I’ve decided to compile a list of the ones that I personally use.  These are rated based on the traffic I’ve seen over several dozen exchanges that I’ve personally tested.

There are some marketers trying to push out their top 25 or their top 50+ list.  Most people that use exchanges don’t have the time or money to utilize that many.  In fact, most part-time business owners don’t have the time or money to effectively use all of the 10 that I’ve listed.

If you’re not sure where to start, I’ve added some more ideas on this page…so check out my top 10 traffic exchange list.

In this course you’ll learn:

• What is a traffic exchange
• The most common mistakes about traffic exchanges
• What are the best offers to promote through traffic exchanges
• What type of landing pages actually convert
• What are the top traffic exchange sites
• and more

Download this Traffic Exchange PDF and learn more!

How Do People Exchange Traffic?

Traffic exchange sites allow you to add your own website addresses to the site. Many of these sites push traffic to your site and other websites through web page views, banner ads, and/or text ads. However, you need points or credits to get traffic to the sites that you add.

Why Use Traffic Exchanges versus Other Forms of Traffic?

If you use them correctly, they offer one of the easiest ways to get traffic your website. This is great if want something duplicatable, if you want to get traffic on a tight budget, or if you don’t like creating content (ie. writing articles, creating videos, blogging, etc.) for traffic.

How Do You Get Traffic Exchange Points or Credits

Many sites give you points just by becoming a member. So after you register, you may get free points and you also earn the privilege to earn or buy points. Many TE’s allow you to sign up for a monthly membership where you get a certain amount of points every month, and you can also buy a certain amount of points as well.

You can also earn points by viewing other peoples websites. If you’re short on cash, this is how you can get traffic simply by using your time to view other sites.

The Major Problem With Traffic Exchange Sites

Most people use them the wrong way. I’m a perfect example of that. I used to think that you can just post affiliate offers just like advertising in pay-per-click (PPC) sites like Google Adwords. I discovered this tip from some internet marketing guru and is was a bunch of B.S. If you want to do well with traffic exchanges, you have to understand that traffic exchanges are different. You must understand the mindset of who’s actually viewing the offers.

Profiting from Traffic

After trying out traffic exchanges the 1st time, I decided to use up my credits to pump up content views. That still works. Later on, I decided to learn more about how to effectively promote on traffic exchanges. I’ve been getting better results over time and I the main reason is because I focused on the top problems of the traffic exchange audience …profiting from traffic.

Learning More About Traffic Exchanges

If you’re wanting to learn the basics of traffic exchanges, here’s a Traffic Exchange PDF course that you can download. You’ll learn a lot more about the problems associated with traffic exchanges and how to actually make money from them.

That may seem impossible, but there are people that have actually done that in less than a year.

Take a peak at this link:

http://ezinearticles.com/?type=mp

What’s interesting is that you’ll find authors that have published multiple articles that are within the top 30…some even grabbing over 200,000 visitors from a single article.

At first, I was thinking that these people really marketed there articles well.

So what I did was that I used my backlink finder tool to see if they actually did any off-page SEO. I tested several from the top and none of them had any backlinks to them.

Seeing that most of these articles were published within the past year shows that EzineArticles.com is still a great place to publish articles for traffic.

If you’ve never published an article before…

1) The first thing that you’ll want to do is register for an account at EzineArticles.com. After you do this, you’ll be able to start submitting articles. The first 10 take a while to get reviewed. After your first 10, then the submission process will be a lot faster.

2) Next, write an article related to your target market. Half of the time I’ll write articles on popular or trendy topics. The other half will be spent on writing articles based around “long tailed keywords”. I find these keywords using popular keyword research tools. This tool will help you find high demand keywords with low to medium competition. Without keyword research, you could spend your time publishing a lot of articles that won’t even be found in the search engines. So by using a keyword research software, you can save a bunch of time.

3) Submit your article to EzineArticles.com. When you submit your article, you’ll need to make sure that you have a title, the body, related keywords, a summary, and a resource box which contains a hyperlink to your landing page (ie. the page that you want visitors to go to). Make sure that you include an HTML hyperlink that people can actually click on to visit your website.

That’s the short version of article marketing.

While you may not strike it big just by publishing 1 article, you’ll find that as you publish more and more over time that a small percentage will get tons of traffic. It’s kind of like the 80/20 Pareto principle. Over 80% of you article marketing traffic will come from 20% of the articles that you publish.

Looking for More High Traffic Articles

Go to Ezinearticles.com and use their search function to find articles related to your niche. Once you find at least 1, view it and scroll all the way down to the bottom of the article.

You’ll find the text:

Most Published EzineArticles in the … Category

Under that sub-heading, you’ll find many high-traffic articles for that particular niche. You can also use my Article Traffic Finder tool to find high traffic articles in various article directories. You can search places like Search Warp, Idea Marketers, and Articles Base and look for a certain range of article views. It’s a simple, but pretty powerful tool!

Positioning Yourself as an Authority

A lot of people go to forums to ask questions. If you’re trying to offer a product or service, perception does matter. Why would anybody want to sign up for your list or buy something from you if you don’t know what you’re not an authority?

That why you need to position yourself and then people will be curious about you. If you’re in a market where information is important (ie. you’re selling infoproducts or something that is complemented by infoproducts), then you should have the knowledge that is relevant to what you’re offering.

Sounds simple right? Unfortunately, a lot of people just post signatures but still position themselves as an absolute newbie. If you’ve read 2-3 books in your industry, you should appear to have more knowledge than a person that has read 1 book to none.

Finding Forums for Your Niche

While there are a lot of forums out there, posting replies on forums that are relevant to your niche is important. In that way, you are targeting your market. This means that people that want what you have to offer are the majority of people on that forum. With that being said, that doesn’t mean that the majority will buy from you or sign up to your newsletter.

So how do you find forums? You can go to Google, but you’ll also find a lot of forums that aren’t so relevant to your offers. So what I’ve done is I’ve created a simple tool called “Forum Finder“. It will help you find forums that you can actually register on and ones that are specific to your niche (based on your keyword).

Once you identify 3-5 of the forums related to your niche, look for questions that you can easily answer. Also, read the forum rules. Some allow you to use signatures in your posts and some don’t. If you can find 3-5 that allow signatures, more power to you. If not, post your website URL in your profile. Keep in mind that signatures can send your more referral traffic compared to forum profile links.

Check out Forum Finder and let me know what you think!

Not Getting Enough High Quality Backlinks?

So why is this? Besides picking highly competitive keywords to rank for, the issue is using low quality backlinks. So why not focus on high quality backlinks? Most people don’t know how to build them or find getting high quality backlinks time consuming.

A lot of people use article marketing to build backlinks. If you’re whole purpose is to build backlinks, why only use this strategy if article directories like EzineArticles.com don’t add much value (backlink-wise) to your rankings? Well submitting articles is an easy approach that most marketers teach. With that being said, it still is a good strategy and I still use it, but it’s not the only strategy that you should use.

Let’s Get Into Guest Blogging for Backlinks

Let’s talk about guest blogging. What is it and why use it? Well it’s a strategy that I use primarily on authority sites or websites I want to become authority websites. While you can use it on lower quality sites, think about it from the blog owner’s point of view that you’re wishing to post on. If you have a lot of credibility with your target audience and the search engines, why would you link out to a site that doesn’t have much value?

Okay, so let’s agree that we’ll be using this for authority sites. What’s the process? Pretty much you look for authority websites and ask if we can contribute “value-added” content that contains links back to our own website.

Finding these sites can be a huge chore. Fortunately, there are easy ways to identify these sites using Google. Google actually allows advanced queries that you can use to filter out websites that are hard to post your content on.

So what I’ve done is created a tool. Most people don’t know how to use advanced queries in Google…and you don’t need to learn them either. This tool, which I call the Guest Blogger Finder performs the advanced queries for you through a simplified interface. It’s a great tool especially if you’re using SEO.

So can you just use any type of backlink? While you can, the quality and quantity will vary. A forum signature link would carry less weight than a link within the content of a blog post on an authority website (a site that has a lot of trust and strength in the search engines).

Over six years ago, I heard about a strategy by super affiliate James Martell which he referred to as submitting PAD articles. Using this strategy, you would get other authority sites to post your content on their site. Of course, you would select websites that had some authority. In my case, I would seek out websites that had a PR of 3 or higher.

So how do you find these websites? First I would search for a website relevant to my niche. It doesn’t make sense posting an affiliate marketing article on a dog training site.

To make things easier, I would seek out sites that openly accepted content. If you contacted CNN and asked them to post your content, the chances would be very slim. However, finding sites through Google isn’t an easy task.

That’s why I’ve created a tool called Guest Blogger Finder. Using this tool, you can find blogs that allow guest bloggers. Even if you don’t have your own blog per se, you can post content on other people’s blogs that then link to yours. This strategy is very similar to James Martell’s PAD system, but using this tool, you streamline the process.

If you’re just getting started, backlink count gives you a rough idea of how much work you have to do to compete and outrank a page in the search engines. By increasing your web page rankings, you’ll be able to increase traffic to your website.

Backlink Basics – How to Gauge Your Competition

When a 3rd party site links to a web page, that link (aka the hyperlink, the backlink) counts as a vote in the search engines. The votes differ by quantity and by quality. Typically, the more high quality backlinks a page has, the less quantity is needed. While there are many other factors (ie. like age of the site and internal links), backlink count gives a rough idea.

If you are looking at your competitions backlinks, you’ll want to find out first how many links are pointing to the page that you wish to outrank. Let’s say that you go into Google and type in a certain keyword. You look at the # 1 result and find out that competing page has over 10000 backlinks. While not impossible, that’s a tough page to outrank. Now what if the #3 listing only had 50 backlinks? That page is low enough for us to easily outrank. All we have to do is create content focused on that keyword and get enough backlinks.

How to Spy On Your Competition

Some of my subscribers have asked me how do I actually find out how many backlinks a certain page or website has. I often tell them about free tools that are readily available. However, some of those tools need some guidance on how to actually use them.

I didn’t want to create a video or tutorial on this. So I decided to create a tool for one of my favorite backlink tools that streamlines the process for discovering backlinks. Here’s my internet-based backlink software. I call it “Backlink Finder” – what a sexy name eh? :)

It’s a pretty simple SEO tool. Just type in a domain name or page URL, submit, and you’ll see the results.

So how does it work? Simply type in a niche keyword and you click on the submit button. So if your website niche was “article marketing”, you would type “article marketing” into the keyword field.

You can tweak the results by changing other criteria on the form too. For example, you can use exact match to get more relevant results.

So once you find article ideas, then create a similar, but “totally” unique version of the article (add your own twist to it). You can either post it to your site or another high PR site or the same article directory. Then you monitor the rankings a week or 2 later to see what the ranking is on Google.

I personally use Firefox plugins to reveal backlink count and pagerank of the pages. The reason I do this is to find out how hard it is to rank the articles before I write them. If an article has a hundreds or thousands of backlinks pointing to it, you know that it’s going to take a lot of time to rank your new article.

Well here’s the article software again. Check it out and use it for your advantage!

How does this work? By leaving a comment and including a website URL, an approved comment will create a link from the site you commented on to the URL that you specified in the comment. These backlinks count as a vote in the search engines and shows the search engines that you’re site has something to offer. The more sites that link to your page, the greater your chances are at increasing the rank of your page. This is a fundamental concept of off-page search engine optimization (SEO).

If you’re looking for blogs to comment on, check this free blog commenting software out. You’ll be able to search through blogs that use Disqus, Top Commentators, WordPress, Blog Engine.NET, Blogger, Live Journal, Movable Type, and Typepad.

This tool was designed for people that are serious about building links to sites that add value to the net. So please use this tool and leave comments that can actually add value to a website. While most of us are trying to market our sites, let’s respect one another and not spam other peoples sites with garbage.

Well enough of my ranting. Here’s the blog commenting software.