Traffic exchanges used to be a hot buzz word when it came to search engine optimization but not the entire concept is out of style. These were sites that used guarantee a certain number of visitors to your blog or web page. Usually they will guarantee a number in the hundreds or the thousands. There are both free traffic exchanges and one that you pay for on a sliding scale. The idea is that you buy this lump of visitors to your site in a package that is priced accordingly ($10,000 visitors for $40 for example). Most of these companies also guarantee a viewing of your site for free.

These sounds like a deal but of course there is a hitch. For each visitor that views your blog you have to view someone else's blog in the same way.

Here is how the free version of this works -- When you register your blog on a traffic exchange, you will be asked to create an account and be given a code. Each time you visit someone else's blog, you earn credits to your account. A timer measures the twenty or thirty seconds that you must remain looking at the other blog. After times up you enter a code that moves you to the next site. The more blogs you visit the more visitors your blog receives.

Another drawback to using traffic exchanges is many of them do not give you a one to one credit for viewing other blogs. Usually you would have to visit 20 sites to get 10 visits to your own site. Obviously this can be time consuming because you only get as much traffic as you care to visit. One way to optimize this type of time is to consider it research and see if there is anyway of linking to the blogs that you must visit. Many of these traffic exchanges also have surplus traffic that they will sell you for as little as a cent per visitor. This is how you can end up spending ten dollars to earn a thousand visitors. The problem is that these visitors are in no way targeted to your blog.