Hi Bea,
The only people I know who do well with traffic exchange, auto surf and banner exchange programs are the ones who have huge downlines. Or who actually own those websites.
They are not worth it in my opinion.
For a newbie, I would suggest what Bill Myers suggests - work backwords.
1. What product are you selling?
2. How much money do you make per sale?
3. How many sales per week do you need to earn a decent income?
The answer to those questions will give you an idea about how much traffic you need to get to your website - and how much can you spend to generate that traffic.
For generating traffic through networking, do this:
1. Start a blog. Post 1-2 posts every week regulalry. Start finding other blogs on similar topics and exchange links. Ask a few bloggers if they would like to exchange posts (you write a guest post for their blog and they do the same for your blog).
2. Participate on forums. But don't advertise. Simply answer questions that you can and show your blog link in the signature line.
This will be slow in the beginning - but its very good to position you as an expert over the long run.
Other ways of generating traffic:
3. Convert your blog posts into 500-1000 word articles and syndicate them on other websites and newsletters.
4. Send out press releases
These are the free traffic generation techniques that work and work well. Most likely, after using them, you'll have enough money to start generating traffic through quicker but paid methods.
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