If you're an online marketer and own a website, you know what free traffic means. You also know there's really no such thing as free. There are free traffic exchanges that allow you to get free traffic to your website or promotion, but you must spend your time surfing through other websites to earn credits. Free traffic exchanges are a great way to get lots of visitors to your site however, so spending an hour a day surfing, is not a lot to ask if you're making sales from your efforts.

Free traffic exchanges are a great marketing tool for a many reasons. The best reason is that you get lots of people looking, and hopefully clicking on your website or promotional pages. But there are hidden benefits to free traffic exchanges you may not have even considered.

Search engines love free traffic exchanges because of all the incoming and outgoing links they generate. Plus the rapidly changing content is another reason the search engines love traffic exchanges. Exchanges that have more content also generate a higher page rank, and therefore more traffic, and increased memberships. The key is to find exchanges that are very active and have lots of members. The more members they have, the more potential customers you get looking at your offer and your chances for sales conversions are that much better. But bigger isn't always better.

Some free traffic exchanges may convert sales like crazy for one person, and be a complete waste of time for another. If everyone were promoting the same website or affiliate program is the same traffic exchange for example, then chances are you would not make many sales. Even if you were promoting the #1 thing on the internet, if everyone promoted the same program, your chances are much lower that someone will purchase through your website or link to make you any money. Also, when people see the same ad over and over again, they get desensitized to it. Don't fall into this trap. It's one thing to try and sell a very popular product/service/ebook etc, but it's another thing when a million other people are trying to do it too. Competition is a good thing, because it validates your market, but too much competition is tough and it's time to move on to something else.

We all know clicking on ads in a free traffic exchange can be very boring, monotonous and can take a lot of time. That's why you need to make the best of your opportunity or you will just be wasting a lot of your time and effort on something that just isn't working. If you have your own niche website, then you already differentiated yourself from the pack. If you are an affiliate marketer, then you need to find products/services that everyone else isn't promoting, especially within that particular traffic exchange.

One way to use free traffic exchanges to your advantage is to join a few at first, and see if your sales pick up. If your sales aren't doing well, then test out a few more. When you do find a few traffic exchanges that appear to be generating sales for you, then narrow those down until you find the one, or two that are working. Now concentrate your efforts on those because they're the ones you want. At least for now anyway. Things may change, so keep an eye on your campaigns and if sales seem to be falling off, then it might be time to change your offer or find another traffic exchange that could pick your profits up again.

As I mentioned, your individual promotion is everything. If you're trying to promote something everyone else is, I don't care what traffic exchange service you're using, your sales conversions are going to be very low, or nothing at all. You cannot always blame the exchange. Sometimes you have to look at yourself and think if you're doing all you can to make sales.

If you're going to use multiple free traffic exchanges, and I recommend that you do, you should get yourself a multi-tab web browser. Many of these browsers are free and run on PCs and MACs. The tabs feature allows you to have one web browser open with multiple tabs each going to a separate website. You could easily put 5 or 6 of your free exchange sites in these tabs, and earn credits for all of them at the same time. So instead of surfing for 1/2 an hour or an hour earning 200 hits for one exchange, you could earn 200 hits for 5 exchanges in the same amount of time. This is a huge time saver and multiplies your earned hits by 5X or 6X.

Getting free traffic to your website is a lot of work. If you don't have the money to spend on full blown PPC (pay-per-click) campaigns like Google AdWords, free traffic exchanges are a great way to get the traffic you need at a very good price. Free!

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Website traffic is deemed the single most important factor when it comes to the success of a website but that statement needs to be qualified. Although it's true that a constant stream of traffic is the lifeblood of a website, the quality of the traffic is far more important than the quantity.

Of course, any amount of website traffic is better than no traffic at all but even if you have the most perfect website, your site is doomed to fail if you are not getting visitors that are looking for the products or information you have available on your site.

It's easy to get caught up in a numbers game. It's exciting to see the number of visitors to your site climb from a few a day to a few hundred a day. On the surface, this looks like exactly what you want but if your visitors are looking for something other than what you are offering, for the most part, your website traffic is wasted.

You could have a great website design, compelling copy, the lowest prices and fantastic specials but all your efforts will be useless unless your website is drawing traffic that is interested in what you are providing or promoting. 

What you need are visitors specifically interested in your product or service -- you need 'targeted traffic'.

Don't think of targeted traffic as a sub-category of website traffic because they really are two separate entities. If you're marketing plan is designed to drive as much website traffic as possible to your site, no matter what kind of traffic it is, then you're not making effective use of your time and you're setting yourself up for disappointment.

The web is a very different venue than a shopping mall. A shopping mall relies on unfocused traffic, wondering from store to store, not looking for anything in particular but willing to spend it's money on an impulse.

Believe it or not, people surfing the web will leave a website after viewing it for only about 2 seconds. They're looking for specific items or information and if they don't quickly find what they are looking for on your site, they'll click out of your site and go to one of the other millions of sites on the web.

That's why most of the successful websites are tightly focused on their 'niche' and their marketing plan is focused on driving people to their site that are looking for what they offer - they understand the importance of 'targeted traffic'.

Of course, targeted traffic and a website focused on a particular 'niche' go hand and hand. Think about your website. Does it really lend itself to a specific product or service, or is it so broad that it tends to confuse potential customers?

Here are a few tips to help you prepare your website for targeted traffic

• Design your website to promote one particular product or service as your main item.
• Determine the type of people that will be interested in your product or service and adjust your website to be attractive to them.
• Establish the items or services that are 'closely' related to what you're promoting on your website. If you think that they would be interesting to your visitors, offer those items on your website as well.
• Keep a constant flow of free content, that your visitors will find useful, on your website and add new content and information often. Invite your visitors back to your site to see the new material you're constantly adding.
• Keep in mind, a website that's focused on a particular 'niche' item or service lends itself to targeted traffic simply because there is something specific to target and the more targeted traffic your site receives, the more productive your site will be. 

There are many conventional and many not so conventional ways to drive targeted traffic to your website but we'll explore them in other articles.

The purpose of this article is to point out the difference between website traffic and targeted traffic. More isn't always better and if you focus your marketing on 'targeted traffic' you'll quickly find that the hits your getting on your website aren't just empty numbers - they'll be potential customers and, more importantly, sales.