Title: Free Advertising for Your Website With Traffic Exchanges Word Count: 814 Summary: Introduction to traffic exchanges. How to use them to get free advertising for a website, especially in business startup and build a downline. Keywords: Free advertising, advertise free, traffic exchanges, autosurf, surf sites, surfing, surf credits, downline, promote website, make money online, business startup, promote business, ebook, Article Body: Your website needs lots of visitors (traffic) if you are going to make money from it. If you do not have a large advertising budget, an effective way to advertise your site for free is to use traffic exchanges, sometimes known as surf sites. These can bring a steady stream of visitors to your website, for no outlay - very important for a business startup if you want to make money online from home. There are two main types of traffic exchanges - manual exchanges and autosurf. A manual exchange requires you click a link after viewing every page, but you can log in to an auto exchange and leave you computer running. It is best to checking every few minutes that all is well, to ensure you get your credits. When you join a traffic exchange (usually free) you view other members' web pages in return for your own web page being displayed to other members in rotation. You log in to the exchange and surf, and you are credited for viewing other members' web pages. You allocate these surfing credits to your web pages so they will be displayed to other members. There are some important elements in surfing for traffic, which may be new to you. -- Paid/Pro Memberships - most traffic exchanges offer free membership with the optional paid upgrades. If you upgrade, there are extra benefits such as an allocation of credits per month and a higher credit ratio for pages surfed. You can also buy extra credits. You can decide whether a paid membership will help you after you have tried out the traffic exchange for free first - I have usually found that free membership gives enough credits. -- Credit Surfing - all traffic exchanges allow you to earn credits in return for viewing other members' websites. Also look out for bonus credits: many exchanges will give you bonus credits for signing up, for surfing a certain number of pages, or they pop up as you surf, to see if you are paying attention. -- Minimum Time Limit - you need to leave a site onscreen for a minimum length of time before you earn a credit. This is normally between 10 and 30 seconds. -- Anti Cheat Mechanisms - to ensure that a real person is viewing your web site most traffic exchanges employ anti-cheating mechanisms. This usually means that instead of clicking a "Next Site" button you have to click on a specific icon such as a number, letter or picture from a selection, before you move on to the next site. If you fail this test repeatedly, your account will be terminated automatically, so pay attention! -- Referrals - this is the fastest way to build up your credits. Most traffic exchanges provide you with referral pages and banners. You can use these to recruit yourself a downline. When someone signs up from your promotional web page or banner they are placed in your downline. This can earn you an immediate bonus plus a percentage of your downline credits, for example you get one credit for every 10 sites they surf. There are hundreds of different traffic exchange websites. You can sign up for an account instantly, submit your website's URL and start surfing for credits. Some sites allow you to advertise up to five web pages. I usually include my homepage, plus pages promoting ebooks and free courses. But the big question is - which traffic exchanges will give you results? Will you be promoting your website in the right places? Traffic Hoopla produces regular reports to show the most productive and successful traffic exchanges to use. This report is updated weekly with the top 50 traffic exchanges and the top 10 new traffic exchanges. You can find out from this report who delivers the highest unique percentage of visitors and who will deliver quality traffic to your website. This will help you to decide, then you can sign up at the best traffic exchanges to get the biggest return for your efforts. In the beginning you may want to set aside time to surf for credits - in fact some traffic exchanges require you to surf a certain number of sites to activate your account. Most people find they can complete their surfing in less than an hour a day In the longer term the best way to make traffic exchanges work for your benefit is to build your own downline. Then the credits flow in as others do the clicking for you. You can recruit members by using the referral web pages of each of the traffic exchanges that you have signed up with or you can sign up with Traffic Hoopla and advertise the 10 best traffic exchanges in one go. This is what I did, and more than 50 people signed up under me in the first week. I now have a comfortable credit balance without needing to surf frequently, and l use my credits to promote my online businesses