The main problem is that it takes too long to generate any great volume of traffic credits, so the unit cost of a recruit is high in time expended.

For those of you who just don't have the finance for paid traffic, I offer these tips to raise your productivity and reduce your time spent per member recruited.

SOME SECRETS OF TE SUCCESS:

Use only the top manual exchanges (see Traffic Hoopla ratings) - most of the rest are a total waste of time.

Traffic Hoopla is an independent ratings agency with useful links to the better exchanges. A link to Traffic Hoopla is provided in the author resource box below.

You should limit the exchanges you use and usually it pays to upgrade to Pro (paid) status. Paid upgrades in the top exchanges are generally good value.

Paid members get many more credits for their surfing and may also benefit from random referrals to their downline. Usually there is a monthly allocation of traffic included in your subscription.

When surfing it is best to set a regular date to go surfing without interruption and use a multi-tabbed browser (e.g. Internet Explorer 7 or Firefox) to run several surfs at the same time so that you are never kept waiting to click and claim your credit. If you are interested in a page, "control click" opens a new page to read at your leisure and releases the original page to be clicked off for credit.

You must build a downline to make TEs work economically with your time. To achieve this you reinvest a percentage (say 20% to 50%) of all your surfing credits into promoting your other exchanges. As your downline builds you will then get free traffic credits from your downline's surfing. This is a cumulative process like compound interest. It starts slowly but you get to a point where you receive steady traffic without surfing much at all yourself.

Advertising with a splash page (cost about $25) usually works better than your full sales letter. In a TE you get maybe 3 seconds to engage attention and then you've lost 'em. So you use the splash page as a graphic intensive headline to grab attention.

Then when they click the splash page you open your full sales letter as a new page. Because the new page does not interrupt surfing and is not overwritten - it may actually get read.

You should track all your advertising - without fail.

Testing and comparison. Reinforcing the strong and culling the weak. This is how nature works - it's called Evolution. And we all know that it works, don't we?

You will find vast discrepancies between different ads and different traffic exchanges. The strangest little quirks make big differences to an ad's performance. Tracking, Testing and Tweaking will do more for your productivity than any other improvement.

SUMMARY

Stick to the top exchanges and upgrade to PRO; organize your time; build a downline; use splash pages; TRACK, TEST and TWEAK

I wish you Happy and Productive Surfing - but not too much of it! Your time is valuable, so don't delude yourself that Traffic Exchange leads come free. Limit the time you spend on Traffic Exchanges and push hard to make that time as productive as you can make it.