I'm going to look into this and try to learn as much as I can about it before implementing it heavily. It seems like a good idea though and to be honest I don't really care for Google policy anyway so I'd rather go this route.

Well, I don't think I can do it, because I do have Google, and it would be against their rules... but I really am OK with that, because I am not after m aking lots of money with my blog. Whatever is going on right now is just fine.

There's nothing preventing you from having the same information from your Googled site, on another site with a different domain name. That way, you can still take advantage of, or experiment with, other advertising options without undoing your Googled pages!

I have tried some manual traffic exchange programs and you are right, it helps boost the number of visitors we have in our sites. I just tried a few though but I think it was well worth it.

It's something worth getting into if you're not getting traffic by other means as well. I think relying too heavily on Google is a bad idea (as far as personal experience goes) because the PR system is so strict and they really stop the new developer from getting anywhere.

I can see the logic of doing it if you just want numbers but how do you know that people who find your blog by this means come back to the site? Is it time consuming to get involved in this?

There is no doubt that manual traffic exchange can be time consuming, unless you tend to just surf around the web as a form of entertainment. Taking that surfing time and running through about 50 to 100 page views on a manual traffic exchange can be a better use of your time.

I can honestly say that I have had people join my website's mailing list, and subscribe to my blog, from the traffic exchanges I have tried.

Thanks SageMother. I assume the gain in traffic is worth the loss of google revenue, I recall that you are not a google fan anyway. I have sitemeter on my blog and it tells me where people have come to my blog from, geographical location etc, but if I get regular readers from a traffic exchange I would have no way of knowing because the first time they would come in showing as from the traffic exchange, but if they bookmark me, subsequent visits would be shown as from their own ISP. So I would only know that the traffic exchange brought regular readers if the new readers told me.