The main essential ingredient needed to make money online is to get a lot of traffic. This is true whether one is selling their own products or doing affiliate marketing. Traffic exchanges can be a excellent way to get a large amount of traffic to a website. Traffic exchanges work on a credit system. Members of an exchange earn credits for every site they visit and use those credits to get visitors to their sites. One big drawback of traffic exchanges is that the sales conversions rates from them are very low. There are a couple of reasons for this. First of all the traffic from most exchanges is not targeted to any categories. Secondly the traffic from these exchanges is from other website owners who are mainly interested in getting credits and traffic to their own sites and usually aren't very interested in the sites they visit while using the exchanges. There are couple of good ways traffic exchanges can be used to make money though. First of all traffic exchanges are good for using lead capture pages. Frequently those who use exchanges to promote multi level marketing programs can be successful because of the lead capture pages that most of those programs use. Secondly since users of traffic exchanges are trying to get traffic and visibility for their sites any site that has to do with website promotion and traffic will do well.

There is one exchange in particular that I like to use. Traffic swarm is more targeted than most exchanges. When you sign up for trafficswarm you select categories of sites you have interest in. Secondly traffic swarm isn't just an exchange it's a whole network of other websites. When traffic swarm lists your the links show up on many of the thousands of other sites in the traffic swarm network. Traffic swarm also has their own search engine that's also on many other sites in their network that will show your links in the results of searches. There is also a pro membership that traffic swarm offers which increases the level of traffic. Traffic swarm is an example of "viral marketing". Which means that the more you use their system the more traffic they will send to your site.

The ads that are put on traffic exchanges are very important. Ad titles and descriptions that are compelling will help increase sales conversions and get more clicks. The ads should be very specific about what the website that is being promoted is about and include clear benefits of the website or program to the exchange surfer reading the ad. Traffic exchanges can be used successfully with the right website and ad to create more traffic and sales and are an exellent resource for promoting a website on a shoestring budget.