Before you click to another webpage, if you are thinking that you do not have the time to view other people's websites, you should realize right up front that you don't have to do this. All traffic exchanges sell advertising. So if you're short on time, you can purchase ads without having to do any work yourself.

These programs provide you with a very powerful and cost effective way of :

• - Branding your name, gathering leads, and even making sales
• - Learning how your competition targets their campaigns
• - Putting your product or service in front of a very diverse audience
• - Seeing what other products or services that others are promoting

Traffic Exchanges are member-based in nature, so you will need to open an account with each one that you intend to use. This is a simple task which you can complete within a couple of minutes. Additionally, and as the name implies, FREE exchanges cost you nothing to join.

Traffic Exchanges operate on a credit system. Members earn credits by participating in a variety of ways, and then "spend" these credits website traffic by exchanging these credits for banner ad impressions, text links, and in some cases, e-mail advertisements.

By maintaining active memberships in a few of the better traffic exchanges, you can generate a tremendous flow of traffic for any of the websites you wish to advertise. When used properly, these resources are an excellent way to promote just about any product or service.

So now that you know the basics and what a Traffic Exchange is, you will need to know what types of exchanges to use.

There are Manual Traffic Exchanges and Auto Surf Traffic Exchanges:

Manual - These are the exchanges that I always recommend and use as you have to manually click on them and move to the next site after so many seconds. This also means that you have to see the page to click on.

Auto Surf - I have always recommended staying away from these as members can just switch on and leave it scrolling from one site to the next while doing something else, like making a cup of coffee or eating a snack. No one needs to actually see your page and in my past experiences, I have seen that many (if not all) usually don't. Be aware that you can have combination exchanges which use both. However, I tend to avoid these as well.

Now that you are aware of the two types of exchanges that you can use, you need to choose between using a FREE or PAID Traffic Exchange.

FREE - a free exchange costs nothing to join and use. This is a great free advertising resource. (I belong to over 40 of these exchanges myself.)

PAID or PRO - a paid, or PRO exchange as they are also known, requires a one time sign-up fee in order to join. However, this can be a viable option because you know that every person who is using the exchange has actually spent money to join these. Again, speaking from my own experience, these produce much better results than the free exchanges do. But they typically have a lot fewer members and do not have as broad a reach.