Webupon

A lot of people see it as a pastime, a hobby they pursue. Instead of going down to the pub and make new friends or deepen already existing friendships, they do it nowadays on the web. Sure, a lot of that socializing is done through social networking sites like facebook, myspace or twitter.

But there are those who pursue an ulterior motive when establishing their web presence – they want to make money. Now, I’m personally not against it, to the contrary, I believe it to be an honest way of earning either some extra money or creating a full income online.

Whatever service or product an individual tries to sell on the Internet, he needs a webpage or blog. There are truly amazing designs for web pages out there, they can be really flashy, have video and audio and even interactive games. However, if the owner of the site doesn’t manage to drive visitors to it, it’s next to useless. On the other hand, if there is a mediocre site offering a mediocre product or service it will without question do well if thousands and thousands of visitors see it.

One way to generate traffic to your site is by using traffic exchanges. They are programs where in exchange for viewing somebody else’s site your site or blog is shown to another user. In a nutshell, the more pages you look at, the more times your site or blog will be viewed by another individual. Views can last from 6 seconds to 20 seconds, depending on the traffic exchange. After that an image or number has to be clicked, and off you go to the next site.

The ratio of the sites viewed by you and your site shown to other people varies a lot. But on the whole, if you are a free user, you have to look at between 2 to 3 sites or blogs so that your site is shown once.

The owners of these traffic exchanges are in it for the money, obviously. So every exchange gives you an upgrade option, where you pay between $5 and $30 US (again, depending on the exchange) per month. This gives you several benefits. The first one is that you get a 1:1 ratio, meaning you yourself have to ‘surf’ (as it is called) less. The other one is that you get a portion of the upgrade fee of those people who you have invited to that particular exchange. And, much more importantly, you get a percentage of the traffic they generate, and you can use that for your site.

Traffic exchanges have been around now for almost ten years, and they have developed into an industry of their own. The funny thing is, you can see now less and less sites where people actually offer programs and services, and more sites where other exchanges are offered. It’s like an endless-loop thing by now, where the traffic in itself has become the business. To top that, there are now very successful downline builders, like traffic-hoopla, where you invite other users to not join just one exchange of your choice, but 20 or 30 of them.

If you have the time, and the stamina, to get into this industry, it is well worth it if viewed on a long term basis. Don’t expect to make a quick buck (because you won’t.) Instead focus on building your downline in those exchanges. Just to give you an example, the write of this piece has a strong downline in the biggest traffic-exchange, trafficswarm. It took me more than a year to build it, but now the page of the product I’m selling gets clicked on about 200 times a day without me lifting a finger. And if you consider that this particular exchange has almost a million users, and my product is geared towards the needs of these users, sales are coming in automatically now.

I’m not saying this to impress you, but to impress upon you that traffic exchanges are well worth the effort if you have the stamina of going through the process of building your downlines.