those of you who did not read my prior hub on this subject I will give you a little background on what Traffic Exchanges are and what they can do for you. For starters you will also see them referred to as TE's for short. So if you see me write TE it's just short for Traffic Exchange. TE's started as a way to help webmasters drive traffic to a site. Which as the internet has grown has become increasingly more difficult. Many small business people and home based businesses can't afford to advertise on Google and Yahoo. They are the big names in pay for click. I guess I should explain pay per click as well since I am sure many of you have no idea what I am talking about. When you do a Google or Yahoo search the top few listings and ads on the top and the side are "Pay Per Click" Google even highlights the background different so you know where the pay per click ends and the organic begins. (Go ahead go try it I don't mind) That simple means that people bid on keywords that when someone types them in a search engine they pay Google to come up in those top positions. Some pay per click advertising can cost a lot. A popular word can be as much as a few dollars a click, but for the most part .25 to .75 a click is pretty common. Now for the small business or home based business with little to no advertising budget it does not take much to burn through a $150 to $200 dollar budget in no time. The other down side is your competition can click on you adds just to cost you money. I found this out the hard way. Google was testing Pay Per Action Advertising for a little while but abandon it. I hope they try it again, or someone else finds a way to do it. What is it? Well you set the action you are willing to pay for so you don't get charged for just someone looking at your ad You get charge only if the complete the action. So the section you set could be buying from your store, or signing up at your webpage, once the do the action you selected then you pay! Google if you listening please try it again!!!

One of the knocks you will hear about traffic exchanges are, “Many people use traffic exchanges to try and generate traffic for their home-based-business. Yes, they may get lots of views from these traffic exchanges but that is just about it. Just views, no sales writes Eric Fields on Ezine. I agree, but I also disagree with Eric because he is missing one of the major goals of a TE and that is to improve you organic search rank. After the top few pay per click positions next comes the "Organic Rank". And this is what the small business owner need to shoot for because it's free. Along with site construction, keywords, code, original content, links and many other factors that also come into play in your organic rank the number of visitors you get is also a big factor. From my own observations this seems to be a larger factor for Yahoo, MSN, and AltaVista than Google, but working at this can be a huge difference in your business. The traffic exchange is a great way to keep a steady flow of recordable traffic to your web page and helps fill one of the things search engines look for in deciding your page rank. So when I first started using TE's I signed up for a few of them for free. Almost all of them have free memberships. Now unlike Eric Fields I did get some sales. My product is fitness based and also seen on TV so the TE for my home business would bring in an occasional sale. All TE's let you buy credits. Basically what you do when you are on a TE is an agreement. You agree to look at another person’s website and each one you look at you get credit. There is a timer that runs any place from 8 to 30 seconds depending on the TE. Once the time is up you can then click to go to the next site to look at. For each site you observe you earn credit. You then assign those credits to the sites you own and want others to look at. So are you wondering why people buy credits. They buy them because the don't have a lot of time to surf other peoples sites but still want people to look at their site. As my business grew one sale could get me enough credits to have my site up on the TE none stop. The more I did that the better it did. The other thing you have to keep in mind is organic page rank does not happen overnight. It can take weeks and even months and it changes all the time. But as time went on my site started to show up on Yahoo and MSN....Then Google for me it was not as high as the rank I got from Yahoo and MSN but Google often picks up on what they have ranked high. I then started to get orders consistently every day. So if you decide to use a TE keep in mind it is not going to shoot you from not on the map to number one in Google over night, but if used consistently it can be a huge help over time. I have also found the best approach is to focus on using 3 TE's When I started I had a paid membership to 1 and used 2 others for free. Now I have 3 paid running all the time.

TE's are a great way to increase your blogs and hubs traffic. In fact I think they react even faster than websites and stores from my observations. Linking your site to a blog, hub or eZine article really helps your page rank. The other great thing you get from using TE's is knowledge and ideas. You will see other advertising ideas you will like and can mimic and get a sense for the market.

If you would like to check out my new Traffic Exchange it's called SURFFAIR.COM and as a free member I will give you a hundred credits to sign up and if you e-mail me that you read my hub on Hub pages I will give you 400 more free credits to get started. Test it out write a hub and link it on my TE and see what it does to your hub rating. Also I can send you a copy of Super Efficient Surfing a great little e-book and guide on the proper way to use a TE and how to get the most out of the time you spend surfing. My other hub also lists my favorite TE's I use so you can check that out if you want to surf a few. My long time favorite has been ILOVE HITS run by Jon Olson a traffic exchange master.

You can e-mail me at seymour.paul@gmail.com and reference this hub and I will add the 400 credits to you SurfFair.com account.