Traffic exchanges are everywhere. A traffic exchange is a clever way to get hundreds or thousands of visitors to your website. The concept is very simple and exchange process is easy to put into action. First, you join a traffic exchange program that includes individuals with websites to promote. Next, you set up website you want to promote. Finally, you visit websites of other members and they visit your website in exchange.

There are both fr^ee and paid traffic exchanges. Some of exchanges are good and some are not so good. They come in two basic flavors: manual surf and automatic surf. In manual surf mode, you have to visit a website for a minimum period of time and then click on a button to visit next website in rotation. In automatic surf mode, websites are visited automatically for a specific period of time before next website is displayed. The order of website visitation in both manual and automatic mode is controlled by traffic exchange webmaster.

A rotator or randomizer can be used to display member websites one after another in either automatic or manual surf mode. The rotator will display a different website in an order specified by traffic exchange. In auto surf mode, rotator usually displays websites for a specific time period that usually ranges from 15 seconds to 60 seconds. The randomizer, on other hand, will randomly select website to be displayed. You earn credits as you view more and more websites.

A traffic exchange will expose your website to many Internet users on a worldwide basis. As a result, exchange can possibly give your website a lot of hits. Visualize traffic exchange in same manner you would view a TV. The exchange provides you with websites to view similar to watching TV commercials.

The basic traffic exchange program works on "credit" principle. You earn a full or partial "credit" every time you visit another member’s website. In turn, you lose a full credit whenever another member visits your website. The typical exchange allows you to earn from 0.5 to 1.0 credit for every visit you make to another member's website.

You can usually obtain credits on traffic exchange by:

* Viewing websites of other members * Referring other individuals to join exchange * Purchasing credits from exchange’s webmaster.

If you purchase credits, you generally have a higher rate of conversion of credits earned and/or purchased versus credits used when you receive visits from other members. You have greater control over how you use your earned credits when you pay to receive credits. It is possible to get an display rate of your website that exceeds 1.0 for every 1.0 credits you earned or purchased.

As an example, in basic fr^ee mode you might have to use 2.0 earned credits to display your website 1.0 times to other members. This is a 0.5 exchange rate. Depending on traffic exchange and number of credits purchased, you can increase exchange rate up to about 2.0 displays of your website to other members for every hit you receive.

Some exchanges offer a sign-up bonus (fr^ee earned credits) to encourage you to join their traffic exchange. This enables you to start getting visitors to your website immediately.

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Web Analytics - Part 2 Jason OConnor Copywrite 2004

Not accessing and reviewing your vital website statistics is like never looking at your checking account activity and never knowing how much money you have in it.

In Part 1 of this two-part series I explained how to crunch relevant website statistical data to facilitate constant e-marketing initiative improvements. I explained what types of data are important, such as unique visits, click-thru numbers and percentages, lead conversion rates, and how to process all these numbers. (You can read Part 1 at http://www.oakwebworks.com/articles/article-6-analytics-part-1.htm). Here in Part 2 I’ll explain how you obtain data in first place and then provide a fool-proof method for website click-thru statistical acquisition.

The first thing you need to know is where your website lives. Every website sits on a server, a computer with purpose of waiting for requests from clients (people’s personal computers by way of a browser). Each server physically lives in one of two places. It is either located at its website owner’s company, which is called in-house, internal, or self hosting. If company A has an active website and owns server website is on, and server is physically located at their company, then it falls in this first category.

The other place a website server can physically live is at an Internet Service Provider (ISP) or host company. There are a number of configurations server can fall under in this category which is beyond scope of this article. The main thing to keep in mind is you first need to know where your website’s server is.

Once you know this, you can begin to assemble all relevant site statistics. All servers automatically generate all data you’ll ever need on an ongoing basis. They are relentless in their stats recording. They record all data in what’s called server log files. Manually parsing through these log files is a horrible job that should only be wished on your worst enemy. They are huge laundry lists of everything from every site visitor’s IP address, browser type, site referral, time and date visited, and much more.

Fortunately, there are software programs that can do this for you. One of most popular is WebTrends (http://www.netiq.com/webtrends/default.asp). You feed your server log files to WebTrends software, and it produces for you an excellent presentation of all your relevant (and some superfluous) website statistics.