One of the newsletter subscribers e-mailed me the other day letting me know that he needs to step up his traffic trading game. He is a blogger and he is been using linkex for trading, “with shitty results”. So he is wondering if I have any “tips for a n00b traffic trader”. My experience tells me that for every person who has the guts to admit they are doing things wrong and need help, there as at least 10x that many who fear asking “stupid questions”, so let me dive right into this one and clear up a misunderstanding or two.
First off, traffic trading is not necessarily link trading and link trading is not necessarily traffic trading. Traffic trading is (as the name denotes) used for trading TRAFFIC. Meaning you trade real visitors between sites (hopefully) similar in theme. The closer the sites trading traffic are to each other, the more productive the traffic will be when it goes from one site to the other. By productive I mean both in terms of clicking around, sticking around and buying.
Link trading, on the other hand, is primarily used for trading LINKS, with the purpose of achieving a higher level of link popularity (amount of incoming backlinks) in order to get ranked higher by search engines for particular terms. While link trading will also (sometimes) generate a click or two from one site to the other, it does not necessarily care about ANY traffic being passed from one site to the other.