Are the free traffic exchanges of any use to you?

The biggest problem in getting exposure to your site is getting high traffic volume right? Wrong, the biggest problem in getting exposure to your site is getting the right sort of traffic. Or, to put it another way what would you prefer? Ten thousand visitors who are uninterested in what your promoting or 10 visitors who will all sign up to your program.

What is important here is to understand the quality of the visitors that you do get. With this in mind I'm going to try and answer the question: Are the free traffic exchanges of any use to you?
Before I try and answer this question I think I'd better mention that (as with all Internet advertising) there are no definitives. Everyone's experience or 'expertise' is subjective. In short if you show an advert to enough people at random you will get some sales, that's just the law of averages. However, most marketeers would like to stack the odds in their favour (at least a little bit anyway!). On the face of it the free traffic exchanges offer you the chance to promote your site with like minded people who will be interested in what your saying. The problem is that
what makes this look like a good idea is also generally the downside. Nearly everyone on the traffic exchange is more interested in promoting their own site rather than joining your system. There are new visitors to the traffic exchanges each day but this is a relatively low number in comparison. If you have enough 'clout' with online marketing you can 'flood' the traffic exchanges with great looking capture pages. I'm sure that you will have see the same pages in many places by now. If you're just starting out the promise of free advertising may look irresistible. I found that the time and effort needed to get enough exposure through this route was too difficult to maintain over any period of time. I tried paying the membership fees to buy 'credits' but this also had little impact on my success.

In conclusion I think that there are only two ways to get the quality of prospects to your site that you require.

1. Spend time working on your website, make it content rich, make it relevant, update it regularly, promote it with links and also work on the search engine optimization.
2. Pay for targeted advertising. Only use well recognized companies who specialize in this field.

Using this technique you will get the prospects who are looking for your type of product and they will be fresh i.e. they will have not come from a 'pool' of current marketeers.

So, to answer the original question, are the free traffic exchanges of any use to you.....Maybe.

As I said before its a numbers game. Probably they are of little practical use but they certainly can't hurt. I certainly have gained prospects from them in the past but in comparatively low numbers when judged against more targeted (and expensive) methods.