Surfing Exchanges

Surfing exchanges are programs where you surf other people's web sites to get others to surf yours.

In start-page exchanges you to set your home page to a special URL on which another member's site will be displayed every time you start your browser. Alternatively, you may simply bookmark URL and receive credit every time you visit it.

Click exchanges allow you to earn credits by clicking on other people's links. There is usually a 20- or 30-second timer that counts down required amount of time you must spend on site. In return your link will be exposed to other members to click on.

Like pop-up exchanges, these schemes will get you traffic just for sake of getting traffic-- little of it be of any use. Most people who join these programs are more interested in accumulating credits rather than looking through your site. Many run several traffic exchange programs simultaneously (in different windows) to gain credits on multiple programs rather than exploring a site that they're supposed to explore.

Link Farming

A link farm is a website that has little or no original content and is created for sole purpose of exchanging links with other websites. Like free-for-all (FFA) pages, link farms have nothing but links to other websites. Link farming has flourished in response to growing emphasis on link popularity for search placement by many search engines.

Never exchange links with a link farm. Many search engines will penalize or even ban your site for linking to link farms. Obviously, you have no control over who links to you, so you cannot be penalized when link farms link to you. But linking back to them is another story.

Free-for-all (FFA) sites allow anyone to post links on their pages. FFA's generally don't require you to link back to them, so listing your site on FFAs will not hurt your rankings. However, link popularity is not so much as about sheer number of links to your site as it is about number of quality links to your site. Search engines are smart enough to tell which links are relevant and which aren't. Securing a handful of inbound links from qualified sites will do you more good than having your site listed on a thousand FFAs.

Article by Oudam Em. Oudam is webmaster of Web Launch (http://www.nexcomp.com/weblaunch), a free resource for web site promotion, search engine optimization (SEO), and affiliate programs. Please visit his site for more free tips and tutorials on optimizing and promoting your site.

See my other articles on how to write effective articles and where to post them.

2) Write consistently Some people will briefly post a few articles and then throw in towel. What a waste. Not only do they lose benefits of viral effect all good articles enjoy on net (of getting posted and reposted all over place.) but they will also end up wasting a lot of their valuable time. Time is a very valuable resource, imagine spending so much of it on something and not then you abandon it and end up not having learned anything?

The other thing is that for traffic to rise and continue doing so, you will have to be very consistent with your posting.

3) Use keywords to increase traffic Ignore keywords at your own peril. Keywords are currency of online content. You will only enjoy 5% of effect or even less, if you do not pay attention to keywords.

Look for keywords that are rising in popularity but do not have too much competition yet. That way you will have a fighting chance of pulling in traffic from search engines, which is most effective affiliate marketing method so far. This can easily be done using search engines and testing various keywords to see what results you get.

The effectiveness of search engines is reason why many successful affiliates buy pay-per-click ads as core of their affiliate marketing strategy. However since you are doing your affiliate marketing with articles, you will need to work a lot harder to place your keyword-rich articles in as many web sites as possible. Done properly it can be just as effective.

For example 10 keyword-rich articles placed in 50 different sites and viewed by an average of just two people per day on average will give you 1000 hits per day. If 20 per cent of these people make it to your affiliate site every day that is 200 serious visitors a day. Enough to make most affiliate programs work well for you.

Please do not take these figures too seriously. It also depends on a lot many other factors which we will discuss in future articles.

Christopher Kyalo is a writer/marketing expert who also writes keyword-rich articles that attract high paying Google Adsense words for a limited number of clients. Write to him NOW for this service at ckyalo at yahoo.com