Blog traffic is Money. Traffic is the key to getting profit. The more traffic you get, the more chances you let customers see your products. In other words, you endorse and offer information about your product to people who get to click your site. With more clicks, you succeed faster. Admit it, traffic is the key to online business.

A traffic exchange program, that is being offered by so many websites right now, applies this basic idea: View other member’s websites and they will view yours. It is classified in two, automatic and manual.

In the manual surf exchange, you manually click through the other members websites. To earn one visitor you must wait for the programmed time to expire (this varies from 20 or 30 seconds, depending on the traffic exchange you signed up for) before clicking the next site in rotation. More often than not, bonus points are given to regular surfers, assuring you of visitors to your site.

The auto-surf exchange, however, is easier to use, but seen to be less efficient. It runs automatically with no effort on your part, advancing to websites or ads every so many seconds. You are not even sure if others are viewing your sites!

The manual surf exchange is believed to work for blogs. Aside from being termed as best for traffic generator, bloggers say, “real eyeballs, real people and real opportunity seekers” are viewing and reading your blog entries. But its use puts too much risk for blogs with Google Adsense program running on them.

Adsense states in its policies on Prohibited Clicks and Impressions: “Any method that artificially generates clicks or impressions is strictly prohibited. These prohibited methods include but are not limited to: repeated manual clicks or impressions, incentives to click or to generate impressions, using robots, automated click and impression generating tools, third-party services that generate clicks or impressions such as paid-to-click, paid-to-surf, autosurf, and click-exchange programs, or any deceptive software. Please note that clicking on your own ads for any reason is prohibited, to avoid potential inflation of advertiser costs.”

Although it is not specifically mentioned in the policies regarding manual surfing, it still is a tool that generates impression and part of a click-exchange program. Thus, prohibited! If you have blogs currently in rotation, auto or manual, disable them as soon as possible, unless, of course, you want Google to disable your account.

This is not an earnest drive for you to avoid traffic exchanges totally. There are advantages and disadvantages of using it. If your site hosts contextual advertising, you might want to check first the terms of agreement of the advertising company as few don’t allow their ads to be shown in traffic exchanges — just like Google Adsense.