If not traffic exchanges - what else?

I have received a lot of criticism of my comments of traffic exchanges recently. I do not mean to give the impression that I am an enemy of traffic exchanges, as this is not the case. I believe they have their place in the correct context as you can deduce from my previous posts. The real dilemma is a different one in 2009. It is reduced to the following question - how can I get (targeted) traffic to my website. That, ultimately, is the bottom line.
It is becoming increasingly difficult to get exposure for any website/blog on the Internet. Do not forget there are over 100 million of us. I am one in 100 million and those are about my starting chances for getting traffic to my site if I am fair - Now that is what I call a pretty formidable challenge - somewhere near to winning the lottery?
So back we go to how can I get (targeted) traffic to my website. In the context of traffic exchanges yes this will give you some traffic which, I agree, is better than no traffic. as discuessed in previous posts, no one can persuade me that it is targeted traffic - how can it be?
The main problem I see is that TE's can only get you noticed if you use splash pages for list building - to do this professional you are going to take a lot of time and effort to collect those emeil addresses.
An excellent success story for this strategy is Tim Linden the owner of Startxchange. Tim's uses his traffic exchange to attract subscribers whom he then emails on a regular basis with all sorts of tips and tricks related to traffic exchanges.

traffic exchange - blog exchange - the differences

In recent posts we had a look at the difference between traffic exchanges and blog exchanges. I want to add an interesting experience I just had. My blog has just been refused on a blog exchange. Why?
The answer I received when I was declined was that my blog on search engine optimizaton was not really interesting enough. Now there is a nice objective decision for you! This has never happened to me on a traffic exchange. We all know the various reasons we can been banned from traffic exchanges but not that it is not interesting enough.
Yet on the other hand while I find such a policy discriminatory, it does show that blog exchanges seem to put a greater emphasis on the quality of content - this cannot be said of traffic exchanges who have fairly low criteria for approval of the site and in many cases is even automated.

Google and linkreferral - answers welcome

A few posts ago we had a lot of discussion on G00GLE's position on the use of traffic exchanges if your website contains Adense adverts from g00gle. The conclusion we came to was that they are very foggy on this topic in their guidelines and basicaly they do not like it but do not say you will be banned for using traffic exchanges.

linkreferral to get traffic to your website. Again I can find no information in the Adsense guidelines so I was wondering if you have any experience oor comments on this. Next question for me - does g00gle allow you to use linkreferral. Basically linkreferral is a free site. You sign up with the url of your website and you categorise your site according to topic. This puts you on a ranked list. Then if you visit 30 sites, review 5 sites and make acomment or a question in the forum within a 24 hour period you move up the list. By doing so you move up the list quite quickly if you do this on a daily basis. And the higher up the list the greater the chances you have of receiving traffic. They claim you can receive up to 60 visits per day through this system. But my question is will this ban me from Adsense?

Traffic exchanges - what are you looking for?

Just good a relevant comment from Elizabeth Barrete about why she uses TE's. Elizabeth states:

"What I seek from a traffic exchange is not direct cash but rather ... traffic. Exposure. New people. After a while, I find that some folks who surf by will stick around and become regular readers.

Also, I surf by multitasking. It doesn't eat up nearly as much time to open the traffic surfing page, leave it up, and just click occasionally between other activities. Sometimes I find cool stuff that way.:



Valid comment I believe but I just think that the numbers who actually stick around are comparively small - I am only speaking of my own experience. I think we all know how tremendously difficult it is now to get good traffic to a website. There is no magic recipe. Buying traffic is really a scam - one click and off they go. Getting good search engine racnkings is the real answer but the work that involves can be quite offputting. I have written a lot on how one can help search engines to find your site. Any ideas on other means of getting traffic???