I could fill pages with those promises. When I started my own online business, I have wasted my time and my money on some of those tools, discover how to save yours!

Online marketing is an area where you can find a LOT of hype. Make a quick search at Google for ‘buy hits’, ‘ad blaster’ or ‘email blaster’ and you’ll have an idea how wide those big void promises of getting ‘automatic’ traffic to your website. But it’s not a real traffic...

By real traffic I refer to traffic that has a great potential to convert to either sales, joining business opportunity you promote, joining your newsletter or any other purpose you might have. This IS bottom line of your business...

As an online business owner, especially of you are building it on a part time basis, you would be very tempted to ‘skyrocket’ your business easily and ‘without efforts’ as those ads implies. Just know this:

YES... you will submit your ad to thousands of websites. And YES... you would get plenty of hits, however, your conversion ratio (how many sales or signups you would gain out of this traffic) will be on a severe diet!

Let’s look at some examples to clarify why this kind of marketing is NOT worth your time or your money:

1. Ad Blasters

First, most of people visiting free classified sites are doing so just to place their ad, and not to view others ads.

Secondly, those ad blasters made many of those sites absolutely useless!

Think about it for a second: Let’s say there are ten people (only) using that database of 10,000 or so classified sites (and I’m sure they share same sites even if they are using different ad blasters). Each makes an automatic submission of 10 or more copies of same ad to a single category (that’s one of so called ‘features’ in those blasters – multiple submission of your ad copy to a specific category). What do you think will happen?

by Stephanie Davies

If you have surfed internet for very long, you have probably ran into what is referred to as a "traffic exchange". These programs can be designed in many ways, with many different functions. In this article we are going to cover what they are, where to find them, and how to use them to actually receive quality traffic as opposed to just plain "hits".

A traffic exchange is, simply put, an exchange of traffic. The basic idea is to view other member's websites or ads, and in exchange, different members will view yours. There are 2 basic types of traffic exchanges available today:

1. The manual surf exchange. In this type of exchange, you manually click through other members websites or ads. Usually there is an anti-cheat method of some variety being used to insure that system is not being cheated. I can assure you that any exchange that does not have an anti-cheat system is being cheated by several people.

2. The auto-surf exchange. This system is easier to use, but far less effective. In essence, it runs automatically with no effort on your part, changing websites or ads every so many seconds. Obviously, if you don't even need to look at it to have it work, chances are, people aren't viewing your ads either.

Most, if not all exchanges of both types will offer new members free "credits" or visitors just for signing up. This amount can vary between 50 free visitors all way up to 10,000 free visitors or more. However, in regards to exchanges offering an extremely high signup bonus, if everyone is given 10,000 free credits upon signing up...who is left to surf exchange?

In addition to sign up bonuses, other things to pay attention to when signing up for an exchange are surfing ratios, timer rate, referral bonuses, and extra features.

All exchanges have surfing ratios. These can vary from 1:1 to 5:1 and up. What this means is that for every X amount of times you view someone elses site, your site will be viewed in return Y amount of times. So if there is a 3:1 surf ratio, for every 3 sites you view, your site will be shown to someone else one time.

All exchanges also have varied timer rates. This is amount of time that a website is shown to you before you can move to next site. Average timer rates are about 30-15 seconds per site. On auto-surf exchanges, this is amount of time before it automatically switches to next ad. On manual exchanges, this is how long you must wait before you see next site or else you will not receive credit for viewing site.

Most exchanges also offer referral bonuses, by giving you extra credits for referring other people to exchange (referred to as a "downline"). Often, exchanges will give you part of a credit for every page your referrals surf.

Some exchanges offer nifty "extra" features, such as lotteries, games, trivia for points, ways to bet your points, and many other things to keep you from being bored as you click away.