Traffic exchanges are business-to-business opt-in "clubs" where you look at members web pages and they look at yours. If you have DSL, Cable, or any other type of high speed connection and don't have a lot of money for advertising, traffic exchanges are a must. They will also work with dial-up connections.

There are two types of traffic exchange pages: those that allow you to automatically have the pages change in the web browser (called "autosurf") and those that require you to click on a top banner-like control to change pages (these are called "manual"). Obviously, to prevent repetitive stress injury, you might want a mix of both. If you have a web host that charges you for bandwidth, you might join these autosurf sites in increments to see just how much you might be charged month-to-month.

This list here is very important because you will find many large lists of traffic exchanges on the Internet which contain many exchanges that no longer work. This list is dated and all the lists on this list work (except in the ones that we are currently about to phase out at the very bottom of the page).

Our philosophy with traffic exchanges is the same as with our approved safelists -- if we found the system could not set me up or log us in properly, after three tries we dropped the service. It's faster to sign up to new services by cutting and pasting your information from a text file that you multitask with than it is wondering if these sites really work or not. After signing up with over a hundred of these kinds of sites, we have seen all kinds of bad behavior on parts of owners. We are putting the ones here that have not done any of that. You also don't want to have too many of the autosurf ones going to your web page if the web server your web host uses can't handle the traffic. This would mean that your pages would load slow for hits by customers who might be coming to your site from a search engine or other market segment targeted methods. From what we've seen, traffic exchanges are the free Internet marketing resource where one has to be especially careful one doesn't waste time on a bad site. We have had to stop using about five sites that were really bogus. One way of telling if a site is fraudulent is if they keep showing the same sites over and over again. This means there is little chance that they are showing their members pages.

Many traffic exchange programs will give you free hits when you sign up but usually those will not be used until you surf a certain amount of pages. Even if the exchange does not state this, if you don't surf and return to the site in two weeks or so you will see you will still have a large amount of free hit credits left. Surf and those should be used for your site. You also usually have to "allocate" credits from your hit "bank" to your web page.

Traffic exchanges get you into international turf easier than safelists, as do FFA's (Free for all pages). Some we've seen display web pages in European or Asian languages which makes me realize that there are probably traffic exchanges in most larger countries and language groups. There could actually be traffic exchanges for specific types of sites, like music websites, much like the way Web Rings operate, but I do not see anyone implementing this idea.

About what you'll see on traffic exchanges: a lot of what you will see are actually scams. Many other page on traffic exchanges are legitimate free marketing programs. Sometimes, you'll see an artist's website or an authors, or any number of people or associations looking for free marketing.

This is a good page to bookmark or add to your favorites if you want to continue to log in to them. You will be able to get to the join sections now, or login by going back to the home page link by only showing the domain name in the top URL bar of your webbrowser.

Once you have an account, you can come back here to log into several of your accounts. You may have to go back to the login prompt at the home page (the .com page you can find by backspacing up in the URL bar).

We do not recommend anyone using Traffic Exchanges without some skill in getting rid of spyware. You absolutely need to use a spyware/adware checker as well as a virus checker when you use these accounts. The only two that we've used with consistant success are the freeware Adaware and Spybot Search and Destroy . All other checkers we've tested, including AOL and Microsoft ones, are inferior. Most of the others are actually themselves spyware. The AOL spyware checker actually did not find over 90% of the spyware the other programs found. Good freeware virus checkers are Avast and AVG. They are completely free and update themselves automatically. Several trojans have been spotted on these sites, and while they can be a great way to market and communicate your ideas to the world, like anywhere else, there are unscrupulous characters who spread these kinds of problems.