Do you use traffic excahnges

I have used traffic exchanges for around two years now and have seen many people not using them to their advantage.

What is a traffic exchange I hear some of you say. A traffic exchange is a web site that allows you to advertise your web site to other people that have joined the traffic exchange. To get your web site seen by other people you have to click on a link to view their web site. Some exchanges give one view to your site for every site you click on, but some only give a view for every two sites you click on.

There are also two types of traffic exchanges, manual and auto. The names say it all. In a manual TE you have to manually click on a site to view and in an auto TE you set the program running and you can leave it to surf pages for you.

Some autosurf examples are:
Jesustraffic4all
The traffic Laundry
TUPA

Some manual surf sites below:
Trafficera
Hitsilo
Soaring4traffic
Hitsboosterpro
Hit2hit

There are some things you need to check and keep on checking. I have seen pages in TE's that return a "404 page not found" page and "This site has been suspended" page.

After submitting your site to the TE and it is approved that is not the end. After this you need to see that your pages are functioning correctly. Obviously you don't want to waste your credits on sites that have malfunctioned or disappeared.

Another thing you need to check is if you have media or scripts running on your advertised web page. I have noticed that a lot of people are using media based or script base pages to advertise some of their web sites. They must fail to realise that a majority of the surfers today run programs like NoScripts to prevent certain problems like some pages that tend to break frames. I know I run NoScripts and I know many other users that do as well. So what is happening when we view these pages with media or scripting? It is all blocked so we just continue surfing as if nothing happened, not paying any attention to the sites that are being blocked. This is bad for YOU if you are using these kind of sites. My suggestion: only use splash pages without media.

If you are promoting other TE's the site you are promoting will have a page full of their own splash pages for you to use, so use them instead of the sites main page, when someone clicks on the splash page they will be taken to the main page anyway.

A splash page is a page that is small in physical size and just a few Kbytes so it will download fast. It may be a page with just a graphic on that is clickable to take the person clicking to the main web site. Here is an example of one I have made.

If you are making your own splash page, make sure the click will open the web site in a new window like my example above so the surfer can continue to surf the TE. I know I have clicked on a page within a TE in the past and when it has opened inside the the TE I have just continued to surf. If the site is opened in a new window the surfer can continue to surf but when that person stops surfing your page will still be on their computer for them to look at.

This also applies to any external link on your web site. If you send someone to another site to have a look at an example, or a similar site, or if you have quoted someone and want to show where the quote comes from, you don't want them to lose your site. How many times have you gone to another site to see something else interesting. A few clicks later your thinking "What was the name of the original site". If your link took them to a new window, your site is still below the one they are looking at and when they close that window your site is still visible to them.