The fact is that traffic exchanges DO work, and ARE an effective way of promoting your website. You just need to know how to use them correctly.

There's a common belief that traffic exchanges will only deliver untargeted, almost worthless traffic to your website. To some extent this is true. In my experience if you try to sell anything on traffic exchanges, whether it's your own product or an affiliate product, then yes maybe they are a waste of time.

However, what you need to do to get results from traffic exchanges is to create and promote a squeeze page to capture the visitors' name and email address. Offer a free product or report, for example, as an incentive for people to sign up to your list. Once they're subscribed and have opted-in to receive email messages from you, then you can begin building a relationship with them and earning their trust, before promoting products to them in due course and making money this way (you should provide good content in your emails as well, and not just product offers).

In addition to this you will get optimum results if your site is related in some way to making money online or getting more traffic, for example, as this is what most users of traffic exchanges are predominantly interested in.

To get the most success, ie the most number of subscribers to join your list, you need to maximise the hits you receive from the various traffic exchanges that you are using. There are several ways to do this (other than surfing for hours on end). You could simply buy credits, which is fine, but I personally prefer to cross-promote the various traffic exchanges and build a downline of referrals in each one, who earn me credits automatically every time they surf, eliminating the need to do a lot of surfing myself.

For example, I use crazybrowser which allows you to have multiple tabs open, and provides easy scrolling between each one, making it very easy to surf multiple exchanges at once. What I like to do is promote one exchange at a time (my referral page) on all the different exchanges and build a nice downline, and then promote another and so on until I have a nice downline in each one.

Once I have done this I can start to promote my own squeeze page and use the credits earned by my downline to receive hits to my site automatically. I do surf myself as well on occasions but it's good to know that you will receive credits even if you don't have the time to surf yourself.

Using these methods I'm adding subscribers to my list on a daily basis, and although there may be a case for arguing that traffic exchange users are not the most profitable subscribers to have on your list, I've found that some of my most profitable subscribers, ie those that spend the most money, are those who originally signed up from a traffic exchange.

To conclude then, in answer to the original question posed, traffic exchanges are most definitely NOT a waste of time. The people who claim they are are simply not using them correctly. If you promote a squeeze page which encourages people to sign up to your list, then you should attract a steady stream of new subscribers, who could earn you some nice profits in the long term.